By Allen Feldman

“It is useless to seek a more substantial truth behind the phantasm, a truth to which it posits a rather confused sign … Phantasms must be allowed to function at the limit of bodies; against bodies, because they stick to bodies and protrude from them, but also because they touch them cut them break them into sections, regionalize them, and multiply their surfaces…Phantasms do not extend organisms into an imaginary domain; they topologize the materiality of the body…they must be allowed to conduct their dance, to act out their mime, as "extra beings."

–Michel Foucault[1]

“The problem of historical representation is how to represent that ghost. Something that is and is not.”

–Michel-Rolph Trouillot[2]

“Der Geist ist ein Knochen” (The Spirit is the bone)

–GWF Hegel[3]

Unthought Actualities

Alan Klima’s opening meditation on hauntology launches serial catastrophes-- the crash of the twin towers, the global deflation of subprime derivatives, the crash of silverware angrily thrown to the floor by no hand, the tumbling of a teak column that once upheld an aesthetic economy of homeliness, and the simulacral implosion of ethnographic realism founded on an anthropology that either precludes the unhuman or subjects it to recursive anthropomorphic expropriation. These catastrophes and conundrums evoke the German “unheimlich” which speaks, not to the purely alien, but to the becoming Other of a once familiar interiority abruptly and intrusively reemerging as what it is not. Klima’s algorithmic and divinatory broker Kamnoi, implicitly speaks of the unheimlich as the de-grounding rawness of misfortune, a traumatic realism, that leaves a wound, a black hole in the world whose leaking transmissions provoke the numerological conjuration of its arcana imperii. For Hegel such phantasia is an Aufhebung—a moment of emerging truth as the delirium of absolute translucidity. In Klima’s ethnography, disfiguration by economic, political and familial catastrophe generates refiguration, a retracement, that can take the form of the personified echographic phantom and numerological phantasms. The trace here simultaneously draws a bar over the disfigured original that signals its unavailability to full presence. This essay will respond to Alan Klima’s call for an ethnographic encounter with the hauntological in all of its site specific heterogeneity that would methodologically be compelled to problematize narrative-synoptic realism, a positivist power-knowledge apparatus that renders the hauntological inadmissible or dismisses it as folkloric. Acknowledging the heteronomous formation of regional hauntologies, I will offer my own ethnographic engagement with the ghosted in indirect conversation with Klima’s theoretical project. What troubles my engagement is how to practice an ethnography of hauntology, that would treat the ghosted as an ethnos, without committing anthropology-- a keystone concept of ethnographic realist aesthetics that precludes the unhuman, the creaturely and monstrosities of form and behavior.

In 1966 Foucault published an essay translated into English as “Blanchot: Thought from Outside." on the transgressive ontology of the without that topologizes hauntology.[4] The French title of the essay is double sided: la pensee du d'hors,” can slide into “la pensee d'hors” “translated respectively as “ thought from outside” and “thought of the outside” which points to different, yet, imbricated epistemic sites, or a site and a nonsite such as the outside of thought. This is the topological difference between interfaces that traverse reason and madness, the host and the parasite, the border and the alien, the algorithmic and the incomputable and a liquified boundary between life and death that subsequently defined Derridean hauntology and its cognate survivance. Alan Klima’s ethnographic rumination belongs to a thinking of the outside, while the ghosts and numerologies he is in deep conversation with index a thought from the outside to which Klima grants unprecedented hospitality and epistemic relevance. Peter Pal Pelbart associates Blanchot’s outside as non-site with Kafka’s obsession with errance, desert, exile and anonymous dispersion that preempt the “metaphorics of proximity, of shelter, of security, and of harmony.[5] For Pelbart, Kafka’s obsession arises from the claustrophobic historical situation of “thought without outside in a world without exteriority” that likewise informs Klima’s critique of a realism which permits only immanence.[6]

