The leftovers. The dead in life and social disappearance

Abstract

Through an analysis of the TV series The Leftovers, we delve into the concept of “social disappearance” and into how it expresses the limits between life and death. The analysis focuses on the event that drives the plot: the mass disappearance of millions of people without reason. It has three moments: (1) the reconstruction of the order that the disappearance has broken; (2) the deviation of the mourning processes from their original logic; and (3) the acceptance that in the post-disappearance world nothing will be the same as before. The text offers some suggestions for thinking about possible lives in a world that is broken and with no promise of reconstruction, a world in which “social death” is one of its main features.

Notes

Notes

1 For example, in the field work for the project “Disappearances. A Transnational Study of a Category for Managing, Inhabiting, and Analyzing Social Catastrophe and Loss” (General Board of Scientific and Technical Research, Spain – CSO2015-66318-P), which we conducted in several places around the world (Uruguay, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, United States, Spain) from 2015 through 2019. In parallel to this text, I worked with María Martínez on theoretical developments in this sense—on the Anthropocene and uncertainty (Gatti and Martínez, Forthcoming).

2 “As far as anyone could tell, it was a random harvest, and the one thing the Rapture couldn’t be was random. (…) An indiscriminate Rapture was no Rapture at all.” (Perrotta 2013, p. 10).