Abstract
The terms ((disappearing}} and ((returning}} appear in Husserl's work mainly in connection with his theory of image consciousness and memory. Husserl recognized that the image effect is linked to the curious and phantastic power of bringing to presence the absent and the vanished, which then returns like a ghost from the afterworld.
He analyzes images and specifically photographs as "vehicles of remembering" (Erinnerungs-Motoren), functioning as "repertoires" and associative "aids of remembering", allowing for a "richer presentification of the object". By virtue of its position in between the past and the present, the alive and the no more living, image exhibits a disturbing ambivalence, since it is equally close to life and to death.
While images of the dead anticipate death and the disappearance (of the other), they also - paradoxically - save and rescue the disappeared, the vanished, the moribund, from definite erasure.