Hauntology

Just as Neon Genesis Evangelion remains a cultural touchstone that signalled the end of Japan’s unfounded optimism of the bubble economy era, Attack on Titan is the revenant marking the post-2008 cultural shift from the free movement of globalised neoliberalism to the rising populism of the far-right and the normalisation of conspiracy theories. Game of Thrones, in the end, succumbed to the temptation of uncomplicated crowd-pleasers, which is why it has no re-watch value for me under lockdown. AoT and Eva, on the other hand, tackle what Mark Fisher termed the sense of a cancelled future under capitalist realism.

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

This essay discusses the use of abandoned places by photographers. I review this subject from a perspective of remembering and forgetting. Giving examples of artists, especially photographer’s works whose subjects are abandoned places in Izmir and Detroit, I interpret photographs of abandoned places in the context of hauntology and ghost-metaphors.

This essay explores the culturally subversive and incredibly unique enigma that is Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism is understood in terms of its inherent delineation from any attempts by a universal cultural modernity to categorise it within the structures of conventional discourse.

Instead, I adopt a deconstructive approach to Afrofuturism’s exploration.
In this essay, I discuss Afrofuturism in relation to theories of Decoloniality, and, in turn, explain the history and rationale behind its subversion to conceptions of a universal modernity. I then explore the methodology and importance of autonomous subjectivity formation in Afrofuturism.

The next chapter discusses Afrofuturism and music, using Detroit techno as a case study. The final chapter covers Afrofuturism in relation to hauntology, with a particular focus on the parallels between Afrofuturist and Intercultural cinema.

The aim of this essay is to broaden the reader’s understanding of Afrofuturism through the contextualisation and explanation of the issues that Afrofuturism seeks to transcend, and the examination of the means with which this transcendence is to be achieved.

Hauntology is a trend in music, and more broadly in culture, defined by Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and Adam Harper. It is linked with who are artists interested in exploring memory and its close connections with the transmission of media (hence its frequent references to radio and television). This paper is an attempt to summarize the phenomenon in the form of an alphabetic breakdown, taking into account both the main inspirations behind the movement and profiles of the artists in it.

Within the broad historical context in which transmedia has been practiced and studied, David Bowie and Floria Sigismondi are instructive for their transformative approaches toward creating art across media, and for their alchemical process. As a collaborative team, their process is driven by an engagement with surrealist strategies of estrangement and analogical composition and a propensity for play. Their distinctive signature styles traverse mediums, space and time; in ways that move through and beyond narrative. Through an analysis of selected music videos, this chapter examines the transmediality of Bowie and Sigismondi’s oeuvres. By firstly exploring Bowie’s conception of himself as a medium, along with his persistent threads of ‘loose continuity’ across media and time, the author then examines the intersection of Bowie’s transmedial process with Sigismondi’s treatment of time as a medium. Drawing on the tenets of surrealism, along with the concepts of dialogic world-building, hauntology and ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, the author proposes that for artists such as Bowie and Sigismondi, ‘transmedia surrealism’ may provide a more appropriate conceptual lens than the currently popular lens of transmedia storytelling.

Is Marx a zombie? Capitalism seems to have vanquished it's warring twin; yet the fall of Communism has been followed by a decline in the free market. Perhaps Western culture is pervaded by ghosts and omens of death because it is built on the exorcism of any alternative to itself. This paper applies Derrida's Specters of Marx thesis to art, film and cultural theory to explain just why the undead refuse to leave us alone.

Can memory and emotion be animated after death, as some perceived hauntings appear to be? If so, then such hauntings involve extended emotions across space and time. In certain circumstances, can the places we once inhabited include this 'afterlife' memory, even though significant changes in cultural, physical, and technological resources have occurred? Can we animate past memory (of an 'attached' presence) through forms of 'cultural cues' that help to recall past experience, and the memory of those experiences? If so, it means that both the emotions and the memories of lived and shared situations and events inhere partly in the places where they occurred. They reflect not only 'imprints' on the environment, but also 'imprints' in memory that may produce, in particular cases, interactive past presence.

