#spectrality

It is tempting to understand the Medieval hermeneutics of plague and pestilence as Neoplatonic—a supernatural force emanating from a divine center. However this would require that we understand the relation between Creator and creature as pathological, a divine sovereign that emanates itself through a miasmic diffusion of decay. But what is being emanated here is not creation itself but rather its opposite, a kind of de-creation that occupies the underside of what Aristotle called 'passing away' (disease, decay, decomposition). This strange type of life, that seems to emanate from a Neoplatonic One and diffuse itself throughout creaturely life, cannot be understood without taking into account another element. As varied as the Medieval accounts of plague and pestilence are, one of the common motifs, along with the angry God, is that of plague and pestilence as a divine weapon. The divine sovereign doesn't simply pass judgment; the sovereign weaponizes the earthly life of the creature, which is itself a product of divine will.

The prime goal of any recording is the creation of an illusion that creates an honest sense of place

Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe even the future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the living present: all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us.

[T]he conceptual metaphor of spectrality is deeply embedded within the discourse of loss, mourning, and recovery that delineated the multidisciplinary project of trauma studies as it emerged . . . To be traumatized . . . is to be "possessed by an image or event" located in the past. To be "possessed"—gripped indefinitely by an anachronistic event—also describes the condition of being haunted . . . In other words, when we think of ghost stories . . . , it is the haunting of the present by the past that emerges as the most insistent narrative. The mode of expression that many scholars use to describe the spectral, then, is similar to, if not fully consonant with, the terms used to describe the affective qualities of trauma.