The document discusses the relationship between ghosts, reason and rationality. It argues that ghosts came to represent unreason with the rise of the Enlightenment, as empiricists sought to prove ghosts were illusions. It also discusses the link between poetry, desire and the poetic sign in Western culture. Finally, it examines the presence of nothingness in poetic language and how literature serves to continually name this void.

1. Habitability and specters in the house of language.
Approaching (pos)modernity in Las flores del frío,
by Luis García Montero
Margarita García Candeira
University of Santiago de Compostela

2. Why do ghosts continue to occupy such a prominent position in
debates over the boundary between real and unreal? Why do
they furnish such workable tropes of untruth? The answer lies in
their relationship to reason and rationality. The current
understanding of ghosts owes less to the Reformation, which
denied their return from purgatory, than it does to the
Enlightenment. With the advent of the Enlightenment, a line
was drawn between Reason and its more shadowy others –
magic and witchcraft, irrationality, superstition, the occult. In
this wider activity of exclusion, ghosts of course fall very firmly
in the camp of unreason and therefore become fair game for
empiricists eager to demonstrate that ghosts are in fact the
product of illusion or hoax, or mere hallucination
Peter Buse and Andrew Stott. Ghosts. Psychoanalysis.
Deconstruction. History (1999:3)

3. Eros and poetry, desire and poetic sign are thus linked and envolved through their
common participation in a pneumatic circle within which the poetic sign, as it arises from
the spirit of the heart, can immediately adhere both to the dictation of that spiritual motion
that is love, and to its object, the phantasm impressed in the phantastic spirits. In this way,
the poets freed themselves from “the primordial positing of the signified and the signifier”
as two orders distinguished and separated by a barrier resisting signification, which, in its
fidelity to the original metaphysical positing of the word as “signifying sound”, governs
every Western conception of the sign. The pneumatic link, uniting phantasm, word, and
desire, opens a space in which the poetic sign appears as the sole enclosure offered to the
fulfillment of love and erotic desire in their roles as the foundations and meaning of
poetry, in a circulation whose utopian topology can be imperfectly exemplified.
Giorgio Agamben. Stanzas. Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1995:128)

4. These texts can be called romantic, and I have purposely chosen them within the period
and the author that many consider the most deluded of all. But one hesitates to use terms
such as nostalgia or desire to designate this kind of consciousness, for all nostalgia or
desire is desire of something or for someone; here, the consciousness does not result from
the absence of something, but consists of the presence of a nothingness. Poetic language
names this void with ever-renewed understanding and, like Rousseau’s longing, it never
tires of naming it again. This persistent naming is what we call literature.
Paul De Man. Blindness and insight. Essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism.
(1983:18).

5. Recuperar el futuro, según están las cosas, tiene más que ver con unos ojos ilustrados capaces de
aprender las enseñanzas del romanticismo que con unos ojos románticos empeñados en acabar con
la Ilustración. En la llamada poesía de la experiencia se produce una lectura precisa de la
postmodernidad. La denostada poesía de la experiencia no pretende una guerra de tribus estéticas
generacionales, sino un regreso a esta indagación en la modernidad. Cuando habla de personaje
poético, de verosimilitud, de escenarios urbanos y realistas, más que renunciar a las ambiciones de
la poesía, lo que hace es volver a un concepto del arte que duerme en la raíz de la modernidad.
To recover the future, as things are nowadays, has more to do with a Enlightened way of thinking,
capable of learning from romantic lessons, than with a strong romantic perspective, obssessed
with the collapse of Enlightenment. In the “poetry of experience” a precise reading of
postmodernity is produced. The much criticized poetry of experience does not intend to create a
warfare between generational aesthetic tribes, but rather a return to this research into modernity.
When it talks about poetical persona, verisimility, urban and realistic settings, rather than
renounce oneself to the ambitions of poetry, it tries to recover a given concept of art, one that
sleeps at the root of modernity.
Luis García Montero. “La poesía de la experiencia” (1998:16-7)

6. “Invitación al regreso” (last stanzas)
Y el mar, el dulce mar tan trágico,
a su propia distancia sometido,
sabrá dejar escrito
que el viaje nunca fue nuestro tesoro,
ni tampoco el dolor famoso en los poemas,
sino los sueños puestos en la calle,
los lechos y su bruma,
el despertar de tantas noches largas
donde sólo pudimos presentir,
hablar de los deseos en la sombra
Al lado de tu pelo, capital de los vientos,
la historia en dos, el ruido de las lágrimas,
tienen que ser pasado necesario,
alejada miseria,
cosas para contar después de algunos años,
si es que alguien pregunta por nosotros.

7. “Invitation to return”
And the sea, the very tragic and sweet sea,
condemned to its own distance,
will give written testimony of (the fact that)
the trip has never been our treasure,
not even the famous pain in the poems,
but rather the dreams taken to the streets,
their beds and their mist,
the awakening after so many long nights
during which we could only foresee sense,
talk about out wishes in shadows.
Beside your hair, capital of the winds,
the dual history, the noisy tears,
have to be necessary(ly) past,
banished misery,
things to be told after some years,
if somebody happens to ask for us.

8. Aunque también, y necesariamente,
entre la baja noche y esta casa
donde suelo escribir,
yo esperaré os labios
que con llamada extraña de nuevo me pregunten:
Prisionero de amor, ¿para quién llevas
un hombro de cristal y otro de olvido?

9. Though also, and necessarily,
between the sunset and this house
where I usually write,
I will wait for the lips
which, with a strange call, ask me again:
Love prisoner, for whom are you taking
one shoulder made out of glass and the other made out of oblivion?

10. “Casa en ruinas”
Yo voy como la luz fabricadora,
especulando
en el rincón que espera una mirada
para ser como barco, castillo con almenas,
bosque perdido, cielo traspasable,
territorio de sueños,
casa en ruinas donde ser un niño,
donde ser lo que viva y nos convenga.
“House in ruins”
I walk as the fabricating light,
speculating
in the corner that waits for a look
to get to be like a ship, a castle wit battlements,
lost forest, reachable sky,
territory of dreams,
house in ruins where one can be a child,
where one can be alive and whatever is most convenient for us.

11. Eres como un extraño familiar,
como el niño de los días borrados,
la huella que redime este silencio
de jóvenes escombros
que a costa de no ser se sobreviven.
En soledad va el niño lentamente,
pequeña su figura y pensativa,
mientras el aire cruje
como un peldaño envenenado
y en las paredes flotan nombres, fechas, dibujos,
confesiones sin público.
Son palabras escritas sobre un muro,
saben menos de amor que de tristeza.

12. You are like a strange familiar person,
like the child of the erased days,
the print that redeems this silence
made out of young rubbles
which, unbeing, are able to survive.
The boy walks alone, slowly,
his figure is small and thoughtful,
in the meanwhile the air crackles
like a poisoned step
and on the walls some names, dates, drawings float,
confessions without a public.
They are words written on a wall,
they know less of love than of sadness.