Resurrecting Lost Futures: Hauntology for Witches

This is a 120-minute intermediate level lecture , in The Sophia's (main level)

Death is not the end, and through necromancy we can summon lost futures. “Hauntology”, coined by Jacques Derrida but popularized in culture by Mark Fisher, gives us the tools of conjuring the ghosts of potential. Fisher observed of the 21st Century in “What is Hauntology?”: “More broadly, and more troublingly, the disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.[...]” We are in an age where visions of futures (promised, or individually shaped) deteriorate before us. The social imagination is foreclosed upon by torrential tragedy, and our capacity to dream new futures becomes integral for survival. Which augurs of potential futures float like ghost lights above the River Lethe, unremembered after their dreamers died? Which…