Cyberspeak, the language of cybernetics, or its metalanguage to be more precise, consists of words that are both explaining and describing human/animal and machine forms of control and communication, while in newspeak, words were value-laden, which means they had strong positive or negative connotations connected to their use. For example, a 'spy' could only be a foreign agent, while a Russian one was a 'patriot'. First, it will be shown how there are still remnants of cyberspeak in modern science, pinpointing (...) its cybernetic background and shaping our thoughts without us realizing they had any cybernetic origin whatsoever. Second, it will be investigated how newspeak, as its counterpart, can be analyzed from the theory of speech acts. Third, the current war in Ukraine allowed us a brief analysis of newspeak present in Russian public communication today (Putin's speeches), which will again be connected to their performative aspect. (shrink)

Her shape and his hand -- Distractions -- The other door, it's floods of tears with consolation enclosed -- Not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there -- There are crossroads.

While the initial reception of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo was unspectacular, it made its presence felt in a host of other films – from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, to Brian De Palma's Obsession, and David Lynch's Mulholland Dr.. What seemed to have eluded the critics at the time is that Vertigo is a film about being haunted: by illusive images, turbulent emotions, motion and memory, the sound and feeling of falling into the past, into a nightmare. But it is also (...) a shrewdly reflexive film that haunts filmmakers, critics, and artists alike, raising fundamental questions about the ontology of moving images and the regime of fascination that churns them out. Douglas Gordon's Feature Film, D.N. Rodowick's The Wanderers, and Lynn Hershman's VertiGhost are contemporary examples of how the appropriation and contemplation of some the film's most iconic motifs, themes and strategies ask us to rethink the relation of fetishism to fabulation, and supplementarity to dissimulation and social engineering. Feature Film, The Wanderers, and VertiGhost are supplementary works, but like the original film they are about duplicity, doppelgänger, and dissimulation. What interests us is how they challenge the authority over, or even proximity to, that which returns in the form of the supplement. And ultimately, attaching themselves to the chain of forgers and forgeries, these supplementary works take their place in the vertiginous sequence of substitutions the film established: a neat allegory for a reign of the digital ghosting that Hitchcock could never have anticipated. (shrink)

Coined by Jonathan Shay, a clinician who works with combat veterans, the term ‘moral injury’ refers to an injury that occurs when one’s moral beliefs are betrayed. Shay developed the term to capture the shame and guilt of veterans he saw in his clinical practice. Since then, debates about moral injury have centered around the ‘what’ and the ‘who’ of moral injury. Clinicians universally acknowledge the challenge of treating moral injuries. I will argue that this is in part because there (...) is an essential piece of the theoretical construct that has been left behind. Namely, when veterans are morally injured, they are not only haunted by what they have done but also by the specter of a world without morals. (shrink)

Metaphysical and epistemological dualism informs much contemporary discussion of the relationships of science and religion, in particular in relation to the neurosciences and the religious understanding of the human person. This dualism is a foundational artifact of modern culture; however, contemporary scientific research and historical theological scholarship encourage a more holistic view wherein human personhood is most fittingly understood as an emergent phenomenon of, but not simply reducible to, evolutionary and developmental neurobiology.

In the woods of Spring City, Pennsylvania, lies Pennhurst, a school for people with developmental and physical disabilities from 1908 to 1987. Like many institutions, Pennhurst eventually became a place of abuse and neglect. Pennhurst was finally shut down, and the residents were relocated into group homes. Two years ago, a group well educated about Pennhurst's past formed the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to making Pennhurst into a national museum. Standing in the way of PM&PA's vision (...) was a businessman named Richard Chakejian, who purchased Pennhurst from the state for $2 million and has now converted it to a haunted house. The result is a bizarre hybrid of history and legend, and of criminality and commercialism, that simultaneously evokes and erases Pennhurst's troubled past. (shrink)

Recent neuropsychological data indicating that an absence of dreaming follows lesions of frontal subcortical white matter have been interpreted by Solms as supportive of Freud's wish-fulfillment, disguise-censorship dream theory. The purpose of this commentary is to call attention to Solms's commitment to Freud and to challenge and contrast his specific arguments with the simpler and more complete tenets of the activation-synthesis hypothesis. [Hobson et al.; Nielsen; Solms].

