Journal articles on the topic 'Yannis Maris'

This edited volume publishes the proceedings of the international conference Embodied Identities in the Prehistoric Mediterranean: Convergence of Theory and Practice, held in Nicosia, Cyprus, on 10–12 April 2012. The twenty–nine contributions published here ‘connect archaeologists working in the eastern Mediterranean beyond the regional limits of their area of expertise, to the broader debates currently contested in the archaeology of the body’ (p. v.). This well–produced volume is efficiently organised around six broad themes: the represented body; material culture and the construction of identities; ritualised practice and the performance of identities; embodied knowledge through technology and space; the lived body and identities; interaction with the dead body.

Michalis Mountantonakis is a Postdoctoral Researcher of the Information Systems Laboratory at FORTH-ICS (Greece) and a Visiting Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at University of Crete (CSD-UoC), Greece. He obtained his PhD degree from the CSD-UoC in 2020. His research interests fall in the areas of large-scale semantic data integration, linked data and semantic data management. The results of his research have been published in more than 20 research papers. For his dissertation, he awarded a) the prestigious SWSA Distinguished Dissertation Award 2020, which is given to the PhD dissertation from the previous year with the highest originality, significance, and impact in the area of semantic web, and b) the Maria Michael Manasaki Legacy's fellowship, which is awarded to the best graduate student of CSD-UoC, once a year. In his dissertation, supervised by Associate Professor Yannis Tzitzikas (Computer Science Department at University of Crete), Michalis Mountantonakis dealt with the problem of Linked Data Integration at large scale, which is a very big challenging problem. He factorized the integration process according to various dimensions, for better understanding the overall problem and for identifying the open challenges, and proposed novel indexes and algorithms for providing core services, which can be exploited for several tasks related to Data Integration, such as: for finding all the URIs and all the available information for an entity, for producing connectivity analytics, for discovering the most relevant datasets for a given task, for dataset enrichment, and many others.

Bringing together researchers, theorists and visual artists, the fourth volume of DAC journal, "Narratives of Crisis: Representing Capitalist Realism", aims to provide a platform for discussions and research, which consider various aspects of the visual and its implication to both ideological formations and cultural forms related albeit not limited to the notion of crisis. The special issues (4:1, 4:2) are, in a way, a continuation of previous, relatively recent projects which the guest editor, Dr Penelope Petsini, has curated or organised, and all invited contributors have been involved in: The group exhibitions "Capitalist Realism: Future Perfect" and "Capitalist Realism: Past Continuous" (2018-19, held at MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography and MOMus-Center of Experimental Arts, respectively), the eponymous book (University of Macedonia Press, 2018), as well as the conference "Representing Capitalist Realism: Crisis, Politics and the Visual" (23-24/11/2018, MOMus-Thessaloniki Museum of Photography & Rosa Luxemburg Foundation). Starting from this point, the issues aim to offer a comparative charting of the crisis discourse by adopting an inclusive definition of the term derived from new scholarship and the concept of "Capitalist Realism" as introduced by British theorist Mark Fisher: an ideological framework for perceiving capitalism's impact on politics, economics, and collective consciousness – encompassing both the spheres of economy and culture. Crucially, Capitalist Realism encapsulates the prevalent notion that not only is capitalism the sole feasible political and economic structure, but it has also become nearly inconceivable to imagine a coherent alternative. Part Two ("The Greek Crisis") is a collection of essays and visual explorations which present the multifaceted dimensions of the Greek Crisis, weaving together threads of cinema, art, literature, architecture, politics, and urban life. It includes articles, visual essays, portfolios and a review by: ​Anna Poupou; Nikolas Ventourakis; Depression Era collective; Paraskevi Kertemelidou; Maria Paschalidou; Maria Moira; Io Chaviara; Ioanna Barkouta; Yannis Karpouzis - Yorgos Karailias - Yorgos Prinos - Pavlos Fysakis (Grossraum); Myrto Marini; Dimitris Kechris.

The School's archaeological programme in 2012–2013 included fieldwork, museum studies (notably a project led by Robin Barber to complete the publication of material from early 20th-century excavations at Phylakopi now held in the National Museum in Athens) and many individual and group projects housed at Knossos and in the Fitch Laboratory. Following the success of the conference Interpreting the Seventh Century BC, in December 2011, a further workshop in December 2012 on Thessalian sanctuaries and cults, organized in collaboration with the University of Oxford, brought together 24 speakers, including many colleagues from Thessalian ephoreias and the University of Thessaly, to present new data and reflections. Maria Stamatopoulou comments further on material presented at this meeting in her contribution to this year's AG below. In London, collaboration with colleagues in the British Museum's Department of Greece and Rome resulted in a very popular study day on Knossos: from Labyrinth to Laboratory in November 2012 (now published online at www.bsa.ac.uk). This will soon be followed (on 2 November 2013) by a further collaboration in a British Museum Classical Colloquium on Archaeology Behind the Battle Lines: Macedonia 1915–1919, also in partnership with the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki.Among our ongoing field projects, I begin with discussion of the excavation at Koutroulou Magoula in Thessaly directed by Nina Kyparissi-Apostolika (Director Emerita, EPSNE) and Yannis Hamilakis (Southampton), which in 2012 sought to clarify activity in the area of two Neolithic buildings uncovered in 2011 (Fig. 2). One of these buildings had been mostly destroyed in later periods, although evidence of outdoor activity includes hearths and in situ deposits.

