First, she describes some of her own hauntings. She writes of her journey to a conference with an abstract in hand only to be distracted by a photograph. Rather, only to be haunted by a photograph. She traces her encounter with Sabina Spielrein, a key but often forgotten figure in the psychoanalytical movement. It’s Spielrein’s absence in a photo that leads Gordon on a detour to theorizing exclusions and absences. For Gordon, “a dead women was not at a conference she was supposed to attend—requires attention to what is not seen, but is nonetheless powerful real” (42). As a reader, our notions of real, imaginary, and fictional shift. We are on this journey with Gordon as she tells the story of her own shifting temporalities and notions of reality. The uncanniness of her haunting experiences are transferred (42) to us as she writes her story. Or rather as she poetically dispels her story with all of its repetitions. We feel her frustration with Freud when she looks back and sees how he once thought of the unconsciousness as being related to the social and not just a private thing, a “self-contained closed system” (47). As we read, we see the “markings of her detour” (60).
She leads us to two novels: Como en la Guerra and Beloved. Gordon prioritizes fiction, but not necessarily in a fictional sense. She focuses on their complexities and their complications. She pushes us to think of ghosts behind or in between or (beyond?) the pages: how are these absences real in the sense they have material consequences? These novels are avenues for us to understand larger social realities. They are means to counter Freud’s “self-contained” notion of unconsciousness. To understand the state terror and desparacedio of Argentina, we must wait and be open to experiencing hauntings. We must engage with ghosts, even when they aren’t our own ((164). We must recognize that our unconscious is actually accessible to “wordy consciousness” (47). We must awake to reality, much like the character in Valenzuela’s novel. And we must know that history is always a site of struggle with the living and the ghostly. Like we see in Morrison’s novel, the power of the past is always lingering (139) in the present.
Gordon begins by tracing the haunting of Sabina Spielrein that is both personal to Gordon and to the institution of psychoanalysis. Spielrein transferred from one invisible field, madness, into another, psychoanalysis, yet still she was moved to the shadows, rejected by Freud and Jung despite her immense contributions to the field in thinking about repetition, death, and the decline of civilization. Gordon questions what psychoanalysis lost as a result, not only what it repressed or marginalized, and urges that out of a concern for justice that we reckon with haunting as a prerequisite for sensuous knowledge. She applies this concern for justice to a discussion of disappearance in Argentina and the involvement of psychoanalysis, utilizing Walter Benjamin’s materialist historiography to provoke a different, “animated” recognition of the “violence of modernization” in the complicated neoimperialism that characterizes Latin America. Unlike the thousands of rationalistic human rights reports, Valenzuela’s novel captures the haunting elements of disappearing: she utilizes the examples of the punctum that brings to life the life external to photos, both when AZ views a photograph in the newspaper and when the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo display the desaparecideos. Gordon argues that in the portrayal of loved ones lost to the state in Argentina, disappearance was not torture, death, homicide, but a complex system of repression involving not only the authoritarian state authorizing torture and death but the complacency of the middle-class; disappearance was a present and lived thing in itself, a haunting. Unlike the bag of bones representing past death and the attempt of an authoritarian state to scare its population into submission, the ghost could not be completely managed by the state.
Gordon proceeds by documenting the continued presence of slavery (without a capital S) in the United States and the unfinished (failed) project of Reconstruction, utilizing Beloved as a sociological text to create the possibility of a becoming something else in the present and for the future. She contextualizes Morrison’s project in Beloved both through an examination of slave narratives constrained by the aims of the abolition movement, yet portrayed as the “real truth of slavery,” as well as Margaret Garner’s encounter with the half-sign of Levi Coffin’s hat and his obsession with his trivial property even as he purported to “represent” her. Gordon argues that Beloved recognizes what the slave narrative forgot, creating a palimpsest, detecting that which was not erased, and pushes forth a recognition that abolition is not emancipation. In addition, Beloved shows that the ghost can be just as haunted as the living, for it is a living force that has its own desires which figure the complicated sociality of a determining formation and is embedded in the social structure of history. Crucially, Beloved calls for accountability in a way that the slave narrative could not, arguing that we must recognize where we are in the story, even if we do not want to be there, accounting not only those who do not count but are counted.