In this paper, we examine how polycystic ovary syndrome is racialized in biomedical research. Drawing from Star’s seminal concept of triangulation, we analyze how the diagnostic criteria for PCOS combine two different biomarkers: body hair and testosterone. Hair and hormones are both haunted by their use in eugenic research, and as clinical measures, they can carry forward powerful narratives of biological difference. PCOS researchers circulate strong claims about racial difference in hirsutism as if they were established knowledge, sometimes calling (...) for race-specific diagnostic thresholds. Tracing the links between race and hirsutism, hirsutism and testosterone, and testosterone and race, we find that these connections are all conceptualized in ambiguous and inconsistent ways. Through triangulation, the uncertainty clouding each link is mitigated by the apparent strength of the chain as a whole. The logic linking race to disease is attenuated, allowing race to persist as a ghost variable. As PCOS is increasingly reframed as a risk factor for other conditions, racial stratification is submerged, implicit but actionable, at every stage of the life course cascade of risk. (shrink)

Examines the theme of haunting in recent U.S. and postcolonial literature as a response to the dynamics of transnational literary circulation.

Unlike many theories of the self found in Western philosophy, Maria Lugones and Mariana Ortega argue that subjectivity is multiplicitous in ways that defy the either/or logic of colonial Western thought. They also center liminal subjects, take embodiment seriously, and position multiplicitous subjects as always already in the borderlands. Their accounts of multiplicity are grounded in their lived experiences. Nevertheless, Lugones and Ortega disagree on the ontological and existential statuses of the multiplicitous self. While Lugones defends ontological pluralism and the (...) discontinuity of experience that dissolves any unified "I," Ortega defends existential pluralism and the continuity of experience, retaining an... (shrink)

In this article, I explore what I call the persecutory trope – which underscores the alterity of the phantom and its relentless haunting and spectral oppression of the protagonists – in recent American ghost films, connecting it to the ethical thought of the continental philosophers, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Films like The Ring, The Grudge, It Follows, and Sinister depict terrifying spectral antagonists whose relentless persecution of the protagonists often defies comprehension and narrative closure. I suggest that these films (...) comprise a specific supernatural subgenre due to the particular way in which their specters haunt the victims. The relentlessness of the spectral assailant, and the foreclosure of actions by which the specter is either expelled from or reintegrated into symbolic understanding of its victim, can be construed in terms of the ethical relationship between the other and the self in the work of Levinas and Derrida. Their focus on the moral agent's responsibility to an other, an obligation that the agent does not undertake voluntarily, entails the spectralization of ethical responsibility insofar as it does not rest on solid, evidential grounds. This article shows how the spectralization of the ethical resonates in recent American ghost films through the disruptive effects of the specter's haunting and responsive mourning enacted by protagonists. (shrink)

Sarah Kamens invites readers to consider ways that psychiatry is colonizing, drawing on the concepts of ghostwriting and voice-hearing as mirrored points of haunting in medical regimes. Her article is provocative and engaging, and she is spot on about some of the more concerning aspects of psychiatry. I suggest some ways that Kamens can expand on this work, but my emphasis is on ghostly and emergent voices of service users.I find myself wishing that Kamens would dig deeper into some of (...) the core concepts she employs. Take post-colonialism. Setting aside the fanciful thinking signified by use of the suffix “post”—a term that is used to indicate that we have moved past the practice itself, as in “post-racial society”... (shrink)

We are not only threatened by the Sixth Extinction, but also haunted. Coming back from the future, the Ghosts of History — some para-Benjaminian creatures—try to tell us how serious the threat is....

This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.

