Aris Fioretos

A Book about Phantoms

Essay
Original title: En bok om fantomer
With art work by Sophie Tottie
Stockholm: Norstedts, 1996, 159 pages
Cover: Sophie Tottie
ISBN: 91-1-960471-8

Shadows, specters, and mirror spooks, figures of fume, fog, and fuddle, poltergeists, phantasms, djinns, and ether revenants . . . The apparitions of the spectral are multifarious. Containing reflections on phantoms in works of art, literature, and film, A Book about Phantoms discusses eighteenth-century technological inventions such as the phantasmagoria and phantom image, as well as developments within criminology and communications theory. It investigates the realm between life and death, word and image, and treats not only different forms of medial apparition, but also the premises and aporias of mediation as such. Moving from the analogical ghosts found in Gothic literature to the digital phantoms of contemporary films such as The Crow, discussing in the process works by Polidori, Poe, Rathenau, Dreyer, and Kafka, the book provides a pertinent and critical, yet always distinctive and personal, account of the uncanny forms that things and people seem to acquire when they disappear.
This is an essay singular in tone and unusual in substance, sedulously registering the odd moments when thoughts gain shape and bodies dissolve. It discusses the significance of impossible statements such the “I am dead” of Poe’s Mr. Valdemar, treats the perplexities found in Dreyer’s Vampyr, and teases out the implications of Alphonse Bertillon’s portrait parlé. Providing a personal dossier of spirits, shades, and shadows, A Book about Phantoms records visits to realms perceived but uncertain, glimpsed yet vanishing, in which errant figures of dust and oblivion alone seem at home.
A collaboration with Swedish artist Sophie Tottie, who has provided original artwork and also designed the volume, the book offers a phantasmagoria for both the eye and the mind.