Lost Past, lost Futures and Hauntologies

Ideology works in the following manner: First you have an ideal or normal social organism-the nation state. But there is a problem. The people are not happy. The reason people are clearly unhappy is because of an invading parasite/the other. There is nothing inherently wrong with people. It is the Other that is problem.

This is a simple narrative. It structures the world and allows people to understand their fears that triggered by lack of jobs, loss of meaning, identity, exploitation etc., as one concrete fear of the other who is demonized as an external other. It encourages people to focus on an external threat. This works for the ruling class and maintains the status quo.

Now in our country we can see the right wing led by the BJP and others seem to follow this form infused in their ideology. In this way ideology becomes a hauntology. It pushes us to deal with imagined or real loss of past and imagined futures. It seems to be more current that future has been cancelled. We do not want It. What we want is an recreation of an imagined past. We are facing a malady of disappearing hope for a future. We are only hoping for a past and waiting for It to inhabit our future. We only reviving the past . We are hauntingly reliving the past. We can no longer create a future. We are children of repetition and hastag.

We are in a world stuck in time.
Such a work is a result of a neo-liberal economy that has locked us into a temporal pathology. We are locked in a past that we are fascinated and are wasting away our present and the future in an active engagement that strive to unfold past in a coming Future. We have closed and locked out our future into past and the forward momentum of our culture is turned backwards. We have the urgent need to understand the hauntological dimension of our life. We have to understand loss of relation with time. We are steadily fading into a past and cancelling our creative potential in the Future. We have closed the future into a past. The future of our past is political and hence is highly intoxicating. It has made us intolerant of otherness, difference and creative novelty.

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GREETINGS

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- Fr Victor Ferrao