This article discusses Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto from the perspective of the notion and the activity of looking or being looked at. It is argued that the power of the gaze and the particular semiotics of " ocular economy " , while to some extent linked to biographical contexts, can also be noticed in Walpole's text itself. What is studied is not only the way in which images are used in the text, i.e. what function they perform, but also how they structure the importance of an appeal to vision and images within hauntological perspective and the Gothic genre of literature. R

The article discusses the possibility of making hauntology one of the methods of studying screen arts at the stage of their formation, which might make it possible to correctly interpret the use of early screen arts techniques in later cinema and television broadcasts. Hauntology is a method backed by a program of research into social life and the role of associations in maintaining stable communicative structures, which program is based on the assumption of “ghosts” as cultural actors inherently belonging to the cultural order. Based on the ideas of Jacques Derrida and Mark Fischer, going back to Sigmund Freud’s methods of studying the “uncanny” and “effect of reality”, hauntology claims that ghosts determine the modes of nostalgia and user orientation of a number of screen and visual arts, in particular, the visual principles of modern musical culture.
Although hauntology researchers focus extensively on the world of ghosts in the culture of the 19th century, they limit themselves to private remarks and often optimistically presume the fact that the plot rationality ultimately triumphs over the power of ghosts. However, this contradicts both the actual history of the culture then, and the basic principles of hauntology, which asserts that ghosts cannot be fully rationalized. Therefore, the article proposes a visual-critical hauntology, which allows us to explain how visualization techniques contributed to the rationalization of ghostly existence, and how, to create the effect of reality, a screen was required as the basic method of this visualization. Vladimir Toporov’s work on the mystical prose of Turgenev provides the main source of visual-critical hauntology thus proving the need for screen projection to express the author’s position in the era under consideration.
The article establishes a connection between the ghostly statuses and the need for a screen reflection mode, which provides a consistent description of psychological reality. It is pointed out that a number of literary experiments of the Victorian era require a screen medium as a basis for understanding the independent sequence of events, from the plot of internal psychological transformation in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol to the “unreliable storyteller” technique in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Visual-critical hauntology, referring to the history of psychology, the decisions of directors, especially Hitchcock, indisputably proves that it is possible to cope with ghosts and rationalize them not with the help of everyday life staging, as it is usually considered, but with the help of its adaptation, which allows to apply emerging technology for creation long-term effect of reality.

В статье рассматривается возможность сделать хонтологию методом изучения экранных искусств на этапе их становления, что позволит правильно интерпретировать использование приемов ранних экранных искусств в позднейшем кинематографе и телевизионных передачах. Хонтология — метод, за которым стоит программа исследования социальной жизни и роли ассоциаций в поддержании устойчивых структур коммуникации, основанная на допущении «призраков» как акторов культуры, неотъемлемо принадлежащих порядку культуры. С опорой на идеи Жака Деррида и Марка Фишера, восходящие к методам изучения «жуткого» и «эффекта реальности», созданным Зигмундом Фрейдом, хонтология утверждает, что призраки определяют режимы ностальгии и пользовательскую ориентацию ряда экранных и визуальных искусств, в частности, визуальных принципов современной музыкальной культуры. В статье указывается, что хотя исследователи, использующие этот метод, немало внимания уделяют миру призраков в культуре XIX века, они ограничиваются частными замечаниями и часто оптимистически исходят из того, что сюжетный рационализм в конце концов побеждает власть призраков. Но это противоречит и действительной истории культуры того времени, и базовым принципам хонтологии, утверждающей, что призраки не могут быть до конца рационализированы. Поэтому в статье предлагается визуально-критическая хонтология, которая и позволяет объяснить, как техники визуализации способствовали рационализации призрачного существования, и как для создания эффекта реальности потребовался экран как базовый метод этой визуализации. Как основной источник визуально-критической хонтологии рассмотрен труд Владимира Топорова о мистической прозе Тургенева, где доказывается необходимость экранной проекции для артикулирования авторской позиции в рассматриваемую эпоху. В статье установлена связь между статусами призрачного и необходимостью экранного режима рефлексии, дающего непротиворечивое описание психологической реальности. Указывается, что целый ряд литературных экспериментов викторианской эпохи, от сюжета внутреннего психологического преображения в «Рождественской песни» Диккенса до техники «ненадежного рассказчика» в «Повороте винта» Генри Джеймса требуют экранного медиума как базового для понимания самостоятельной последовательности событий. Визуально-критическая хонтология, обращаясь к истории психологии, решениям режиссеров, прежде всего Хичкока, неоспоримо доказывает, что справиться с призраками и рационализировать их удается не с помощью театрализации быта, как обычно считают, а с помощью его экранизации, которая позволяет применять новую технику для создания устойчивого эффекта реальности.

