A Subtle Body for a Time Immemorial

‘Be alone in the desert, for there the soul bears witness (to the unseen).’ 

– Arabic proverb

 

A stolen artefact is not simply an object that has been taken away; rather it is a deep object ripped from the world that once rendered it intelligible and forced thereafter to persist as signal, flattened skin, and ghost or what medieval thought broadly called subtle bodies: corpora aëria, corpora subtilia, or more generally phantasmata. 

In the Platonic dialogues, especially the Sophist, the phantasm appears as the lowest class of image, an eidolon from which the word ‘idol’ derives, a mere semblance of contact with reality. Its likeness, or iconic status as image or eikōn, to what is real and original is achieved through distortion, perspective, and artifice; the phantasm therefore occupies the rank of the deceptive and illusory. Yet in Aristotle’s De Anima, phantasms acquire a more performative status, save for those images that remain empty semblances.

The phantasm is introduced instead as a likeness that animates something deep within the soul, and without it the soul cannot think or act. It becomes the kernel of mental activity, extending even to purposeful action. A phantasm, or the ghost of the object, once aroused by interest, attention, or purpose, becomes the very pragma of thinking that object. Accordingly, imagination, understood as the activation of images that serves as memorials of things wrested or destroyed, comes to the foreground as a machine for mobilising ghostly impressions and records of time immemorial, ab immemorabili.

What first appears as a disembodied memento of something lost or stolen can be returned to a kind of existence only through the murky work of memory – that is, unforgetting (anamnesis). In that moment, what seemed merely illusory becomes the organon for imagining how things objectively were. A phantasmic image thus galvanises the mind into unforgetting what was stolen. This is how reality, for lack of a better word, is stirred anew.

In this sense, theft or destruction is only the first incision, and pulverisation the visible portion of the wound. The deeper cut begins when the object is severed from the field that once made it intelligible: its site, neighbours, use, custodians, and the routes through time that anchored it within collective memory. What disappears, then, is not only the thing, but the syntax that once allowed it to say what it was. This is why the looted artefact is never simply gone. It returns as fragment, inventory number, grainy photograph, rumour, black-market commodity, or surrogate.

The history behind Hrair Sarkissian’s work is precise enough to resist wistfulness. The Raqqa Museum in Syria, once holding thousands of objects, was pillaged after Islamic State took control of the city. What followed across Iraq and Syria was more than random vandalism. It was a regime in which the levelling of idols became both an attack on collective memory and a source of illicit trade. What was attacked was historical continuity.

An archaeological museum is not, or should not be, a warehouse of inert things. It holds together relations among objects, sites, periods, techniques, and forms of local memory. Yet the modern history of the museum is split. The local or indigenous museum seeks to keep the artefact near the world that made it coherent. By contrast, the Western imperial museum converts dislocated objects into trophies of classification and reinstalls them under the abstract universality of world heritage. In that sense, iconoclastic destruction and metropolitan collection share a logic of displacement. One demolishes the inherited object outright; the other preserves it while erasing its world.

With grim pertinence to Raqqa, the French archaeologist and paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan understood this with acute lucidity. In Prehistoric Man, he conjures a thought experiment whose clinical calm contributes to its disturbing nature. Imagine a family of six photographed inside a barn with pigs, dogs, and chickens. Around the neck of the little girl hangs a necklace of punctured animal teeth; the father holds a pipe. Nothing in the image announces catastrophe. Then the roof collapses, smoke fills the structure, the family and animals die where they stand, and the scene becomes an archaeological site.1

Now imagine reaching this site centuries later. If the skeletons remain – if the child’s cervical vertebrae still lie within the circular arrangement of perforated teeth – a fragile reading becomes possible. The ring of teeth may once have been a necklace; the bent tube near the adult skeleton, a pipe. Bone, position, residue, and proximity let the object stammer back towards life because around it enough syntax still survives.

But darken the scene further. Suppose the bones are gone, shattered, reduced to dust, or scattered beyond recognition. Suppose all that remains is the ring of punctured teeth and the broken tube. At that point, what do we have? Not nothing. Never nothing. We still find cut marks and perforations, traces of agency upon matter. Yet towards what end? Ornament, ritual device, toy, trap, glyph? Without the vanished neck and the dead man’s hand, the object is severed from the web that once bound it to function and form of life. It becomes equivocal. It is no longer simply a necklace. It is an object wrested from its world.

This is the true scandal of looting. The wound is not exhausted by disappearance; it strikes at intelligibility itself. The artefact that survives endures as an orphaned clue, clinging to a life it can no longer explain. The crime, then, is not merely against property or patrimony, but against relation, context, and the fragile web through which matter becomes readable as history.

The darker forensic twist is that the real crime scene is not the emptied museum or the looted site, but the destruction of the evidentiary matrix itself. What is stolen is not only the object, but the conditions for inferring it. Looting thus approaches the perfect crime against history, not because it leaves no evidence, but because it leaves behind evidence that can no longer testify.

One can say, then, that the looted artefact becomes ghostly since the stubborn matter remains while its world has vanished. Archaeology has always dealt with such ghosts, particularly in the desert: remains that outlive their explanatory worlds and can be reconstructed only from the rupture between what persists and what has disappeared.

At this juncture, disappearance exceeds mere lack. Violence dismantles the conditions under which the missing can still be read. The stolen object does not lapse into pure void but is forced into a regime where evidence, absence, and violence converge. The consequence is a charged remainder: matter surviving the loss of its alibi while the object’s horizon is revoked.

