Abstract

This article provides a genealogy of Edward Bond’s use of the ghost in his drama and interrogates the symbolic function which it performs in his political and aesthetic cosmology. It argues that Bond’s deployment of the ghost is a signifier of a materialist aesthetic that counter-intuitively embeds these ethereal figures within the corporeal, attributing the same material properties to them as living characters and thereby locating them squarely within his own scheme of affective biopolitics that understands the body as a site upon which the operations of power are painfully inscribed. Using Bond’s theoretical postulation of the late-capitalist world as a ‘posthumous’ society, the article reads Bond’s ghosts as the distilled essences of the oppressively dead and dehumanising societies which he believes should be discarded or rejected, while particularly focusing on the unique materiality and specific corporeality that these spectres possess in his plays.