ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the motif of vanishing people in Georges Perec's La Disparition and Assia Djebar's La Disparition de la langue francaise. It interprets these motifs of vanishing bodies and silence in both novels through philosopher Jean-Luc Marion's understanding of silence as an ultimate expression of the divine. The chapter outlines Marion's ideas on the divine as silence and empty space. He argues that the divine remains beyond any attempts at codification or representation, and that silence is the best way to conceive of the divine as distance and withdrawal. His silence, which lies beyond all systems of code and logic is theistic, affirming the divine, unlike the excess evoked in the writing of Abdelwahab Meddeb and Jean-Luc Nancy. Thus Marion undertakes to show that only certain philosophical concepts of God have died. His idol is thus a physical expression of a highly personalized or localized moment of intuition of the divine.
