ABSTRACT
There is an epistemology of ghosts (del Pilar Blanco & Peeren, 2010), haunting life in the Anthropocene. In the Specter of Marx, Derrida (1994) reminds us that each age has its own ghosts and the specters who are our contemporaries are the most difficult to recognize. In popular culture, ghosts are useful constructs to query denials. As figurative embodiments of skepticism, they force us to question how much we think the world is what it is (Davis, 2010). Ghosts are partial perspectives, a heart palpitating second-guessing of intrusive thoughts of future food shortages leaking into dinner conversations with friends. Untethered spatially and temporally, they form their own connectivity to instigate temporal disturbances. The ghosts of our time appear in the somatic echoes of global warming. The haunting I refer to in this work is not the return of something dead, like contemporary calls to return to some romanticized image of Nature, but a haunting presentism, one in which the collective embodied awareness of the climate crisis interferes with the day-to-day visuality of interpretation.