One of the most widely-discussed arguments against physcialism appeals to the conceivability of zombies, being which are physically or functionally identical to humans but which have no conscious experiences. Philip Goff : 119–139, 2010; Consci Cognit 21: 742–746, 2012a; in Sprevak M, Kallestrup J New waves in philosophy of mind. Palgrave, 2014) has recently presented a number of different anti-physicalist arguments appealing to the conceivability of ghosts, entities whose nature is exhausted by their being conscious. If ghosts are (...) conceivable, this would rule out a priori physicalism. If the conceivability of ghosts entails that they are metaphysically possible, then this forms the basis for arguments against a posteriori physicalism. Drawing on work on conceivability by Peter Kung :620–663, 2010, Noûs 50: 90–120, 2016) and my own discussion of arguments which appeal to the conceivability of zombies Consciousness and the ontology of properties. Routledge, New York, 2019), I shall argue that ghosts are conceivable, but that what allows us to conceive of them undermines the belief that conceivability is a reliable guide to possibility. While this does not undermine Goff’s argument against a priori phyiscalism, it suggests that a posteriori physicalists need not be haunted by ghosts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 53-71 [Access article in PDF] Ghostly Politics Jann Matlock [Figures]The failure of the Second Republic, as we know well, thanks to Marx, was a matter of ghostly politics.1 Successful revolutions succeeded—claimed Marx—in "waking the dead" in order to glorify the new struggles. Unsuccessful revolutions parodied, as in 1848, the old ones. The Second Republic failed to find again "the spirit of revolution" ("den Geist der Revolution"); (...) instead, it made its "ghost walk about again" ["Der 18te Brumaire" 116].2The "conjurations of the dead" ("Totenbeschwörungen") [115] of the failed Second Republic—and of the Second Empire, which crowned its disastrous experiment—were nowhere more apparent than in the obsession that swept France in 1853 within months after Louis-Napoléon declared himself Emperor in the spectral shadow of his great-uncle, as contemporary Louis Figuier described:Suddenly—it was near the last days of April 1853—Paris woke up prey to the [Table-]turning epidemic, and the newspapers, which finally had to break the silence, informed us that [the epidemic] had simultaneously burst forth in Strasbourg, in Marseille, in Bordeaux, in Toulouse, and in all our other great population centers. For the public, it was, at first, only a simple amusement to which people everywhere surrendered themselves amidst great bursts of laughter. Pedestal tables [guéridons], [other kinds of] tables, hats, plates and washbasins—everything that was within reach—were called into service. Some people succeeded. Others—and these were the greater number—failed at the experiment; they accused the successful of deception [supercherie], and the successful, in their turn, accused the unsuccessful of failing to believe. "They turn; they donít turn": that summed up all the debates on this subject, and these were the only two terms through which, among the vulgar, the question of the tables was thrashed about. In our country, always quite frivolous about serious matters, though sometimes extreme in its credulousness and sometimes absurd in its skepticism, the tables were for the larger share of people only an amusement, only a way to kill time in society. Quarrels were frequent [End Page 53] on this subject. People denied. People confirmed. People laughed—when they were not losing their tempers.Nevertheless, the phenomenon soon appeared to make progress, and this was quite another story. Not only did the tables turn, but they spoke and wrote; they rose up and held themselves in the air without any strings—or at least without any visible ones. The tables gave consultations, discovered secrets buried in the most profound mystery, put the world of the living in communication with the world of the dead, and finally, behaved in such a way to let people believe they were haunted by spirits [hantées par des esprits]. [294-95] The Baron Du Potet, editor of the Journal du magnétisme, remarked in the summer of 1853 that "The tables are making one hell of a noise! —Enter into the porter's lodge, you'll see him make his table turn; go to the home of a judge, of a lawyer, of an archbishop even, and their tables are turning—after dinner, of course. It seems that they are even interrogating tables in palaces" [643]. Alexandre Erdan, author of an 1855 book on "the religious excentricities" of contemporary France, denounced the table turning as "a universal monomania" and declared it the "the characteristic event" of the year 1853, "that memorable period of universal mental estrangement" [71]. Daumier honored the trend in May and June 1853 with a series of a dozen caricatures called La Fluidomanie.3 Caricaturist Cham continued to ridicule its believers well into the year 1853 [Fig. 1].4 Louis Huart, author of a series of satirical articles in the opposition newspaper Le Charivari recounted a debate between two scholars on the subject: "Sir, are you for tables turning or for tables not turning," asked the first. The second replied, "It's all the same to me so long as the table is well served and it doesn't turn while I'm eating." Huart's conclusion, not dissimilar to that of most... (shrink)

