Spectrality

“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.

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.

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.

الصراع الفلسطيني الإسرائيلي كصراع على الغرابة: قراءة لرواية غسان كنفاني عائد إلى حيفا

الملخص: تحاول الورقة قراءة الصراع الفلسطيني الإسرائيلي من خلال مفهوم الغرابة لفرويد، وبعض المفاهيم المشتقة منه كالطيفية لدريدا واللامنزلية لهومي بابا. سيتم ذلك عبر تطبيق هذه المفاهيم على رواية "عائد إلى حيفا" لكنفاني، التي اخترتها لأن حبكتها تصور مأزقًا يكشف التعقيدات المتشابكة التي وجد الفلسطيني والإسرائيلي نفسيهما فيها بعد النكبة. سأحاول أيضًا إعادة قراءة مقولة إدوارد سعيد "الصراع بين الفلسطينيين والصهيونية صراع بين حضور وتأويل" على ضوء ما أقترح تسميته بـ "صراع الغرابة"، أي صراع بين الغرابة التي يفرضها الإسرائيلي على الفلسطيني بفرض واقع لامنزلي عليه، والغرابة التي يفرضها الفلسطيني على الإسرائيلي عبر وجوده الطيفي المقيم في كل جغرافيا فلسطين.

The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict as a Conflict of Uncanny: A Reading for Ghassan Kanafani’s “Returning to Haifa”

Abstract: This paper tries to read the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the lens of Freud’s “Uncanny” and other concepts derived from it, such as Derrida’s “Spectrality” and Bhabha’s “Unhomeliness.” I use Kanafani’s novella “Returning to Haifa” to apply those concepts as its plot provides a good analysis of the complexity of the Palestinian-Israeli situation after Nakba. I suggested the concept of “The Conflict of Uncanny,” which sees the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a conflict to impose the uncanny on the other. The Israeli tries to impose the Palestinians’ unhomeliness feelings, and the Palestinians try to haunt the Israeli by the spectrality.

I am interested in what I suggest are the spectral figures that question historical justice and that embody both remembering and forgetting. Specifically, I examine not only the spectres of colonisation but also the unsettled past of the infamous Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. As such, this chapter first provides a theoretical discussion of spectrality and its correlation with trauma and belatedness. It also studies the difference between mourning and mid-mourning, the latter understood as a way of ethically re-assessing historical losses. Second, it proposes two readings of the revenant, Nenita Coogan. In the third part, which analyses manifestations of ecological spectrality, I interrogate new ways of thinking about trauma in “‘disaster cultures.”’. Consequently, in the fourth part, I investigate the compatibility of Magic Realism and postcolonial trauma in decolonised societies. Finally, the chapter considers the spectrality of the Marcos Regime and the inclusion of dictatorial eras as legitimate areas of investigation in Trauma Studies. All these elements support my argument that, in Cave and Shadows, spectral figures – —corporal or climatic – —allow an interrogation of historical trauma through haunting and mid-mourning. Unlike most trauma paradigms based on Western events, I consider other possible traumatic models, such as colonisation, climate disasters, and dictatorship. I also propose Magic Realism as an alternative to postmodern aesthetics.

This essay brings Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx (1993) into critical dialogue with the German-language school of Marxist theory known as Wertkritik. Through an engagement with value-critics such as Robert Kurz and Norbert Trenkle, as well as with figures associated with the neue-Marx Lektüre such as Moishe Postone and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, the essay makes four interrelated arguments: (1) that Derrida privileges the 'exoteric' over the 'esoteric' Marx through a lack of engagement with Marx's categorical critique of bourgeois political economy; (2) that Derrida projects aspects of Marx's early work into his reading of Capital in a way that sets up Marx as a straw dog against which Derrida launches his familiar critique of Western metaphysics; (3) that Derrida trans-historicises the category of labour and shares fundamental assumptions with the same traditional Marxism he sets out to critique; (4) that Derrida misrepresents the categories of use-value and exchange-value, to which he ascribes a teleological process when no such relationship exists. In this way, the essay seeks to contribute to the development of a concept of spectrality as an immanent characteristic of the value-form under capitalism.

