Masini, T. (2024) ‘Where Do Animals Go When They Disappear? The animal spectre as a more-than-human epistemology in performance’, Performance Research, 29(7), pp. 100–109. doi: 10.1080/13528165.2024.2569240.
Abstract: This essay addresses the disappearance of non-domesticated animals as both material beings and spectral figures within contemporary aesthetic, ecological and political imaginaries. Through a posthumanist lens, I argue that animals rarely ‘leave' the scene of human representation; rather, they return as phantasmatic presences whose absence signals a form of haunting. Drawing on Critical Animal Studies and performance epistemologies, I interpret the vanishing animal not as a mere lack, but as a generative fault line that disrupts human-centered understandings of presence, visibility and embodiment. In this sense, disappearance becomes a performative event in which nonhuman life continues to act through ghostly remainders and traces. The text situates this spectrality within the broader context of animal exploitation, environmental crisis and the anthropocentric imaginary, suggesting that the disappearance of animals coincides with their transformation into symbols or commodities. Yet these spectral animals also carry the potential to destabilize anthropocentric epistemologies by interrupting the smooth functioning of representation. The essay explores this disruption as a form of 'bug': a generative error that exposes the fragility of human mastery, and renders visible the limits of anthropocentric systems of meaning-making. By treating the spectral animal as an active participant in performance and cultural production, I propose a rethinking of disappearance not as final erasure, but as a mode of critical thinking. Ultimately, the essay argues that the spectral animal forces us to inhabit a temporal and ethical space in which disappearance and survival are no longer opposites but intertwined processes. The haunting returns of animal life invite a different kind of perception: one that is attuned to the possibility that something continues to speak and resonate even when it is no longer materially present.
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