Is there an outside as such as an unplaceable space? The term "from" infers a relationship of derivation, dependency and a without lacking delimitable content-- an undecidable. Where does its origin lie, from where does the outside come from, what borders this border? Consider the catastrophic locus of transmission of Kamnoi’s torn fabric of the world that has no stabilized anchorage; an abgrund that appears through the decimation and decimalization, the fracturing and the fractioning, of all signifying referentiality? For Foucault interiority is not externalizing itself as an outside which it could then recuperate. Rather, following Nietzsche, there are only exteriorities, relations of non-relation confronting each other. That is why for Foucault what is central to the experience of the outside is that “one is irremediably outside the outside.”[7] Though, Etienne Balibar concedes that the thought of the outside arises from an experience of the latter that has become “anxiously internal.” [8] For Foucault interior spaces, household enclosures and architecture are the anxiety provoking zones where the outside initially manifests as in the ghost house of the film “Nang Nak,” discussed by Klima, with its rotting steps, shredded walls and swarming household rats. The interstitial home here becomes the aperture of the outside in its seeping into unheimlichkeit. For Blanchot spatial interiority is the requisite yet broken frame or screen upon which the outside appears, but within which it cannot be contained while shape-shifting into what Foucault names “a placeless place.”[9]

Alongside ruptured space, I am suggesting the outside as Unzeit, as a fall from time and the fall of a time into the “non anticipatable” and the “inhomogenous.” For Werner Hamacher Unzeit is an anachronous pre-essence that refuses “every compossibility and every co-presence and therefore also every place within a time series, a place that could be put before or after another.”[10] Unzeit is the intemporal “pre-possibility of all temporal possibilities that does not precede these within a time series; rather it precedes the latter as the non-linear—non-geometric and non-metrical—play of various times and time-possibilities, and precisely therefore lies within these as what is absolutely external to them.” [11] For Foucault the thought from the outside and its unraveling of temporal continuity is indexical of a politics of asubjectivity in which language has a permanent self-destructive capacity to abolish references to a subject, temporality and meaning. Foucault writes of: “A thought that stands outside subjectivity, setting its limits as though from without, articulating its end, making its dispersion shine forth, taking in only its invincible absence; at the same time standing at the threshold of all positivity, not to grasp its foundations or justifications but to regain the space of its unfolding, the void serving as its site, the distance in which it is constituted and into which its immediate certainties slip once they are glimpsed.” [12] As transgression, language is connected to the uncanny double of the sovereign subject that supposedly governs its own interiority including its communicative cognitive means and media. The experience of a linguistic outside occurs

“when all of discursive language is constrained to become undone in the violence of the body and the cry...when thought forsaking the wordy interiority of consciousness, becomes material energy, the suffering of the flesh, the persecution and rendering of the subject itself ...when thought ceasing to be the discourse of contradiction and the unconscious, becoming the discourse of the limit, or ruptured subjectivity, transgression... the experience of the double, of exteriority of simulacra, of the insane theatrical multiplications of the Self.”[13]

Foucault is in agreement with Gilles Deleuze here who associates the outside with the impersonal dispersion of words and statements that cannot be appropriated by any apparatus of mastery, for it is a speech without institution.[14] Linguistic institution also troubles Klima in his struggle to think outside the black box of narratological realism- an aestheticized fetish that represses the conditions of its production as the effect of a falsification that calls itself the contradiction of the true and the false.[15]

The thought from outside intersects with the Hegelian concept of the concept that is bound to catastrophe. The concept of the concept is the affirmation of that which is unthought within the concept like a ghost in the machine. In Hegel’s Phenomenology every concept as a figure of self-consciousness must pass through the pathos of enactment. This trial by unthought actualities dramatizes the inversion of subject and substance. Hegelian enactment as catastrophe becomes the pathogenesis of the concept it was meant to exteriorize, conserve and repeat but instead displaces, defers and detours. Hegel’s lesson is any border crossing by an outside disrupts the political field and intrudes from somewhere other than that field; it is irreducible to any medium and ideation by which a political field thinks itself. It arises from an entire terrain of the unthought -- what has been unquestioned, unsayable and invisible. Though the outside is not utterly symmetrical with the unsayable because the without can be involuntarily experienced as catastrophic. Therefore the experience of the outside is somewhat akin to the event, to the arrivant, of something that enters and intrudes that's not intrinsic but extimate. The event of the arrivant is simultaneously the experience of an outside and a limit, a border, boundary or threshold that has been ruptured. Such misarrival, Derrida writes, unfolds a topological hauntology “an absence of horizon [that] is not one that has no horizon at all; it’s where the horizon is, in a sense, “punctured” by the other. With the coming of the other there is a non-horizon.” [16]