En este artículo analizamos la relación entre la filosofía de Jacques Derrida y la Fenomenología. En relación con lo que un día este filósofo llamó “anarquía del noema”, buscamos tender un puente entre sus obras anteriores y las más recientes. Procedemos a aclarar cuál es esta característica fenomenológica, sin duda muy activa en el pensador de la deconstrucción desde sus primeros escritos. Señalamos su alcance e influencia en cuestiones actuales, en la fenomenología francesa contemporánea y también fuera del campo de la fenomenología./

In this article we analyze the relationship between the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and the Phenomenology. In relation to what one day this philosopher called "anarchy of the noema", we seek to build a bridge between his previous works and the most recent ones. We proceed to clarify what is this phenomenological characteristic, undoubtedly very active in the thinker of deconstruction since his first writings. We point out its scope and influence in current issues, in contemporary French phenomenology and also outside the field of phenomenology.

The study of ghosts and spirits, and the ethnographic evidence associated with this, is a fertile area for developing methodologies. By employing theories of materiality and the anthropological study of ontologies, I argue that looking at the traces of spirits and ghosts in the material domain can reveal crucial insights into their nature, position and relationships with the living. Two ethnographic case studies from the Buddhist ethnic Lao are used to demonstrate how material traces can explain the 'ontic shifting' of certain ghosts. I will then explore how through the modernization and rationalization of Buddhist cosmology there have evolved competing ideas of the nature of ancestral spirits addressed in Buddhist rites. While in an older interpretation these spirits are accessible through objects and the exchanges between layperson, monk and spirit, 'modernist' Buddhist monks advocate that the dead cannot be reached through objects. Finally, I argue that the material traces of spirits and their different readings hint to important transformations regarding the conceptualization of ghosts and spirits through the socialist revolution and the rationalization of Buddhism.

In this paper, I explored what Sartre referred to as Camus' 'most beautiful and least understood novel,' The Fall. As a methodology, I applied textual hermeneutics to immerse in the text and got out of it what I deemed as the crux of its existentialism as founded in the two-in-one leitmotif of narration and hypocrisy. In Clamence, there was a profound need-a specter that lingered and haunted-to narrate his life, especially the fall that triggered it and the judgment that allowed him to do it. I argued then that the nature of the text reflected a deep sense of narration that stemmed from hypocrisy, in which Clamence branded himself as 'judge-penitent'-what such a life entails, how it freed him, and how it mirrored life-callings or vocations in all walks of life.

This article addresses the functions and meanings of Second World War German material heritage in northern Finland from a haunting perspective and in terms of magical thinking. While archaeologists and heritage professionals have primarily been interested in the historical information that Second World War sites and military material culture may contain, this article explores how encounters and engagements with Second World War materialities in the northern wilderness of Lapland can be considered to affect people and manipulate their perceptions, awareness and understanding of the surrounding world. Second World War sites and matériel may be taken to promote a kind of magical consciousness which enables a degree of restructuring of relationships between the self and world and the past and present.

The present article argues that the examination of the significance of Gothic motifs in Caryl Phillips's The Lost Child (2015) reveals the author's approach to unresolved individual and collective traumas that haunt his protagonists, but also his texts. The intricate interaction between the circular structure of the novel and the theme of historical and generational cyclicity requires a special attention to the journey trope and its spatial markers. The title of this essay is borrowed from Chapter III of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), The Lost Child's canonical intertext, in which Catherine's ghost appears at the window and begs Lockwood to let her in. Drawing on some concepts developed by Derrida in his Specters of Marx (1993), the essay explores the meaning and function of spectrality and how it relates to circularity and to Phillips's commitment to justice, which goes beyond remembering the ―lost children of the past, to actually let them in the present.

Analizamos aquí la propuesta teórico-política de Ernesto Laclau. Observamos que es a través de una abertura constitutiva que Laclau intenta operar la deconstrucción de los presupuestos teóricos y políticos de la tradición revolucionaria. Reparamos en el hecho que, pese a este intento, cierto historicismo persiste en él sobre la base de la represión de una cierta mekhané.

