ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the issue of hauntings that have social effects and consequences. Ghosts are summoned up time and time again; in political practice, in the social sciences, in fiction and film. It focuses on the question of memory and haunting and at ways in which ghosts are a form of remembrance and recomposition. The chapter also focuses on a parochial and provincial sense of specific, empirical ghosts in specific landscapes and houses towards a general, more global sense of repetition and social haunting. It explores the human landscapes of haunting and situate the human itself within a genealogy and history of haunting. The chapter expresses the haunted house, space, castle and the buildings within the haunted landscape. It then focuses on the very materialist doctrines that sought to banish ghosts and phantasms – that of Marx and Marxism.
