1 Fabian Bernhardt On Ghosts and Affective Afterlife 1 The dead? But the dead have no rights. They are nothing; and nothing cannot own something. Where there is no substance, there can be no accident. Thomas Jefferson 2 I Disturbances Something is wrong with 124 on Bluestone Road. The house is haunted. And this is hard to endure: 124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once—the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. (Morrison 1987, p. 3) This is the beginning of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved which tells the story of Sethe, an escaped slave. A ghost is haunting the 124, moving furniture and making things fall to the ground, causing disturbances and generally straining the nerves of those who live there. The readers, who open the book and enter the text over the threshold of these first lines, feel no differently than the inhabitants of the house. They do not quite find their way around and somehow try to gain orientation in an environment that is under the influence of a force that seems to do everything in its power to deny them the security of clear orientation. In the foreword to Beloved, Morrison explains: “In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietude of everyday life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead […].” (Morrison 1987, p. XIX) Isn’t that what all ghosts do? Give us the latent feeling that something is wrong, cause mischief and irritation? Ghosts do disturb. It is not necessary to actually believe in the existence of ghosts to 1 Unpublished manuscript of a presentation given at the inaugural workshop of the network “Religion and the Emotions”, funded by DFG (German Research Foundation), initiated and organized by Prof. Dr. Hartmut von Sass and Prof. Dr. Notker Slenczka, October 5 – 7, Theological Faculty of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Please do not cite or circulate without permission of the author (f.bernhardt@fu-berlin.de). 2 Letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816 (Jefferson 1984, p. 1402).