Cultural studies of recent memory tend to cling to love and find a certain answer from its musings. This critical move proceeds from various interrogations of cultural or cross-cultural practices towards adapting a linear progress so that love is tasked to provide an antidote to contemporary social maladies. This critical paper, however, attempts to appraise the idea that love is not a panacea, especially in a setting where theory is fragmented and assumes almost definitively a dead state. Instead, love functions as a specter that haunts a post-theoretical culture. The paper hinges this take from contemporary thinkers whom Nicholas Birns points to as "theorists without 'theory'." As such, the spectral concept of love is explored and critiqued in the lens of Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben-both thinkers taken as separate and together-as a subversion to its affirmative theoretical standing and as a proposal on how its spectrality can inform the possibilities of its function.

Critical realism has a long pedigree in Marxist literary criticism. Most fully developed as an aesthetic theory by Georg Lukács, it was conceptually limited by a narrow understanding of realism and the suggestion that only realist art could be critical of social reality. In an attempt to revise the rigidity and dogmatism of Lukács' theory, Michael Löwy proposed the category of 'critical irrealism' which emphasised the fact that there were many non-realist works of art that contained powerful critiques of the social order. More recently, the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) has taken up Löwy's arguments to work out the implications of critical irrealism for world-systems analysis and Trotsky's theory of combined and uneven development. This paper seeks to critically evaluate the WReC's theorisation of critical irrealism through a reading of Angolan author Ondjaki's Os Transparetes (2012). Recently published in English translation as Transparent City (2018), Ondjaki's novel is centred around a protagonist that is in the process of becoming transparent. As the novel's most salient non-realist features become a means of launching a trenchant social critique against the institutionalised corruption and industrial malpractice of Angola's 'petroleum dictatorship', it seems as if the text corroborates the WReC's conception of irrealist aesthetics as the determinate formal register of (semi-)peripherality in the capitalist world-system. However, as a category with its conceptual foundations rooted in the tradition of western European literary realism and modernism, is the relevance of critical irrealism for African literatures inherently limited? Might not the persistence of oral traditions and non-European epistemologies within texts like Os Transparentes render irrealism obsolete as an analytical category for literatures produced under non-European social conditions? Opening with an intellectual history of the concept of critical irrealism, this paper argues that the reformulation of Marxist concepts in African contexts is a productive if not vexed theoretical exercise.

This article analyzes Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining (1980) in its complex textuality, where ghosts, spectrality and repetition compulsion play a relevant role in defining the symbolic space of a contemporary gothic story about madness, fear, evil traces and perception. In a context where time is out of joint, and where evil laws try to frame human presences in a dimension of distress, spectral presences shape a ghostly world where fears and violence are defeated by a special mental strength, the 'shining'. This article proposes a reading concerning ghosts, otherness and the uncanny in Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining (1980). The strong relation between the feeling of the uncanny and a radical strategy of artistic expression, aiming to show the absolute relevance of otherness, will be examined. The aesthetical elaboration of ghosts and spectrality, questioned in the film's narrative, explains how ghostly presences play a central role by strongly determining the film's meaning and, more generally, our relationship to speculative fiction.

The immaterial dimension of our reality, powered by our computational and medialized prostheses, is becoming ever wider and more powerful. This article suggests that the so-called “dematerialization” hides away the material conditions that are necessary to its dominance. It inquires into the role played by logistics in this systematic repression of the articulation between the material and the immaterial. By allowing commodities magically to “appear”, and trash no less magically to “disappear”, the logistical organization currently in place rests on a unique mix between transparency and opacity.

La dimension immatérielle de notre réalité, grâce aux prothèses informatiques et médiatiques, est devenue de plus en plus étendue et puissante. Cet article suggère que la prétendue « dématérialisation » comporte le recel des conditions matérielles nécessaires à son propre essor. Il examine le rôle joué par la logistique dans ce processus de refoulement systématique de la jointure entre matériel et immatériel. Permettant que la marchandise puisse « apparaître » presque magiquement sur les rayons des magasins ou directement chez nous, et que les déchets puissent « disparaître » tout aussi magiquement, l’organisation logistique actuelle repose sur un mix unique de transparence et d’opacisation.