Phantasms of Value Extraction

In his juxtaposition of catastrophes, Klima signals the inter-defacement of political economy and war as predatory technologies of value extraction. They converge in a politics of abstractive destruction where the extermination of value becomes the inaugural point for the institution of value—value expands as an automatic self-generating subject by becoming ghostly. In warfare this entails the renewable exploitation of geostrategic and embodied substrates of aleatory threat, risk, and insecurity. Aleatory, spectralized risk conjures value as it drifts and swerves, thereby provisioning a securitizing or fiscalizing project with expanding scenic prospects and newly encumbered bodies of value extraction. Fiscalization is characterized by unfixed sites of value generativity not so distant from Kamnoi’s cosmological number-streaming wound-aperture. Deleuze might have associated Kamnois’ cosmic gash of numerical and phantomatic value emission with a ghostly la place du mort (the dead man’s place), and “the empty square,” which can never be substantiated, occupied, or filled in order “to be displaced in relation to itself.” Deleuze elaborates: “Such an object is always present in the corresponding series, it traverses them and moves with them, it never ceases to circulate in them, and from one to the other, with an extraordinary agility. One might say that it is its own metaphor, and its own metonymy.” [17] The dead man’s place evokes Poe’s purloined letter entered into hauntological circulation that generates value and narrative trajectory from the void of its serially deferred, if not altogether, illegible, visible content.

In Archives of the Insensible, I had to come to terms with the war on terror as driven by value generating phantasmagoria; what Derrida calls a coup de théâtre personified by the “terrorist,” the extraordinarily rendered and the collaterally damaged and by the war generating abyss of ground zero[18] Here the executive and sovereign power is an political technology of ghosting and presents as spectral in itself. The auto-spectralization and self-ghosting of executive power is what Schmitt called the state of exception and likened to a miracle- a theological event. Risk and threat in the war on terror are shaped by autonomic value generation by presenting as a “sensuous nonsensousness” and as a “spectralizing disincarnation.” [19] The polemological threat form presents as an “a-physical body.” “This silhouette is inaccessible to pure sensuous fixation. Its appearance is a step beyond, “a thing in flight, that surpasses the senses,”[20] Consider drone surveillance and assault through the algorithmic meta-data doubling and ghosting of the lived body, invisible to the surveilled which instates “the malignant exploitation of the life habits of the victims… in such a way that they become involuntary accomplices in their own destruction”[21] Derrida, using Marx’s own terminology, calls this “becoming bodiless” of appearing value forms, “Eskamotage,” a spectralizing disincarnation, which “speaks of subterfuge or theft in the exchange of merchandise, but first of all the sleight of hand by means of which an illusionist makes the most perceptible body disappear” (159). For Derrida the value form is a parthogenic subject, simultaneously dead and alive. “The autonomization and automatization of ideality as finite-infinite processes of difference (phantomatic, fantastic, fetishistic, or ideological)—and of the simulacrum which is not simply imaginary in it. It is an artifactual body, a technical body, and it takes labor to constitute or deconstitute it” (213). The spectral “terrorist” as biometrical ghost becomes an algorithmic automaton: “The automaton mimes the living. The Thing is neither dead nor alive, it is dead and alive at the same time. It survives. At once cunning, inventive, and machine-like, ingenious and unpredictable, this war machine is a theatrical machine, a mekhane.” (192) Here we cannot ignore that Hobbes named the Leviathan an automaton composed of flesh and blood bodies incorporated and consumed by the social contract. The staged sexual tableau at Abu Ghraib, which reanimated the dead flesh of pornographic film in postcinematic political flesh, another dramaturgical reanimation of sovereign power. Derrida writes of phantasmagoria: “The conjuration is anxiety from the moment it calls upon death to invent the quick and to enliven the new, to summon the presence of what is not yet there.”( (135). This suggests that Kamnois’ number-stream is both an algorithmic automaton and a ghostly apparition of digital meaning technically constituted out of the dead of 9/11.