Abstract Introduction: Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is an aggressive cancer with limited treatment options. The application of photodynamic therapy (PDT) was shown to significantly improve patient survival. Previously, we found that low dose PDT (L-PDT) enhanced the immune infiltration of MPM and increased the impact of immune checkpoint inhibitors on tumor control. However, the mechanisms behind these observations are unknown. Here, in an orthotopic murine model of MPM, we show that L-PDT upregulates tumor vascular E-Selectin expression via NF-kB. This upregulation favors enhanced leukocyte trafficking and immune mediated MPM regression. Methods: We analyzed adhesion molecules (E-Selectin, ICAM-1, VCAM-1) and canonical NF-kB activation (phosphorylated IκBα) protein levels in endothelial (ECRF-24) cells treated by L-PDT in the presence or absence of a NEMO/IKKγ siRNA in vitro. For in vivo validation, AB12-Luc MPM cells were grown in the pleural cavity of syngeneic BALB/c mice and treated with L-PDT (verteporfin 400 µg/kg, fluence 10 J/cm2, fluence rate 50 mW/cm2) alone or in presence of NF-kB or E-Selectin inhibitors (NEMO Binding Domain (NBD) peptide and E-Selectin blocking antibody respectively). For each treatment group, we determined the expression of endothelial adhesion molecules (E-Selectin, ICAM-1, VCAM-1) and the tumor immune infiltrate by immunohistochemistry and flow cytometry. In parallel, the impact of L-PDT on MPM growth and mouse survival were assessed in the presence of E-Selectin inhibition. Results: L-PDT increased the levels of endothelial adhesion molecules E-Selectin, ICAM-1 and VCAM-1 9 to 24 hours after L-PDT treatment in vitro. This was preceded by an increase of IκBα phosphorylation. In the presence of NEMO siRNAs, the expression of NEMO/IKKγ was reduced and led to E-Selectin repression. In orthotopic MPM bearing mice, the treatment of MPM by L-PDT enhanced adhesion molecules expression in tumor vasculature at 24 hours. This correlated with increased infiltration of CD4+ and CD8+ granzyme B+ T-cells and improved tumor control and mouse survival. NF-kB inhibition impaired tumor vascular adhesion molecules upregulation and the recruitment of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes in MPM. The targeted inhibition of E-Selectin abrogated the immune infiltration and tumor regression of MPM following L-PDT, which ultimately decreased animal survival in our MPM model. Conclusion: Low dose PDT relieves MPM tumor vascular anergy via NF-kB mediated adhesion molecules expression. Endothelial E-Selectin has been identified, in our MPM model, as a major determinant for L-PDT enhanced lymphocyte trafficking, tumor control and animal survival. Citation Format: Louis-Emmanuel Chriqui, Yameng Hao, Damien Marie, Michel Gonzalez, Thorsten Krueger, Etienne Meylan, Johanna Joyce, Sabrina Cavin, Jean-Yannis Perentes. Photodynamic therapy promotes immune infiltration and control of malignant pleural mesothelioma through NF-kB mediated upregulation of E-Selectin in the tumor vasculature. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 5152.

Abstract Background: Brain metastases (BrM) with highly invasive (HI) growth patterns are associated with shortened local recurrence free- and overall survival compared to minimally invasive (MI) lesions (Dankner et al. 2021). Compared to MI lesions, HI BrM form abundant contacts with cells in the peritumoral brain, particularly GFAP+ reactive astrocytes (RAs). RAs expressing phosphorylated STAT3 (pSTAT3+ GFAP+ cells) have been shown to be required for BrM colonization and outgrowth (Priego et al. 2018). Here, we investigate the role of pSTAT3+ cells in the brain microenvironment in promoting invasive growth. Methods: We performed immunohistochemistry to identify pSTAT3+ GFAP+ cells in HI and MI human and patient-derived xenograft BrM. We assessed how pharmacological inhibition or genetic ablation of STAT3 affected HI and MI BrM growth in vivo with patient-derived xenograft and syngeneic models of BrM. The secretome of STAT3+ RAs was interrogated to identify STAT3 target genes that could drive invasive cancer growth. scRNA-Seq from patients with highly invasive brain metastases was used to examine the expression of candidate invasion factors in distinct cell types within the brain. Finally, cancer cell invasion was modeled in vitro using a brain slice-tumor co-culture assay. Results: HI BrM displayed increased pSTAT3+GFAP+ cells compared to MI lesions. Pharmacological STAT3i with Legasil (Silibinin) or genetic ablation of STAT3 specifically in RAs decreased in vivo growth of HI, but not MI, BrM. Brain slice cultures treated with STAT3-activating cytokines induced cancer cell invasion, a response that was ablated with STAT3i. Chi3L1 was identified as a STAT3 target gene expressed abundantly by stromal cells in the BrM microenvironment. Cancer cells treated with recombinant Chi3L1 showed enhanced invasion into brain slice cultures compared to control-treated cells. Conclusions: pSTAT3+GFAP+ cells are over-represented in HI BrM, rendering HI BrM preferentially sensitive to STAT3i. pSTAT3+ stromal cells functionally contribute to BrM invasion within the brain, in part through Chi3L1. This work nominates HI histopathological growth pattern as a predictive biomarker of response to STAT3i, and highlights Chi3L1 as a novel therapeutic target for the management of HI BrM. Citation Format: Matthew Dankner, Sarah M. Maritan, Neibla Priego, Javad Nadaf, Andy Nkili, Rebecca Zhuang, Georgia Kruck, Dongmei Zuo, Alexander Nowakowski, Yanis Inglebert, Paul Savage, Morag Park, Marie-Christine Guiot, Anne McKinney, William J. Muller, Manuel Valiente, Kevin Petrecca, Peter M. Siegel. pSTAT3+ stromal cells drive the invasive growth of brain metastases [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2022; 2022 Apr 8-13. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(12_Suppl):Abstract nr 1569.

