engleski

Spectra of Transcommunication: A Survival Study after Raudive and Derrida

The article analyzes instrumental transcommunication (ITC) as a widespread cultural practice of representing the afterlife. A brief introductory survey of the phenomenon focuses on its history, its conceptual and technological development, its impact on the world of art, and various types of criticism it provoked. Belief in the possibility of communicating with the dead is further explored from a cognitive and psychoanalytic angle: the “specters” of ITC are traceable to a specific interplay of apophenia or pareidolia and the work of mourning (as defined by Freud and critically developed by Abraham and Torok). In the concluding chapter, ITC’s ontological premises – “realism” of the photographic image and equating voice with life – are examined in the light of Derrida’s hauntology and Barthes’s theory of photography: if signifying processes are irreducible to the singularity of a living presence, then writing, photography and sound recordings actually “spectralize” the living instead of reanimating or documenting the dead.

spectrality ; hauntology ; text ; mourning ; photography ; Derrida ; Barthes ; instrumental transcommunication

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