The hurried phone photographs taken by the Raqqa archaeological team as destruction closed in, and later used as the archive for Stolen Past, operate within this regime. Far from formal museum records, they function as emergency signals, final relays, minimal acts of custody under pressure. Rather than honouring the object with patient clarity, they intercept it at the threshold of erasure. At such a limit, representation gives way to salvage. Photography ceases to be a record of possession and becomes the terminal proof that the object was there at all.

The intervention of Stolen Past proves decisive here. The transformation of these images into lithophanes reaches the project’s conceptual core. As the light thickens, so does the history of the object. The lithophane exceeds the simple categories of photograph and sculpture. Unlit, it withdraws into a pale material reserve; backlit, it surfaces as apparition. Nothing is restored intact. The lost object refuses a return to itself, appearing instead as a second-order body, a host for an absent thing. The lithophane turns into a subtle body forced to bear the weight of a deep object.

In Raqqa, the archaeological sequence envisioned by Leroi-Gourhan is inverted. The world of the object is shattered first. With setting, archive, and museum liquidated, the quickly taken photograph ceases to be a supplement. It inherits the burden of proof, standing where site, layer, and custody once resided. Through its translation into lithophane, the witness becomes ghostly. The proof survives, but only by taking on the density of an apparition.

At this juncture, absence gives way to logical depth. According to Charles H. Bennett, a deep object is marked not by mere complexity but by the internal evidence of a costly causal history, a sequence of operations whose decipherment requires time, memory, and labour.2 Even the pull tab of a soda can condenses a history of engineering that disappears behind casual familiarity. To a haphazard glance, it looks like junk; seen properly, it points back to the technical civilisation required for its existence. Archaeological artefacts, the desert, and photography itself belong to this class. A hurried phone image of a looted artefact is a radical compression of depth. The image is planar, but the technical object is not.

One might say the same of the desert. For the Libyan writer Ibrahim Al-Kuni, the desert exceeds scenery and emerges as a metaphysical plane revealed after the Great Flood receded. He describes it as a non-place (لامكان) crowded with ghosts. In the desert, emptiness is a decoy. While the city lodges things within archives and histories of custody, the desert loosens these bonds. Even the oasis never abolishes the law of exposure. Here presence is never complete and disappearance is never final.

Not only does the desert shelter hidden existence, it also trades in severed time. Across the Sahara, rock art, fossils, and archaeological remains are excised from their landscapes and dispersed as portable curiosities for those seeking depth without context. The desert becomes a site of extraction and circulation. Once removed, these artefacts persist as displaced fragments, detached from their original horizon of relations. Smugglers, tourists, militias, and contraband brokers complete the work that sand and ruin begin.

Within this archive, conflict elevates the image beyond secondary status. The digital turn has shown that destruction scripts the after-image as much as it erases the object. Images of ruin are staged and absorbed into the global feed, compelling archaeologists and local communities to answer with images of their own. Under these conditions, photography serves as the prosthetic after-life of the artefact, its portable body.

A stolen past occupies such a non-place. Translated into a lithophane, the photographed artefact crosses into another jurisdiction. It functions as a digital fossil, poised between forensic evidence and spectral return, carrying contour without weight and likeness without a world. Yet this image remains active, testifying as the minimal subtle body through which a damaged object continues to insist.

At this point, the figure of the jinn acquires a specific relevance.3 In the tv series The Veil, the moniker ‘Djinn al-Raqqa’ designates a concealed operative moving as rumour, disguise, and latent threat through ruined geographies. The figure is apt because it condenses the atmosphere of Raqqa after wreckage: a landscape crowded with agencies that evade ordinary perception and appear instead as whispers, decoys, hidden routes, and mirages. Looted objects behave similarly. They vanish from public sight, enter hidden circuits, and return only under the right conditions of light and attention.

This is why reproduction transcends the simple opposition between authentic original and secondary copy. A technical reproduction cannot restore the destroyed site, the broken chain of custody, or the ecology that once sustained the artefact’s significance. Yet it is not merely false. It provides a damaged object with a secondary body through which to persist, preventing disappearance from closing entirely. Reproduction thus operates as a technology of incomplete survival.

For the Salafi-jihadi imagination, the endurance of the erected thing rivals the exclusive sovereignty of God. Whether idol, sculpture, or archive, the object’s persistence becomes a suspicious claim to be levelled. The filmed destruction of antiquities at the Mosul Museum made this logic explicit: the same apparatus that denounced the artefact as worthless harvested its value on the illicit market. Here iconoclasm and trafficking converge.

This convergence ensures that the spectral techniques of the desert culminate with force in Sarkissian’s project. Photography provides the terminal proof of existence, while the lithophane serves as the spectre-body hosting that proof. Evading both the calm of memory and the authority of restoration, the artefact survives by turning into its own apparition. Destruction seeks finality, yet matter proves recalcitrant. The past leaks into shadows, inventories, poor images, and substitute bodies. One stands before the stubbornness of survival.

What gathers in these backlit images is an Aristotelian reversal of the Platonic suspicion of the image. The photograph of the stolen object may begin as phantasm – as semblance or surface – yet under the pressure of loss, it ceases to be mere illusion. It becomes eikōn and mnēmoneuma at once: likeness and memorial, a moving cause that leads thought back towards what no longer is but truly was. 

The photographed artefact thus joins the nocturnal family of ghosts, jinns, and fossils, those deep objects the desert keeps half-buried in its non-place. Once attended to as likeness rather than mere picture, each becomes a relay to deep time, forcing the mind to unforget what violence and looting sought to sever from the world.

The lithophane radicalises this condition. Forgoing both restoration and threnody, it provides the stolen phantasm with a body. Within that body of light, the desert’s oldest technique returns: to make the absent act, to summon the buried into appearance, and to force the ghost of the object into a new apparition for a world contemporarily lived.