Applied Hauntologies: Spectral Crossings and Interdisciplinary Deconstructions

Abstract

This issue of AVANT is dedicated to hauntology, an approach originally defined by Jacques Derrida as a “logic of haunting” that is “larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being,” and that “harbor[s] within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves” (Derrida 1994: 10). At a most general level, hauntology is a study of spectrality and spectres—that is, entities and processes that exceed any definite categorization; accordingly, it inevitably questions the established notions of being, thereby transforming the status of the objects and subjects of knowledge, and contesting the possibility of objectivity. The very idea of spectres—positioned as they are between worlds and times—disrupts the conventional means of measuring time and space, as well as all kinds of dichotomous conceptualizations, including “the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being” (Derrida 1994: 11). Significantly for the articles collected in this issues, the figure of the spectre questions the divisions between texts, and the separation between the individual and the social/communal, thus palpably demonstrating the impossibility of examining any concept or text independently of others. Accordingly, instead of looking for certainties, the scholar of spectres looks for sites of crossings, borrowings, and contaminations, re-discovering traces of other times, places, and beings in the seemingly solid here and now, and producing somewhat melancholic accounts of a culture that is both already haunted and potentially haunting.