Gordon begins by tracing the haunting of Sabina Spielrein that is both personal to Gordon and to the institution of psychoanalysis. Spielrein transferred from one invisible field, madness, into another, psychoanalysis, yet still she was moved to the shadows, rejected by Freud and Jung despite her immense contributions to the field in thinking about repetition, death, and the decline of civilization. Gordon questions what psychoanalysis lost as a result, not only what it repressed or marginalized, and urges that out of a concern for justice that we reckon with haunting as a prerequisite for sensuous knowledge. She applies this concern for justice to a discussion of disappearance in Argentina and the involvement of psychoanalysis, utilizing Walter Benjamin’s materialist historiography to provoke a different, “animated” recognition of the “violence of modernization” in the complicated neoimperialism that characterizes Latin America. Unlike the thousands of rationalistic human rights reports, Valenzuela’s novel captures the haunting elements of disappearing: she utilizes the examples of the punctum that brings to life the life external to photos, both when AZ views a photograph in the newspaper and when the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo display the desaparecideos. Gordon argues that in the portrayal of loved ones lost to the state in Argentina, disappearance was not torture, death, homicide, but a complex system of repression involving not only the authoritarian state authorizing torture and death but the complacency of the middle-class; disappearance was a present and lived thing in itself, a haunting. Unlike the bag of bones representing past death and the attempt of an authoritarian state to scare its population into submission, the ghost could not be completely managed by the state.Gordon proceeds by documenting the continued presence of slavery (without a capital S) in the United States and the unfinished (failed) project of Reconstruction, utilizing Beloved as a sociological text to create the possibility of a becoming something else in the present and for the future. She contextualizes Morrison’s project in Beloved both through an examination of slave narratives constrained by the aims of the abolition movement, yet portrayed as the “real truth of slavery,” as well as Margaret Garner’s encounter with the half-sign of Levi Coffin’s hat and his obsession with his trivial property even as he purported to “represent” her. Gordon argues that Beloved recognizes what the slave narrative forgot, creating a palimpsest, detecting that which was not erased, and pushes forth a recognition that abolition is not emancipation. In addition, Beloved shows that the ghost can be just as haunted as the living, for it is a living force that has its own desires which figure the complicated sociality of a determining formation and is embedded in the social structure of history. Crucially, Beloved calls for accountability in a way that the slave narrative could not, arguing that we must recognize where we are in the story, even if we do not want to be there, accounting not only those who do not count but are counted.
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