This mode of motion of risk and threat is striated by what Jean-Luc Marion, in another context, terms saturated images as the presenting of nonlight (aphos) within light (phos) itself. The saturated, unmappable threat image, lacking a stable referential horizon, impoverishes the quotidian gaze as an intentionality toward light. The image, filled with fear, violence, and indeterminacy, emerges only at the very moment of its loss in the invisible. This dislocation is an incorporeal motion within or of the image that refuses stable definitional outline. Thus the optico-political curvature of the threat object, its taking place is contingent on its singularizing withdrawal. The saturated apparition “contradicts the subjective conditions of experience precisely in that it does not admit constitution as an object. In other words, though experientially visible, it never-the-less cannot be looked at, regarded. The saturated phenomenon gives itself insofar as it remains according to modality, irregardable.”[22] With Blanchot, we need to rethink such moments as operations of destruction that resist temporal and spatial location in operating “inoperably” from a time and space that destroys time and space.

The political technologies that have congealed around the figure of the terrorist return to the original sense of “phantasmagoria” as the conjuring of ghosts, while agoria also means “to fool” and agoreuein translates as “allegory.” The collaterally damaged in being ghosted bear and incarnate the death of the proper enemy as a structuring hauntology without being or even witnessing that death; they are wedded to the death of the absent enemy, the proper and capitalized target, through an infinitely elongated and immaterial kill chain of misidentification and inadequation. Their disembodiment is a medium of connecting without connection. There is often no actual relation between the disappeared and the structuring enemy for what is set up as the proper enemy is more often than not phantasmatic—a malleable void by which noncombatants are conscripted through biographical attrition as ghostly doubles of the disappearing enemy.

Aphanisis: Appearing Under Erasure

Derridean Hauntology (there are others see note 23) may have had its graphic origin in the Heideggerian practice of Durchkreuzung; (crossing out) and Durchkreuzen (crossing through) as a critique of inheritance: a pivotal and anchoring concept in a text, for example ~~Nature~~ is crossed out and over by an X and thereby placed under erasure (sous rature) to signal its historical and semantic inoperability and even disappearance. In being retained in the text beneath the mark of its defacement, the deferred concept signals a flashing emergency zone, a spectral continuance- a contretemps has befallen the concept in its historical trajectory so that it can appear only under erasure. The X is not solely an after-image of the now inoperable referential punctum; for what has been placed under erasure is cast as bearing its own self-cancellation across time as the intrinsic catastrophic structure of its being.

More recently I have been engaged with the hauntology of political aphanisis- a disappearance that produces a traumatic reappearance, an ekphrastic apparition of the absent that can be applied to the spectrality of the collaterally damaged and the politically disappeared or rendered. Aphanisis was reclaimed from Greek and Roman philosophers and rhetoricians by the psychoanalysts Ernst Jones and Jacques Lacan. Lacan uses the term to describe a particular form of disappearance of the subject that is constitutive of that subject—subjectivation here originates, not with apparition but in disapparition. Aphanisis allows one to think a becoming of the subject through the dissolution of that subject. For Lacan, "when the subject appears somewhere as meaning, she is manifested elsewhere as 'fading', as disappearance, as aphanisis.”[24] Interstitial subjecthood is simultaneously spatialized, dispersed and congealed through disapparition and apparition Aphanisis for Lacan is “to make disappear” (aphanisios) rather than passively and abruptly “to disappear.” Lacan’s theory does not deploy the compressed binary of presence/absence but implicitly stresses an interval, temporal, spatial, affective and sensorial, between the concepts of disappearance and aphanisis and within the passages of aphanisis itself; the gap between the two terms is used to stress that aphanisis does not abrogate subjectivization but advances it though a neo-Hegelian negativity tantamount to an historical manifestation that becomes through its erasure.

My focus on aphanisis emerged in confronting the mechanical reproducibility of being ghosted by enforced political disappearance in Northern Ireland during the “Troubles” and in apartheid era South Africa. Pogroms of enforced disappearance and covert rendition are frequently dissimulated and disavowed as anomalous, nondescript mishaps by the abducting executive power. To think through this aporia is to step back from the worthy tomes of empirical data on enforced political disappearance (that are merely the tip of an unquantifiable iceberg) collated by human rights organizations in order to consider the making of the vanished as a formative metaphysics and hauntology of executive power—not all ghosts are victims.