Following recent work by Eleanor Kaufman, this essay reads Deleuze as a thinker of stasis and immobilization in order to think through the fantasy of the refugee as an exemplary figure of mobility. Working through Difference and Repetition, I argue that Deleuze’s understanding of space emerges from a concern with both immobility and the singular concept of temporality articulated in his concept of the “third synthesis of time.” The essay then turns to two contemporary instances of stateless people immobilized by very different forms of nation state sovereignty in Tunisia and the West Bank. I examine graffiti in both locations and develop a concept of tagging, which considers both the graffiti tag and the digital tag as intersecting technologies of distributed social networks that serve to freeze and make visible the stasis of the stateless person.

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Localizados en el campo ambivalente entre la vida y la muerte, los fantasmas siempre han inspirado fascinación cultural y estética así como reflexiones teóricas, filosóficas y teológicas. En esta ponencia se planteará la “espectralidad” como una herramienta conceptual y metodológica que permite comprender la representación espectral en la imagen no como una representación misteriosa, etérea, ni como una representación de una manifestación sobrenatural que es necesario colocar en “otro” lugar para restaurar el orden, sino como aquello que puede revelar aspectos esenciales sobre nuestra cultura visual contemporánea.
Pensar la mirada espectral es pensar en una de las posibles formas en las que un vocabulario simbólico y una sensibilidad espectrales han penetrado y pautado el modo en cómo vemos, imaginamos y narramos nuestra experiencia cotidiana. La pertinencia que tienen las figuras del fantasma, el espectro y la espectralidad en el análisis de la imagen radica en la ambigüedad constitutiva de su significado. La equivocidad del espectro, su significación defectuosa, lábil, evasiva, elusiva o diferida resulta ser un llamado a ver lo invisible en la imagen, a ver aquello que, a primera vista, no se puede ver. A prepararnos a ver la invisibilidad, a ver sin ver y por consiguiente a pensar la invisible visibilidad de la imagen sin imagen. Si no se reconoce dicha invisibilidad, entonces la representación de la cosa, inmediatamente percibida, sigue siendo lo que no es, una simple representación que se juzga trivial y demasiado evidente.
¿Qué nos puede decir el lenguaje de las imágenes sobre la espectralidad que subyace en la configuración del espacio y la vida cotidiana en la actualidad?; ¿Es posible identificar huellas de dichos procesos y sus efectos en la producción de imágenes en América Latina?;  ¿Cuál es la relación entre la producción espectral de la mirada y los procesos económico-políticos de la sociedad contemporánea? A la luz de esta categoría se analizará “Subsuelo”, una serie de imágenes producidas por el artista mexicano Juan-Pablo Villegas en 2011.

Resumen:
En 2012 se estrena el segundo largometraje del director español Pablo Berger, Blancanieves, adaptación cinematográfica del cuento popular basada en la versión escrita de los hermanos Grimm. La originalidad de esta transposición estriba en la opción por parte del cineasta de rodar una película muda y en blanco y negro, en la que propone además una hispanización de la historia original. El presente artículo pretende examinar los resortes de este cuento en imágenes contemporáneo cuyo autor elabora una poética de la exhibición que actualiza el carácter espectacular y el poder hipnótico del cine primitivo. Se analizarán las distintas declinaciones de la dialéctica del mostrar y del ver, piedra angular de una estética que recicla los tópicos de la españolada, a la par que recoge la tradición de los circos de monstruos y el legado del cine mudo como arte de la ilusión. Más allá de los espectáculos que se despliegan dentro de la diégesis, es la propia película la que genera un metadiscurso sobre la naturaleza mostrativa de la imagen cinematográfica y, por tanto, puede ser considerada como un homenaje a las fantasmagorías del séptimo arte.

