"that life is complicated may seem a banal expression to the obvious, but it is nonetheless, a profound theoretical statement—perhaps the most important theoretical statement of our time” (3). "a paradigmatic way in which life is more complicated than those of us who study it have usually granted. Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither premodern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it. This confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge, in our mode of production" (7)We must engage with ghosts, even when they aren’t our own (164). For Gordon, reckoning with ghosts “is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the past, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had” (183).“To write a history of the present requires stretching toward the horizon of what cannot be seen with ordinary clarity yet.. To imagine beyond the limits of what's already understandable is our best hope for retaining what ideology critique traditionally offers while transforming its limitations into what was called utopian possibility” (195)
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