Haunted body and ghostly spatialities. ALICE Seminar Series #2.

 

Ghosts and hauntings are familiar with architecture. Das Unheimliche, the essay of Freud, resonated all along the XXth century into architectural theory. Unhomeliness has been first thought of as a bourgeois aesthetic experience referring to estranged homes to their inhabitants and leading to the haunted house's figure. Secondly, the development of psychoanalysis in architectural methods and theories to address the fundamental unlivable conditions of the modern city shifted the relations between bodies and architecture, site and structure, and paved the way to deconstructivism's dismembered bodies and below language aesthetics.

 

However, a third way remains unaddressed in the architectural field. Ghosts appear asking for reparations. Traces of institutionalized violence and silencing, their phenomenal existence is an effective, shared, and lived reality. As a particular figure of plural temporalities defining affective landscapes, ghosts inhabit, dwell, and thus, shape and influence our spatialities. Not our past, our commons, ghosts are a particular texture of living memories with whom we are sharing our lands, practices, and becoming.

 

For this second session of the seminar Surrounded by a fog of virtual images, we aim at addressing architectural histories of haunting, as much as the spatial dimensions and agencies of ghosts. Starting from different perspectives  (sociology, architectural, and critical theory), this discussion aims at opening common grounds for critical, intersectional, and reparative architectural (hi)stories. 

 

We will do it in collaboration with Avery Gordon, whose intervention will address subversive historical alternatives with the aim of returning to the ghost a certain agency with which the living might make common cause. Meanwhile, Gabriele Schwab will ask how “ghostly spatialities” affect the texture of traumatic memories. Under the title Memory Crypts, she will use several examples from her hometown in order to analyze these haunting memories, including the erasure of traces of Jewish life, a spatial memory of Roma life, and a memory of the discovery of an Aleman burial ground.

Biography: 

Avery F. Gordon was a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara for thirty years and is currently a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck School of  Law University of London. Her most recent books are The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins, The Workhouse: The Breitenau Room (with Ines Schaber), Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination and Keeping Good Time: Reflections on Knowledge, Power and People. Her work focuses on radical thought and practice and she writes about captivity, enslavement, war and other forms of dispossession and how to eliminate them. She has been the co-host of No Alibis, a weekly public affairs radio program on KCSB FM Santa Barbara since 1997.

Gabriele M. Schwab is Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine.  She holds appointments in the departments of Comparative Literature, Anthropology, English and European Languages and Studies. She received her Ph.D. in literary studies and critical theory at the University of Constance in 1976 and a Ph.D. in Psychoanalysis from the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles in 2009.  A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Heisenberg Fellowship, her research interests range across critical theory, psychoanalysis, trauma studies, literature and anthropology, and 20th- and 21st century comparative literatures.  Monographs in English include Subjects Without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction (1994); The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language (1996); Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (2010); Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Subjectivity, Culture (2012.Winner of the 2014 Choice Award for Best Academic Book). Radioactive Ghosts (2020) Edited collections: Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood (2006. with Bill Mauer); Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis (2007) and Clones, Fakes and Posthumans: Cultures of Replication (2012. with Philomena Essed).

We also have the pleasure to receive Denise Bertschi, artist and PhD candidate at LAPIS as guest discutant.