Cose di fantasmi: haunting e immaginazione sociologica
Trans. Stefania Consigliere e Federico Rahola. Rome: DeriveApprodi (2022)
Italian translation of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination with a new preface.
From Stefania Consigliere and Federico Rahola’s introduction:
“Published in English in 1997, Ghostly Matters lived a double life: the academic, recognized and successful one, which made it one of the most influential works of contemporary American sociology; and the underground one that made it circulate from hand to hand among those who were looking for another way of looking at and narrating reality, which knew how to weld the material and the imaginary. In this quarter century Ghostly Matters has been for many an escape route from the Cartesian cages of thought, a tool to measure themselves with the invisible and the repressed and to say publicly - in the arena of social sciences as in the adventures of activism - unspeakable things, mostly banished or listened to with all the haughtiness that disenchanted moderns are accustomed to opposing to what is not solid and measurable. Interweaving sociology, critical thinking and literature, Avery Gordon gives us a glimpse of the ghostly matter that inhabits everyday reality: anxieties, a sudden anguish when crossing a square, the fright in front of the face of a passer-by, the whispering of polluted rivers, mundane hours that spill over into fierce struggles against the temptation to end it. The ghost indicates the traces of the violence of history, tells of the unjust organization of the world; but it also carries the omen of something beautiful and still possible: the certainty that around the corner of a street there is a happiness waiting.”
Recent events
Book discussion with Stefania Consigliere and Federico Rahola. Libera Collina di Castello. Genova IT. 28.6.2024
