The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny

Conclusion: This Place is Haunted

c o n c l u s i o n ................................... this place is haunted Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I “haunt.” —André Breton, Nadja Why do the dead return? Why, in the darkness of the night, when all activity has been reduced to a trembling in the distance, do the dead disavow their rest and return to the living? What strange beacon is emitted in the world of the living that draws these phantoms to the things of everyday life? When, in some act of elaborate risk, we venture to the basement after hearing a sonorous clanking in the floorboards, what greets us: an immaterial specter sent from the undead, or a memory trapped somewhere between the basement and our imaginations? The living and the dead; the material and the immaterial: Those who pass from the land of the dead to the living carry with them the promise of a place to come, and that place is haunted. ghost h(a)unting Considered retrospectively, the contents of this book have been visited by a series of ghosts, which have so far remained largely buried beneath the pages, only occasionally rising above the perceptual horizon. We have, for instance, seen ghosts appear in the case of where objects are uncannily displaced from their native place of memory (such as in the case of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason being transported from Las Vegas); where the body reveals itself as embodying a different set of experiences and histories to that of abstract 280 conclusion reflection (such as journeying through a harshly lit environment late at night); where our intimate attachments to a place are offset by the anonymity lurking beneath the veil of personal attachment (such as returning to one’s childhood home after a long absence); and, finally, where there is a complete suppression of the lived experience of the past, such that the past manifests itself indirectly through the body (such as undergoing a traumatic event). In each case, something has returned from a state of apparent hibernation to roam the living. Just as we have returned to the past, so the past has returned to us. In doing so, something else was assimilated in the return, a life independent of the event of remembering itself. But what is this “thing” that accompanies our memories, especially our memories of places? As this book has sought to demonstrate, the “thing” in question is nothing less than the force by which our memories are given their strange, unsettling, and unresolved resonance. The “thing” that interbreeds with the recollection of an event is the anonymous life of memory, its animate and vital spark. Because of this dynamic, memories remain irreducible to either empirical or evidential qualities. As has been emphasized, the memory of place is a visceral and primal memory resistant to all modes of rigid abstraction. Above and beyond their status in the world, the returning of memories attests to both their fundamental singularity and their inherent fragmentation. Yet the quality of memories being unresolved and fragmented is not a question of their phenomenal status. Structurally speaking, a memory of trauma is no less irresolute than a benign episode all too familiar to the remembering subject. At stake is not only the question of what is being remembered, but the brute fact that there is remembering at all. More thematically, the implicit undercurrent of spectral presences has intensified in correlation with the threefold arc of the book. In the case of everyday memory, we took it for granted that memory had a “place,” which was interwoven with the act of remembering. Even within the realm of things losing their bearings—such as the vague quality memories can bring, in which we ourselves are objectified in the scene of memory—there is nonetheless an abiding unity to the event and the place being recalled. This presupposition of unity meant that “things” of the world stood in a roughly harmonious correspondence with one another, with all experiences orientated toward a desired state of concordance. Yet even here, the incipient germs of disorientation were rooted in the very fabric of what it is to remember. After all, if our account of the structure of place memory as involving a disturbance in the “pregiven stillness of the this place is haunted 281 contextual and everyday world” is...