A year-old obsession with the haunted house. Not atypical for me, not by subject nor by the feverishness associated. Sometimes I think living is just management, measuring and quelling the various humours that attach me to me, and then to the rest. The house might stay me in that way but that too… It’s not something you don’t think about as an immigrant. Or if you just move often.
What is the house? A symbol for structure, stability, for a place to call home. But only sometimes. The house, I have felt, evaporated much earlier, in more personal and devastating tones, in a shock of air bursting. I’m sorry. The definition got corrupted. I couldn’t stop seeing the bitrot and the restlessness endowed in the walls and the cracks between them. Being as young as I was, I had attached a malice to the house because it was where I was, because I couldn’t imagine what else it could be but malice. No horror movie required, no, not for me. If the house is safety then the haunted house is its natural inversion.
This sort of symbol or relation has been expanded upon onto nations. If the house is security then am I the one haunting it? Do I present a foreign element, a beast of salt? Canadian multiculturalism disagrees, but I feel it in my vertebrae, my pineal gland. And even within my own family the fear is there. Perhaps this is the root of my feeling of liminality, of my depersonalization and then my inhumanity: not just on the coastline between the sea and the country, but between two deaths. A state of biological life but to be functionally deceased. Zizek says that Agamben calls this homo sacer, and I suppose I should feel complimented—I fear the definition might contain all of me.
On later reflection I think I was born with it. But the moment I could finally parse it was a year ago, learning and saying the word “hauntology”. Portmanteau between ontology and haunting. Esoteric political concept; enjoyable to a far-enough leftist but might confirm for other people my lunacy if strayed too far from its point of origin… but I usually traffick in these anyways, even to acclaim. If the haunted house is a subversion of “the safest place in the world”, then hauntology details that but on more massive scale. This what I mean by it applying to a nation. The term originates with Jacques Derrida, as he discussed in The Spectres of Marx and the proclamation that "a spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism." It is also associated with the quote, “the time is out of joint.” The politics of hauntology delineate the insistence or persistence or subsistence of history into the present, and so fragments the time being experienced. The Shah is-was a dictator. In this new space you can conceive of things differently. Futures can be lost. People can be not. An area to deny reality of its cruel being-there, when you felt like you weren’t. Perhaps the reason I became attached to the term was that if the world was as unreal as I felt then maybe I truly was at home. This way, a state of nothinghood is still a nation-state.
(This I discovered by way of the internet, in similar mode to exploration and desperation. This is the process or advantage of such a thing. If it weren’t there for me I don’t know what I would’ve failed to learn, how much lon ger it would take to lose tension and float into my lofty knowledge.)