This article seeks to disrupt the deadly deployment of boundaries that mark particular people as normative or queer, socially living or dead. Conversing with the Decapolis of Mark 5:1-20 and Washington D.C.'s prostitution free zones (pfz), the present project deploys a hauntological and critical spatial response, that locates points of contact between transwomen of color in the U.S. capital and the possessed Gerasenes. This article challenges biblical scholars to lean into historiography that sees such stories-from the tombs and from the pfz-as politically active in and of themselves, and with one another. Mark 5:1-20 is imagined here as a place constructed by alliances of queer bodies spatialized into unlivability. Such alliances are resources for thinking beyond the neocapitalist drive to create deadly normativity through insides and outsides, suggesting that biblical texts are always already infused with demands from places where life is suffocated. Keywords Gospel of Mark-Gerasene demoniac-necropolitics-hauntology-queer theory-prostitution free zones © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 |

The literature of the Southern United States has always been expression of a multilayered connection with 'place,' a complex term encompassing identity, history, and politics. Because of its distinctive history, the South's literary landscapes are often haunted by real and metaphorical ghosts: simulacra of the region's burdensome and blood-soaked legacy. A narration that acknowledges the existence of specters further complicates the representation of southern space through the polysemic, unpredictable connection with the netherworld. The traditional chronotope of the South, that of the self-supporting idyll, is forced to interact with a repressed, troubling beyond. Haunted places enable forms of counter-communication that challenge the status quo, because, as Jacques Derrida writes, addressing ghosts is also a quest for justice that goes beyond the living present. In the case of a political author like Jesmyn Ward, the commitment to justice is clearly expressed in her use of gothic tropes as a way to channel and revive the suffocated voices of the past. Ward's work questions the present and restores the dark corners of her native Mississippi's history. Through theories of literary spaces and hauntology, this essay analyzes Ward's militant poetics, and how they are grounded in the relationship between immanent and transcendental landscapes.

To understand the intricate interconnection between politics and affects, I examine a performance of the Berlin-based artist collective Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (Center for Political Beauty, ZPS), in which artist activists staged a horseback ride to fasten a manifesto of ten theses of political beauty on the façade of the German Bundestag. Interconnecting theories of political difference (Marchart 2010), which differentiate between the ontological realm of ‘the political’ and ontic realizations of ‘politics’, and political theories of affect, I approach the affective dimensions of political difference as affective politics. Building on Bargetz’s (2014) “political grammar of feelings”, I situate the performance’s temporary institutions and interruptions of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, as well as ‘feeling politics’ and ‘politics of feeling’ respectively, as affective encounters to experience or enact political beauty.

Political beauty, in an antagonistic framework that foregrounds contingency, conflict and absence, mobilizes affects as inherently ambivalent and contentious. As a challenge to the diagnosis of an inevitable post-political condition, I discuss the potential of political beauty as affective politics to potentially re-politicize politics. Borrowing from Derrida (1994), I conduct a spectral reading of ZPS’ ten theses and carve out three analytical vignettes –  BEAUTY, VITALITY and SEHNSUCHT – to conceptualize political beauty as oscillating between the desire and hope for political change, which can never be fully satisfied, and a dismissal of (political) ugliness and death. In the end, political beauty escapes a definition because it is, after all, nothing but an impossible project for politics and affects of an unknown future.

Widely regarded as one of the foundational 'Unholy Trinity' of folk horror film, The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) has been comparatively over-shadowed, if not maligned, when compared to Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973). While those horror bedfellows are now accepted as classics of British cinema, Piers Haggard's film remains undervalued, ironically so, given that it was Haggard who coined the term 'folk horror' in relation to his film. In this Devil's Advocate - the first monograph dedicated solely to an analysis of the film, and released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the film’s release - David Evans-Powell explores the place of the film in the wider context of the folk horror sub-genre; its use of a seventeenth-century setting (which it shares with contemporaries such as Witchfinder General and Cry of the Banshee) in contrast to the generic nineteenth-century locales of Hammer; the influences of contemporary counter-culture...

