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Hauntology (a portmanteau of ghost and ontology, also spectral studies, spectralities, or the spectral turn) is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as if to haunt the present. The term is a neologism first introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. It has since been invoked in fields such as visual arts, philosophy, electronic music, anthropology, criminology, politics, fiction, and literary criticism.
While Christine Brooke-Rose had previously punned "dehauntological" (on "deontological") in Amalgamemnon (1984), Derrida initially used "hauntology" for his idea of the atemporal nature of Marxism and its tendency to "haunt Western society from beyond the grave". It describes a situation of temporal and ontological disjunction in which presence, especially socially and culturally, is replaced by a deferred non-origin. The concept is derived from deconstruction, in which any attempt to locate the origin of identity or history must inevitably find itself dependent on an always already existing set of linguistic conditions. Despite being the central focus of Spectres of Marx, the word hauntology appears only three times in the book, and there is little consistency in how other writers define the term.
In the 2000s, the term was applied to musicians by theorists Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher, who were said to explore ideas related to temporal disjunction, retrofuturism, cultural memory, and the persistence of the past. Hauntology has been used as a critical lens in various forms of media and critical theory, including music, aesthetics, political theory, architecture, Africanfuturism, Afrofuturism, neo-futurism, metamodernism, anthropology, and psychoanalysis.Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books, May 30, 2014. Due to the difficulty in understanding the concept, there is little consistency in how other writers define the term.
Derrida's prior work on deconstruction, on concepts of trace and différance in particular, serves as the foundation of his formulation of hauntology, fundamentally asserting that there is no temporal point of pure origin but only an "always already absent present". The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Ed. by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, 1970), p. 254 Derrida sees hauntology as not only more powerful than ontology, but that "it would harbor within itself eschatology and teleology themselves".Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Routledge. His writing in Spectres is marked by a preoccupation with the "death" of communism after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, in particular after theorists such as Francis Fukuyama asserted that capitalism had conclusively triumphed over other political-economic systems and reached the "end of history".
Despite being the central focus of Spectres of Marx, the word hauntology appears only three times in the book. Peter Buse and Andrew Scott, discussing Derrida's notion of hauntology, explain:
Ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the present. However, the ghost cannot be properly said to belong to the past .... Does then the 'historical' person who is identified with the ghost properly belong to the present? Surely not, as the idea of a return from death fractures all traditional conceptions of temporality. The temporality to which the ghost is subject is therefore Paradox, at once they 'return' and make their apparitional debut ... any attempt to isolate the origin of language will find its inaugural moment already dependent upon a system of linguistic differences that have been installed prior to the 'originary' moment (11).
Kit Bauserman notes that for Literary theory and Critical theory, the ghost is "pure metaphor" and "a fictional vessel that co-opts their social agenda", whereas ethnographers and anthropologists "come the closest to engaging ghosts as beings". Some scholars have argued that the "neat distinction quickly breaks down in ethnographic analysis" and that "it is far from clear that the presence of ghosts as metaphysical entities is primary."
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