Thanks Zoe for putting this workshop together – these readings went together perfectly. I was also really thrilled to read Ghostly Matters again, especially because I have my physical copy from 2007, apparently having decided it “sparked joy” when I did my last major purge!
I’m just going to highlight a few passages I was struck by in the texts, in order to see if these things interest anyone else. I think these passages in different ways get to Zoe’s questions about the ethical obligations to ghosts and hauntings.
From Ahmed: “I had no right to tell their secrets, as they were not my secrets.”
This quote blew me away, and thinking of this precise phenomenon alongside thinking about ghosts, hauntings, melancholia was so interesting. What do we do with secrets that we know that it is not our “right” to tell? What do we do with secrets that it is not our right to tell, even when our knowledge of this secret is what motivates what we DO write? A lot of times when I read people’s writing I try to consider if what motivates a whole project can’t, for whatever reason, make it into the project, and how the work would be transformed if somehow the taboo secret did appear (and I guess I can rephrase that as: I often think about what is haunting the work). It’s honestly an ethical problem that has been with me (haunted me?) for as long as I remember thinking of myself as someone who could be a scholar, and I’d be really interested in discussing this attached to the particulars of Ahmed”s essay, and as it attaches to other particulars.
Avery Gordon –
“I have not endeavored to establish transhistorical or universal laws of haunting per se but rather to represent the structure of feeling that is something akin to what it feels like to be the object of a social totality vexed by the phantoms of modernity’s violence. What does it mean? It means following the insights that come to those who see all these forces operating at once. Such a way of seeing can make you a bit crazy and imprecise and wary of shorthands” (19).
Love this, and it reminds me of two things: 1) It reminds me of Deleuze’s notion of “hysteria” that he elaborates upon in The Logic of Sensation, where he writes of “hysteria” as a state that does not see linear time or normative space (so, it sees a lot of times together at once and a lot of spaces together at once). 2) It reminds me of Sara Ahmed’s notion of the “feminist snap” which…is a very tricky snap because it often emerges at exactly the time where it seems disproportionate to the IMMEDIATE offense!
Also: “In the twentieth century, literature has not been restrained by the norms of professionalized social science, and thus it often teaches us, through imaginative design, what we need to know but cannot quite get access to with our given rules of method and modes of apprehension” (25).
I wish I had this quote on top of my syllabus or research paper assignment this semester, as this is the precise thing I teach my students about what art can do that is unique, and is the answer to the question about why it might be valuable to study fiction.
I don’t have a particular quote from Eng, but melancholia vs. mourning has been something I’ve thought about a lot lately and appreciated his figuring of the two (“two”) experiences, especially as last semester we read the Butler essay referenced – which I really recommend and which I actually think gives a pretty decent diagnosis of heterosexuality!
Looking forward to talking about these texts tomorrow.
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I’m happy to hear that Ghostly Matters survived your purge!
I, too, love that quote from Ahmed—I think his is my favorite piece in this week’s readings. I actually read the essay two years ago and have returned to it periodically since.
I’m thinking a lot about what you say—how sometimes what motivates a project can’t make it into the project itself—and how the reasons for that lapse so often have to do with ethical considerations, taboo prohibitions on subject matter *as well as* institutional or disciplinary restraints on what constitutes “knowledge.” It’s quite the spread to contend with. In Ahmed, it seems like the problem is primarily ethical, that he must be very careful while approaching familial knowledge or secrets that hover over the public-private divide —but there’s also, in the archive, a sense of how unavoidable the collision between public and private actually is. We see this in the objects in the archive, many of which are mundane things that have been confiscated by the state. It raises the question: if the state is always intruding into and shaping our lives, often in ways that are violent, emotionally corrosive, even humiliating, how do we know what counts as public knowledge (what, in fact, we are obligated to share) and what we can keep to ourselves? Can we sketch the contours of the state without also illuminating the personal lives and stories that the state partially produces (seems like Gordon would say no, we can’t)? What is lost in that process? Conversely, what is gained in retaining a sense of privacy, in allowing some things to remain elusive, enigmatic, to go unanalyzed? I don’t have an answer to this question and don’t think an answer can be approached in any kind of systematic way, but I do believe there’s no shame in walking away from projects or bodies of knowledge that we don’t quite know how to deal with yet.
Stefanie – that second quote you pulled from Gordon is so beautiful and I agree that it encapsulates well the argument for studying literature in a world where the urgency of politics is always in our thoughts. Thank you!