All Representation is Ghostly

Walley, Joanne ‘Bob’ and Lee Miller. “The Hauntologies of Clinical and Artistic Practice.” Risk and Regulation at the Interface of Medicine and the Arts: Dangerous Currents, edited by Alan Bleakley, Larry Lynch and Greg Whelan, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, pp. 101-102:

And while it [hauntology] absolutely applies to the digital, the dispersed, the postmodern, it might also be indicative of all arts practice. As Andrew Gallix observes:

[w]hen you come to think of it, all forms of representation are ghostly. Works of art are haunted, not only by the ideal forms of which they are imperfect instantiations, but also by what escapes representation. See, for instance, Borges’s longing to capture in verse the “other tiger, that which is not in verse”. Or Maurice Blanchot, who outlines what could be described as a hauntological take on literature as “the eternal torment of our language, when its longing turns back toward what it always misses”. Julian Wolfrey argues in Victorian Hauntings (2002) that “to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns” so that “all stories are, more or less, ghost stories” and all fiction is, more or less, hauntological (Gallix, 2011: UP).

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