Among LiB cathode materials, lithiated NMC (Li1Ni(1-x-y)MnxCoyO2) formulations with ≥90% nickel have the potential to increase the specific capacity of LiBs, which is the most direct route to increasing the energy density of the battery. Lithiated NMC (LiNixMnyCo (1-x-y)) has the α-NaFeO2-type crystal structure of LiCoO2, but is chemically more evolved; nickel and manganese are substituted for cobalt, decreasing toxicity and expense, and increasing specific capacity [1-3]. Pristine 90% Nickel-rich cathode material frequently performs with a baseline cycling stability of ~75% over 50 cycles, regardless of synthesis method [4, 5]. NMC morphology is described as having secondary particles made up of many smaller primary particles, which is advantageous to packing density when in application- the best performing materials report secondary particle size of up to 20 μm, with primary particle size of ≤ 1 μm [6]. Fig. 1. Particle morphology of secondary particles up to ~20μm made up of primary particles ≤1μm. Microwave plasma at atmospheric pressure provides a facile method for cathode material fabrication. With a working gas of air, ionized gas catalyzed immediate reaction to form cathode precursors from metal salts. This commercializable synthesis method provides a solution to the excessive time and energy waste as well as the environmental and health hazards which are inherent in the coprecipitation manufacturing method that dominates the current NMC production market. In this work, high capacity NMC compositions are produced using the plasma fabrication method. Method produced desired “meat-ball” particle morphology of secondary particles up to ~20μm made up of primary particles ≤1μm. Ni rich Ni-Mn-Co (NMC) cathode materials were characterized for their lithium-ion capacity. Specifically, pristine cathode material with 955 and 811 compositions were prepared and tested using coin cells. Li-NMC with 955 (90% Ni; 5% Mn; 5% Co) cycled with initial specific capacity of 215 mAhg-1, with coulombic efficiency 99% at 20 cycles. Similarly, Li-NMC with 811 composition (80% Ni, 10% Mn and 10% Co) exhibited 190 mAhg-1 capacity and coulombic efficiency >99% over 20 cycles. Cyclic voltammetry confirmed three expected phase changes upon lithiation and delithiation, with clear durability and reversibility after first cycle. Layered crystal structure is confirmed with highly desired particle morphology for best packing density. NMC particles as synthesized by the atmospheric plasma method exhibit baseline NMC performance characteristics. [1] Vanessa Pimenta, M.S., Dmitry Batuk, Artem M. Abakumov, Domitille Giaume, Sophie Cassaignon, Dominique Larcher, and Jean-Marie Tarascon, Synthesis of Li-Rich NMC: A Comprehensive Study. Chemistry of Materials, 2017. 29: p. 9923-9936. [2]Monu Malik, K.H.C., and Gisele Azimi, Effect of Synthesis Method on the Electrochemical Performance of LiNixMnCo1-x-yO2 (NMC) Cathode for Li-Ion Batteries: A Review. Rare Earth Metal Technology 2021, 2021. [3]Dong Ren, Y.S., Yao Yang, Luxi Shen, Barnaby D.A. Levin, Yingchao Yu, David A. Muller, and Héctor D. Abruña, Systematic Optimization of Battery Materials: Key Parameter Optimization for the Scalable Synthesis of Uniform, High-Energy, and High Stability LiNi0.6Mn0.2Co0.2O2 Cathode Material for Lithium- Ion Batteries. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2017. 9: p. 35811-35819. [4]Feng Wu, N.L., Lai Chen, Ning Li, Jinyang Dong, Yun Lu, Guoqiang Tan, Mingzhe Xu, Duanyun Cao, Yafei Liu, Yanbin Chen, Yuefeng Su, The nature of irreversible phase transformation propagation in nickelrich layered cathode for lithium-ion batteries. Journal of Energy Chemistry, 2021. 62: p. 351-358. [5]Ya-Ting Tsai, C.-Y.W., Jenq-Gong Duh Synthesis of Ni-rich NMC cathode material by re dox-assiste d deposition method for lithium ion batteries. Electrochimica Acta, 2021. 381. [6]Fengxia Xin, H.Z., Xiaobo Chen, Mateusz Zuba, Natasha Chernova, Guangwen Zhou, and M. Stanley Whittingham, Li−Nb−O Coating/Substitution Enhances the Electrochemical Performance of the LiNi0.8Mn0.1Co0.1O2 (NMC 811) Cathode. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2019. 11: p. 34889-34894. Figure 1

Background:Tofacitinib (TOF), an oral JAK inhibitor, is approved for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) either as monotherapy or in combination with background methotrexate (MTX). Despite the current evidence of efficacy from randomized controlled trials and open-label long-term extension studies, evidence of effectiveness and safety in real-world settings is limited, not only in Argentina but also in Latin America.Objectives:To describe effectiveness, safety and persistence of TOF therapy in RA patients from public and private medical centers from Argentina. In addition, establish prognostic factors for clinical remission at 3 months and TOF monotherapy at 12 months.Methods:A retrospective, observational and multicentre study was performed from an analysis of medical records of 10 medical centers. RA patients (ACR/EULAR, 2010) and age ≥ 18 years who had received or are under treatment with TOF until June 2020 were included. The data collection was done on a standard database that included baseline data and at 3, 6 and 12 months. Clinical remission was defined as DAS28-ESR < 2,6. Adverse events, treatment duration, TOF treatment persistence at last visit and discontinuation cause were assessed. Comparison to baseline values was performed using Wilcoxon sign for numerical variables and McNemar´s test for categorical variables. Treatment persistence was analyzed using Kaplan Meier´s technique. Multivariate analysis was performed using R software and its library packages (Lme4, Tidyverse and ggpubr). A p value < 0.05 was considered significant.Results:A total of 167 patients were included (78.4% were female). At baseline, the median age was 53 years (IQR 43-63 years), median disease duration was 4 years (IQR 2-13 years). RF was positive in 85.6% of patients, ACPA in 80.8% and structural radiological damage was present in 71.8%. Previous use of MTX was 97%, leflunomide 74.8% and biologic therapy 42.5% (28.74% 1 biologic, 11.98% 2 biologics and 1.8% ≥ 3 biologics). TOF dose: 48% 11 mg/day and 52% 5 mg BID. A statistically significant difference was observed not only in disease activity (p<0.0001) but also in the requirement of MTX and PDN (p<0.0001) in the 12 months evaluated. Remission significantly increased from baseline to month 3 and to a much lesser extent to month 6 (p < 0.001). The mean duration of treatment with TOF was 20.10 ± 15.25 months. Treatment persistence was 93.84% at 3 months and 91.24% at 6 months. In those patient who achieved REM at month 3, a statistically significant differences in duration of RA (p 0.0002), structural radiological damage (p 0.011), basal disease activity (p 0.018) and prior treatment with biological therapy (p 0.017) was found when compared with patients who remained active. Furthermore, in univariate logistic regression analysis, 5 years or more of disease duration was associated with a 3 times higher risk of not achieving clinical remission at 3 months (odds ratio = 0.35, 95% CI = 0.15-0.83). In the multivariate logistic regression analysis, previous biological therapy was the only predictor associated with a decrease in the probability of clinical remission (p < 0.008). Adverse events were registered in 26 patients (herpes zoster, n = 9).Conclusion:The effectiveness of TOF was observed not only in the clinical response achieved but also in the dose titration or withdrawal of MTX and PDN. The safety profile did not show any difference from long-term extension studies. At 12 months, 86.81% of the patients persisted with TOF therapy. We found prognostic factors associated with clinical remission at 3 months but those associated with monotherapy at 12 months could not be defined due to small number of patients analyzed that could have generated lack of statistical power, although more studies are required to confirm these assumptions.Disclosure of Interests:Maria Del Rosario Maliandi: None declared, Yanina Silvia Malvano: None declared, Alejandra Cusa: None declared, María Julieta Gamba: None declared, Ramiro Gomez Speakers bureau: Abbvie, Novartis, Julio Got: None declared, Oscar Gut: None declared, Ursula Vanesa Paris: None declared, Maria Andrea Spinetto: None declared, Carolina Mariach: None declared, Alejandra Ines Abalo: None declared, Adrián Estevez Speakers bureau: Bristol-Meyer-Squibb, Jose Luis Velazco Zamora: None declared, Juan Pablo Vinicki: None declared

