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A subarctic mine on the shores of Great Bear Lake provided Canadian uranium for the bombs detonated over Japan in August 1945. Through interviews, archives, and physical remains, Peter van Wyck's The Highway of the Atom considers the legacy of this history for the Dene community and inquires into trauma, landscape, disaster, and memory.
This could perhaps be read differently.We could think of phantoms, for example. As Abraham and Torok describe them, phantoms have no energy of their own; they cannot be abreacted, but merely designated. There. That comes from the dead. Phantoms pursue their “work of disarray in silence.” The point is this, writes Abraham: “In no way can the subject relate to the phantom as his or her own repressed experience, not even as an experience by incorporation. The phantom which returns to haunt bears witness to the existence of the dead buried within the other.”
But it not only bears witness; it also calls out to us. It involves us by making a claim. Derrida writes:
"If death weighs on the living brain of the living … it must then have some spectral density. To weigh is also to charge, tax, impose, indebt, accuse, assign, enjoin. And the more life there is, the graver the spectre of the other becomes, the heavier its imposition. And the more the living have to answer to it. To answer for the dead, to respond to the dead. To correspond and have it out with obsessive haunting, in the absence of any certainty or symmetry. Nothing is more serious and more true, nothing is more exact than this phantasmagoria."
Here the communicable traces of the dead impose themselves. The Highway of the Atom is a route along which the dead make a claim on the living. All of this makes a language of haunting seem perfectly reasonable.We are haunted intellectually, philosophically, epistemologically – the three great narcissistic wounds – by the projects of modernity, traces of which haunt and animate the Highway as I have been writing it here. These things are perhaps easier to resolve, easier to bring back to a life of awareness and memory than the other hauntings, the hauntings of the invisible, or the avisible. These are more difficult yet still weigh upon us. The contaminated body that will reveal its disease only through its progeny. The contaminated land that can reveal its burden only through transmission to something or someone else. The contaminated community that struggles to account for its damaged fabric. In each there is a mode of transmission, a kind of communicativity, even a significance; a disturbance, but no message."
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Meet author Peter C. van Wyck in person at Titles Bookstore in Peterborough the evening of December 2!
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