Activity: Talk or presentation › Conference presentation
Description
In this presentation I explored literary haunted houses as sites of material agency, where the man made and the living overlap. I will use Jacque Derrida’s Spectres of Marx to consider the hauntological
importance of these sites. I will connect the idea of a haunting to the new materialist and post- humanist theories like Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter and Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble.
The natural world has been artificially removed from our dwellings, and this removal has been unsuccessful. In Spectres of Marx, Derrida states that declaring something dead is always an attempt to kill it, and a sign that it is haunting us. By declaring houses as separate from nature, we are trying to kill the nature that lives in our homes, in the form of fungi, pests and moulds.