Resumen: Max Stirner siempre ha sido considerado un pensador menor en la teoría política moderna. Una de las razones de este olvido se debe tal vez al ataque al vitriolo que Marx y Engels le dirigieron en el largo apartado "San Max" en La Ideología Alemana, donde Stirner es descrito como la quin-taesencia del filósofo idealista que ignora las relaciones de fuerza y poder que gobiernan la realidad, reduciéndola a una mera representación de la con-ciencia. "Contra" Marx y Engels, en este escrito se defenderá la tesis según la cual Stirner, lejos de ignorar los factores materiales de la ideología, desvela la técnica oculta de la nueva gobernabilidad liberal: la transformación del individuo en creyente. Se seguirá entonces el análisis stirneriano del someti-miento ante lo sagrado como condición imprescindible para la dominación. De allí se verá cómo, en la época moderna, lo sagrado se ha reconfigurado bajo la forma de nuevos "espectros" que piden obediencia al individuo. Por último, se explorará la propuesta stirneriana de la insurrección como técnica de emancipación de lo sagrado y de la necesidad psicológica del creer. Abstract: Max Stirner has always been considered a minor thinker in modern political theory. One of the reasons for this oblivion is maybe due to the vitriolic attack that Marx and Engels directed in the long section "San Max" in The German Ideology, where Stirner is described as the quintessence of the idealistic philosopher who ignores the relations of force and power that govern reality, reducing it to a mere representation of consciousness. "Against" Marx and Engels, this paper will defend the thesis according to which Stirner, far from ignoring the material factors of the ideology, reveals the hidden technique of the new liberal governamentality: the transformation of the individual into a believer. The stirnerian analysis of submission to the sacred as an essential condition for domination will then follow. From there, we will see how, in modern times, the sacred has been reconfigured

There has long been a relationship between artistic work and the influence of the world, though it is taking a new turn in trends of conceptual relationality and an ‘expandedness’ is prevalent in contemporary art. In this essay I think through categories and the meanings of expanded cinema to argue that a relation exists for contemporary artists to use ‘the world’ as source material in their creative reiterations. As most theory on expanded cinema focuses on an historic position I argue for the relevance of ‘expanded cinema’ in a contemporary art context. I consider the ecological approaches by artists in fields of expanded cinema, sound and relational listening, 16mm film, and expanded thinking through worlding and framing. I consider work by Lawrence English, Amy Hanley, myself and briefly, Stan VanDerBeek, and Philip Samartzis. The essay considers ideas that exist in processes and conceptual peripheries of my collaborative 16mm film work with Amy Hanley’s sound work, which was commissioned for Speak Percussion as part of their Social Distancing (SD) Series over April to June 2020. Amy spent time at Bogong Centre for Sound Culture as a sound artist in residence and I spent time with The Weight of Mountains film residency in Dawson City, Canada working with 16mm film1 of which the SD Series work evolved from. Our collaboration is contextualised by ideas existing in contemporary sound and arts, including artist’s craft or t​ echnē that uses the world as source material for creating expanded objects or recorded and re-framed ‘worlds’.

Keywords: expanded cinema, relational listening, field recording, 16mm film, sound, hauntology, worlding, frame, and/or re-framing, contemporary art.

Lifestyle-Ratgeber erklären uns, Analog sei ‚das neue Bio‘, Nachrichtenportale verkünden die Rückkehr der Schallplatte, in Kunstgalerien surren wieder die einst ausgesonderten Diaprojektoren und die befürchtete Einstellung der Produktion von fotochemischem Filmmaterial konnte vorerst abgewendet werden. Die in den 1990er Jahren bereits totgeglaubten analogen Medien suchen offenbar auch heute noch unsere digitale Medienkultur heim. Die Fetischisierung ‚des Analogen‘ und seiner Ästhetik ist längst im Alltag auch jener Generation angekommen, die bereits mit Computern und Mobiltelefonen sozialisiert wurde: Software-Filter verleihen Smartphone-Fotografien einen hippen Polaroid-Look und digitalen Musikproduktionen wird das Knistern von Schallplatten beigemischt. Auffällig ist dabei, dass gerade jene Aspekte, die einst als Störung oder Rauschen erlebt wurden, heute oft als Garanten eines privilegierten Wirklichkeitsbezugs aufgefasst werden. In der populären Wahrnehmung oszilliert ‚das Analoge‘ so zwischen unendlicher Exaktheit und menschlich konnotierter Imperfektion.
Um den Motivationen und Modalitäten solcher Phänomene nachzuspüren, wird zunächst die Diskurs- und Theoriegeschichte der Nostalgie selbst fokussiert. Dieses Konzept erweist sich als vielschichtiger und heuristisch ergiebiger als gemeinhin angenommen. Auf dieser Basis werden medienwissenschaftliche Debatten über die Digitalisierung beleuchtet. Dabei geht es jedoch nicht darum, das Wesen ‚des Digitalen‘ im Gegensatz zu dem ‚des Analogen‘ zu bestimmen, sondern aufzuzeigen, wie diese technische Differenz zu der binären Opposition geworden ist, als die sie heute wahrgenommen wird. Ausgehend von der Überzeugung, dass auch die populären und künstlerischen Reflexionen des Medienwandels als eigenständige Beiträge zu jenen Diskursen ernst zu nehmen sind, deren Elemente sie aufnehmen und verarbeiten, ist der letzte Teil des Buchs der Analyse paradigmatischer Beispiele gewidmet. Diese stammen u.a. aus den Bereichen Film, Fotografie, Medienkunst, digitale Remixpraktiken und populäre Musik. Durch die medienübergreifende Perspektive offenbart sich eine ganze Reihe wiederkehrender Topoi, die schon in früheren historischen Umbruchssituationen geprägt wurden. Solche mediennostalgischen Topoi offenzulegen ist das erklärte Ziel dieses Buchs.

