Message on behalf of phi-net, an early career network for philosophy and critical theory funded by CHASE-AHRC and co-hosted by CPCT and the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI):
Dear all,
We’re delighted to bring you details of our first phi-net events as part of the network’s 2026/27 annual programme ‘Against Frictionlessness’: a reading group session and a screening of Ghost Dance (1983) with director Ken McMullen.
We’ll start with the question of the spectre as a figure of thought for philosophy and art and consider the friction and fiction of linear time described by Jacques Derrida as ‘artifactuality’.
Reading list together with details about the screening below. Please join us if you can and feel free to share widely.
All the best,
Anna, Grace and Jack
https://phinet.cargo.site/
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Ghost Dance group-read
19th October 2026, 6:30pm
Birkbeck Malet Street, Room 253
Jacques Derrida, ‘Artifactualities’ in Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, translated by Jennifer Bajorek (London: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 1–27
Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, ‘Spectrographies’ in Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, pp. 113–34
Further reading/viewing:
Jacques Derrida, excerpt from Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge Classics, 2006), pp. 185–221. Republished here
Bernard Stiegler, ‘Reflections on Ghost Dance‘
Ghost Dance (1983)
Screening and Q&A
with the director Ken McMullen and collaborator Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
Birkbeck Cinema – 30th October 2026, 6.30pm
In association with Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI)
Book your place here
Ghosts are ubiquitous, their influence inevitable. Far from catalysing a move beyond the age of ghosts, technological advancements are bringing them out; the supernatural finds its home in myth and radio waves equally. While tech enables ghosts’ renewed visibility, our histories affirm their ever-presence. In response to social, political and psychic fragmentation, we seek to incorporate them, to internalise them and allow their unconscious to speak through our bodies. Fundamentally intertwined with the past and memory, they do not appear, they only return.
Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983) explores the ghost as the passing between boundaries, blurring the lines of history and memory, consciousness and corporeality, the primordial and the advanced. It follows two women adrift in Paris and London, dual sides of a persona that collapse into one through their interactions with one another, as they seek to find the ghosts present in the remnants of history, Marx and the Paris Commune; anthropologies of early human psychology; the shift away from tangibility through media and cinema; and the “ghost in the machine” that speaks through the answerphone. The narrative flows from Pascale’s discussions with Jacques Derrida on what it means to be haunted, a precursory view on ideas he developed in Specters of Marx (1993) a decade later, to a non-linear experimentation with image and sound, evoking the confrontation with dualism, materialism and form, enabled by the ghost’s passing into the present from a past that never was.
This screening will conclude with a Q&A with the director Ken McMullen and collaborator Oscar Guardiola-Rivera on the enduring influence of the ghost in contemporary memory, recent technological changes and the ghost’s lingering presence within those, and the notion of the ghost as the disruptor of narrative and linearity.
Ken McMullen is a film director, artist, and Professor of Film at Kingston University London. He has produced and directed more than 50 motion picture works, including major international feature films such as Zina (1985), 1871 (1987) and Hamlet Within (2022). Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is a writer, philosopher, cultural critic, and Professor of Human Rights and Political Philosophy at Birkbeck Law School. He is the author of the critically acclaimed What If Latin America Ruled the World? (Bloomsbury, 2010) and Story of a Death Foretold (Bloomsbury, 2013).