Introduction In this article I suggest a reading of the magic trick from a politico-ideological perspective, using Slavoj Žižek’s critique of ideology, and in particular, the aspect of cynicism as a part of the functioning of a certain ideology by keeping a distance towards it at the same time. The structure of the magic trick – from the classic sleight of hand up to levitation in front of a live television (TV) audience – can be useful in understanding how politics and ideology function today, and perhaps more importantly, how the critique of ideology can paradoxically help rehabilitate the notion of ‘illusion’. The crucial question to be posed here, based on this theory, is one of the status of the illusion and the search for truth ‘behind the curtain’, in the ideological sense and the age of social media. The magic trick has two sides to it: what the audiences are supposed to see from one certain point of view, and the mechanics of the trick behind it, which are known only to the magician. The job of the magician is then to perform the trick in such a way that audiences, even if they know it is only a trick, still remain in awe of the mastery, and perhaps for a moment start to believe in ‘pure’ magic. Magicians or illusionists have traditionally guarded their secrets – not only for the trick to work but also to preserve the belief in something more than the banal reality. The once-famous illusionist and TV star David Copperfield considers this essential for magicians and what they represent: and all of them … share a common trait – they keep their secrets, hoarding them with the fervour of a miser, not because they represent wealth or personal prestige, but because divulging them to the uninitiated breaks the spell, ruins the fun, and tells the child inside us all not to dream. As some cognitive scientists have pointed out (see Pailhès and Kuhn), magicians also tend to influence the spectators/participants on an unconscious level, in card tricks, for example, by evoking (verbally or visually) certain images, shapes or colours in order for the participants to pick the right card. My argument is that even when we know how the trick works and that we are being manipulated, we can still believe in magic. The magic trick falls apart only if the performance itself fails and the spectators witness a fatal mistake that suddenly reveals the hidden wires (as it were): “no magician is allowed to miss a trick and escape that moment when applause turns to derision” (Copperfield). This might also be true for politicians: the mistake caught as it happens might spell doom for the not-so-skilled (ideological) illusionist. At the same time, what if any revelation after the fact still cannot break the illusion? Illusion and the Functioning of Ideology Revelation is the basic premise of Žižek’s definition of ideology today: it works even when we very well know that it is ideology. Based on his reading of Marx and Freud through Lacan, Žižek attempts to show the workings and pitfalls of ideology today and relies partly on Marx’s analysis of “commodity fetishism” in his Capital. Our attitude towards ideology is therefore “fetishistic” and is best displayed in the example of commodities. As soon as some product of labour becomes a commodity, it seems endowed with special powers, with “mystery, magic and necromancy” (Marx 47), it abounds in “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx 42). There is a certain something ‘more’, which has nothing to do with an object like a chair or table when they are outside of the marketplace. Based on this reading, Žižek paraphrases Marx’s formula of ideology: “they do not know it, but they are doing it”, and proposes a new approach: “they know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know” (Žižek, Sublime 30). Just like, for example, the foot fetishist who at the same time knows that the foot is ‘just’ a foot and something more at the same time – an object of their desire – we deal with money and commodities. Money is either paper or a number on a screen which can be worth something or suddenly lose its value, and become worthless, depending on social circumstances. The truth of commodity fetishism, and analogous to that also ideology, is therefore in the “doing”: we know very well that perhaps an idea of “freedom is masking a particular form of exploitation” (Žižek, Sublime 30), but we still believe in this idea of freedom, in our practical life we ‘stick to it’ – we are therefore ‘fetishists’ or cynics in practice. We also know very well that the late capitalist, ‘neoliberal’ system is in itself problematic, that it has “inherent contradictions” which produce its countless crises, but we still behave as if there is no alternative: “cynical distance is just one way – one of many ways – to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy, even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them” (Žižek, Sublime 30, emphasis in original). The ideological trick, the deceiving character of the image is something that is connected to our perception of reality and is pertinent to understanding ideology. But it is simply not enough to disconnect the illusion from reality as a separate entity. The everyday notion of ‘illusion’ stands in the way of grasping the way ideology works and the way the critique of ideology could be truly effective. In Žižek’s view thus, ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension, it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‛reality’ itself: an ‛illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel. (Sublime 45) This approach to ideology goes beyond ‘meta-narratives’, it stresses the subject's position within the network of social relations – to change one’s point of view might therefore lead to the disintegrating of an ideological edifice. Yet at the same time, this shift is not the move from the ideological illusion to reality itself; it is important to note here that ideologies, from organised religions to Nazism and antisemitism, from totalitarian socialist regimes to neoliberalism, all build substantially on certain facts, however distorted. To then simply confront an ideology with such facts is not ‘automatically’ a way out of its grasp. The Truth behind the Veil To sum up, there is magic and transcendence in our secular and ‘enlightened’ world even though we pretend to be pragmatics, all the while actually being fetishists in our actions who believe in otherworldly properties of money and commodities. It is therefore useless to simply look at the reality ‘as it is’, to turn to statistics, for instance, and to expect that the “veil of ideology” will then be lifted. Whether it is far-right extremism or the belief in neoliberal individualism, ideologies are rooted in reality and cannot be confronted or debunked by merely stating facts, however true and convincing they might be. The veil itself is the ruse. Žižek often quotes the classic Greek tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios (as told by Jacques Lacan), two painters who competed in painting the more realistic painting. Zeuxis painted grapes that attracted birds who wanted to pick at them. Parrhasios simply painted a (very realistic) veil on a wall. Zeuxis, upon seeing the veil, asked Parrhasios to lift the veil and show him what he painted. Lacan draws from this the conclusion that: “the … example of Parrhasios makes it clear that if one wishes to deceive a man, what one presents to him is the painting of a veil, that is to say, something that incites him to ask what is behind it” (Lacan 112, emphasis added). The veil, therefore, captures our imagination