Voluntary Disappearances: Creative Destruction and the Re-Making of Personal Identity

Following the work of Kenneth Burke, most theorists understand modern identity as something that is formed through the processes of identification, recognition, and association. Further, recent work on personal transformation suggests that new identities are legitimized through personal, confessional testimony about the self. In contrast, this essay focuses on “voluntary disappearances” as one example of a type of personal transformation that operates through dissociative practices. Voluntary disappearance is the term given to situations where a person wishes to completely cut ties with all aspects of the present life and achieves this by moving to a new place and assuming a new identity. Through a rhetorical analysis of various books on the topic of how to enact such a disappearance, this study demonstrates two central insights: a) that some modes of ethos formation are achieved by dissociation rather than association, and b) that dissociative personal transformations are achieved through disidentification, non-recognition, concealment and deception.