Some ghosts pass away quietly, their evocative call to story and thought (“speak to it, Horatio”) a fading whisper. Other ghosts keep questions of justice open. These ghosts promise an exchange between the crimes of the dead and the desires of the living.

Guyanese writer David Dabydeen’s Turner (1995) exemplifies this second type of haunting logic. The poem (or verse novel) is an extended narrative emerging from the drowning figure in J.M.W. Turner’s famous painting Slave Ship. Dabydeen’s intention to provoke questions of justice is explicit, but so too are his acknowledgements about the difficulties of such a poetic enterprise. As he writes, when the African lost to the sea awakens into his poem, “it [the African voice] can only partially recall the sources of its life, so it invents a body, a biography, and peoples an imagined landscape” (7). Here, when the exchange between invention and recollection becomes one between a living desire and a paralytic history, the poem becomes a haunted reflection on aesthetics and identity: consciousness, the poem’s creation through language, displays itself as “a garment of invention.”

With theoretical models from Agamben and Derrida, my paper examines the spectres of Dabydeen’s poem to articulate the connections between the poem’s inventive voice and its haunting exchange between desire and an impossible justice. In this analysis Turner is a transatlantic tour of passage where spectropoetics translate the images—the phantasms—of Slave Ship into a different medium, provoking a vibrant if impossible passage towards restitution, justice, and a new kind of vision where, as the poem’s voice admits,  “Words are all I have left of my eyes” (IX). This paper thus works in the broad field of transatlantic literatures and employs the theory of hauntology to describe a form of contemporary poetics.

The Author would like to point out Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology which perfectly describes the experience of literature and contemporary world as haunted. Therefore, he follows closely the psychoanalytical concepts of phantom and crypt made by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Then the Author shows how the notion of specter was absorbed and could be use in literature studies (Esther Rashkin, Nicholas Royle, Jodey Castricano). Derrida's theory makes it possible to perceive literature not as homogenic and coherent but as open structure, inhabited by voices of Otherness.

Just as code constructs digital spaces that reflect the structure, syntax and lexicon of the language in which it was written, the worlds imagined in radical speculative fiction reveal the limitations of language while gesturing towards those meanings that are rendered unthinkable—or at least unspeakable—within the existing constraints of language and discourse. Highlighting the material and cognitive effects of structured symbolic speech, Delany points to the limits of language as a tool for liberation.

Baroque opera was invented on a deathly premise: reviving a tradition of sung ancient tragedy that had in fact never existed. Modern historiography has struggled with the notion of origins, focusing on relationships among the surviving textual sources to make sense of the proliferation of theatrical subjects. These relationships remain important—but there is also reason to delve deeper into the “haunted” status of early opera. With respect to three central works on the subject of Agrippina and her son Nero (Nerone fatto Cesare, Noris-Perti, Venice 1693; Agrippina, Noris-Magni, Milan 1703; and L’Agrippina, Handel-[Grimani], Venice 1709), the haunted status of performances was made explicit, both in the drama and in contemporary poems dedicated to the main singers.
Using terminology associated with the “spectral turn” in the humanities, this essay argues for rethinking operatic genealogies through the lens of hauntological intertextualities. In contrast to traditional theories of compositional influence, this study adopts a non-linear historiographical approach to performance genealogies, embracing text, music, and discourse about opera itself. Contesting the use of the concept of “origins” with respect to both the birth and subject matter of baroque opera, I argue that the genre developed as an already haunted narration.

