On the Ghosts of Western Philosophy
Many philosophers of different schools have critiqued society and attempted to offer us ways out, but they all seem like dead ends. At this point in time, it may be considered whether these ghosts of the past hold any answers, may they return from the underworld and offer us a path home, or will the ghosts, like Shakespeare’s old Hamlet, be led by vengeance? The present is haunted by the past. The present has been sowed with the future, the growth will have watchmen, the specters of the past, that are watching and tending to the half-withering sprouts that almost made the futures we hoped for.
When the great philosophers wrote their masterpieces, assembling their grand systems of philosophy, they forgot to consider the shadows of history in their long-winded texts. Jacques Derrida contended that all ontology is, in some sense, shadowed by a hauntology, whereby the ghosts of the past go unnoticed,
“of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration” (Derrida, 1994, p. 202).
Hauntology is a shadow of ontology, the ghost of a metaphysics,
“it requires, then, what we call, to save time and space rather than just to make up a word, hauntology” (Derrida, 1994, p. 63).
Derrida believed that metaphysics had become too fixated on the presence or existence of idealised forms, so that specters, conjured up in the past, were largely overlooked. What is repressed is the term that is supplementary to the main concept, absence is secondary to presence, and in between presence and absence, we find the ghosts who mark the absence that supplement the presence,
“to haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept” (Derrida, 1994, p. 202).
The specters haunt the realm of thought, subverting the stable meanings of ideas, philosophy is linked to the spectral, to that which eludes, and remains forever elusive and in flux. In this sense, the presence of ghosts within philosophical discourse reveals the inherent instability, continually haunted by the trace of what is absent, yet still pervades and disrupts the present. Even the words of philosophers are haunted, if philosophy is considered a field that searches for truth or knowledge, it should follow that philosophy must be articulated as clearly as possible.
By clear, it is understood to refer to an unambiguous and logical language. Unlike poetry, we do not seek to apply metaphors, yet ‘clear’ itself is a metaphor. Terms identified as neutral concepts, used to describe truth evaluation, like ‘clear’, are often connected to a metaphor, here the reference to a clear point of view. Even if one intends to use the word ‘clear’ literally to describe the knowledge-seeking of philosophy, it will always have been transferred from a secondary discipline. It is impossible, in the context of our spoken and written language, to purge philosophy of analogies or metaphoric expressions. Insofar as philosophers try to kill a term’s metaphorical or poetic origins, they will fail to exorcise its ghosts.
The appearance of hauntology as a philosophical concept emerges in the spectral realm of Derrida’s work, specifically in his seminal text, Specters of Marx. Here, Derrida engages with the ghostly phantom of communism, evoked by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto:
“a specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter […]” (1955, p. 8).
Today, Marxism has become spectral as there are many texts that conjure up many different ‘Marxes’ and ‘Marxisms’, more than one Marx across books and documentaries, and more than one kind of self-proclaimed Marxist. Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, or the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Marxism continued to haunt us. After Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history, and communism had been buried in the ash heap of history, Derrida was quick to note that this was not the last exorcism,
“what is the effectivity or the presence of a specter, that is, of what seems to remain as ineffective, virtual, insubstantial as a simulacrum? Is there there, between the thing itself and its simulacrum, an opposition that holds up? “ (Derrida, 1994, p. 10).
Just like we are not done with religion and its ghosts, we are not done with the critical philosophy of Marx,
“I’m afraid we’re not rid of God because we still believe in grammar” (Nietzsche, 1997, p. 21).
By positing lines, myths, causes and effects, we believe in an intrinsic order of the world. Grammar counts as one of those conditions in life, in which our concept-webs, conjured up by language, are in a sense religious. Whether or not you believe in ghosts, they are everywhere in philosophy, the specters of the dead haunt us,
“a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come back” (Derrida, 1994, p. 123).
In the search for specters, between the lines of presence and absence, we engage with Derrida’s hauntology. Just because something is dead does not mean that it knows it is dead. In order to examine these apparitions, they will be classified into two distinct types; those phantoms which linger as a longing for the past, referred to as the nostalgic specter, or as a representation of an unrealised future, known as the specter of an aborted future.
The nostalgic specter is a drug for the masses, it is a pill of the past, we willingly swallow it to conjure up visions of our lost origins; nostalgia is the drug to take us back to the ‘good old days’. Even histories that we have never experienced first-hand can become articles of nostalgia, we often see how people will look back in time for a nostalgic utopia, a time of innocence with social coherence before the world spun into chaos. Utopia, in Greek ‘ou-topos’, meaning ‘no place’ or ‘nowhere’, is today considered an imagined state where everything is perfect. Utopia has never existed, will never exist and can not exist, but it does not take away its efficacy, both revolutionaries and reactionaries alike reel utopian visions to impose their political ideals, and lodge a deep longing in our hearts. When political commentators proclaim that “the West has lost confidence in its values” (Applebaum, 2019) or we must “save the soul of America” (Williams, 2012), the nostalgic specter haunts us.
