Pulsações de luzes tênues: fantasmas e fantasmagorias assombram o presente

Abstract

This article aims to think a relationship with the imaginary of ghosts as a possibility of interrogation to the present, through luminosities that can haunt imperative forms of contemporary visibility. The text addresses the conception of phantasmagoria in Walter Benjamin and turns to technical inventions such as the photography of ghosts that emerged in the nineteenth century, to point out an aesthetic and political potency of the imaginary of ghosts as “survivals” engendered socio-historically. The text addresses the conception of spectre in Derrida and problematizes the reduction of the notion of ghost to an individualistic and psychologizing sense. The faint lights of ghosts can haunt and interrogate both a disenchantment that encases us in an uninterrupted time of hyperconnectivity, and the sorcery of contemporary capitalism that captures even capacities to think and feel.