Ghosts

To answer the call of Schlunke and Healy for a ‘utopic politics that might bind species in new ways precisely because we are together in a time of multiplying extinctions’, let us consider the usefulness of ghosts—not metaphorical ghosts, nor even metaphorically ghosts, but the ghosts described in accounts of ’visitations’.2 Folklorist Gillian Bennet suggests that while ‘ghosts’ are a strange, threatening intrusion on the domestic, 3 describes the return home of something lost: a keeping by, and being with, of the dead with their living.4 The other term for this is Contrary to expectations in parsing that phrase, the stress falls not on the living percipient: by the dead, that ‘great cloud of witnesses encompassing us’ (Hebrews 12:1)