A cselekvőhálózat-elmélet (Actor-Network-Theory, ANT) értelmében egyetlen társadalmi ágens sem tekinthető a társadalom középpontjának, a materiális ágencia nem vezethető vissza egyetlen alapvető rétegre vagy kauzális mozzanatra. Az ANT-nézet szerint minden entitás valamilyen módon hozzájárul legalább egy hálózat fenntartásához és fennállásához. Szimmetrikus módon kell elemeznünk a hálózatokat, amelyek a társadalmi valóság szövetét alkotják. 49 Egyetlen ágens sem rendelkezik monopóliummal az ontológiai fontosságot illetően. Mint John Law és Annemarie Mol írja a cumbria-i bárányok és a 2001-es száj-és körömfájás járványról szóló tanulmányukban, "a materiális szemiotikában egy entitás akkor számít ágensnek, amennyiben egy észlelhető különbséget hoz létre". 50 Egy ágens annyiban mondható cselekvőképesnek, amennyiben ágenciát fejt ki, tehát egy hálózat csomópontjainak valamelyikében. "Az entitások", folytatja Law és Mol, "egymás számára adnak létet [...], egymást valósítják meg". 51 Nincsen az ANT társadalmi ontológiában semmilyen tiszta "önmegvalósítás": létezni annyi, mint mások megvalósulásához folyamatosan hozzájárulni. Kölcsönös megvalósítás, adományozás híján aligha beszélhetnénk bárminek a létezéséről. Mindig a másik az, aki létet nyújt számunkra; másság nélkül elképzelhetetlen bármilyen önazonosság. Amit hajlamosak vagyunk fizikaiként aposztrofálni, rendkívül sokféle konstrukció végeredménye. Graham Harman rámutat arra, hogy a Bruno Latour neve által fémjelezhető 49 LATOUR 1999: 733-740 50 LAW -MOL 2008: 58 51 U.o.

The Doon is a quiet valley of hamlets in the state of Uttarakhand, India. It is home to a nearly 200-year-old English literary tradition and many Victorian styled decaying structures. Of all its little townships, Mussoorie and Landour comprise what is arguably the most fertile literary territory in the country. Well-known writers from the valley include the legendary octogenarian author Ruskin Bond; historian Ganesh Saili; Stephen Alter with his warmhearted recollections of an American boyhood in the Indian hills and intrepid romances; the travel writer and spiritualist Bill Aitken; and the thespian-turned-essayist Victor Banerji. Around the mid-1820s, Mussoorie became of the first sanatorium in British India. It was established by Captain Frederick Young, founder of the Sirmour Rifles regiment, who also sowed the first potato seeds in the valley. While Rudyard Kipling seemed to be more partial towards his beloved Simla, Victorian writers such as Emily Eden, Fanny Parkes, John Lang and Andrew Wilson gave us numerous literary and epistolary writings on Mussoorie. Most of them became characters in the ever-expanding folklore of the valley. Some turned into the endeared ghosts that are said to haunt the region.

While frequent earthquakes, tsunami and fires have been the subject of a long history of disaster literature in Japan, Kimura Saeko argues that the nature of the 3-11 nuclear disaster gave rise to a genre of literature focusing on the voices of the dead. She supports this argument by reading several key works on the subject of 3-11 through a lens of Derrida's theory of hauntology. In this paper, I further focus the argument on the relationship between the voices of the dead and their bodies, examining the way in which Itō Seikō's Sōzō Radio presents a theory of reality in which human beings are inhabited by two distinct souls: a spiritual soul and a corporeal one. By doing so, Itō attempts to tackle the mountainous task of how to cope with a reality suddenly forced to be shared with innumerable ghosts. Moreover, I argue that two distinct features of the 3-11 disaster-the combination of living in an age of mass communication and the physical limitations of efforts to recover from radiation exposure-compel us to cope not only with the loss of human life, but also with the overwhelming presence of former humans, reduced to their composite parts under the eyes of the world. In giving a voice to bodies, who still share the shape of what we lost, Itō suggests that the nature of human psychology requires living alongside ghosts, whose presence may be no more than imaginary, but no less real than the memory of the living who were.

Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction is about the appearance of the specter in the work of five major US authors, and argues from this work that every one of us is a ghost writing, haunting ourselves and others. The book’s innovative structure sees chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, author of Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter, that is, without ghost writing.

This article explores the ways in which death can be understood to occupy a formative function in the construction of Irish national identity. The analysis of three distinct moments in Irish history (Plantation-era funerary practices, the Great Famine, and the 1981 hunger strikes) is undertaken with recourse to Michel Foucault’s understanding of race as it is deployed through disciplinary and biopower and Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics. The continuing concern with history in Irish political discourse is juxtaposed with Derrida’s idea of ‘hauntology’. It will be seen that the act of remembering politically carries with it an ambivalent legacy, exposing the violence at the heart of the establishment of both states in Ireland, while maintaining the potential of emancipatory promise. This promise is itself rooted in the violence implicated in the production of alterity through the historical experience of death.