and desire, the idea that there must be something behind it, the desire to know what goes on behind the scenes, and exactly here, we as spectators/political subjects fall into the ideological trap. Whether in wildest conspiracy theories or in fact-based investigative journalism, the same underlying mechanism is at play. The point therefore is not only that we are deceived by the surface, but we are also deceived by our own desire for the knowledge of what might be behind it. As previously mentioned, politicians as magicians have power as long as their ‘trick’ works in real-time. Afterwards, the revelations of crimes or corruption end up being futile and the ideological spell remains intact. This can be witnessed in many cases ranging from Nazism and Adolf Hitler to the “reactionary neoliberalism” (Fraser) of Donald Trump, as well as with other similarly nefarious figures and pernicious ideologies that persist even long after the facts about their crimes have been revealed. It is, therefore, being repeatedly contended across the media that we live in a so-called “post-truth” era (Harari), and it appears that in liberal democratic societies, the exposing of truth in the media has become, in a way, neutralised: no matter how often the ‘dirty tricks’ of corrupt politicians are publicised, they, as illusionists of our time par excellence, somehow manage to perform their tricks time and again and get away with it. Does then the shift that has been taking place for some time within the media, from television and film to social media and streaming, with its tendency for ‘revealing truths’, from reality shows to Hollywood making-of promotional videos, enable us, simply put, to see more or less? Magic in the Social Media Age YouTube and other social media platforms abound with the ‘making-of videos’ of Hollywood films as well as endless content that supposedly debunks diverse mysteries and illusions. Instead of keeping their craft (whatever it may be) a secret to protect the trade, it has become a part of the social media business to show ‘how things are done’, to intrigue us with a look behind the scenes. Fig. 1: Sean performing magic tricks and making tutorials on YouTube in 2023 (@SeanDoesMagic) Magicians have of course also discovered the potential of social media. One example is the young magician Sean (@SeanDoesMagic, fig. 1), with six million subscribers and yearly earnings estimated at up to US$150,000 (as of September 2023, see Socialblade). He combines performing magic tricks and showing how they work, creating tutorials, and short explanations of some basic magic tricks. This ostensible paradox of doing magic and explaining the trick is at the core of how social media work: they conceal and reveal at the same time. Again, we witness here that the trick can still work even when we know how it is done. The conceptual approach of many YouTubers, in general, can be read along the lines of Žižek’s definition of ideology and cynical distance – bloopers and mistakes often stay in, there is a meta-approach of commenting on oneself, not taking oneself seriously, thereby creating a counter-concept to the mainstream media’s professionalism. The social media magicians themselves are not immersed in their own world anymore, jealously guarding their secrets. This approach keeps them relevant in today’s social media culture. From David Copperfield’s ‘classic’ style of magic to the ‘postmodern’ social media magicians, a parallel could be drawn between the trajectory of the development of capitalist societies in the last forty years and the evolution of the magician as an entrepreneur, as well as the adaption of the capitalist system to cultural and economic changes. In a way, the ‘social media magic’ becomes the ‘magic of social media’: something inconceivable in the past – magicians revealing their magic tricks – is now part of the job of the social media magician as a content creator. The social media magician can profit from explaining the trick, making it the show of their ultimate power as magician (the social media presence of magicians is also seen by some as the “democratisation of the magic industry”; see Ryssdal and Hollenhorst). To show the workings, the mechanics of a magic trick is not ‘disillusionment’ – the trick still works even if we know how it is made. Does this mean that the illusion is stronger than reality, or does it simply imply that we can never truly disentangle the illusion from reality? This approach can also be taken in regard to politics proper: despite our knowledge of the systemic corruption and inherent flaws of capitalism, we still believe in the system by simply ‘doing it’, by not truly accepting the possibility of a true alternative. We know how money and finance work; we know very well that the capitalist system produces its financial crises and inequalities in society. Still, we act as if there cannot be any alternative to the current state of things. What seemingly prevents us from ‘ideological illusions’ (such as ‘communism’ or ‘socialism’ in their many iterations) simply produces another ideological illusion: the belief in the sole prospect that the world will end up being saved by the ‘magic’ of the finance market or ‘wizardry’ and humanism of Big Tech billionaires. The Real Magic of Politics What connects social media and the functioning of ideology in Žižek’s sense is therefore the desire to know what hides behind the curtain, which may have made the classic magician as a celebrity obsolete – we are seemingly no longer interested in ‘parlour tricks’, but in ‘the truth’, the ‘real thing’. Fig. 2: David Copperfield flying on live television in 1992 (CBS) We can thus oppose the decline of Copperfield’s magic TV shows (fig. 2) to the rise of the reality shows of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The spectacle of magic gave way to the spectacle of the “hyperreal” (Baudrillard) – from MTV’s Real World (1992) to Big Brother (1999) and many others. Someone like Copperfield, a household name during the 1980s and 1990s, could appear almost ridiculous and outdated in today’s social media-dominated world. The result is that instead of a few ‘greats’ like Kellar, Houdini, or Copperfield, there are a myriad of small content creators that can profit from the emerging new post-neoliberal order that Varoufakis calls the “techno-feudalism” of the new digital capitalism of Internet platforms, or, in Zuboff’s analysis, “surveillance capitalism” with its primary goal of collecting and selling user data for profit. Meanwhile, the magic tricks of financialised capitalism dominate – creating money out of thin air being the most popular one. Still, it is not sufficient to simply ‘debunk’ or expose this, however thoroughly or engagingly. We have witnessed attempts of this in popular culture: it is not enough to show us the dealings and debauchery behind the scenes, as in films like The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) or The Big Short (2015). When we watch the Wall Street brokers ‘work their magic’ it remains fascinating, the tricks still work and the illusion that perhaps ‘I also can still somehow make it’ persists. Paradoxically, in the age of ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ perhaps only illusions can save the day, but those of the ‘right kind’: the illusions of Greta Thunberg that planet Earth can actually be saved from the climate catastrophe, and the illusions of voters still believing in democracy and in a possibility of a transnational, class/gender/race-defying solidarity. In a way, for a society to work, a form of illusion is needed, and we should not fall into the trap of revealing the workings behind the scenes as being the solution, but accept the power of the illusion as such. The rift between the surface of the illusion and the truth is necessary, but it is the fetishising of ‘what lies beneath’ that is the ‘wrong’ illusion: what Žižek calls the ‘illusion of the real’. Instead, what is needed is the “real of the illusion” (Žižek, Lacan 59) – the truth that emerges from the trick itself, from the realisation