ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the axis of thinking, willing and judging cuts across and through another triad of terms: silence, spectres and shards. Silences, spectres and shards are fundamental features of masculine subjectivity and they work within and through flesh and blood men to conceal, ameliorate and disavow the damage done to, and perpetuated by, the socio-political orders and in turn the destruction inflicted on men by other men. Masculine identities are formed within and inhabited through the nexus of historical events, emotions, memories and identifications which persist in an interlinked and redolent chain. Shadows of events, understandings, emotions and identities evoke and provoke other occurrences, considerations, affects and identities. The chapter explores the textures and affectual burdens of history and hauntings for two reasons: first, to understand how the past impacts profoundly on the present and second, to move towards an ethical relatedness based on responsibility to the other.
