本篇目录 / Contents
Hauntology Special Issue English Abstract v1: Living Remains
Recommended Title
Before Death, After Visibility:
Living Remains, Hauntology, and Pre-Mortem Afterlife in Shoot Self with You
Alternative title:
Preservation Is Not Possession:
Hauntology, Living Remains, and the Ethics of Visibility in Shoot Self with You
English Abstract / Proposal v1
Hauntology is often approached from the side of what comes after death: the dead, the past, and the unfinished event return as shadows, remainders, debts, or voices that disturb the present. This article asks whether hauntology can also describe a condition that begins before biological death: the conversion of living persons and ongoing events into witnessable, preservable, repeatable, yet unpossessed remains.
The article examines Shoot Self with You, a 156-minute Chinese experimental feature and performance-film. The film does not represent ghosts in any conventional sense, nor does it enter death studies through death scenes, funerary rituals, or mourning narratives. Rather, it stages a more difficult question: how does a living person become a remainder? An opening declaration of intimacy is carried away from a two-person relation by camera movement, space, and the presence of others; rehearsal failures and unfinished versions repeatedly return instead of being discarded; when language can no longer prove relation, beds, water, white light, bodies, dreams, and everyday objects begin to act as provisional witnesses; in the public performance, blankness, refusal, staring, skipping, the desire not to be seen, and delegated speech cease to belong only to private interiority and become living residues held by spectators, materials, procedures, and other voices; finally, backstage sound, names, thanks, institutional marks, black screen, and silence turn the event into an afterlife while refusing to let preservation become possession.
Methodologically, the article does not search for apparitions. It reads haunting through shifts in the ownership of appearance, speech, silence, refusal, ending, and remains. I argue that Shoot Self with You shifts hauntology from the return of the dead to the ghosting of the living. The ghost here is not an invisible deceased figure, but a living subject who becomes over-visible yet still unpossessed. For death studies, the film offers a theory of pre-mortem afterlife: practices usually associated with posthumous existence, such as witnessing, naming, preserving, repeating, commemorating, and leaving remains, can begin before biological death.
The article does not equate visibility with death, nor does it claim that every visible subject is ghostly. Rather, ghostliness emerges when living appearance, speech, silence, and ending continue as remains beyond the subject's control. The film's final ethical claim is therefore not that everything should be preserved, but that preservation must reach its own limit. To be seen is not to be understood; to be recorded is not to be owned. Preservation is not possession.
Short Version
This article examines Shoot Self with You, a 156-minute Chinese experimental feature and performance-film, as a case for rethinking hauntology and death studies before biological death. Rather than representing ghosts, death scenes, or mourning rituals, the film asks how a living person becomes a remainder: how appearance, speech, blankness, refusal, public witnessing, backstage sound, names, thanks, and silence turn living events into traces that can be preserved but not possessed.
Methodologically, the article reads haunting not through apparitions, but through shifts in the ownership of appearance, speech, silence, ending, and remains. It follows an opening declaration of intimacy carried away by the camera, rehearsal failures that return as unfinished versions, public moments in which blankness and the desire not to be seen become shared residues, and a closing movement of backstage voices, names, gratitude, black screen, and silence.
I argue that the film shifts hauntology from the return of the dead to the ghosting of the living. For death studies, it offers a theory of pre-mortem afterlife: witnessing, naming, preserving, repeating, and leaving remains can begin before death. Preservation, the film insists, is not possession.
Keywords
Shoot Self with You; Human Surrender; hauntology; death studies; living remains; pre-mortem afterlife; visibility; performance-film; preservation ethics
Submission Note
The safest English phrase for the core concept is:
living remains
Use ghosting of the living as the hauntological intervention, not as the only title concept. This lowers the risk of making hauntology seem merely metaphorical while keeping the article's theoretical force.
Avoid making surrender the main abstract keyword unless the article includes a clear sentence:
Surrender here does not mean submission to another person, but the collapse of the fantasy that the self can sovereignly own its visibility, speech, memory, and afterlife.