that our reality is already structured by fantasy, that if we lose fantasy, we lose reality itself. In Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006), two rival magicians are ready to sacrifice everything in order to discover each other’s secrets, to outplay one another, and create the ultimate illusion on stage. One of them even deploys science, ‘real magic’, to achieve the impossible. In the end, it is the same magician who summarises what magic is about and what it means to him: the audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special. You really don’t know? It was... it was the look on their faces. (Prestige) It is clear that the audience knows what is going on, that they want to be fooled, and that the magician wants to capture their gaze. The ideological fantasy also thrives on this desire, and simply directing that gaze to look ‘behind the scenes’ does not break the illusion but opens up an abyss: coping with the “miserable world” by finding scapegoats (Jews, refugees, women, trans persons) to make the inconsistent and troubled system whole, which can only lead to a catastrophe. Conclusion The belief that the late capitalist system will go on forever and that the manifold crises will somehow get resolved by themselves is a dangerous dream after the disastrous financial crisis of 2008, the COVID crisis, and the ongoing Ukraine war, as well as the looming environmental catastrophe. Here it would be necessary to remain on the side of ‘true’ magic: not the ideological belief that the (already shaken) status quo will go on forever, but the conviction that things need to change: and at the moment, this is proclaimed unrealistic, and fantasy comes into play – the ‘real of the illusion’ which might provide an opening for a true and significant change. Fig. 3: Harry Houdini performing the Handcuff Escape in 1907 (David Folender) Perhaps Harry Houdini’s (fig. 3) legendary contempt for the “spiritualists” of his time (Tompkins 93), and his fight to expose them, can help us understand politics and ideology today through magic: we are in dire need of true magicians against those who simply try to deceive us by painting the veil that hides nothing. References Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan UP, 1999. Big Brother. John de Mol. 1999-present. Big Short, The. Dir. Adam McKay. Paramount Pictures, 2013. Copperfield, David. “A Delicate Sleight of Hand: Magic and the History of Illusion.” Omni 17.2 (1994): 6. Fraser, Nancy. “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond.” American Affairs 1.4 (2017): 46–64. Harari, Yuval Noah. “Yuval Noah Harari Extract: ‘Humans Are a Post-Truth Species’.” The Guardian 5 Aug. 2018. 30 June 2023 <https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/aug/05/yuval-noah-harari-extract-fake-news-sapiens-homo-deus>. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998. Marx, Karl. Capital. Abridged ed. Oxford UP, 2008. Pailhès, Alice, and Gustav Kuhn. “Influencing Choices with Conversational Primes: How a Magic Trick Unconsciously Influences Card Choices.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 117.30 (2020): 17675–9. Prestige, The. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Warner Brothers, 2006. Real World, The. MTV, 1992-2019. Ryssdal, Kai, and Maria Hollenhorst. “How the Internet Democratized the Magic Industry.” Marketplace Mar. 2019. 10 Sep. 2023 <https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/01/how-internet-democratized-magic-industry/>. SeanDoesMagic. 7 Aug. 2023 <https://www.youtube.com/@SeanDoesMagic>. Socialblade. SeanDoesMagic Statistics. 7 Aug. 2023 <https://socialblade.com/youtube/c/seandoesmagic>. Tompkins, Matthew L. Die Kunst der Illusion: Magier, Spiritisten und wie wir uns täuschen lassen. Köln: Dumont, 2019. Varoufakis, Yanis. “Techno-Feudalism Is Taking Over.” Project Syndicate (2021). 5 Aug. 2023 <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/techno-feudalism-replacing-market-capitalism-by-yanis-varoufakis-2021-06>. Wolf of Wall Street, The. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Paramount Pictures, 2013. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2009. ———. How To Read Lacan. London: Granta, 2006. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future and the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile, 2019.

Right from the start of HBO’s surreal new sketch comedy Fantasmas (2024), we are confronted by the “ghosts” of the show’s title. The work of Salvadorean-American comedian, actor, and writer Julio Torres, Fantasmas constructs a highly artificial set of digital hauntings that, this article argues, speaks to and through a Latin experience that conjures unresolved tensions of displacement and exile, as well as raising probing questions about human agency and identity in an era of globalised neoliberalism. Torres has also given his own explanation for the use of the term in his show: all the people in the show are a little limited, and that’s where the idea of them being ghostly comes from, them being fantasmas [the Spanish word for ghosts]. I don’t lean into that title for its spookiness, I lean into it for the idea of being lonely and having things that people can and cannot do. I’ve always loved the rules around the mythology of ghosts: You can’t talk to that person; you can’t leave this house. That’s exciting to me, feeling a little invisible. (O’Falt 2024) Yet here, we find that objects and concepts can be ghosts as well, not only people, and ideas of artificiality are used deliberately in the show’s storytelling to emphasise a site of haunting. The constructed artifice of life is presented through different ghostly technologies in Fantasmas. There is Julio’s “very important talent agent” Vanesja, who is really a performance artist in the role for so long that now she finds herself doing “regular agent stuff”. There is Julio’s TikTok influencer friend Skyler, who becomes possessed by a demonic Algorithm (another type of artifice) and loses all humanness in his desire to remain relevant on social media. There is the New York City set itself, constructed on an open sound studio, its Brechtian forms emphasising transitory moments and temporariness. Meanwhile, Julio’s personal assistant robot Bibo is more human than some of the show’s main personalities, chastising Julio for “gaslighting”. The human and non-human characters of the show take on synthetic personas whilst refusing the divide of the self and other, rendering the characters as “ghosts” (which we explore in detail later). Julio, as the protagonist of the show, is the one character who strains to keep his identity—he actively tries to avoid getting a “proof of existence” card throughout the series—even as he finds his persona is highly coveted and at all points at risk of being commodified. In the opening scene of the show’s comedic odyssey through New York, Julio finds himself the creative lead in a consultation with Crayola, in which he presents the necessity of a new clear colour crayon that signifies “the in-between”. “But clear isn’t a colour!”, the Crayola execs rebuke. “If it isn’t a colour, then what do you call this?” Julio asks, gesturing to the air between the management side of the table and the consultant. “What do you call what?” they question. “The space between us. The emotional space, I mean”, Julio responds. When the Crayola team suggest that it can’t be done (“Why are you doing this? Why do you need this?”), Julio reminds them of the glass of water in front of them: it’s already done. Some things aren’t one of the normal colours or play by the rules of the rainbow. Think about air or smells or … or memory. Shouldn’t they be allowed to be colours? … To colour something clear is to re-imagine colouring as we know it. While not entirely convinced, as the Crayola executives usher Julio from the meeting, they ask what they might call this clear Crayola. “Oh, um, call it ‘Fantasmas’.” / “Fantasmas?” / “It means ‘ghosts’”. Julio leaves conceding the final plural “s” to the executive: ghost—not ghosts. Yet, from there the opening title