Aims and Background

This New College Symposium will examine ideas around what might be called a ‘spectral turn’ in modern culture in an interdisciplinary context. It is driven first by the plethora of ghosts, phantoms, spectres and manifestations of the undead that have appeared in recent literature, film, music and culture and which has led Mark Fisher to say that ‘“hauntology” is the nearest thing to a Zeitgeist’ at the moment; but it also seeks to explore these individual manifestations within larger overarching philosophical, ideological and cultural categories. Traditionally, the appearance of a revenant has been interpreted as the sign of unfinished business: a disturbance in the symbolic, moral or epistemological order, which is resolved once the ghost has delivered its message. But it can also manifest unaccommodated, censored or taboo aspects of the past which have been overwritten in the governing ideological interest.  Derrida’s essays on ‘hauntology’, especially his Spectres of Marx (1994), which derives a ‘politics of memory’ out of entertaining spectres, is a key inspiration; but so too is Abraham Torok’s ‘cryptonomy’, which argues, contrary to Derrida, that one must exorcise the phantoms in order to survive. But where are the haunted spaces of contemporary society and how do such visitations mobilize the past? While some commentators have identified phantoms as manifestations of a ‘millennial anxiety’, for others they have far more historical bent, drawing on the overlaid legacies of Fascism and Communism. And for others again they are the ghosts in a Capitalist machine, a response to a dead end of culture and the relentlessness of the hyper-production of the present.

This symposium will draw on these pivotal approaches to the question of haunting; but also attempt to open up debate in new ways: by exploring the relationship between the idea of haunting and nostalgia, haunting and constructions of cultural memory and generational transfer, the politics of specters, spectral topographies, ghostwriting and the possibility of a spectral aesthetic.

The Symposium draws together distinguished speakers from various different disciplines (Cultural Studies, English, French, German, Latin American Studies, Russian) María del Pilar Blanco (Popular Ghosts, 2010), Colin Davis (Haunted Subjects, 2008), Mark Fisher (Ghosts of my Life, 2012), Kirstin Gwyer (‘ghostwriting’ the Holocaust), Dina Khapaeva (Gothic Society, 2007) Karen Leeder (Spectres of the GDR), Julian Wolfreys (Victorian Hauntings, 2001), along with the prize-winning writer David Constantine (Something for the Ghosts, 2002) and the painter and visual artist Sarah Sparkes (GHost 2008-).

Funded by the Ludwig Fund New College and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oxford.