The cognitive mind-brain is haunted by the ghost of consciousness. Cognitive science must face this ghost, since consciousness is perhaps the most important mental phenomenon: it forms a seemingly united, multimodal phenomenological world around the subject who experiences this world from a certain point of view. Many current approaches to consciousness fail to illuminate the nature of this “experienced world”. Some philosophers want to eliminate consciousness from science for good, others build theories in which the concept of consciousness is (...) distorted beyond recognition. I argue that elimination and Daniel Dennett's “multiple drafts” model do not offer genuine explanations for consciousness. However, certain empirically-based approaches to consciousness succeed in exorcising its ghostly reputation and, at the same time, in preserving the experienced world of consciousness as an important explanandum. (shrink)

According to Jacques Derrida, there is a différance – his infamous mis-spelling of the French différence – that ‘has no name in our language’ (‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy); its name is not différance, and it is not just nameless but ‘unnameable’. ‘The a of différance’, he also tells us, ‘remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb’. My essay, which is haunted throughout by Derrida, seeks to address the following question: if the a of différance is like a (...) tomb, then who or what died? To Kzomil. (shrink)

Graphic justice and the law of aesthetics have in very recent years successfully brought law, aesthetics and comics scholarship into the same space. The culture of copyright infringement within comics (including in the Marvel, DC, and Disney universes) has been extensively in the literature by scholars including Saval. How copyright law is portrayed within the graphic novels and comics themselves is the focus (and contribution of) this article. This article will explore several comics and graphic novels, as well as included (...) this author’s reflections of portraying copyright visually within zines for public dissemination. Throughout this article, the discourses of ghosts and spectres that are interwoven with copyright law and haunt the texts will be seen, as will the discourses of oppression and warfare that are involved for anyone seeking to make use of copyright works. As Gómez Romero and Dahlman note, comics offer “an alternative legal discourse” and we can see these alternative legal discourses through their aesthetic graphic form. This article will consider: the aesthetic portrayal of copyright law in A Gift for a Ghost and Josie and the Pussycats No. 6; as well as Bound by Law, Theft! A History of Music, and Pictures within Pictures. These comics and graphic novels have been chosen as they aesthetically portray copyright law and copyright infringement (referred to in some of the comics as “plagiarism”), and others aesthetically portray the public domain and fair use. In viewing these aesthetic manifestation of copyright law, the reader understands the limiting nature of copyright on creative freedoms, and that copyright law’s power is absolute. This article will explore the following: (i) copyright’s aesthetic portrayals and the impact of this; (ii) comics haunted by copyright law, considering A Gift for A Ghost and Josie and the Pussycats; (iii) comics about the necessity of the public domain and fair use, considering Bound by Law, Theft! A History of Music, and Pictures within Pictures; and (iv) self-reflections on portraying copyright aesthetically in publicly disseminated research zines. This article has not set out to determine that certain visual aesthetic portrayals are “correct” or “better”, but rather to explore how legal discourses and narratives about copyright law are circulated through the comics medium. These visual depictions hold considerable weight, and it is striking to see similar narratives used across a range of comics works, with different intended audiences. What is clear is that the visual depiction of copyright law enables a greater ability to convey the multiple copyright law discourses that can be felt at once, and also to highlight that some of these discourses are contradictory to one another. (shrink)

Academic dishonesty presents in different forms, including fabrication of data, falsifying references, multiple submissions, collusion, and sabotage, with two forms haunting academia, namely plagiarism and contract cheating or ghost writing. These latter forms have received considerable attention and have been subjects for research. This interview-based study provides some further insight into the problem of ghost writing through presenting the attitudes, justifications and networking practices of some hired ‘ghost-writers’ from a developing country and discusses the depth of this emerging threat to (...) the academic community.Initially, through simple internet searches using specific keywords, an array of professional advertisements selling contract writing services were identified. Some of these promotional advertisements were found in Facebook® posts, and/or Twitter® feeds. The second part of this study presents a summary of findings from interviews of a group of ghost-writers including their background, attitude and justifications for setting up this new business. The study identifies several high calibre post-graduates who have come to understand the Western (European/north American/australian) ways of scientific writing and have produced a network of ‘consultancy’ services. Although the birth of their business was ad-hoc, they have established a good network and are now able to share projects and practices. Many of them offer services to home and foreign students with varied levels of customer focus. Some of them are even using Turnitin© software to identify text matching issues. This study suggests that these paper mills have widely been subscribed to by students. The article finally discusses wider issues arising from these interviews and proposes some ways of tackling this new threat to academia. (shrink)

