The Power of Ghosts

Abstract

Before we can assess the impact of the digital revolution on our conception of psychic work, the author argues, we need to understand how the new spatio-temporal coordinates instituted by the Digital Revolution demand a revisioning of our conceptions of objectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. The melancholic dimension and the narcissistic regression involved in the virtual must, therefore, be reconceived if we are to recognize the transfiguring power of the virtual phenomenon.

Keywords:

• awakening
• Walter Benjamin
• Jacques Derrida
• ghosts
• history
• Jung
• melancholy
• memory
• mourning
• narcissism
• progress
• psychic phenomena
• virtual world

Notes

^1. See Richard Frankel, “Digital Melancholy,” in this issue (9–20).

^2. “From the dawn of Western-European thinking until today, Being signifies the same as presencing. Out of presencing, presence speaks of the present.... Being is determined as presence through time” (Heidegger 1972, 2).

^3. “In general, I try to distinguish between what one calls the future and ‘l'avenir.’ The future is that which—tomorrow, later, next Century—will be. There's a future that is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l'avenir (to come), which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. […] So if there is a real future beyond this other known future, it's l'avenir in that it's the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival” (Derrida in Dick and Kofman 2005, 53).

^4. The punctum is what Barthes calls that surprising aspect in the photographic image that connects us to the wound of time. He describes it as a “fulguration” that triggers, “provok[es] a tiny shock, a satori, the passage of a void….”, “an essence (of a wound), what cannot be transformed but only repeated under the instances of insistence….,” “an intense immobility … an explosion [that] makes a little star on the pane of the text or of the photograph” (1980, 49).

^5. Bion opens up this space, desaturates our concepts, frees them from our memory and desire, in order to provide new unthought-of channels for the expression of the psyche.

^6. See Gregory Shaw, “The Eyes of Lynceus: Seeing Through the Mirror of the World” in this issue (21–30).