The Missing Pieces. Henri Lefebvre. Trans. David L. Sweet. Semiotext(e), 2014. 88 Pages.

Henri Lefebvre’s The Missing Pieces is just what the title suggests: a list of lost things. Novels unfinished, manuscripts destroyed, museums burnt and looted. With the dryness (though not the verbosity) of a historian, Lefebvre delivers an index of losses which are themselves missing pieces — mere fragments of lives and events, as intriguing for the contextual details omitted as for the brief summaries included. “Murder, The Hope of Women, a twenty-five minute opera composed in 1919 by Paul Hindemith • The novel Theodor by Robert Walser • The letters of Milena Jesenska to Franz Kafka” and so on. Over the course of its nearly 80 pages, the prose poem (for lack of a more accurate designation) takes on a mesmerizing drone, a rhythmic lull that might be soporific if not for the strange dramas barely breaking its surface, great comedies and tragedies briefly and tantalizingly encountered.

The project’s conceit is simple, but its criteria quickly become complicated. A stolen painting is uncontroversially “missing,” but what about a journal that never existed in the first place, except in its would-be editors’ minds? Can the years in which Verdi did not compose be counted objectively as lost? Is a single missing comma really enough to render a whole poem incomplete?

The process of reading The Missing Pieces becomes, then, an extended meditation on the meaning of loss. Even among the items that qualify unproblematically as “missing,” the specific circumstances of their disappearances vary so wildly that the category begins to lose its coherence, to dissolve rather than resolve itself. What does Joyce’s deteriorated eyesight have in common with indigenous art desecrated by colonizers, or a rock opera never performed with the forgotten date of Pedro Almodóvar’s birth? What emerges is less a single unifying principle of “loss” than what Wittgenstein would call a “family resemblance” — a set of objects grouped together on the basis of several overlapping characteristics rather than a few defining characteristics that they all share. In other words, there are many ways to be lost, missing, or absent: to be stolen, to be forgotten, to be destroyed, to be transformed, to be aborted, to be concealed, to escape, to pass without notice.

The work’s original French title is Les unitées perdus — literally “the lost unities.” Thinking fragmentation in terms of unity suggests, at first glance, a solution to the difficulty of furnishing a single criterion for what counts as “lost”: to be a missing piece means once to have been part of a whole, to be absent means potentially to be present, to be lost means no longer to be found. But this turns out only to be a restatement of the problem: defining the incomplete, tautologically, as that which is not complete only raises the question of what it would mean to be a “unity.”

In the face of Lefebvre’s deluge of fragments, totality begins to feel like a chimera. Many of the missing items are projects conceived but never executed; their wholeness, then, was only ever a projection. On the other hand, Walter Benjamin reminds us in “The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses” that “The work is the death mask of its conception,” i.e., every that completion is a destruction, every executed work a betrayal of the vitality that birthed it. To be conceived and never executed is to have lost the consummate product; to be executed is to have lost the ideal of the conception; completeness and incompleteness are never objective states of affairs but only points of view. Their relationship is dialectical and thus shifting, dynamic. Every whole implies a fragment and is itself a fragment; every fragment implies a whole and is itself a whole.

Where wholeness and brokenness are contestable, to name an object “missing” is not an observation but an argument, not merely art historical but political. This calls to mind Judith Butler’s concept of “grievability”: the idea that only certain lives are socially recognized as worthy of mourning, while others are not, and that this distinction is politically produced.

In their book Frames of War, Butler describes the condition of human life as “precarious,” caught between birth and death. “Precariousness,” they write, “is coextensive with birth itself (birth is, by definition, precarious)... Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live.” The classical and illusory promise of the work of art is to offer us a way out of this precariousness, a kind of workaround. I am mortal, but my work is immortal. What The Missing Pieces demonstrates instead is that the work of art shares in human precarity. Viewed behind glass in heavily guarded, light- and temperature-controlled museum galleries, works of art appear literally untouchable. It is hard to imagine the Mona Lisa one day going up in smoke. But if art objects are exquisite corpses, they can die a second time. Libraries are burned. Museums are bombed. Scripts are shredded, negatives fade, murals are painted over.

Butler’s argument is, however, about human beings and not art objects. Their argument is fundamentally one for the preciousness of human life, and was made in the concrete historical context of the United States’ brutal “war on terror”; it may thus seem distasteful or like an egregious misrepresentation to apply Butler’s framework to paintings and sculptures, or to place, as Lefebvre does, murders and suicides so casually alongside slashed canvasses or unfinished films.