In this chapter, I propose to examine a specific form of self-awareness in which we become aware of our existence in a problematic sense: wistfulness. In thinking about what it means to have a life, one is often haunted by different senses of possibility: of what could or should be, of what might have been, but just as well, of what could never have been. In such latter instances, we become aware of ourselves not in terms of actuality (who (...) I am) or possibility (who I can or could become), but in terms of impossibility, namely, as the impossible selves that nonetheless, in some sense, define and hence belong to us, as attested to in the experience of regret and remorse, not for what we did (or who we have been) but for what was impossible for us to be (or do). Drawing on Georg Simmel’s philosophy of life, I shall explore various senses in which we are responsible for ourselves, of who we have been and could yet be, as well as who it was impossible for us to once have been. In this regard, what Simmel calls the meta-ethical significance of death refers to the responsibility we have for ourselves in terms of what was both possible and impossible for us. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 135-149 [Access article in PDF] Ghostly Comparisons: Anderson's Telescope H. D. Harootunian While the formation of area studies in the universities and colleges of the United States was initially inaugurated as a response to the Cold War "necessity" to win the hearts and minds of the unaligned, many of whom were new refugees of decolonization, one of its unintended consequences was to foster the development of (...) comparative perspectives of study across disciplines and different cultural regions. But this secondary goal was often diverted by the principal purpose of area studies programs to supply authoritative information on regions outside of Euro-America (the second and third worlds) considered crucial to the national security and to private businesses thrown increasingly into an expanding global market seeking new regions capable of providing buyers, workers, and materials. In time, the vocation of comparison became part of the unconscious of area studies, as the unit of the nation-state took precedence over all other considerations. Instead of envisaging genuinely interdisciplinary agendas that were able to integrate different disciplines, area studies have too often settled for simple multidisciplinarism, substituting coverage for comparison, language acquisition for method, the nation-state for the totality of the cultural region. Benedict Anderson's recent Spectre of Comparisons reminds us of the role played by area studies programs in the American academic profession during the nervous days of the Cold War and the wartime exigencies that led to their postwar organization and installation in a number of universities. But it also recalls for us the comparative promise associated with area studies and how it was either redirected to a multidisciplinary approach poorly disguised as interdisciplinarism or simply incorporated into large developmental narratives like modernization theory. It is instructive to see how Anderson's own work, rather than Southeast Asian area studies, has been able to achieve the remote goal of integration and comparison in a number of stunning examples that have eluded the collective efforts of many institutional programs. This singular success magisterially discloses how he was trained to envisage the region as a "unified" area studies program, even though little more than a geographical term named this unity, and what he needed to do to actually realize the dim prospect of achieving some sort of larger, integrated understanding, which was eventually inscribed in his seminal book, Imagined Communities. At the most basic level, Anderson was able to secure this effect first by roaming around the area (turning his banishment from Indonesia in 1972 to good use by shifting his attention to Thailand and then the Philippines). Yet, as his essays show, there were other, more intellectually and epistemologically compelling reasons which, if amplified, might provide such diversity with a sense of commonality that only geography and the putatively integrative approach of an area studies program seemed willing to promise even as they failed to deliver.Anderson situates his own intellectual trajectory within the institutional circumstances of the region as an area studies which he and his contemporary fellow students "helped give a certain reality" [Spectre 19]. In fact, "Southeast Asia" has always been [End Page 135] the common frame that structured the particular relationship between Europe of the colonizers and its Asian colonized and thus became the location that best exemplified for him the peculiar nature of the "haunting," as he puts it, as both the place of comparison and the necessity of comparability. In other words, Southeast Asia was the locus that best afforded a sighting of the spectacle of specters that recalled authorizing sister images in Europe and provided a perspective that was necessarily comparative. In Anderson's reckoning, comparison first referred to the circulation of images between metropole and colony and secondly between the various colonial sites that constituted Southeast Asia. As a result, Southeast Asia, and by extension all colonies, became the overdetermined place of haunting.Beyond the agency of the war, of course, was the experience of colonialism and those first modern interpreters of Asia who, as administrators, spent long years in the field serving imperial bureaucracies and who were in the incomparable position of examining such sites... (shrink)

