Book Releases, Faculty & Student Mentions, News
Prof. Michael Fischer’s “Hauntology’s Genesis, Catacoustics, and Future Shadows”, in Sadeq Rahimi’s “Hauntology of Everyday Life” (Springer, 2021)
Feb 22, 2022
- Develops a comprehensive frame for applying the theory of hauntology to everyday life from clinical and ethnographic points of view.
- Demonstrates the immediate relevance of hauntological analysis in everyday life.
- Uses vignettes and data from ethnographic research and clinical settings.
Brief Excerpt of Michael Fischer’s “Hauntology’s Genesis, Cautacoustics, and Future Shadows”:
Hauntology has gone through three major historical formations
indexed by dreamwork, electronic music, and algorithmic simulacra.
Rahimi introduces the first with: a story of a mentally disturbed man as a
kind of midrash (often a story mode of biblical or qur’anic interpretation);
the second with the analogy of justice as a slingshot around a black hole;
and the third with an invocation of emergent cyberworlds and virtual reality
as new forms of power relations depending less on information than on
data and simulacra. Hauntology itself is the undoing of all ontology, all
singularities, all claims to singular origins; of singular sovereignties, of the
unified self, and of European philosophy as a restricted language game.
Behind every claim of “how things are” lie shadows, ghosts, temporary
suppressions of alternatives and contestations in the rich possibilities of
life, history, politics, justice, and desire.
LINK: The Hauntology of Everyday Life