Abstract:
In 2012, the Spanish film-maker Pablo Berger directed Blancanieves, cinematographic adaptation of the popular tale based on the Brothers Grimm’s written version. The originality of this transposition lies in the director’s choice of making a black-and-white silent film in which, moreover, he proposes a hispanisation of the original story. The present article aims to examine the resorts of this contemporary tale in pictures whose author elaborates a poetics of monstration that actualizes the spectacular character and the hypnotic power of primitive cinema. We will analyse the different declinations of the dialectic of exhibition and contemplation, cornerstone of an aesthetics that recycles the topics of the españolada and combinates them with the heritage of freak shows and the legacy of silent cinema as an art of illusion. Beyond the shows that take place in the diegesis, the film generates a metadiscourse about the monstrative nature of the cinematographic picture and, consequently, can be considered as a hommage to the phantasmagorias of the cinema.


Résumé:
En 2012 sort sur les écrans le second long-métrage du metteur en scène espagnol Pablo Berger, Blancanieves, adaptation cinématographique du conte populaire basée sur le récit scriptural des frères Grimm. L’originalité de cette transposition repose sur le choix du réalisateur de tourner un film muet en noir et blanc, dans lequel il procède en outre à une hispanisation de l’histoire originale. Le présent article se propose d’examiner les ressorts de ce conte en images contemporain dont l’auteur élabore une poétique de l’exhibition qui actualise le caractère spectaculaire et le pouvoir hypnotique du cinéma primitif. Nous analyserons les différentes déclinaisons de la dialectique du montrer et du voir, pierre angulaire d’une esthétique qui recycle les topiques de l’espagnolade, tout en recueillant la tradition des foires de monstres et le legs du cinéma muet comme art de l’illusion. Au-delà des spectacles qui se déploient au sein de la diégèse, c’est le film lui-même qui génère un métadiscours sur la nature monstrative de l’image cinématographique et, par là même, apparaît comme un hommage aux fantasmagories du septième art.

In this article We analyse the interactive video installation Uncanny (Paola Barreto and Ana Kfouri, 2013-2014), developed as an artistic response to Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec's concepts discussed in his philosophical fiction Vampyroteuthis infernalis ([1985], 2011). We present this work as a vampyrotheutic form of cinema, aroused from the network involving man, machine and image.
Key Words: Image, Mediality, Espectrality

Written in the midst of a courageous collective response to antiblack police brutality in the US, this text tackles the figure of breathing as a performative embodiment of grammar and time through which the ongoingness of racialized breathlessness is articulated, dis-remembered, and dismantled. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the text seeks to account for repeated and immeasurable (un)breathability in its particular implications in the histories of racial capitalism, and in multiform sites, geographies, and temporalities that underwrite the global present. In this sense, breathing is addressed through its differential and differentiating conditions of possibility induced and regulated by suffocating spatio-temporalities, as a way to attend to the question whether and how the biopolitical contingencies of vulnerability, weariness, and brokenness are taken up as situated knowledges of courage, critical response-ability, and radical political imagination.

Foregrounding Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider (2014), the Hindi cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” this paper extends the spatial and temporal aspects of haunting to the political and ethical questions concerning the framing of “spectrality of the postcolonial nation,” catastrophic history, negative heritage, the problem of the haunted subject, the social and phenomenological aspects of ghosts, and the political responsibility of the people as the implicated subject. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02759527.2020.1765070