An examination of the use of medical simulators shows that they contain traces of the one-sex body model found in pre-Enlightenment anatomies. The simulators present the male body as ‘male including female’ rather than ‘male, not female’. Only when female sex organs are relevant to a practice, as in gynaecology, does a simulator need to become ‘female, not male’. The widely held modernist understanding of sex and gender as binary categories is actually masking local practices which allow varied sex and (...) gender paradigms to coexist in simulator use. This analysis applies the discussions of Laqueur, Schiebinger and Faulkner to simulator practice. The consequences of recognizing the presence of the one-sex body are two-fold. Firstly, seeing that the reification of medical knowledge can still be haunted by conceptual paradigms of the past forces a more nuanced understanding of the variety that localized medical practices contain. Secondly, observing the ease with which the reified knowledge of a one-sex body is embraced by subjects who also exist in a world of binary gender points to the complexity our subjectivities can embrace and forces the researcher to acknowledge the implications of the simulations’ context. (shrink)

Understanding the human spirit, the thinking, motivating, feeling aspect of a person, need not entail supernatural reference in any more than a boundary sense. Methodological naturalism accounts for many putatively supernatural experiences in terms of naturalistic and scientific research. Fairy tales have natural functions, naturalistic accounts of miracles can have moral and spiritual power, and neuropsychological research can have value in understanding experiences of ghosts, apparitions, and presences. Even beliefs in personal immortality, at odds with current neurobiology, may serve (...) a range of psychological functions and may raise more moral questions than they answer. Naturalistic accounts can make spiritual explorations possible where supernatural answers provide epistemic barriers. (shrink)

Belief in the existence of spiritual entities is an integral part of many people’s religious worldview. Angels appear, demons possess, ghosts haunt. But is belief that such entities exist justified? If not, are there conditions in which it would be? I will begin by showing why, once one clearly understands how to infer the best explanation, it is obvious that neither stories nor personal encounters can provide sufficient evidence to justify belief in spiritual entities. After responding to objections to (...) similar arguments I have published in the past, I will go on to show that there is at least an imaginable circumstance in which belief in spiritual entities would be justified but then point out that it is not reasonable to think that such conditions will ever be met. In short, if such entities were real, it would be theoretically possible to demonstrate their existence scientifically, and in doing so, one could make belief in their existence justified. But doing so would require and entail a scientific revolution equivalent to proving that the Earth is flat. (shrink)

Recent new materialist and posthumanist research in curriculum and pedagogy studies is focusing more and more on the intertwinement between social justice, fairness, and accountability, and how to put these ideals to use to create inclusive, consciousness-raising canons, curricula, and pedagogies that take the dehumanized and the more-than-human into account. Especially pedagogical responsibility, often rephrased as ‘response-ability’ to accentuate the entanglements that this notion engenders versus forgotten or forcefully eradicated knowledges, and between teacher and student as intra-active learners, is highlighted (...) in this ethico-political turn. In this chapter, a critical pedagogical cartography of response-ability is sketched out to philosophically expand on—and also better anchor—the above turn. This critical cartography is put together at the backdrop of critical new materialist reflections with regards to the COVID-19 crisis; a crisis demanding a pedagogical but also ethico-political reorientation toward the hauntological powers of past-present-future injustices, the thick material present, and a more response-able engagement with the world. (shrink)

What happens when we blur time and allow ourselves to haunt or to become haunted by ghosts of the past? Drawing on archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data, Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure demonstrates the value of conceiving of ghosts not just as metaphors, but as mechanisms for making the past more concrete and allowing the negative specters of enduring historical legacies, such as colonialism and capitalism, to be exorcised.

Julian Wolfreys starts with loss. All memory is the memory of loss... All that we are, all we experience, all we remember, all that we forget but which leaves nevertheless a trace on us, in us, a trace that countersigns and writes us as who we are (in effect the constellated matrix of Being's becoming): this is a process of loss. This just is loss. Loss is who we are. Loss is authentically the necessary and inescapable inessential essence of Being. (...) Loss names the ghosts, the revenants of Being, Being's others. Neither there nor not there, loss persists as the always already becoming of the thinking of Being. There is more than one loss. There is no one loss. Loss never arrives for a first time. All loss is the return of what is lost to Being's being in the world. From that starting point, the author explores the nature of being and dwelling... of memory and the nature of the traces of the past... of apparition and appearance and perception... of touch and being touched... of the material and the (a)material. In a book that draws in multiple threads from 19th- and 20th-century European literature, he references extensively Heidegger, Derrida, Lacan, Cixous, Celan, Husserl, Woolf, Joyce, Hegel, Badiou, Rilke, Merleau-Ponty, Winterson, Stockhausen and True Detective in an impressive and eclectic tour of the being-becoming-loss.". (shrink)

