Theory of a Missing Person
Some years back, I heard from one of the psychologist Paul Harris’s Ph.D. students that Harris was working on a theory of the experience of having a missing person in your life. The student didn’t know the details of the theory, and as far as I know, Harris never finished it (or perhaps even started it). For me, however, the comment became one of those weird, one-off remarks that gets lodged in your head. I find myself wondering about it every now and then. Maybe I should develop a theory of a missing theory.
I thought of it the other day when I came across this passage from an issue of the Situationist International Journalfrom 1963: “small circles of poetic adventure may be the only places where the totality of revolution subsists, as an unrealized but haunting possibility, like the shadow of a missing person.” There’s a lot packed into that short line regarding language, aesthetics, and politics, so naturally, when I read it, I ignored all of that and focused on the metaphor rather than the actual claim. It reminded me of Harris’s missing theory.
The SI line uses apt phrasing: the missing person signals an “unrealized, but haunting possibility.” They cast a “shadow.” Indeed, being “missing” is a unique status. Slavoj Zizek’s delightfully titled “You Only Die Twice” in The Sublime Object of Ideology reminds us of the multiple types of death. In one case, one can die symbolically or culturally. Looking beyond Zizek in particular, while the register here changes, social and postcolonial theorists might talk about social death, political theorists the homo sacer, Hegelians erasure from the unfolding of spirit, etc. the idea is similar enough across accounts: one can come to experience a type of symbolic death by being placed outside the human community in one regard or another. In a second case, there’s also of course the physical death a surgeon or undertaker specializes in (what 99.999% of the world means by “death”). This common sense, physical form of death either requires a lot of explanation or none at all.
The missing person, however, hasn’t even had the chance to die a first time. If they were confirmed to be physically dead, then they wouldn’t be “missing.” At the same time, a person prematurely judged legally deceased as in the case of a missing soldier later found to be a POW might force us to amend Zizek’s quip to be “some of us die three times.” Thus, the missing person is, well, missing. They’re not “dead” (even if they’re very likely dead). They’re absent, leaving behind a gap, an unrealized potential of return.
As a result, they’re hardly “missing” from the perspective of the person missing them. Was that lookalike on the subway her? Has he turned up after all these years in the obituaries section of a local paper in Sheboygan? Was that her I glimpsed on the beach in Boca Raton, having found a new life after joining the FBI’s witness protection program.
Some time back, I edited a memoir about a person’s search for the remains of a missing relative, a WWII soldier. What stood out to me was that even if the soldier hadn’t been killed in combat, which was doubtful, he had almost certainly already died of natural causes. Of course, none of that made a difference to the author, who wanted closure. Life would change for those left behind if the man’s remains were found. How the missing person’s story was told would change. The historical record of how the war was fought would change—even if just in the smallest way.
In the spirit of the quote from the SI journal, certainly things besides people go missing: car keys, glasses, political revolutions. That part of the quote can seem a little quaint in 2026. Things might have been different in 1963—just a few years before the explosive events of France’s May ’68.
I’ve never had the sense of revolution as hovering on the horizon of anything in my life. My challenge has been more how to live in an unchanging and less-than-ideal social order. Perhaps because of that political depressiveness at the heart of my thinking, I’ve always been interested in cases of resistance that happen in the cracks and interstices: to use examples that will likely date me, Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zones, Occupy, EZLN communities in Chiapas, etc.
In a different way, I like to read the memoirs of former radicals. This isn’t about learning tactics or even necessarily reflecting on a shared belief system. It’s about curiosity regarding a strange and unique style of life. To go from the rush of believing you were on the cusp of radical social change to being forced to build a life in a largely unchanged version of the current social order is a weird way to live. These are people who at one time or another probably could relate to the feeling of revolution as latent potential hovering in the background.
Among thinkers in that vein, former Weather Underground member Jonathan Lerner’s work stands out as particularly thoughtful. While I liked One Battle After Anotheras quirky cheerleading, I’m inclined to think PT Anderson would have done well to bring Lerner on as a consultant. His writing captures the complex feelings of guilt, yearning, and confusion that can accompany the later life of an aged radical. Lerner’s memoir Swords in the Hands of Childrenis particularly strong, though his autobiographical novel Alex Undergroundis equally illuminating, albeit less polished in execution.
The events of Alex Underground mirror many of those in Lerner’s own life. The protagonist Alex joins a revolutionary student organization in the ‘60s, finding himself traveling, stealing, prostituting, and the like as he negotiates the ethics and practicalities of being a middle-class urban guerilla. The final section of the novel jumps forward a few decades to give us a middle-aged Alex returning to Cuba, one of his former revolutionary posts. Lerner writes:
Alex scans every room he enters. He inventories the people on benches as he walks through Parque Coppelia. He peers into faces … He hopes then that the reason he can’t find Force is that Force is home somewhere like a normal middle-aged person should be, in a place where he feels safe, with a man who adores him. Force is watching Fidel on television, or sipping rum out in the street with his neighbors over dominoes … Alex only knew [Force] for three or four days, years ago, but the connection means more to him than that, and he insists on believing that the same is true for Force. So God damn it, Force, where are you?
Lerner’s language here is reminiscent of that from the SI journal: hope, hovering, unrealized possibility. But in this case, the former guerilla doesn’t give the failed revolution much thought at all. It’s a literal missing person—a former lover—that stands out to him. Perhaps a theory focused on explaining a missing version of anything else misses the point.