Hauntological Structures of Communication and Feeling: Making Space for the Non-Rational

In this chapter, I offer an analysis of embodied hauntological experiences that have been the subject of my research over many decades. They are often associated with the irrational, with moments of craziness, and framed through pathologizing discourses. In different ways they are embodied phenomena that are characterised by traps, knots, binds, masks, mazes, parasites, shadows, and forms of “topological looping” (see Chow, 2012). I include the phenomenon of hallucinations and related experiences, like grief, that are associated with the past, or multiple pasts, encroaching in the present. The experiences that I focus on can destabilise self and other, near and far, dead and alive, real and imaginary, sane and insane, and the human and more-than-human (see Blackman, 2001, 2012). They disrupt borders and boundaries, staging what has become lost, separated, and disjointed, yet maintaining an absent presence. I approach these phenomena as part of an embodied hauntological apparatus of sensing and feeling that has much to say, if only we could listen in new ways.