Ritual, magic, and politics: The haunting of Farid Fairuz

Shrouded in mystery and controversy, Farid Fairuz’s emergence on the Bucharest scene, publicly self-revealed during the procession of Farewell (2009/2010), took everyone by surprise. This was the first “coming out” of a haunting spirit – many would soon follow – an event whose magnitude cannot be overstated. If Niels Bohr proved that our common understanding of observation-independent physical reality is fundamentally wrong, and that apparatuses for measurement and observation are part of any description of “reality,” Fairuz has given us a new understanding of the phrase “ghost in the machine”: in other words, that observation technology, including our own bodies, is itself visited, haunted and inhabited, and that a haunting is a condition for the possibility of understanding reality. It should be said, however, that Farid did not emerge out of thin air, and he certainly did not disintegrate into nothingness. His work was developed on ground fertilized by Romania’s unique articulation of its geo-political and geo-spiritual contexts, a significant body of esoteric literature, as well the media’s role in popularizing the occult at the turn of the 21st century. This text represents a modest contribution to a contextual understanding of Fairuz’s existence and its global significance; through a hauntological analysis of his work, and especially Farewell, this text will argue that Fairuz opens a new era of profound transformations, which urges humanity to examine and discover itself anew through kindness, compassion, self-forgiveness, and love.