Haunted Experience

Being, Loss, Memory

Julian Wolfreys

• Publisher: Triarchy Press
• ISBN:
  9781911193036
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

?Julian Wolfreys starts with loss. All memory is the memory of loss…

All that we are, all we experience, all we remember, all that we forget but which leaves nevertheless a trace on us, in us, a trace that countersigns and writes us as who we are (in effect the constellated matrix of Being's becoming): this is a process of loss. This just is loss. Loss is who we are.

Loss is authentically the necessary and inescapable inessential essence of Being. Loss names the ghosts, the revenants of Being, Being's others. Neither there nor not there, loss persists as the always already becoming of the thinking of Being. There is more than one loss. There is no one loss. Loss never arrives for a first time. All loss is the return of what is lost to Being's being in the world.

From that starting point, the author explores the nature of being and dwelling… of memory and the nature of the traces of the past… of apparition and appearance and perception… of touch and being touched… of the material and the (a)material.

In a book that draws in multiple threads from 19th- and 20th-century European literature, he references extensively Heidegger, Derrida, Lacan, Cixous, Celan, Husserl, Woolf, Joyce, Hegel, Badiou, Rilke, Merleau-Ponty, Winterson, Stockhausen and True Detective in an impressive and eclectic tour of the being-becoming-loss.

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——— Sel...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• To start from loss…
• …I Am, Yet What I Am…
• …Someone Who Identifies Him- or Herself As ‘european’…
• …Dwelling Through the Careful Reading of the Traces of the Past…
• …They Stay With Us As Afterimages, Traces of A Familiar Conventionality That is Lost, But Remembered…
• …A Matter of Unthinking Residence…
• …Essentially Decorporealised Visions…
• …Haunting, the Spectral and the Uncanny…
• …An Archive of the Traces of Experience…
• …A Series of Apparitions…
• …It is Perhaps A Question of Memory, and Modernity, it Seems, is to Blame…
• …It is As If All the World Touched Me…
• …The Ghosts are Already Here of Course…
• …There is the Primacy of Perception, Which is Groundless…
• …All Possible Meanings Resonate…
• …All Memory is the Memory of Loss…
• …The Apparition is Called Up As Much As it Arrives Unbidden…
• …Do You See What I Mean?…
• …I is the Frame by Which I Name Myself…
• …This is My Perception, in the Perception of the Other…
• … “O for the Touch of A Vanish’d Hand!”…
• …What Does it Mean to Say One is Touched?…
• …There is A “gap in Local Continuity As Well As Sense”…
• …We Hold On, or Make-believe We Do, to An Empirical Past We Can No Longer Have…
• …There is … That Which is ‘felt from Within’…
• …Imagine What Has Been and That Which is No Longer, and Yet ‘is’ Otherwise…
• …What Would Constitute An Invisible Appearance?…
• …Pause in Order to Rethink, or Simply to Think for A First Time…
• …We are Opening Ourselves to A Different Materiality, An (a)material Historicity of the Subject…
• …Allow Me to Conjure the Scene for You…
• …Visitation of Any Kind Implies That ‘absolute Hospitality’ Must be Extended…
• …Appearance is Everything Here…
• …There is A Point of Invisibility, A Limit to Visibility…
• …Can This Ghost Touch You in the Same Way?…
• …There is No Accounting, No General Principle by Which One’s Being Haunted Can be Considered the Same for Everyone…
• …We Might Begin to Think … in Terms of … the Givenness of Being, If We are to Start With Loss.
• Works cited
• ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
• BY THE SAME AUTHOR
• Notes
• Back Cover