Virginia Woolf's "A Haunted House" thwarts all readerly expectations. The story at once endorses and transgresses the rule of its genre, the ghost story, to become a playful and reflexive modernist text, a haunted intermediary space. In this article, I would like to suggest that the short story is haunted by texts and images and that this makes it a site of both inheritance and creative subversion, the very locus of early-twentieth-century literary crisis and experimentation.
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« A Haunted House » de Virginia Woolf déjoue toutes attentes lectorielles. La nouvelle à la fois reprend et transgresse les lois de son genre, la ghost story ; elle s'impose comme un texte moderniste ludique et réflexif, véritable espace intermédiaire de hantise. Cet article analyse en quoi la nouvelle est hantée par des textes comme par des images ce qui en fait le site d'un héritage autant qu'un espace créatif de subversion, le lieu d'expression d'un geste expérimental émancipateur et d'une littérature qui, au début du vingtième siècle, est en crise.

This article examines the intervention of one work of art in the public debate about Germany's colonial past. It suggests that Black Box/Chambre Noire by South African artist William Kentridge has provided a forum for the calibration of archival evidence and ethnical considerations on reparation, reconciliation and forgiveness.

One book dominated music criticism in 2011. A virtuoso work of both musical and cultural history, a strangely personal memoir of a life dedicated to pop and its more obscure fringes, an absorbing and incisive polemic against certain forms of musicological nostalgia, retro and pastiche, a sometimes deterministic and curmudgeonly look at the tectonic changes supposedly wrought by the ‘digital revolution’ on both musical consumption and practice: Simon Reynolds’s 'Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past' was all of these things and more. Artforum put it in its top 10 books of the year and called it ‘the best book on pop music written since the turn of the twenty-first century’. Perhaps it is. But the fact that many of the other main contenders were also written by Reynolds means that this is probably not a question worth dwelling on at length.

This paper situates both reviews the book and situates it relative to Reynolds' previous work. It argues that Retromania is best read as a provocation, an exercise in what Mark Fisher calls 'negativity', a spur to thought and action, an attempt to force us — musicians, critics, listeners — to think more carefully about what is at stake in retro, to think twice before we endorse or applaud it, to remember that sometimes, in some contexts, retro is simply not good enough, that we can and sometimes should do better.

Autor twierdzi, że współczesna kultura odeszła od pragnienia nieskazitelności i przestała interesować się tym, co bezbłędne. Stara się odpowiedzieć na pytanie dlaczego zakłócenia i mankamenty zajmują centralne miejsce w świecie sztuki najnowszej oraz pragnie zbadać ich rolę w kształtowaniu obrazu współczesnej rzeczywistości. Odpowiedzi na zadane pytania znajduje w późnej filozofii Jacquesa Derridy, badaniach w ramach glitch studies (Rosa Menkman, Michael Betancourt) oraz pracach dwóch współczesnych artystów wizualnych: Andy’ego Denzlera oraz Davida Szaudera.

Usando Ia noci6n de hauntology, expuesta por jacques Derrida en su /ibro Specters of Marx, este trabajo analiza e/ film Biutiful (2ow), dirigido por Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Gonzalez Inarritu explora los "espectros" de Ia sociedad espanola mediante un dia/ogo con el cine de terror, en e/ que se e/abora un vinculo entre Ia explotaci6n y e/ sufrimiento de los inmigrantes actuales con el destino de los exiliados de Ia Guerra Civil. Asimismo, sugiere que nuestra relaci6n con los marginados es rea/mente filial: tenemos que vivir y convivir con los "espectros" como miembros de una familia nacional. AI insertar Ia referencia a/ desenterramie.nto de las vfctimas de Ia Guerra Civil, Gonzalez lnarritu sugiere que si Ia sociedad espanola quiere reconocer las atrocidades del pasado, no puede ignorar Ia situaci6n de los inmigrantes actua/es.

The article centres on the notion of responsibility in Tom Stoppard's Darkside (2013). While Pink Floyd's original album, which inspired the playwright, thematises its connection to ethics in a spectral and hauntological manner, through the use of field recording sound snippets interwoven in the music, the radio play explores the notion of responsibility through what is called " thought experiments. " The article identifies the subversive function of these narrative examples and, following Emanuel Levinas' suggestions concerning the instability of the link between the philosophical discourse and that of examples, shows the latter's insolent and disruptive nature. The notion of responsibility is further linked to its discussion by Jacques Derrida in his Gift of Death (1995) which consequently makes it possible to view the relation between responsibility and responding from a subversive, hauntological and undecidable perspective.

