We were told that ghosts succeeded the living when they would die. It had always been like that. This is the natural order, the law of life and death, the law of things that are and things that are not. But nowadays ghosts are no longer posthumous because they have ceased to live in the future: they are here, among us, indistinguishable, demanding a growing distance from the ghosts to which we were already used to, the classic ghosts of the past that accumulate as things fade away. “We are the sad opacity of our future spectres,” Mallarmé has written.
These are spectres of the present, of beings and things that have not yet died. Ghosts have anticipated death in order to live in real-time: they are the epiphany of the new, they got tired of waiting. We are obliged, whether we like it or not, to speak to them daily and we make profuse use of them. In the past ghosts acted through mimesis: they resembled the original. Today, however, they act without it, without ceasing to perform as us, like avatars. How, then, can I tell whether it is a ghost? What space of verification should be recognised and applied? A truth without verification? Which public and common space? Phantasmagoria (phantasm & agora: assembly of ghosts): what assembly and what agora?
