AT HOME IN AN UNHOMELY WORLD. ON SPECTERS, GHOSTS, MONSTERS AND OTHER UNWELCOME CO-INHABITORS

While we try to stack away our nuclear waste in places that hopefully no one will ever return to, burying and burning “residual” waste, it keeps coming back. Not full circle, but in uncanny loops, like the plastic soup that is taking possession of the oceans, of fish, of us. The moment we stop desiring objects, they become waste. We use disposable things, minimizing care, saving time. But of course, these things don't go away. Waste lingers. Waste remains. We act as if things don’t exist until they come to human consciousness and as if they disappear after we are done with them. But they don't. They stay. Or come back later. Waste appears to have a haunting quality.

Modern-day waste distorts notions of inner and outer, of familiarity and strangeness, of own and other. I will trace the concept of the uncanny in Freud (es spukt – the Heimlich itself is Unheimlich), Heidegger (Dasein itself is uncanny) and Derrida (presence itself is uncanny) and argue that living with waste means resisting the urge to conjuring away specters in the name of a redeemed whole, a “true Heimat”, as Martin Jay puts it.

On medieval maps unknown territory is marked by monsters. Nowadays we seemingly have no uncharted territory left; there are no monsters on Google Maps. But there are monsters nonetheless, things unknown, frightening, eerie, both without and within. And we’d better pay attention to them. As the editors of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2016) remark, monsters make us pay attention to ancient chimeric entanglement. They also point towards life’s symbiotic entanglement across bodies and the ‘denial of the monstrosity of entanglement has turned this life-making trait against us’. Ghosts on the other hand, they remark, point to our forgetting. But these ghosts disturb our plans and leave traces. When we pay attention, those traces can be seen.

When, as I suggest, we take symbioses, that is living-together, as a starting point it is unclear where the one ends and the other begins. As Morton puts it: “Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me? Who is the host and who is the parasite? The term “host” stems from the Latin hostis, a word that can mean both “friend” and “enemy”. (Morton 2017, 1). Who is the host or hostess and who comes to visit? As Michel Serres remarks in The Parasite the French word hôte refers both giving and receiving, to offer and to accept, the welcoming host and the stranger who comes to visit. Sticking with the metaphor of (un)home(liness) I will argue that our house is a haunted house and that clear distinctions between inner and outer, canny and uncanny, wanted and unwanted cannot be maintained.