Solidarité: Journal of the Radical Left
else. But why becoming-ghost? The answer to this question is already indicated in the common logic of haunting. Ghost hunters typically engage in one form or another of ghost-busting, and to deal with the ghosts, they say that the ghosts will continue to haunt until, X, Y, or Z is done. Typically, ghosts will haunt until there is some kind of reconciliation with the past, some kind of reckoning, some kind of justice, as it were. In the supernatural world of ghosts, it is often said that the spirit of some being must be set free to put an end to the haunting. Another way to put it is to say that the haunting only ends in liberation—the liberation of the spirit, which is to say Geist, the mind, ghosts. Can the existing world rid itself of its ghosts without becoming something else? That is the question. Is ghost-busting merely a matter of policy? Will the ghosts of the economic crisis stop haunting with the implementation of austerity measures, or with their defeat? Even without austerity, even before the latest crisis, things have been getting worse for precarious people everywhere: there is more inequality, less opportunity, more disaffection, less security, no certain futures, not even in the stock market. Some systems are haunted without even knowing it. We should haunt them more actively, making them afraid, sharing our precariousness with them to make their own futures uncertain. There is a necessarily revolutionary—or transformative—imperative at work in all of this, which can be expressed as the conclusion: The existing world cannot rid itself of its ghosts without becoming something else.
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