Abstract: Trauma emerges as a fundamental enigma that must be continuously re-discovered through the senses and imagination, going beyond purely indexical processes. What one encounters inwardly, however, is not a space of ontological security but the treacherous “non-place of language,” wherein one feels but cannot speak of one’s knowing. To interrogate the affective gap wherein trauma is begotten, "Encountering Absence" explores representations of trauma in film and photography and uses the toolkit of trauma studies, media studies, and deconstructive philosophy to examine its cases: the aftermath photograph Sobibór (Dirk Reinartz, 1995), the monumental documentary Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), and the historical Holocaust drama Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015). "Encountering Absence" focuses on works of visual media that materialise traumatic absence in an affective form, prompting the spectator to reach beyond language into the sensual, liminal, ontological space of their own ambivalent selfhood, and conceptualises spectatorial experience as an act of witnessing, further interrogating the origin of writing (in a broad Derridean sense) as a decidable action that transforms one’s missing testimony into a definitive relationship between the I and the other, always bound to reveal themselves in their underlying supplementarity.