This article contends that feminism is haunted by its past, and that to be haunted means that feminists need to bear witness to the possibilities, often unrealized, of that past and to actively resist the policing and defensiveness that have marked feminism's relationship to its diverse history in recent years. It engages with the work of Terry Castle and Avery Gordon in order to make this argument, and to map out a methodology for looking for the ghosts (...) of the recent feminist past. In looking for one such ghost - the figure of the feminist-as-lesbian - the article asks, how does the trope of the apparitional in lesbian cultural visibility structure cultural memories of the second wave movement? To that end the article discusses the presence of the ghost in a recent feminist/queer study of feminist historicity and in the popular press respectively. The final section looks back to the 1980s in order to trace the connections between then and now, and, therefore, something of what the ghost wants us to remember. (shrink)

Although Walter Benjamin's writings are considered to be among the most powerful theoretical enterprises of the twentieth century, his ideas are resistant to cooptation by the doctrines of various critical programs. These essays engage this resistance by examining the ghostly in Benjamin's work. The contributors show that the haunting truths Benjamin offers point towards new forms of responsibility. These truths reside in a figurative elsewhere, a ghostly space that his texts delimit but never fully inhabit, and these essays seek to (...) do justice to the ghosts of Benjamin. Issues explored include: the status of the image in Benjamin's literary reflections and in his meditations on cinema and visual culture; abiding Benjaminian notions of messianism, aura, reproducibility, semblance, and melancholy; Benjamin's relation to Freud; his innovative rethinking of history, virtuality, and translation; and his reflections on tragedy and prophecy, the geometrical dimensions of writing, and the relation between eros and language. (shrink)

The question of where ghosts live can hardly be addressed without speaking of a haunted house. This essay reads Don DeLillo's novel The Body Artist, in which there is a ghost called Mr. Tuttle who haunts the house of Lauren Hartke, the body artist, as a text grafted onto Jacques Derrida's Dissemination. The essay takes as its starting point the first words spoken in DeLillo's text, ‘I want to say something but what’, a quasi-question directed to Lauren by (...) her husband Rey, in order to ask if it can ever be said what lies on the other side of ‘what’, or if it remains forever unknowable, or unheard, at an ‘infinite remove’, even if it is one's self. It is Rey's suicide, and Lauren's subsequent work of mourning, which locates DeLillo's phrase within the context of Derrida's efforts, again and again, to give words to those whose voices are absent: the lost friend, the other self, the dead. To Lauren's question, ‘What am I supposed to say?’ Derrida replies, ‘Speaking is impossible, but so too would be silence or absence’. Through the ghostly form of Mr. Tuttle, DeLillo's work tells of the various mimetisms by which the silent speaker is heard and remembered. (shrink)

This article analyses the representational stakes of queer of colour performance, by taking the case study of the Cocoa Butter Club: queer of colour cabaret night in London. Within a British landscape that has silenced queer subjectivities of colour at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality, I explore the potential of QPOC performance to redress historical erasure. To enact their presence, I argue that the Cocoa Butter Club’s performers showcase their collective disidentification from the scripts pre-assigned to their bodies (...) within the European imagination. By doing so, they disrupt hegemonic representations of queerness and racialised otherness, making room for a multitude of queer of colour becomings kept otherwise invisible from public view. Such disidentifications unleash ‘ghosts’ into the public space, spectres of elided subjectivities and unresolved coloniality within a city that likes to think of itself as a post-racial LGBT haven. Drawing on ethnographic material and interviews with performers, I analyse what happens when such queer of colour hauntings reach the audience’s gaze. I consider their unsettling effects in relation to the white gaze, as well as their empowering function in relation to desiring QPOC subjects, seeking reflections of themselves in spectatorship. (shrink)

