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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2018

Nature's Ghosts: Environmentalism as Spectral Mediality

Yves Citton

Résumé

This article attempts to trace one particular register of spectrality, in a lineage going from Lucretius to Anna Tsing via Paracelsus and Charles Tiphaigne de La Roche, where ghosts are a matter of multitudes and environments rather than individualized revenants. My goal is not to prove or disprove anything about the current interest of spectrality studies-let alone about the degree of existence attributable to ghosts and revenants. My purpose is to better understand the degree of liveness we attribute to each other and to ourselves within relations inextricably entangled in apparatuses and networks of mediality. This will lead me to question the current status of one of our most evanescent but prevailing ghosts-Nature-and to sketch a form of environmentalism that would unabashingly reclaim its spectral thickness. Ghosts, spectres, spirits and phantoms were perceived, discussed, theorized and, yes, "de-constructed", long before Jacques Derrida made them popular (again) among academic and intellectual circles in the 1990s. The "spectral turn" well documented over the past decades looks very much like a merry-go-round, surviving its own decay century after century, as an eternally reappearing ghost of itself. This article will attempt to trace one particular register of spectrality, in a lineage going from Lucretius to Anna Tsing via Paracelsus and Charles Tiphaigne de La Roche, a lineage where ghosts are a matter of multitudes and environments, rather than individualized revenants. My goal, of course, is not to prove or disprove anything about the current interest of spectrality studies-let alone about the degree of existence attributable to ghosts and revenants. My purpose is to better understand the degrees of liveness we attribute to each other and to ourselves within relations inextricably entangled in apparatuses and networks of mediality. This will lead me to question the current status of one of our most evanescent but prevailing ghosts-Nature-and to sketch a form of environmentalism that would unabashedly reclaim its spectral thickness. Emanations My beloved cat Rudy, a beautiful female baptized with a Palestinian name, recently passed away. I have seen Rudy countless times after her physical body had been cremated. Of course, I have not seen her, but only her ghost. What was this ghost made of? Something similar to what Lucretius called simulacra in De rerum natura: a superficial appearance that came to detach itself from Rudy's material body and to float away from her actual presence.

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Dates et versions

hal-02912289 , version 1 (05-08-2020)

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  • HAL Id : hal-02912289 , version 1

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Yves Citton. Nature's Ghosts: Environmentalism as Spectral Mediality. Ritorni Spettrali. Storie e teorie della spettralità senza fantasmi, 2018. ⟨hal-02912289⟩
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