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Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms (French Studies)
Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms (French Studies)
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HAUNTOLOGY, SPECTRES AND PHANTOMS
COLIN DAVIS
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 con-
troversial and inuential works of his later period.
1
Marxist and left-
leaning readers have been less than enthusiastic about Derridas claim
that deconstruction was all along a radicalization of Marxs legacy, their
responses ranging, as Michael Sprinker puts it, from skepticism, to ire,
to outright contempt.
2
But in literary critical circles, Derridas reha-
bilitation 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 gure 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 frame-
works, 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-sufcient 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
Torok, especially in some of the essays collected in LE
corce et le noyau
# The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French
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1
References are to Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris, Galile e, 1993).
2
Introduction, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Spectres de Marx, ed. by
Michael Sprinker (LondonNew York, Verso, 1999), p. 2. For political responses to Derridas
Spectres de Marx, see the essays in this collection; see also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ghostwriting,
Diacritics, 25 (1995), 6584, and Ernesto Laclau, The Time is Out of Joint, Diacritics, 25 (1995), 8696.
3
Marxs Purloined Letter, in Ghostly Demarcations, pp. 2667 (p. 39).
French Studies, Vol. LIX, No. 3, 373379
doi:10.1093/fs/kni143
and Toroks work subsequent to the death of Abraham.
4
In fact, Derrida
played a key role in getting the work of Abraham and Torok known to a
wider audience. In 1976, the year after Abrahams death, their radical
re-working of Freuds Wolfman case study, Le Verbier de lhomme aux
loups, appeared in the Flammarion Philosophie en effet series of which
Derrida was one of the co-directors, and it was preceded by a long and inu-
ential essay by Derrida entitled Fors.
5
Derridas essay suggests some of the
similarities between his thought and that of Abraham and Torok, but he has
next to nothing to say about their work on phantoms and the marked differ-
ences between their conception and his. Abraham and Torok had become
interested in transgenerational communication, particularly the way in
which the undisclosed traumas of previous generations might disturb the
lives of their descendants even and especially if they know nothing about their
distant causes. What they call a phantom is the presence of a dead ancestor
in the living Ego, still intent on preventing its traumatic and usually
shameful secrets from coming to light. One crucial consequence of this is
that the phantom does not, as it does in some versions of the ghost story,
return from the dead in order to reveal something hidden or forgotten,
to right a wrong or to deliver a message that might otherwise have
gone unheeded. On the contrary, the phantom is a liar; its effects are
designed to mislead the haunted subject and to ensure that its secret
remains shrouded in mystery. In this account, phantoms are not the
spirits of the dead, but les lacunes laisse es en nous par les secrets des
autres (LE
ditions
universitaires, 1989); Didier Dumas, LAnge et le fantome: introduction a` la clinique de limpense genealogique
(Paris, Minuit, 1985); Serge Tisseron, Secrets de famille: mode demploi (Paris, E
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iz ek (London and New York, Verso, 1994), pp. 133. It should be stressed
that interesting work is being done on ghosts which does not draw explicitly or signicantly on the
work of Derrida or Abraham and Torok; see, for example, Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters:
Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (MinneapolisLondon, University of Minnesota Press, 1997),
and Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature
(CharlottesvilleLondon, University Press of Virginia, 1998).
10
Nicholas Royle also comments on Derridas surprising lack of reference in Spectres de Marx to
Abraham and Torok; see Phantom Text, in The Uncanny, pp. 27980 and, on differences between
Derridas and Abraham and Toroks conception of the ghost, see pp. 28183.
376 COLIN DAVIS
challenge it may pose to them: Or ce qui parat presque impossible, cest
toujours de parler du spectre, de parler au spectre, de parler avec lui, donc
surtout de faire ou de laisser parler un esprit (Spectres de Marx, p. 32;
emphasis in original). Conversing with spectres is not undertaken in the
expectation that they will reveal some secret, shameful or otherwise.
Rather, it may open us up to the experience of secrecy as such: an
essential unknowing which underlies and may undermine what we think
we know. For Abraham and Torok, the phantoms secret can and should
be revealed in order to achieve une petite victoire de lAmour sur la
Mort (LE
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