Both genocide and enforced disappearance inflict ghosting by classifying persons and populations as improper to the terrestrial surface. A regime of vanishment defaces any evidence of the victim’s terrestrial anchorage before and after their abduction. The rhizomatic dispersion and cordoning off of the disappeared from molar space in turn enhances the circulating spectrality of an executive power that gives itself an immaterial anchorage in its attrition of somatic and biographical gravity—the missing become sheer effluvia and ephemeral historical ghosts that fuel power and fear amongst those that remain. They and their survivors haunt the juridical structures of citizenship who no one admits to seeing or hearing for fear of being ghosted themselves. Enforced disappearance can be accidentalized in being randomized, silenced and rendered unmotivated and acausal by the disappearance of disappearance. Both the vanished and the act of vanishment are literally placed under erasure, not completely voided, but subsumed under the quasi-opacity of a self-cancelling event that is recast as a nondescript mishap inflicted upon those who henceforth become nondescript in wartime and postwar society. Disappearance and its aftermaths are designed to inhibit the capacity of political and legal witness to catch its causality in the act, thus heightening the hauntological power of the abducting regime. Anatomizing the accidentalization of enforced disappearance need attend to the sensory content of a political phantasm in which the vanished have disappeared outside of their disappearance. A tropology of anthropophagy marks a regime of vanishment as an autonomic cannibalism wherein the disappeared, the event of their disapparition, and the socio-cultural memory of the event are mechanically and voraciously consumed by an executive power that, through auto-retraction, manifests as a “hungry ghost.” I write of this political cannibalism:

Michael Taussig envisions colonial and neocolonial phobias about the cannibal as the hallucinogenic re-creation” of the sovereign self in an anti-self. This transverse mimesis politically embodies the fear of the colonizer, the hegemon or sovereign power of “being consumed by difference” as aversion to the contretemps that the Other xenophobically personifies. Can programs of enforced disappearance be construed as the apotropaic consumption of difference that is imagined as potentially engulfing? Would this explain the regime’s foreclosure of... future political interlocutors? Enforced disappearance maps difference onto those it wipes off the earth either preemptively or ex-post-facto”[25]

Survivance

Denied disappearance is a political computation to not decide on the state of death, to withhold death and posthumous disposition from the disappeared, and if not the vanished, most certainly their family, friends, neighbors and peers. Sovereignty here occupies a threshold that de-juridifies the state of death through the abandonment of civic purview over the disposal of the dead— the clandestine mass grave, without markers, speaks to the withholding of civic jurisdiction over the postmortem and the consequent reassignment of death to a spectral and anomalous outside beyond civil society that forecloses any recuperation by the families of the disappeared and even the perpetrators who fear being held to account-- it as if this outside is where sovereignty erases itself in an act of autoimmunization. This dynamic can be discerned in the Derridean hauntology of habeas corpus and the corpse:

The dead person no longer has the corpse at his or her disposal, there is no longer any habeas corpus. Habeas corpus, at least, is not a habeas corpse, supposing there ever were such a thing. Habeas corpus concerns the living body and not the corpse. Supposing, I repeat, that there ever were a habeas corpus for the living body. Because you can guess that I believe that this habeas corpus never existed and that its legal emergence, however important it may be, designates merely a way of taking into account or managing the effects of heteronomy and an irreducible non habeas corpus. And the non habeas corpse, at the moment of death, shows up the truth of this non habeas corpus during the lifetime of said corpus.[26] (141)

Habeas corpus is a legal phantom, in being vulnerable to expropriation and dispossession to the sliding of the body out from under the category of the subject into the sphere of a materiality that no longer matters (in the double sense of the phrase) that Derrida calls survivance. There is a politics of survivance as an Unzeit, that suspends the difference between the active and the passive, life and death, corpus and corpse, as indicated by the “ance” ending which re-traces the indifference of Derrida’s différance. This indifference between the active and the passive is built into the depoliticizing accidentalization of enforced disappearance and the aftermaths of its silent disavowal. The indifference of disavowed disappearance is where both habeas corpus and the corpse become derivatives of what Derrida terms an “irreducible non habeas corpus” that infers the incorporeal Unzeit of survivance.