This paper utilizes poststructuralist theory to investigate the polysemic nature of the eponymous character Beloved in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. The ghostly, anachronistic presence of Beloved renders the text open to multiple interpretations and this essay sets out to explore the ways in which meaning is created and communicated. From a poststructuralist perspective, considering that the meaning is in a state of flux, a text weaves its system of meaning around an assumed center in order to provide so-called stability. Peripheral meanings are repressed by the center to secure the meaning system. However, the periphery, which has a constructive function in the organization of the text, also has the deconstructive potential. Hence, the deconstructive dynamics are already inherent in the text. In Beloved, Toni Morrison addresses, among other things, the act of speaking the unspeakable and the process of constructing a new subjectivity out of the ghost of the past. Her text deconstructs the dominant narratives that have marginalized the black motherhood experience, explores the horrors of slavery through horror elements, and eventually exposes the inadequacy of language to depict such horrors. While the textual periphery is enabled to speak louder than the center, the textual subconscious flows freely. The reader is forced to participate actively in meaning-making in order to make sense of the fragmented narrative imbued with deliberate ambiguity. Beloved, as the abject other, defies the phallogocentric symbolic order. A counter-discourse emerges from the maternal, semiotic chora and empowers the otherized heroine Sethe to construct her subjectivity. Delving into the interrelationship between traumatic memory and the act of creating one’s own narrative, the text finds reparative elements in ancestral connection and thereby blends the psychological with the historical and the micro-level with the macro-level of meaning. This paper employs deconstructive key concepts from Jacques Derrida, psychoanalytic key concepts from Julia Kristeva, and seeks to unravel the dynamics in Morrison’s text that enable Beloved to be read polysemically

The article examines Zero Dark Thirty as a narrative treatment of a traumatic moment of crisis. The article proposes perspectives on a narrative logic and the means by which this logic is executed. It does so by using Derrida's notion of spectrality as demonstrated in his readings of Shakespeare's Hamlet as well as his analysis of archival spectrality (Derrida, 2006 and Derrida, 1995). This Derridean perspective allows us to see the movie as an attempt to confront the horrors of crisis and bring the ensuing disequilibrium back into balance. This process, however, entails a complicated negotiation of spectrality that aims to preserve one's own ghostlike state while giving the enemy's various spectral forms a body so that he may be properly laid in earth.

The philosopher Fabián Ludueña is developing a treatise on Spectrology in the three-volume oeuvre The Community of The Spectres, Anthropotechnique (2010), Spectrology (2016) and Arcana Imperii (2018). Before biopolitics, Rome and Greece put in motion the zoopolitics of an Anthropotechnical machine. Spectral entities that defied binary cuts were erased from history or reassembled in the oikonomia of the Western onto-epistemologies. Successful processes of stratification culminated in the figure of the normative human-read as the neurotypical cis-heterosexual male. The practice of expositio is the foundational zoopolitical human gesture: it consisted of exposing newborn children on street markets to be sold as slaves, or in the nature, left to survive (or die) subject to the fluctuations of the weather and hungry animals-"the zoopolitical practice from the ancient city, whereby the biosocial destiny of the newborn subjects was decided" (Ludueña, 2010, p. 47). The spectres of those body-minds still haunt our onto-epistemological worldviews: we must look back to the broken chains of the production of able bodies. Ludueña's genealogical work investigates how and why the figure of the spectre gradually disappeared from the discursive milieu, and why we should bring it back to spotlight. Its potential resides in existence between binary categories like God and human, man and animal, male and female. It queers, defying epistemological boundaries, what it means to be dead or alive. It cuts preprogrammed gestures and modes of perception, manifesting through a continuous otherness that resists taxonomy. The autistic scholar Melanie Yergeau employs the term "neuroqueer" to talk about the non-neurotypical and queer subjectivities that are a continuum of indiscernibility and are violently displaced into binary categories. We argue for an operationalisation of the concept of the spectre to help us short-circuit the neurotypical and heteronormative futurism, by looking back to the ghosts of the exposed children. Bio: Francisco Trento is a Postdoctoral Fellow at CERADA, UniArts Helsinki. They participate in the Senselab, laboratory for thought in motion. Their research interests range from artistic research, film, spectrality, radical pedagogies, and neurodiversity. Recently, they focused on producing multimodal propositions in artistic research, gestated as texts, video and other materialities. Their current project, The Pedagogy of The Anarchive (http://www.thepedagogyoftheanarchive.com), aims to emphasise neuroqueer perception and techniques of building non-neurotypical pedagogical frameworks. They are drafting the project of an experimental film around Svalbard's Seed Vault's non-human materialities, against what Rose Braidotti calls anthropocentric exceptionalism.

