Specters of Waste

I will argue that we are haunted by the specter of waste. While we try separate the wanted from the unwanted and the useful from the useless, stacking away our nuclear waste in places no one will ever return to (hopefully) and burying and burning 'residual' waste, it keeps coming back. Not full circle, but in strange loops, like the plastic soup that is taking possession of the oceans, of fish, of us.

The figure of the specter famously turned up in Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. Derrida uses the specter to address metaphorical ghosts, to deal with figures that are simultaneously present and absent, giving rise to an ambiguous ontology and a paradoxical state of being and non-being – a “hauntology”. I will take up Derrida's hauntology and show how this ambiguous ontological status can also clings to something as material as waste. For don't we act as if our world is filled with ontological U-bands (Morton), taking waste to some “away”?

Derrida writes that to speak with ghosts is also to mourn them. Mourning in terms of spectrality is not about localizing ghosts and keeping them buried, but about the act of learning to live with them. We should learn to live with waste and resist the urge to conjuring away specters like waste in the name of a redeemed whole, a “true Heimat” (Jay) and keep in mind that the “unheimlich” resides in the “heimlich” (Freud). Sticking with the metaphor of 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.