Ghosts - an introduction

Every period has its ghosts (and we have ours) - its own experience, its own medium, and its proper hauntological media.
Jacques Derrida: Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International, 1994

Here is the outline I explain in the video - for connecting to your own ghost/haunting theme - PLEASE do comment and share about it, the conversation is just starting :)

Step One: Invitation

"Who haunts me?
Not to terrify me, not to trap me — but to demand recognition, to unsettle the easy narrative of my life.

Come forward.
What remains unfinished between us?
What work have I refused to complete?"

(Pause and wait. The ghost does not respond on your timeline.)

Step Two: Acknowledgment

"I will not deny you.
I will not explain you away.
I will sit with the discomfort of your presence.

You represent a piece of history, memory, or injustice — personal or collective — that persists because it was never properly laid to rest."

Step Three: Engagement

"Ghost, what is it that you need me to see?
What structure have I been complicit in maintaining?
What story have I refused to grieve?
What do you want me to carry forward — and what must I finally lay down?"

(Write down or speak aloud any impressions, memories, physical sensations that emerge — even if they seem disjointed. The ghost speaks indirectly.)

Step Four: Extraction

"I will not sanitize your message into something convenient.
If it wounds me, so be it.
If it frees me, so be it.

The price of living is being willing to be haunted — and to answer with something more than silence."

Step Five: Closure

"I will remember you without freezing you in time.
I will change because you insisted I do so.
You are not my enemy.

You are the pressure of a world trying to become more just — inside me, through me, beyond me."

(Thank the ghost. Let it stay or let it leave. Either way, the pact has been made.)

Resources:

Avery Gordon: Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
Jacques

Derrida: The Specters of Marx:The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the NewInternational