FANTASMA appears, with a defiant “S” appearing shortly afterwards, which signals the plurality of the ghosts that will continue to haunt Torres for the remainder of the season, in this dream-like show that in the words of one reviewer “presents itself as a narrative series, but really, it is more of a sketch show, with a series of mini film-like interludes bound together by the loosest of threads” (Nicholson). As the surreal Crayola pitch makes clear, what takes place is also a blurring of the concept of “ghosts” between human subjects and objects, which speaks to the reification of human subjectivity under capitalism, but also of the magical potential of boundary-dissolving as new identities are produced or created. This Spanish word for “ghosts” evokes the word “fantasy” in English—and in the show, the idea of procrastinatory dreams and reverie as a way of escaping anxious reality remains a constant theme. The show innovates on the formal conventions of sketch comedy in interesting temporal ways to further this concept, with the move to a new sketch as Julio has a change of thought or wants to focus on a particular idea. And, to continue this fluidity of subjective viewpoint, Julio’s ideas and fantasies mix with the reflections of other characters—and so a sketch about why Julio thinks the letter Q is too early in the alphabet is followed quickly by a schoolteacher’s musings on graffiti of a backward-facing penis in the school’s toilets. The Crayola headquarters parodies the classic Sesame Street (1981) television segment “how crayons are made”, which shows a young girl using a crayon to conjure up the means of production in a folksy, small-scale Crayola factory (and against the grain, Crayola crayons are still produced in American factories, unlike many industries that have relocated to the global south). An ambivalence is constructed around this idea of collaboration with major industry, which seems to link to Julio’s concern in the series that he is selling out his uniquely creative vision to corporate America. The series leaves this concern as a permanent question, but the play with ideas about the culture industry—and Julio’s role as a kind of imagineer “thinking outside the box” for these high-level corporate executives—leads to a parody of American “dream factories”, which can certainly be extended to Hollywood and television networks such as HBO, with their search for distinctiveness. While the show is darkly humorous—Vinson Cunningham for The New Yorker suggests, the show “is strange and sorrowful, but it’s also deeply funny in a way that series with overt political messages rarely manage to be”—an eeriness is also produced as an affect by the show. As Mark Fisher notes in an analysis of eerie texts, capital contains a ghostliness and “is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity” (5) and that ideas of the eerie are tied up with bigger questions about agency: ‘we’ ‘ourselves’ are caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces. There is no inside except as a folding of the outside; the mirror cracks, I am an other, and I always was. (5) Fantasmas plays out these concerns using the figure of Julio as a guide through such disturbances: while Torres has the agency to name the crayon, he is still unable to escape the “non-human forces” of the system, which for him requires proof of identity (a clear metaphor for the legitimate immigration allowed by a US Visa, a recurring idea in Torres’s work, and a central focus of the A24 film Problemista, 2024). Julio’s recurring nightmare of being trapped in a collapsing room—where he is dressed like a cross between harlequin Pierrot and David Bowie in the Ashes to Ashes video—is just one of the many European avant-garde references that evokes twentieth-century aesthetics. This places the show within a high-brow comedic tradition characterised as “satirical, ironic, less exuberant and more avant-garde” and which “prioritises a cerebral and distanced perspective on beauty over the search for direct enjoyment and immediate entertainment” (Claessens and Dhoest 53). This highbrow modality and focus on Torres as an auteur showrunner and artist also fulfills the content requirements of HBO, known for its “prestige” comedy shows with the same cultural status given to indie cinema (Newman). In this highbrow mode, Adi Walker has argued that Torres’s humour is cerebrally produced “in the space ‘behind the joke’”, and actually is aimed at providing commentary on “the US itself and its structural conditions” (145). The space behind the joke can be potent. For Torres, who grew up in the final years of the Salvadorean Civil War, born to a Venezuelan mother and who spent formative time in Brazil, the “fantasmas” of the title have a peculiarly Latin quality that speaks more broadly to a “zone of experience” that would appear as the fictionalised country of Los Espookys (2019-2022), Torres’s first Spanish-language comedy series, also made for HBO. And, as has been argued before, the Latin experiences of the late twentieth century—Chile, Columbia, El Salvador, Argentina, Paraguay, Guatemala—, if not interchangeable with one another, speak of a shared “colonial aphasia” and “colonial agnosia” that Adriana Zavala has argued generated a condition that is “simultaneously known and unknown, resisting a method of apprehension and instead ruminating on the interstices between knowledge and ignorance, reflecting on the relationship between production, loss, and disassociation” (Zavala 8). These Latin exiles serve as a defence against uncomplicated “exileness” by continually substituting sites of memory—in Los Espookys, real-life production filming decisions meant that Columbia stood in for El Salvador’s site of exile, Chile stood in for Columbia, etc. (Marez). Similarly, in Fantasmas, the continued shifts of temporality and landscape and mix of Latin and Latinx cast speak to the complexities of that shared and unshareable experience of exile, substitutions, and conjuring. As mentioned, Torres also talks about the “exciting” aspect of being a ghost—of being able to hide and to be invisible—and perhaps a connection from this statement can be drawn to the large “undocumented” population of Hispanic-origin immigrants residing in the United States (Ruggles et al. suggest that 7.4 million people are currently undocumented in America). The multiplicity of Latin lives currently invisible to the government in the US arguably also constitute the imaginary “fantasmas” of the show, enlivening the politics of this Brechtian take on Manhattan. As Adi Walker has suggested about the comedian’s earlier work, “Torres plays a crucial role in using comedy to reorient the collectively engaged attention economy to underappreciated, rendered invisible labour that persists in the background” (148), and this is certainly also true of Fantasmas, for highlighting small details in immigrant labour in the United States. The study of ghosts—as a critical and historical term—dwells on what French-Algerian thinker Jacques Derrida has termed a “hauntology”. Working from and beyond Sigmund Freud’s work on mourning—taking typically Derridean detours through Martin Heidegger and South African politics of apartheid—hauntology is “the persistence of a present past or the return of the dead which the worldwide work of mourning cannot get rid of” (Derrida 101). Hauntology, as articulated within critical and cultural theory, has a focus on discursively unpicking seen absences and unseen presences. Or, perhaps more plainly, the unresolved question of presentness. It is then a position that insists that the “other side of life is not always death” and that there remain absences that present themselves to us in search of or demanding justice. For Derrida, his study in hauntology begins in the immediate post-Apartheid moment of South Africa in which “disappeared” peoples return to demand justice in the present. A spectral residue or ghostly presence of those who have disappeared, but nor are they—legally in many cases—fully dead. For Derrida then, the ghost’s failure to rest is characteristic