Paper short abstract:

This study of recent works by Doris Salcedo uses Derrida’s trope of the ghost to suggest a way to address their political and ethical but also the aesthetic and affective dimensions. It considers their culturally and geographically specific concerns but refuses to impose interpretative segregation.

Paper long abstract:

Rejecting the language of memory and of Freud in particular, this study of two recent works by Doris Salcedo turns to various texts by the philosopher, Jacques Derrida. It explores how his concept of spectrality, its blurring of the distinction between past and present, fact and fiction, and the haunting of one by the other may be used to provide an art historical framework and language that is sensitive to the political and ethical dimensions of these works but also to their aesthetic and affective power.

With regard to Plegaria Muda (2008-2010), the study suggests that although it can be read with reference to the Colombian army's massacres of civilian youth, what is at stake is not the past as such but the viewer's engagement with it and ethical responsibility towards it. Secondly, it considers A Flor de Piel (2011-2012) as a visual metaphor for mourning and the way in which the work takes up Derrida's insistence that to do justice on behalf of those who are dead, mourning cannot be an act in and of itself but must recognize that "they are always there, specters." The study concludes by considering the implications of spectral survival for art history's approach to context in general and, in particular, for art history's search for alternatives to the interpretative segregation of imposed on art from outside the western centres.