Survivance in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death … a survival that is not more alive, nor indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends itself to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance … (that)… is without superiority, with- out height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or sovereignty…the survivance I am speaking of is a groundless ground… It [Ça] begins with survival. And that is where there is some other that has me at its disposal; that is where any self is defenseless. That is what the self is, that is what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not.[27]

Under a regime of aphansis citizenship is constituted under the unwritten charter of a law founding violence— to let appear and make disappear—no civil appearance without potential political disappearance (and retracement as phantasmatic). No biographical dispensation by an appellate authority without ghosting by biographical annulment. This is to render death itself, once an object of central civic administration unavailable. A regime of survivance disables the sovereign potential of the subject to be capable of death as death. The phenomenology of enforced disappearance, its diffusion of pervasive absence and retraction, coincides with the chronotopology of Derridean justice, which is organized around the “not there” and responsibility for that which has been denied living presence, it is a court of ghosts negatively authorized by the phantasmagoria of positive law:

If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice. Of justice where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights…the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism. Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question "where?" "where tomorrow?" "whither?[28]

Derridean justice vibrates between thought of and from the outside. Here, the possible anabasis of the victim of war crimes entails the divorce of victimage from the adequation machines of jus ad bellum and jus post bello that promotes the exchangeability of political codes, body parts, deaths, and wounds, whether for warfare or lawfare. The hauntological return of the victim stands for the transcendental to any transcendental project of reproportioning violence or law that aspires to master the collaterally damaged, the disappeared and the anonymously buried either for domination or restoration and recall. Derrida calls this archivization and memorialization of the missing and murdered, a writing on cinders, in which ashes constitute the hauntological textile of historical dismediation. Cinders index the embodied subject burnt by the sun of the sovereign; the disappearance or disfiguration of the body that originated as a target present to or fabulated by an assailant and the spectral scarification left by such subtraction. The victim of violence can return with or without a body, voice, and face, as incommunicable, insistent and inexistent; but in all these (mis)arrivals those placed under erasure by executive power perdure in the cinders of what has been consumed by history, amnesia and anesthesia. Any ex-post-facto iteration of the historical deportee steps upon a fragile spiders web of cinders and risks dispersing this charred revenant in an effort to affix and to outline it- which is to freeze the cinders of historical suffering in the ice and mirror of archival refraction as petrifaction. This is why Derrida repeatedly stresses that the cinder here no longer is—rather, the cinder there is, indicating dislocation and displacement that speaks to the outside.[29] Cinders are hauntology. “Cinders there is” desists from the authoritative readability of the disappeared, those buried en masse and the collaterally damaged. The juridical and historiographic legibility of the historical deportee promoted by law, memorialization and archivization insists on the convergence of the erased with a transmittable surplus — productivity, information, the control of space and time and moral calculability-- anything to, perhaps unconsciously, avert the advent of historical hauntology. To adequate the disappeared or the collaterally damaged, to make their collectivizing value equivalence, through archivization is to reenact the reductive commensurating logic of enforced disappearance or collateral damage in the latter’s very adjudication and condemnation. Such retracement will attempt to extract the ghosted from the justice necessity of an outside from which they must be thought in the aftermaths of violence and terror. In this context their monumentalization could be likened to the inversion of the anonymized mass grave that turns it upside down and inside out, erecting a pyramidal structure of historical mummification. I would think that would be unacceptable for many survivors of the disappeared with whom I have met, who sustained over decades the affective “hauntology” of those under erasure in their search for accountability and an end to political impunity. As with the Argentinian Asociacióainn Madres de Plaza de Mayo who abjure memorials, and the Chilean women have been in search of the remains of the executed disappeared in the Atacama desert for more than 30 years, the choice between justice and law vibrates between hauntology and archival mummification. Derrida writes of the hauntological structure of the inheritable and the uninheritable: “If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it […]One always inherits from a secret...”[30]

Allen Feldman teaches and researches visual culture, media archeology, critical war studies and critical race theory. He is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic and visual culture research on policing as fusing warfare and lawfare in Northern Ireland, South Africa, with the HIV+ homeless in NYC and in the global “war of terror.” His research and teaching interests also include media ethnography, the anthropology of the body, the political sensorium, transitional and reparative justice, practice-led media research and the political anthropology of space. He is the author of Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics and Dead Memory (2015), Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (1994), and numerous articles on critical war studies, racialist policing and visual culture.

[1] Michel Foucault, Memory, Counter Memory and Practice, (New York: Routledge, 1987), 246.