There is, of course, no real equivalence between the death of a human and the destruction of an artwork. The works included in The Missing Pieces raise the question of not only who but what is grievable, why Goethe’s bathrobe is worth spilling ink over when millions have died in manmade disasters. When Lefebvre references “the great Buddhas of Bamiyan” (this is the whole entry), he does not include the context of their destruction (as is his wont). But, as the art historian Finbarr Barry Flood argues in his essay “Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum,” the Taliban’s highly-publicized destruction of the Buddhas in 2001 actually critiques the very fetishism of the artwork that The Missing Pieces partakes in. Drawing from the group’s own statements, Flood suggests that the Taliban attacked the Buddhas not as religious objects per se but as museum pieces — “priceless” items of “cultural heritage” coveted by the so-called “international community” which hypocritically espouses secularism and humanism while apotheosizing dead matter and shrugging their shoulders at the deaths of real men, women, and children in Afghanistan.

Indeed, where non-Western works of art appear in Lefebvre’s list, it is often as victims of Eastern regimes which are tacitly assumed to be fundamentally anti-art (as are, to be fair, such usual Western suspects as the Nazis and the Communists): the pieces at the Museum of Kabul smashed by the Ministry of Vice and Virtue, copies of a magazine destroyed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the tomb of an architect’s mother bulldozed during the Cultural Revolution. It would be easy to say (with the Taliban) that, in his attention ad absurdum to the minute details of European artists’ lives and relative neglect of the rest of the world — except when their contributions to the international community are violated by despotic states — Lefebvre is showing his paternalistic and Eurocentric hand, creating his own list of select grievable subjects, weeping over paintings when children are starving. In fact, one item in The Missing Pieces explicates a mission which Lefebvre’s prose poem would seem, broadly, to share in: “Patrice Quereel, president of the Duchamp Foundation, inaugurates the first cemetery for missing (deceased) works of art on the grounds that ‘they are mortal like men.’”

But a more generous, and more interesting, reading of Lefebvre’s choice to single out, and formally to equate, art and artists is that eulogizing cultural objects lost in times of human tragedy need not supplant our grief for human victims, but may in fact heighten it. Instead of elevating the art object above the human, highlighting the coincidence of the destruction of art and the destruction of people in times of war, disaster, and atrocity might instead rehumanize the art object in its ordinary precarity — not an immortal testament to universal human genius but an object shaped by human hands, lovingly preserved by human caretakers, treasured by generations of living people even as bombs fall and flames rise.

When the state of Israel bombed and destroyed the Edward Said Public Library in Gaza on January 22, 2025, Palestinian poet and the Library’s founder Mosab Abu Toha released a statement of mourning on social media. “All the dreams,” Abu Toha wrote, “that I and friends in Gaza and abroad were drawing for our children have been burnt by Israel’s genocidal campaign to erase Gaza and everything that breathes of life and love.” For Abu Toha, the destruction of the library is a “war crime” — not more or less heinous than the literal decimation of Gaza’s living, breathing human population but continuous with it, part and parcel of it.

Abu Toha’s statement is not just a eulogy but a call to action. “The obliteration of Gaza’s universities, schools, cultural centers as well as religious sites must be condemned,” it reads. “Moreover, the world of culture and literature must respond to this atrocity by publicly [condemning] it and by boycotting Israeli cultural institutions and anyone coming from that part.” There is no harm in mourning the loss of cultural and aesthetic objects to senseless brutality — in fact, it is essential, especially as countless churches and mosques in Gaza have been shelled to rubble with hardly a finger raised by an international community which raised almost $1 billion towards the reconstruction of Notre-Dame de Paris. But let our grief inspire us to action, let our tears be continuous with our cries of outrage, or we are cowards and hypocrites.

I could criticize Lefebvre for all of the items he omitted, but it would be foolish to point out the partialness of a work precisely about partialness, which could never in any case be completed but can only be added to, infinitely: a catalog of loss that must grow as long as history moves, intractably, forwards. So I submit instead, in solidarity with the people of Palestine and their historic struggle for liberation, this addendum to The Missing Pieces, which is necessarily limited by the confines of this review and which could certainly, tragically, fill the pages of its own book:

On January 22, 2025, the Edward Said Public Library in Gaza is bombed and destroyed by the Israeli Occupation Forces • Poet and novelist Hiba Abu Nada is killed at age 32 by an Israeli airstrike on her home in Khan Younis on October 20, 2023 • The Byzantine Church of Jabalia, established in the 5th century, is completely demolished by Israeli shelling in 2023 • Palestinian artist and community organizer Dorgham Bassam Qreiqea is killed along with his wife and over 30 family members in an Israeli airstrike on their home on March 18, 2025 • The Great Omari Mosque is mostly destroyed by Israeli bombardment after surviving several demolitions and reconstructions in its centuries of existence • More than 200 Palestinian journalists have been targeted and killed by the IOF in the last 18 months alone • Accomplished poet, writer, and professor Refaat Alareer is killed by a targeted Israeli airstrike on December 6, 2023. His last poem, “If I Must Die,” achieves international renown. “If I must die, / you must live / to tell my story.”