of a deconstruction that “suggests that what we have is not sufficient and warns that we are not fully in control, that we have not taken everything to account. It speaks to a hesitation” (Zacharias 104). Within Fantasmas—and perhaps in the context of this examination of Latin American experience more broadly—these hesitations of voice (“um, err, … “), the show’s artificial landscapes (incomplete sound sets and scaffolded sets), and the existential journeys of the show’s main characters speak to the endless deferral of rest. Those that are absent but never fully dead, speak to many shared experiences of absent voices in the Latin experience. And, as considered by a broad range of scholars, the Latin experience is one haunted by multiple absences: thousands of los desaparecidos (disappeared youth), mass student disappearances, and countless political exiles. And if the critical high point of hauntology occurred at the end of the long twentieth century, within the Latin/a/x context, the diasporic and exiled communities of a broad range of peoples have sustained such resonances, continuing with work in visual art (Doris Salcedo, Cecilia Vicuna), music (Jorge Martin), and television comedy (Julio Torres, Fred Armisen). These spectral subjects speak to a different condition to that of other ghosts and instead speak to sets of political exiles and the returning of the disappeared. The ghosts of Fantasmas evoke the conjuring of the unresolvable tensions of exile that speak to a geo-political trauma of displaced peoples, juntas, mass gravesites, and murders that—entangled with colonial histories of traumas against its indigenous peoples and languages—continued well into the twenty-first century and, even post-Castro, mark out a shared and unshared experience of diaspora and unreturnings. In the show, the constructed and Brechtian Manhattan as a location of confluence for multiple Latin/a/x stories, and the show’s many otherworldly parodies of lost television—such as MELF, an alternative version of 1980s sitcom ALF—become potent sites for these unresolvable questions of exile and loss. For Juliff and Tierney, responding to the psychoanalytic signalling of Latin absence calls on the work of Torok that hauntings take place within a language of presentness rather than mourning: “the ghost refuses to occupy a position within the established binaries through which we are accustomed to constructing our identities and interpreting experience … . It is neither dead nor alive, past nor present. The ghost is always a revenant because it begins by coming back” (Juliff and Tierney 37). It signals, therefore, a perpetual process that has neither beginning nor end: “it has no point of departure and no moment of arrival. It is irreducible and undecidable” (Juliff and Tierney 37). For Hentyle Yapp—a leading voice in queer transnational studies of race and culture—the dizzying array of temporal shifts in cultural production marks “the dissipation of sense [that] pushes us to develop a minoritarian ethic around expiration and return, difference and repetition” (Yapp 7). The continuing failure of the ghost to rest upon a known time and place is one that speaks to the necessity of Torres to return (a large proportion of Julio’s exposition takes place in a ride-share travelling back to an apartment that he never seems to arrive back to), expiration (of dates relating to medical insurance cards), and endless returns. As Rossi has argued, Torres’s combination of “distinctly queer aesthetics and immigrant ethos” is deeply subversive for American television, especially “when political rhetoric and invisibility in Hollywood has led to the racialization of Central American migrants as dangerous gang members and unworthy of the U.S.’s sympathy” (368). Derrida’s ghost, and its haunting presence in absence, suggests that just as the meaning we seek to convey through language constantly escapes along an endless chain of signifiers, so collective and individual histories, and the art practices embedded in them, are less sealed off than we might imagine. The return of the ghost complicates, in other words, the opposition of presence versus absence, visibility versus invisibility, memory versus forgetting, the taken-for-granted linearity of the connections between past, present, and future, as well as the way in which art addresses us. Derrida’s ghost, unlike French psychanalyst Maria Torok’s “transgenerational phantom”, does not return to reveal a secret. However, by unfixing meaning, it re-opens the door to history’s unfinished business, making visible some of the costs of modernity in its various guises. From the first episode, Julio is faced with an uncertainty of status. Asked to provide proof of his existence—the document of proof required is never stated, so remains existential—he cannot provide anything other than a childhood exemption from sport provided by his absent mother. Across the series, Julio tries to locate workarounds, loopholes, and alternatives for the proof of existence (usually in the form of half-heartedly selling out to large corporations). He remains surreally unable to obtain proof that he does indeed exist, and instead can only hope for documents that prove another existence. Fantasmas’ Julio is no refugee, but he remains, as many in the Latin zone of experience, burdened by the necessity of proof of identity that exile demands. That proof, like the spectre, has an expiration date. Fantasmas speaks of a haunting of the Latin experience, one that is marked out by dislocations, exiles, and undeterminable landscapes. There is a deliberate hesitation to name places and to set out the interior scenes in any realistic manner, with most scenes taking place on a series of highly artificial sound studio sets, representing a mythic Manhattan. The show’s lead character, who is on an odyssey to locate a lost earring, moves across sets and scenes that appear unparticular and dislocated. The “real” earring of the quest, a synecdoche of identity perhaps, remains unfound, just as Julio never quite resolves his identity or his location, caught endlessly moving through an urban landscape that is neither one place or another. References Claessens, Nathalie, and Alexander Dhoest. “Comedy Taste: Highbrow/Lowbrow Comedy and Cultural Capital.” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 7.1 (2010): 49-72. Cunningham, Vinson. “Julio Torres’s ‘Fantasmas’ Finds Truth in Fantasy.” The New Yorker, 9 July 2024. <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/29/fantasmas-tv-review-hbo>. Derrida, Jacques. 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O’Falt, Chris. “‘Fantasmas’ Wants You to See Its Scaffolding.” IndieWire, 12 July 2024. <https://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/fantasmas-set-design-julio-torres-nyc-1235024005/>. Rossi, Nathan. “Julio Torres and the Queer Potentialities of U.S. Central American Representation.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 39.5 (2022): 367-379. Ruggles, Steven, Sarah Flood, Sophia Foster, Ronald Goeken, Jose Pacas, Megan Schouweiler, and Matthew Sobek. IPUMS USA: Version 11.0. Dataset. Minneapolis, 2021. <https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V11.0>. Torok, Maria. “Story of Fear: The Symptoms of Phobia—The Return of the Repressed or the Return of the Phantom.” The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand. U of Chicago P, 1975. 177–86. Torres, Julio, dir. Problemista. A24, 2023. Walker, Adi. “Shaping Life, Shaping Work: Julio Torres’ Queer Comic Labor.” Theater Topics 34.2 (2024): 143-149. Yapp, Hentyle. “Feeling Down(town Julie Brown): The Sense of Up and Expiring Relationality.” Journal of Visual Culture 17.1 (2018): 3-21. Zacharias, Robert. “‘And Yet’: Derrida on Benjamin’s Divine Violence.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 40.2 (2007): 103-116. Zavala, Adriana. “Blackness Distilled, Sugar and Rum: María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s Alchemy of the Soul, Elixir for the Spirits.” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1.2 (2019): 8-32.