Hauntology, spectres and phantoms

Abstract

Hauntology, as a trend in recent critical and psychoanalytical work, has two distinct, related, and to some extent incompatible sources. The word itself, in its French form hantologie, was coined by Jacques Derrida in his Spectres de Marx (1993), which has rapidly become one of the most controversial and influential works of his later period. 1 Marxist and leftleaning readers have been less than enthusiastic about Derrida's claim that deconstruction was all along a radicalization of Marx's legacy, their responses ranging, as Michael Sprinker puts it, 'from skepticism, to ire, to outright contempt'. 2 But in literary critical circles, Derrida's rehabilitation of ghosts as a respectable subject of enquiry has proved to be extraordinarily fertile. Hauntology supplants its near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive. Attending to the ghost is an ethical injunction insofar as it occupies the place of the Levinasian Other: a wholly irrecuperable intrusion in our world, which is not comprehensible within our available intellectual frameworks, but whose otherness we are responsible for preserving. Hauntology is thus related to, and represents a new aspect of, the ethical turn of deconstruction which has been palpable for at least two decades. It has nothing to do with whether or not one believes in ghosts, as Fredric Jameson explains: Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe even the future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the living present: all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us. 3 The second, chronologically prior yet less acknowledged, source of hauntology is the work of psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria

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