Andrzej Marzec (w: Od pamięci biodziedzicznej do postpamięci, red. T. Szostek, R. Sendyka, R. Nycz, Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2013, ss. 140-160) Drugie życie teorii, czyli myślenie (p)o końcu Sowa Minerwy wylatuje dopiero z zapadającym zmierzchem G.W.F. Hegel Zasady filozofii prawa, tłum. A. Landman, PWN,Warszawa 1969, s. 21.

En 2012 se estrena el segundo largometraje del director español Pablo Berger, Blancanieves, adaptación cinematográfica del cuento popular basada en la versión escrita de los hermanos Grimm. La originalidad de esta transposición estriba en la opción por parte del cineasta de rodar una película muda y en blanco y negro, en la que propone además una hispanización de la historia original. El presente artículo pretende examinar los resortes de este cuento en imágenes contemporáneo cuyo autor elabora una poética de la exhibición que actualiza el carácter espectacular y el poder hipnótico del cine primitivo. Se analizarán las distintas declinaciones de la dialéctica del mostrar y del ver, piedra angular de una estética que recicla los tópicos de la españolada, a la par que recoge la tradición de los circos de monstruos y el legado del cine mudo como arte de la ilusión. Más allá de los espectáculos que se despliegan dentro de la diégesis, es la propia película la que genera un metadiscurso ...

Athena Athanasiou, “(Im)possible Breathing: On Courage and Criticality in the Ghostly Historical Present.” Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory, 23(2), pp. 92–106, 2020.
https://journal-redescriptions.org/articles/10.33134/rds.337/

Focusing on contemporary Việt Nam, this article examines the monumentalizing project concerning the life, revolutionary career and political legacy of Hồ Chí Minh. After Hồ's death and especially after the introduction of dồi mồi, or renovation policies, the revolutionary state instigated a process of making memorials out of the places where he lived and struggled for the nation, projecting his biography onto the country's landscape. The article explores a series of ambiguities and uncertainties that, in a Derridian manner, haunt the state commemoration of Hồ Chí Minh, and that are primarily manifested in his incomplete kinship status and imperfect death.

Foregrounding Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider (2014), the Hindi cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” this paper extends the spatial and temporal aspects of haunting to the political and ethical questions concerning the framing of “spectrality of the postcolonial nation,” catastrophic history, negative heritage, the problem of the haunted subject, the social and phenomenological aspects of ghosts, and the political responsibility of the people as the implicated subject. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02759527.2020.1765070

For Dastur, commemorating the dead is ethnologically universal to the species we all are or share; in all cultures and times we have distinguished ourselves from other creatures and forms of life by making of death an issue for us.  The strange co-incidence between a decade or three is astrologically irreducible, but for the pretext of an homage, here we are again just days from the repetition of an astral commemoration of that loss.  For we are still writing for Derrida and cannot forget Foucault.

Caroline Walker Bynum has argued that the ancient doctrine of the resurrection has played an intractable role in the construction of the modern human subject. This argument appears incredibly prescient given recent popular and academic interest in figures traversing life and death. Derridean notions of hauntology and spectrality have arisen alongside a proliferation of vampires, zombies, and other posthumanities. Similarly, stories of the resurrected Jesus come from a moment filled with gods and emperors situated between or beyond life and death. This paper explores the resonances between these pre- and post-"human" phenomena. Zombies often represent anxieties about the human subject’s stability. Likewise, the uneasy relationships between past, present, and future are embodied in undead figures like vampires and zombies. While Jesus’ resurrection is framed as life’s victory over death in orthodox theology, the canonical stories are much messier. The gospels anxiously portray the resurrected Jesus denying that he is a ghost (Luke 24:38) and offering proofs of his materiality (John 20:24-31). These ambiguities increase as he moves great distances instantaneously (Luke 24:23), becomes invisible (Luke 24:31), and passes through walls (John 20:26). This absent-present living- dead figure displays a deep unsettling of how the past, present, and future relate. In reading these ancient (biblical and western) canonical texts alongside examples from contemporary popular fiction, I join other scholars in arguing for the metaphysical similarities between the pre-modern/human and the post-modern/human. Moreover, I will show that closer examination of the relationships between these disparate materials is mutually beneficial for understanding them both.