The Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

This is a class about ghosts. In this course, we delve into the haunting legacies of forced removals and violent dispossession, exploring how their affectivity and materiality persist through time in archives and historical records that are filled with countless gaps and omissions. We will think through the potential implications of adopting Derrida's hauntology, Benjamin's angels of history, Hartman's critical fabulations, Barad's quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, as well as many others as a framework for critical heritage practices and counter-histories. By employing pedagogical concepts such as sensitivity to nonlinear time, indeterminacy, and discontinuity, we confront the quantum specters of multiple pasts, presents, and futures or what I propose to name "quantologies". This approach offers a nuanced understanding of justice, challenging the constraints imposed by modernity, historicity, and teleologies shaped by revolutionary Marxisms.
Join us as we navigate the complex terrain of memory, trauma, and resistance in our exploration of ghosts and their enduring significance.