[2] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 147.

[3] G. W. F Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 336-340.

[4] Michel Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot: the Thought from Outside” in Foucault/Blanchot trans. Brian Masumi, (Cambridge MA:, Zone Books, 1987).

[5] Peter Pál Pelbart, “The Thought of the Outside, the Outside of Thought,” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 5 no. 2, (2000): 201-209.

[6] Pelbart, “The Thought of the Outside,” 202.

[7] Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot,” 27.

[8] Etienne Balibar, Thought of/from the Outside: Foucault’s Uses of Blanchot, https://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2013/02/etienne-balibar-a-thought-offrom-the-outside-foucaults-uses-of-blanchot/

[9] Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot,” 24.

[10] Werner Hamacher, N’essance, The Oxford Literary Review 36 no, 2 (2014): 212.

[11] Ibid., 214.

[12] Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot,” 16.

[13]Ibid., 18

[14] Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Séan Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

[15] The epistemic foundations of ethnographic realism that Klima assiduously interrogates points to an omitted beginning and a ghost in the machine of anthropological realism that, though currently disavowed, remains intrinsic to the narratological and media archeology of ethnography in the form of the enframing case history dossier that underwrites scholarly capital. Ethnographic realism is not polarized to the ghostly rather its media archeology constitutes an inherited hauntology that troubles Klima and which the discipline to which we both belong has all but refused to exorcize despite its commitment to decolonizing itself. In the mid and late 19th century, in first world metropoles, confronted with proletarian urbanizing crowds, and at the frontiers of administrative and settler colonialism, forensic case histories surveillance and archives were mobilized as technologies of xenomorphic and xenophobic identifiability that fed into entrenched racialized and classist aversions of monstrosities of form and behavior. Such xenophobic technicities of pattern recognition and anomaly detection constituted a computational abnormation driving colonizing penal, militarized, economic and psychiatric tactics of phobogenesis. These dispostives included forensic assemblages of census taking, spatial- architectural grids, archives of phrenological photography and cognate racialized and criminalizing biometrics, that scanned, calculated and rehearsed the alien and the errant. Xenophobic forensics originated in mandates to identify the biosocial physiognomy of aberrancy in typified bodies and across the body politic of previously unknowable collectivities be they the proletarian “crowd” or the pacified “tribe.” The forensics of detected bodily and behavioral anomaly were essential to the advancement of an anthropological biopower. These forensic dispositives shed any proclaimed technological neutrality in presenting as inherently eugenic, sovereign, garrisoned, epidermalized and nationalist. Institutionalized anomaly detection enforced behavioral, bodily and territorial borders as well as cultural and racial authochony against biopolitical catastrophe.

[16] Jacques Derrida “Nietzsche and the Machine,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 7, (Spring 1994): 51.

[17] Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Text, 1953-1974, ed, by David Lapujoude, trans. by Mike Taorma, (New York: Semiotexte, 2004), 186.

[18] Allen Feldman, Archives of the Insensible: Of War Photopolitics and Dead Memory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).

[19] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, ed, Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2004), 51 and 189.

[20] Derrida, Specters of Marx, 189.

[21] Peter, Sloterdijk, 2009, Air Quakes , Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 1 (2009), 48.

[22] Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 214.

[23] The psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok first developed the concept of hauntology as the transmission of intergenerational secrets through the unconscious (which influenced Derrida) in their L' Écorce et noyau, (Paris: Flammarion,1978) published in English as The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. by Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). The film “Nang Nak” may be read through their hauntology as Mae Nak seeks to keep the truth from her husband that she and her child are ghosts, a secret which makes of the derelict house a crypt in a double sense. For Durchkreuzung; (crossing out) and Durchkreuzen (crossing though) see Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. David Krell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1995).

[24] Jacques Lacan, “Subject and the Other: Aphanisis,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1981), 216-232.

[25] Allen Feldman, “War Under Erasure: Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance.” Theory & Event 22 no. 1 (2019), 191.

[26] Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign 2: The Seminars of Jacques Derrida, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011) 141

[27] Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign II, 131

[28] Derrida, Specters of Marx, xviii.

[29] Jacques Derrida, “Eating Well Or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Points.... Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1995) 390.

[30] Derrida, Specters of Marx, 18.