Dear besties,
In honour of the gay high holidays, The Insane Secret cordially invites you to our first event: Halloween Hauntology, a reading and writing workshop series.
Where: Cyberspace (we will send a link)
When: Sunday Oct 26, noon EST/4 pm GMT & Sunday Nov 2, noon EST/4 PM GMT
Cost: PWYC
Something spooky and perverse goes on at the halloween party. It's hard to discern if masks are just masks and not the faces of ghosts worn by the haunted. Through costume, we express our greatest fears and fantasies. In the jouissance of fool’s play, encrypted in the drama and fabulation of tricks and treats, our ghosts resurrect themselves and mingle. Behind glitter facades and ghoulish ensembles is a secret impulse to reveal: to let the specter speak. Unbeknownst to us, we dance with our phantoms. But aren’t we always? So when we say, for the girls and gays (and our allies), this is our high holiday, we must observe it accordingly, with awareness set to the weight of the day. Do you really know what you're conjuring this season…???
October is a scary month. Having always represented Halloween, it is now marked by the anniversary of October 7th, which was not the beginning, but a major turning point and escalation of the now 78 year genocide of the Palestinian people. A genocide, haunted by one that came before it, unmourned and therefore emanating spectral content, has been masked so deliberately and delicately through the fantasies and traumas of its perpetrators, who continue to evade the consequences of the living. Without justice, the dead don't rest. They carry out their unfinished business as ghosts living in hosts. And so, the time is out of joint, cursed by the hushed horrors and crimes of the past, whose casualties’ cries echo through the space-time of collective subconscious: reverberating in our nightmares—nightmares which are resurrected and reenacted through compulsive drives of States within States. In the drama of colonial crimes, phantoms stage words through the staging of worlds, creating a horror show that goes on. But must it?
With that in mind, the Insane Secret welcomes you to our very first workshop: Halloween Hauntology. In a two part reading and writing series, we will explore the topic of Hauntology. In the first session we will do a close reading of TOP SECRET selected texts(sign up to find out) and facilitate conversation. Seasonal and timely, these texts implicitly and explicitly draw connections between intergenerational trauma, phantasy, statehood, secrecy, genocidal impulses, shame, taboo and possession. In the second session, we will write and share ghost stories, performing exorcisms through word play, speech acts, and the writing/reading of encrypting/ed texts, based on writing prompts provided in the first session.
Wearing our x-ray specs, we will tackle this work using the Insane Secret toolkit, which combines strategies from psychoanalysis, historical materialism, comparative literature, pataphysics, and poetic interpretation to explore the political, psychological, and mystical experiences that intersect Hauntology. We will explore how repressed ghosts communicate through Hauntology’s very own literature, wiggling through the word-shaped steel bars of language. As we’ve prepared for this workshop, one question that continues to come up in our research is: when choosing to engage in the work of Hauntology, does one inevitably meet their own ghosts?
We can attest, the answer is yes.
WARNING: ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK. We anticipate holding conversations about: colonial and genocidal legacies (including the present day genocide unfolding in Palestine), failed resistance (the haunting of the missed chance), collective and personal ghosts, trauma reenactments and intergenerational trauma. Here, it is possible that we may discuss abuse (sexual, physical and/or psychological). While we will do what we can to handle with care, if these are not topics you feel comfortable facing, then this might not be the workshop for you.
Space is limited. And the readings, while short-ish, pack a punch. You’ll wanna sign up early.
To sign up, simply reply to this email with an RSVP Yes! Each spot admits you and your unwitting plus one (your ghost). Once we hear from you, we will send along your reading package!! There may even be a trick or treat or two included. If you can, please send payment concurrently, or if not, let us know when you plan to pay. You can choose either e-transfer, EU or UK bank transfer or paypall to make a payment of 100-250 bones in the currency of your choice.
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Please email theinsanesecret@gmail.com to arrange payment. We'll send you the deets.
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Please note that we will be responding manually, so if you do not hear back right away, know that your confirmation is on its way along with the texts in PDFs.
*A note about money: this is the bare minimum of what we need to do this work. Our collective is, so far, completely self-funded and self-sustained. We have no institutional support to finance our time and efforts. In order to fairly cover the many hours of labour that go into planning a workshop like this, we are completely reliant on fees. We say this because we value having transparent conversations about money (as per our politics). And this is a conversation. If at all, you need more time, please let us know. And if, even at our lowest rate, this cost is unfeasible to you but you really want to participate, please reach out to us. Don’t abuse the currency of choice thing. We just wanted to make life easier for our international friends, since exchange rates are yet another thing to fear this Halloween.
We hope to see you soon!!!!
& until then, here is a favorite clip from our childhood:
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TTYL
Chelsea + Max
[The Insane Secret]