Radioactive Ghosts

366 Pages·2020·5.873 MB·English

by  Gabriele Schwab

Radioactive Ghosts
Cary Wolfe, Series Editor
61 Radioactive Ghosts
Gabriele Schwab
60 Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the
Anthropocene
Bruce Clarke
59 Te Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life
Jamie Lorimer
58 Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information
Volume II Supplemental Texts
Gilbert Simondon
57 Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information
Gilbert Simondon
56 Tinking Plant Animal Human: Encounters with Communities of
Diference
David Wood
55 Te Elements of Foucault
Gregg Lambert
54 Postcinematic Vision: Te Coevolution of Moving- Image Media and
the Spectator
Roger F. Cook
53 Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility
Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova
52 Variations on Media Tinking
Siegfried Zielinski
51 Aesthesis and Perceptronium: On the Entanglement of Sensation,
Cognition, and Mater
Alexander Wilson
50 Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifce Zones, and Extinction
David Farrier
49 Metaphysical Experiments: Physics and the Invention of the
Universe
Bjørn Ekeberg
48 Dialogues on the Human Ape
Laurent Dubreuil and Sue Savage- Rumbaugh
(continued on page 340)
R ADIOACTIVE
GHOSTS
GABRIELE SCHWAB
posthumanities 61
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Copyright 2020 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
“Children of the Nuclear Age” copyright 2017 Gabriele Schwab and Simon J. Ortiz
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmited, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior writen
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Tird Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
htp://www.upress.umn.edu
ISBN 978-1-5179-0782-2 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-5179-0783-9 (pb)
Library of Congress record available at htps:/lccn.loc.gov/2020024768.
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
Te University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
UMP BmB 2020
For Leon and Lucia
and in memory of all those who died
afer nuclear wars or catastrophes
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CONTENTS
PREFACE On Three- Eyed Fish and Other Ghostings ix
INTRODUCTION Why Nuclear Necropolitics Today? 1
PART I. NUCLEAR SUBJECTIVITIES
ONE No Apocalypse, Not Now: 39
Derrida and the Nuclear Unconscious
TWO Nuclear Colonialism 57
THREE Critical Nuclear Race Theory 85
FOUR The Gender of Nuclear Subjectivities 105
INTERLUDE: CHILDREN OF THE NUCLEAR AGE 133
with Simon J. Ortiz
PART II. HAUNTING FROM THE FUTURE
FIVE The Afterlife of Nuclear Catastrophes 151
SIX Hiroshima’s Ghostly Shadows 187
SEVEN Postnuclear Madness and Nuclear Crypts 217
EIGHT Transspecies Selves: 237
Intimacies, Extimacies, Animacies
CODA Postnuclear Ecologies— Language, Body, 267
and Affect in Beckett’s Happy Days
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 285
NOTES 289
INDEX 319
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PREFACE
ON THREE- EYED FISH
AND OTHER GHOSTINGS
BLINKY, THE THREE- EYED FISH
On November 1, 1990, FOX aired “Two Cars in Every Garage and Tree
Eyes on Every Fish,” season 2, episode 4 of the iconic American tele-
vision show Te Simpsons.1 Te episode opens with Bart and Lisa Simpson
fshing in a river downstream from the Springfeld Nuclear Power Plant,
where their father, Homer, works as an employee. Just as a reporter
for the Springfeld Shopper arrives for an unrelated story, Bart hooks
a three- eyed fsh. Soon afer, the story of Blinky the three- eyed fsh
makes headlines across the state. Suspecting radioactive contamination
as the cause of the fsh’s mutation, Springfeld governor Mary Bailey
calls for an investigation into the Springfeld Nuclear Power Plant and
the dumping of nuclear waste into the town’s water supply. To avoid
a shutdown, the plant’s owner, Mr. Burns, runs against Bailey for the
ofce of governor. To dispel the community’s fears, Mr. Burns stages a
highly publicized dinner at the house of an ordinary employee, Homer
Simpson— a choice that causes a rif between Homer as an employee of
the Springfeld Nuclear Power Plant, on one hand, and his wife, Marge,
and daughter Lisa, on the other, who belong to an antinuclear coali-
tion of Springfeld residents. Te highlight of the episode occurs when
Marge serves Mr. Burns Blinky for dinner. Unable to swallow his bite,
Mr. Burns spits out the mutant fsh in front of a live audience, efec-
tively ending his campaign for governor.
In its simplicity, “Two Cars in Every Garage and Tree Eyes on
Every Fish” speaks to a number of concerns found in Radioactive Ghosts.
One of my goals in the pages to come is to understand how the multiple
and entangled legacies of the Manhatan Project generate a “haunting
from the future” that is specifc to nuclear politics, and that profoundly
impacts the very formation of subjectivity. Psychically, this haunting fre-
quently manifests in what I refer to as “phantasms of the mutant body.”