Some of my favourite passages below, dutifully typed out in the course of a read-through seeking poetic ways of thinking about hauntings; Gordon's approach is politically-minded but also lends itself readily to individual and personal experience.
Via close readings of psychoanalysis ("sociology needs a way of grappling with what it represses, haunting, and psychoanalysis needs a way of grappling with what it represses, society") by way of Sabina Spielrein (familiar to me from A Dangerous Method), Luisa Valenzuela's He Who Searches and Toni Morrison's Beloved, with quality time spent with Freud (especially "The Uncanny"), Benjamin, Barthes ("Camera Lucida") and Raymond Williams along the way.
If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition. (8)
… the method here involves producing case studies of haunting and adjudicating their consequences. What kind of case is a case of a ghost? It is a case of haunting, a story about what happens when we admit the ghost - that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present - into the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts of the world. … It is often a case of inarticulate experiences, of symptoms and screen memories, of spiralling affects, of more than one story at a time, of the traffic in domains of experience that are anything but transparent and referential ... (24)
… uncanny experiences are “qualities of feeling” … haunting experiences. There is something there and you “feel” it strongly. It has a shape, an electric empiricity, but the evidence is barely visible, or highly symbolised. [Something familiar] has transmuted into an unsettling spectre. … We are haunted by somethings we have been involved in, even if they appear foreign, alien, far away, doubly other. (50-51)
… the ghost imports a charged strangeness into the place or sphere it is haunting, thus unsettling the … lines that delimit a zone of activity or knowledge. … the ghost is primarily a symptom of what is missing. It gives notice not only to itself but also to what it represents. What it represents is usually a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken. … the ghost is alive, so to speak. We are in relation to it and it has designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice. (63-64)
… the ghost is a living force. It may reside elsewhere in an otherworldly domain but it is never intrinsically Other. It has a life world … of its own. And it carries this life world with all its sweet things, its nastiness, and its yearnings into ours as it makes its haunting entry, making itself a phenomenological reality. There is no question that when a ghost haunts, that haunting is real. The ghost has an agency on the people it is haunting and we can call that agency desire, motivation or standpoint. And so its desires must be broached and we have to talk to it. The ghost’s desire, even if it is nothing more than a potent and conjectural fiction, must be recognised …[but] haunting makes its only social meaning in contact with the living’s time of the now … the need of the dead to be remembered and accommodated … is inseparable from the needs of the living. In other words, the ghost is nothing without you. (179)
… the ghost cannot be simply tracked back to an individual loss or trauma. The ghost has its own desires … the force of the ghost’s desire is not just negative … [The ghost is] pregnant with unfulfilled possibility, with the something to be done that the wavering present is demanding. This something to be done is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the present, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had. (183)
Profane illumination … the immense forces of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in everyday things … the emphasis on phenomenal forms, or habitual relation to them, and their capacity, upon a certain kind of contact, to shatter habit … crossroads where ghostly signals flash … until that one day when they become animated by the immense forces of atmosphere concealed in them. These illuminations can be frightening and threatening … the profane illumination is a discerning moment. … when thought presses close to its object, as if through touching, smelling, tasting, it wanted to transform itself. The profane illumination captures the medium by which we have a different kind of access to the density of experience … [it] captures just that experience of the ghostly matter … [it] is a kind of conjuring that initiates because it is telling us something important we had not known; because it is leading us somewhere, or elsewhere. (204-205, quoting Benjamin and Adorno)
To experience a profane illumination is to experience the sensate quality of a knowledge meaningfully affecting you. … a way of encountering the ghostly presence, the lingering past, the luminous presence of the seemingly invisible … when you know in a way you did not know before, then you have been notified of your involvement. You are already involved, implicated, in one way or another, and this is why, if you don’t banish it, or kill it, or reduce it to something you can already manage, when it appears to you, the ghost will inaugurate the necessity of doing something about it. (205-206)
