[...] try to evade loss by soliciting misrecognition (on the part of the ghost), but they cannot cover over the fact of an already existent loss

working as a repetition compulsion --> the widow ghost (بختک bakhtak?) as an example of death drive
(waking up nightly having felt themselves robbed of breath and speech)
--Mills+Morris--> capital (not war) as the source of this trauma

trauma that arises in war ~/= injury that is the function of insertion into new and painful economic structures

mastering the wounds produced by capital, depend on:
•not the production of cathartic discharge through aberration or historisization through narrative
•on some kind of socialization or collectivization through which the source of injury can be addressed

(تقدم anteriority =/= causality عليت)

*discernment of cause is precisely the domain of political analysis*
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in a history that is experienced as the space of contingency, or accident, symptoms are likely to be recognized as cause (<== the order of anteriority is no longer distinguished from causality)
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older patriarchal orders might reassert their values

young people being possessed by crowds and then escaping that possession --> the labor to discern other possibilities in relation to the accidental...


accidental encounter as the basis of politicization --reiterates-transforms--> narrative of ghostly encounters ~=reveals==> *a fundamental but ultimately inexplicable antithesis exists* (between the way things exists and the possibility that they might be otherwise)

the “accident” makes visible the contingencies of everyday existence

[*]ghost: materialization of the spectral possibility of being absolutely otherwise (we give it a name “death” or “fiction”) and negates it by assuming a material form

...the ethical impulse constantly:
•risks disappearing into a mere chance affair
•risks disappearing in a rule

(Morris -->) spirit possession ==> *an individual learns to contain the effects of lost consciousness* (hence a certain kind of death)--by regularizing it and by surrendering her to his body to a voice that comes from without, almost always in the form of a commandment
*a mode of absolute comformity* --expresses--> desire =/= interest [Marx diagnosis: (how) the ‘interest’ of power appears as the ‘desire’ of the ones who are disenfranchised]
--> simulacrum of a dialogue, reciprocal sociality in a theater where the spirits respond to the questions of mortals
[crowds split between a desire to be in the place of power and an interest in its overthrowing]

the medium: always one called to her task, one who cannot refuse the demands made on her by a ghostly power. in her, power becomes visible.
-and is personal (in form of commandment--and not rule of law)
-the medium, in submitting, keeps alive *a memory of power before the bureaucratization of state*

young inmates entering into insurgent movement largely on the basis of contacts with older ideologues (with whom they had contact solely because they were incarcerated in spaces reserved for political prisoners

consciousness as reason --> double sense of being unmoored from explanatory and thus causal logics rooted in the idea of interest and expressed as a faith in the liberatory capacity of knowledge

bearers of popular political agency

mediatized neoliberalizing world

(identification with middle classness [its universal interests] -->) aspiring to classlessness

spirit mediums dressing themselves in the costumes of ancient priests

inadvertent and accidental politicization ~=> an awkward form --> opening to the liberation of the political from historical determination and its various teleologies

the fall of Soviet socialism ==>
•disorientation of structures within which opposition to the injustices of the capitalism could be articulated
•more ethical conception of democracy


(rethinking the conditions of) posibility for political organization (and political forms)

-(let's not) programmatic politics --reverting--> to a parodic reinstantiation of older oligarchic forms
-(let's not) reduction of accidental to trauma [~= incapacity to speak]

crowd: a context in which one can become subject to powers that exceed one --> for which spirit possession offers a normative form

the crowd lends people an instrument by which they can become audible (to the extend that they lose their own particular voice) ~= the medium lends a body to the spirit who can speaks in a voice from elsewhere

[*]crowd: a mode of the (political) sublime : one dies as a subject to be recognized as a citizen(= one who has a voice)

*sorcery: the translation of one fact into the form of another*

an antecedent rendered as cause

when we say something needs retrospection, it means narration (that allows the accidental to appear as that which will recur, not an anxious anticipation, but *a resolute commitment to an ethics of the event) =/= retrospection structured only by the question of origin (--> an approach to *curing trauma*)

(sustainable forms of) social good and distributive justice

ghosts ~= signs of reason's failure
•failure =/= absence of rational faculties
•[*]reason: that which arises to transcend a kind of being that would live only in the mode of the accidental

Morris's ‘giving up ghosts’ --> ***an acknowledgment of the accidental ground on which reason enacts the enabling violence of its regulative ideals***
-*enabling violence* --{trauma =/= accident}--> accidental events (such as the convergence of a crowd in a street in Bangkok) can precisely be rendered as the “ground” of socially transformative politics and institutional interventions (without original motivations)

(?what is at stake in elaborating the relationship between [Derrida's]:)
•grounding --> gesture of rational calculation and decision making
•running ground --> moment of accident when the boat touches bottom and is immobilized

(we can never) guarantee its own effectivity
(cannot know that if it is effect or cause)

([can we ever?] resist) melancholy eschatology


(?) the gesture of politicization must be made repeatedly---often in situations that arise as though accidentally

...how the experience of the political as accidental (in popular mobilization during the 1990s) was also (at least partly) written into the interior of another discourse about the impossibility of change [~ neoliberalism's triumph and the end of history]

binarism of the war on terror resignifies older more disparate conflicts, and cultivates subjects who conceive of the political in these narrow oppositional terms --> to define the political as opposition between friends and enemies

***power always works by claiming that the future is already determined by a past narrated from its perspective*** (<-- that is why my work is about the past) --> [my work:] *learning to think otherwise about both the past and the future*

(the failure of political imagination in only speculating about the future)

*(the basis of) the political: transcendence of the accidental*

Morris shows how the potential force of the political depends on the recognition that it is not merely that which can be relegated to the past

...................................

(Bubandt > Morris > in Buli, North Maluku in Indonesia) witchcraft: ambivalent aporia, the interminable problem of life ~= empty seashell (shell in which there might or might not be an occupant, provides the de-sexualized figure for doubt that saturates the consciousness of those who inhabit the world of witchcraft, an internally split subject)

anthropology of witchcraft
--✕--> charges of residual exoticism by reading witchcraft phenomena as sites at which the transformations of modernity are mediated and made available for resignification
-to displace (witchcraft) into the domain of representation --> capacity to resignify the historical real

lethal violence at Marikana (South Africa, August 2012) --> muti magic was a not matter of resurgent tradition (for the black South African analysts), rather, magic was a visceral, strategically instrumentalizable, and absolutely lethal power. the kind that enables people to go to war, the kind that operates at the point where langu[...]