Merchant's House Museum is haunted. While it functions as a historic house museum in Manhattan, the house remains the home of the Tredwell family who now appear as ghosts. For the museum, these ghosts become animating presences, continuing to keep the everyday things of the house embedded in the intimate space of a family's home. Throughout this article, I explore how those connected to the house as staff, visitors, and volunteers present the ghosts of the Tredwells and, based on these peoples' experiences, I examine the Tredwell house within a museological framework of, what I term, haunted intimacy, that keeps the house in vital relation to the family.

Morte e Espectralidade nas Artes e na Literatura reúne um conjunto de ensaios nos quais se reflecte sobre as problemáticas da espectralidade e da morte nos campos da produção e da teorização das artes. Na primeira parte, procede-se à questionação e à análise de algumas configurações que o tópico da morte conheceu na literatura, na fotografia, no cinema, na literatura e nas artes de palco no decorrer dos últimos dois séculos. Num segundo momento, trata-se a espectralidade enquanto problema inerente à fotografia e ao pensamento crítico em torno desta arte, interrogando diversos pressupostos da representação realista que lhe são comummente associados.
Este volume tem origem em dois encontros organizados no âmbito do projecto “RIAL – Realidade e Imaginação nas Artes e na Literatura”, sedeado no Centro de Estudos Comparatistas da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, designadamente a Jornada “Máscaras de Cera: O Espectáculo da Morte na Literatura e nas Artes dos Séculos XIX e XX” (2017, em colaboração com a linha de investigação “Teatro e Imagem” do Centro de Estudos de Teatro da FLUL) e o Seminário “O Realismo Espectral da Imagem Fotográfica” (2018).
Os ensaios reunidos são da autoria de Amândio Reis, Ana Campos, Fernando Guerreiro, Filipe Figueiredo, Golgona Anghel, José Bértolo, José Duarte, Kelly Basílio, Luís Mendonça, Margarida Medeiros, Patrícia Soares Martins e Susana Lourenço Marques.

The article discusses the recent phenomenon of postdigital aesthetics, with a focus on postdigital artists’ preference for destructive actions, and their use imperfection, distortion and errors. It analyses glitch art creators, using the theoretical tools proposed by Rosa Menkman and Michael Betancourt. It addresses the possible reasons for a return to analog in the postdigital age and for critical use of glitch in contemporary art, The art of glitch perhaps best epitomizes our postdigital condition and shows a discontinuous experience of reality.

Joy Division, relative to their Manchester Post-punk contemporaries have often been seen in proximity to industrial music, a perception reinforced by Genesis P-Orridge’s claims that Curtis was a Throbbing Gristle fan particularly appreciative of the former’s track “Weeping” from their DOA: Third and Final Report album. P-Orridge returned this fandom by referring directly to Ian Curtis in Psychick TV’s later track “I.C. Water” and reiterating their personal connection in several interviews and other texts. This paper will argue that beyond this purported connection between the two groups and individuals the resonances between Joy Division and industrial music run deeper in the ways both were haunted by post-industrial cityscapes, modernist literature (especially Ballard and Kafka but also the proto-modernist Gogol, author of Dead Souls) and especially a shared interest in Esotericism and the occult. In fact Joy Division’s track “Dead Souls” has less to do with Gogol’s satirical portrayal middle class corruption and spiritual ennui, than with being haunted by past lives, an abiding interest of the vocalist: “Someone take these dreams away/That point me to another day”. This paper will argue that more generally Joy Division were haunted by the ruins of modernism whether in the form of decaying urban environments, or literary modernism, in ways that correspond closely with the ways similar environments haunted industrial groups like Throbbing Gristle, and perhaps with greater proximity, Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire. In both cases, we are confronted by “missions of dead souls” (the title of the live album of TG’s final performance in 1980) with profound resonances.

In un saggio del 1990, Rethinking public sphere, Nancy Fraser suggeriva che l'idea di "una" sfera pubblica finisse per coprire o mascherare l'esistenza di contro-sfere subalterne. La stessa cosa sembra valere per lo spazio urbano, l'idea di città: parlare di contro-spazi subalterni invita a leggere l'urbano come una sorta di battleground, tenuto insieme da un racconto, un'immagine, l'astrazione (reale, ovviamente) di una città come spazio pubblico condiviso.