Ghostly real estate: Haunting, debt and capitalist realism in Milan

Ghosts and analogous supernatural entities are pervasive cultural objects. Anthropologists have delved into the religious, social and cultural value of these presences in depth. However, the discipline does not seem to have dedicated enough energy to interpreting this phenomenon in late capitalist societies. Nevertheless, the relationship between ghosts and capitalism constitutes an object of great interest. The real estate sector seems to be particularly suited to investigating the logic of haunting in contemporary societies. Haunting, which gives rise to ghosts, is a compelling category for understanding power relations and economic brutality. Following Derrida, ghosts are relations that mediate different temporalities in the present. In the cases of the foreclosure I ethnographically observed in Milan, those peculiar relations are debt relationships. Judges and justice system actors who oversee the procedures, aware of the presence of ghosts, act in the awareness that this haunting can in no way be resolved, following a logic that Fisher has defined as ‘capitalist realism’.