As educators we are haunted. This haunting takes place on several levels, through our personal histories, through key theoretical ideas we have encountered on our journeys, and by those significant educators who have gone before. This paper highlights how Elwyn S. Richardson continues to haunt education in New Zealand. Also how Elwyn, in turn, was haunted by ‘Wal’ and John Dewey. Rubbing up against neo-liberal reform, philosophers such as Elwyn, give us permission to develop our own personal educational (...) philosophy. Through employing an arts-based autoethnography, we explore how our educational journeys have been haunted by Elwyn. And by drawing on Jacques Derrida’s directive, ‘speak to the ghost’, we summon up Elwyn. To do this we write a series of fictional letters which enable us to reflect on one author’s memories. Through analysis of these letters we demonstrate the importance of the Arts as a method to critically reflect upon, and rise above, the dominant neo-liberal ideology we work within. We speculate here that a strong personal philosophy has the potential to disrupt and engage educators critically with an institutional philosophy that continues to dominate much of mainstream education in New Zealand. (shrink)

Bearing witness is complex, and haunted by the past and the present. It takes place through and within a web of power relations attested by truth telling. This essay suggests that ghosts have the c...

This paper focuses on the opposition between two contemporary research programs in economics: behavioral economics (BE) and experimental market economics (EME). Our claim is that the arguments of this opposition can be clarified through the lens of another opposition in the philosophy of probability and in probability theory, between Bayesianism and frequentism. We show how this probabilistic opposition has indirectly shaped a controversy in psychology that opposes two research programs – Heuristics and Biases and Ecological Rationality – which play respective (...) roles in the foundations of individual rationality in BE and EME. To understand these theoretical interrelationships, we investigate the 1996 controversy between Kahneman, Tversky, and Gigerenzer. Those psychologists held different views on how probabilistic representations influence the context-dependency of rationality. This provides a rationale to suggest that a probabilistic ghost may be haunting the experimental machine in economics, and explai.. (shrink)

In this article, the notion of broken bodies is explored in relation to the African body and the history of colonialism in South Africa. This exploration will be rooted in a retelling of the story of the woman, Saartjie Baartman. In this retelling, the product of colonialism comes to the fore in a haunting. Jacques Derrida’s use of the concept of Hauntology is employed to investigate the ethical demand the spectre makes of us. With the help of the African concept (...) of ubuntu and African women’s theologies, we then seek to find healing and restoration for the broken bodies. (shrink)

This article discusses haunting as a condition and strategy for Black women in their lived and literary experiences. I use the haint as a key figure for understanding Black women's liminal state as both the ones haunted and the thing haunting and focus on one of the haint's primary manifestations: the hag. Throughout the essay I unpack maligning myths of this specter and center the works of Phillis Wheatley and Lucille Clifton to refigure the hag as a spiritual and (...) ancestral presence. (shrink)

Haunted People Syndrome denotes individuals who recurrently report various “supernatural” encounters in everyday settings ostensibly due to heightened somatic-sensory sensitivities to dis-ease states, which are contextualized by paranormal beliefs and reinforced by perceptual contagion effects. This view helps to explain why these anomalous experiences often appear to be idioms of stress or trauma. We tested the validity and practical utility of the HP-S concept in an empirical study of an active and reportedly intense ghostly episode that was a clinical (...) referral. The case centered on the life story of the primary percipient, a retired female healthcare worker. Secondary percipients included her husband and adult daughter, all of whom reported an array of benign and threatening anomalies across five successive residences. Guided by prior research, we administered the family online measures of transliminality, sensory-processing sensitivity, paranormal belief, locus of control, desirability for control, and a standardized checklist of haunt-type phenomena. The primary percipient also completed a measure of adverse childhood events and supplied an event diary of her anomalous experiences. We found reasonably consistent support for HP-S from a set of quantitative observations that compared five proposed syndrome features against the family members’ psychometric profiles and the structure and contents of their anomalous experiences. Specifically, the reported anomalies both correlated with the family’s scores on transliminality and paranormal belief, as well as elicited attributions and reaction patterns aligned with threat detection. There was also some evidence of perceptual congruency among the family members’ anomalous experiences. Putative psi cannot be ruled out, but we conclude that the family’s ordeal fundamentally involved the symptoms and manifestations of thin mental boundary functioning in the face of unfavorable circumstances or overstimulating environments and subsequently acerbated by poor emotion regulation, histrionic and catastrophizing reactions, and active confirmation biases. (shrink)