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Spectral Haunts and Ghostly (S)crypts
"The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts."- Italo Calvino
"Contrary to what we might believe, the experience of ghosts is not tied to a bygone historical period, like the landscape of Scottish manors, etc., but on the contrary, is accentuated, accelerated by modern technologies like film, television, the telephone. These technologies inhabit, as it were, a phantom structure."- Jacques Derrida
"The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows."- Gaston Bachelard
"Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night . . . shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves."- Virginia Woolf, The Waves
"If the destination of one's own writing is names or if one writes in order to call up names, then one writes also for the dead. Perhaps not for the dead in general...Rather, one writes for a specific dead person, so that perhaps in every text there is a dead man or woman to be sought, the singular figure of death to which a text is destined and which signs. Now, if the other who signs in my place is dead, that has a certain number of consequences."- Jacques Derrida
"[W]ere I not haunted by a relentless epistoliphobia, which dulls my head and lames my hand: if I can get rid of it, expect volumes."- Henry Fuseli
"To be sure, this charming and singular state in which all forces are in equilibrium, in which the imagination, however marvelously powerful, does not draw the moral sense toward perilous adventure, in which an exquisite sensitivity is no longer tortured by afflicted nerves, the most common counselors of crime or despair- this marvelous state, I say, appears without harbinger. It arrives as unexpectedly as an apparition. This, too, is a type of haunting, but an intermittent one, from which, if we are wise, we may derive the certainty of a better existence and the hope of attaining it through the daily exercise of our will."- Charles Baudelaire
"But on the other hand, repetition is the very movement of non-truth: the presence of what is gets lost, disperses itself, multiplies itself through mimemes, icons, phantasms, simulacra, etc.. Through phenomena, already. And this type of repetition is the possibility of becoming-perceptible-to-the-senses: nonideality."- Jacques Derrida
"And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language."- Karl Marx
"The graft, by definition, and herein no different from the parasite, is never simply alien to and separable from the body to which it has been transplanted or which it already haunts."- Jacques Derrida
"A specter is haunting Europe- the specter of communism."- Karl Marx
"Not to drag their generation to the grave, but to found a new one- that is the motive that ever drives them onward; and even if they are born late, there is a way of living by which they can forget it- and future generations will know them only as the first-comers."- Freidrich Nietzsche
"Thus the resurrection of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in imagination, not of fleeing from its solution of reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not of making its ghost walk about again."- Karl Marx
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