Haunted Nap is the reading-performance of an endless phrase, crafted in the shadow of beloved texts in the wake of a collective bruise.

It addresses what it means to be 'planted here' [plantées là], operating from the brushwood of our languages, tongues, writings, (hi)stories. A lecture with a flock of open books recursively resonating across fields – of vision, of cotton, of knowledge, of corn, of complaint, of joy, of sugar, of constraint, of complicity – this phrase-field comes from a practice of hauntological reading among many, across the texts that have been keeping us company in the frame of our respective research projects: ‘Institute of Rest(s)’ (Alix Eynaudi) and ‘Expanded Practices All Over’ (Paula Caspão).

As a haunted phrase-field of unending rehearsal, it puts several texts in common to unbutton their sentences and make them breathe through one another’s mouths; to make them transpire, conspire and diverge together, as an antidote to that something that does not pass (Marboeuf 2022): the great Euro-North-America-Centric fable, whose impact we must endlessly take time to register (Ahmed 2020) so as to rehearse the undoing of its never-ending fake continuity (Wynter 1971).

More than accounting for intertextuality, Haunted Nap is a matter of summoning several forms of intensive resurgence of texturing, which we find necessary not only to “disengage” ourselves from everything which, in our forms of living, studying, working, naming, telling and translating, continues to install cycles of violence (Azoulay 2019); but also to make a certain resonance heard between the beats of discourse – their forms of falling time and again, of incorporating and ex-corporating themselves with and against each other – and the beats of percussion instruments; a resonance that discloses the body-corpus (of writing and storytelling) as an extended choreographic field, a body-field of reverberation that may prepare the grounds for some kind of collective choreolinguistic care.