This notion suggests that the loss of traditionalist nostalgic specters would entail the demise of Western civilisation itself, but in the end, nostalgia is a bad trip. Appeasing in the moment, but followed by great headache, as ignoring historical inequities and relying on unrealistic ideals, inevitably leads to the disillusionment of a nostalgic high. On the contrary, the specter of an aborted future acknowledges that the ‘good old days’ were not the ‘good old days’ for everyone. This specter is powered by the many miscarried futures, envisioned by the past, it is propelled by the broken dreams of history. Like old Hamlet’s vengeful ghost, the specter of an aborted future maintains a vindictive spirit of the injustices never brought to justice. As the unfixed evils of history persist, these specters remain to haunt us. Marx’s specters are of this kind as the social maladies of alienation, exploitation, inequality, and so on, remain afflictions of contemporary society, and it seems these issues are only aggravated.
Just as the shadows of Marx’s specters continue to loom over society, postmodernity has likewise taken on a spectral dimension, haunting our very perception of reality. Postmodernity has become ‘hauntological’, it spectralises, the medium of specters is no longer restricted to the necromantic spells of a witch, nor do the specters only haunt us through standard forms of mediation. As the gears of progress continue to turn, the acceleration of technology has unleashed a spectral development, casting an eerie light on the future and blurring the line between real and hyperreal. Consequently, the technological acceleration has a spectral effect,
“the new speed of apparition (we understand this word in its ghostly sense) of the simulacrum, the synthetic or prosthetic image, and the virtual event, cyberspace and surveillance, the control, appropriations, and speculations” (Derrida, 1994, p. 67).
Deployed as unheard-of powers, the technological devices are the new necromantic machines, by which the spectral accelerates, namely with
“the medium of the media themselves […] news, the press, telecommunications, techno-tele-discursivity, techno-tele-iconicity […] this element itself is neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it spectralises” (Derrida, 1994, p. 63).
As our world becomes increasingly mediated and interconnected, mobile technology has the power to render the present a ghost, we increasingly live in a mediated reality, in the illusion of presence. From spectacles of politics to daily life, everything spectralises as the decentralisation of society has brought about a hauntological temperament. Like a haunting melody that lingers in the air long after the violinist has stopped playing, the spectralisation of society has been spurred not by postmodern thinkers, but by the relentless race of mechanical acceleration.
Bouncing off the walls as echoes of history, ideas and concepts have always been mediated, but in the age of infinite reproducibility, they become specters of themselves, now mediatable ad infinitum. The contemporary world is one where ghosts of ghosts are conjured up, where the spectacle contributes to a decentering of our reality, maybe Guy Debord had been right all along? While some may see a disjuncture between Debord’s ideas and those of Derrida, who approached philosophy ontologically rather than via situationist practice, both thinkers share a concern for the spectralisation of contemporary life. Debord’s spectacle serves as a haunting reminder of how society has mutated since Marx’s day. As spectacular mediation became the epicentre of the social and political realm, social behaviour and political discourse were transformed into spectacular mediation.
Social phenomena and reality have been separated into distinct categorical spaces, consumed as mere spectacles that haunt us with their eerie presence. Derrida’s work reveals how spectropolitics have replaced critical thinking, leaving us in a mysterious haze. Mapping out the ghosts of the past, Derrida demonstrates how the language of classical Marxism is reawakened, invoking an enigmatic object for thought that takes on many shapes and forms. The ghosts of ideology, philosophy and art haunt us, even Marx himself was haunted by the past,
“the specters of Marx are also his. They are perhaps first of all the ghosts that inhabited him, the revenants with which Marx himself will have been occupied, and which he will have wanted in advance to make his thing” (Derrida, 1994, p. 122).
To you, this text is a ghostly presence or absence, a collection of hauntological elements (even the text here becomes a ghost to the author himself). Haunted by ghosts, and ghosts ourselves, we are left with a sense of unease, much like the deconstructionist paradigm that characterises postmodernity. In the face of this perplexity, it makes sense that some long for the ‘good old days’, and swallow the pill of nostalgia. Plenty are haunted by nostalgic specters, yearning for the nostalgic glory of ancient Rome. They seek a return to Western civilisation, while others seek vengeance on behalf of an aborted future, and try to carry on the baton of displaced fortune. Whether haunted by the nostalgic specter or the specter of an aborted future, people are afflicted by a sense of longing, fantasy or loss. Stuck in a self-sustaining loop, many Americans and Europeans see themselves as the product of Western civilisation, assembled upon ancient Athens and Rome, yet our civilisation is more the product of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Our time is out of joint, we are haunted by the “impure, impure history of ghosts” (Derrida, 1994, p. 221), disillusioned in our former fantasies,
“what then are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?” (Nietzsche, 2001, p. 120).
Our sense of longing is reeled by advertisers, who conjure up brand auras that facilitate fantasies of a nostalgic past with retro aesthetics, or a promising future for us all. “Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces”, so mankind goes under the spell of new gods in the untethered realm of the markets — ghost markets (Weber, 1946, p. 149). Stray and fragmented, society’s social production goes to the extremes of deterritorialization as the tendency of metaphysical production, which brings desire along with it, propagates it in a new world (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 130–131). The fate of our time is characterised by disenchantment,
“for civilized man death has no meaning. It has none because the individual life of civilized man, placed into an infinite ‘progress’” (Weber, 1946, p. 139–140).
Despite the measures to banish Marx’s ghosts, they continue to linger in the shadows, haunting us with their presence and absence. They are vengeful spirits that refuse to be laid to rest, whispering their subversive message, reminding us of the unresolved tensions and contradictions of our society,
“at a time when a new world disorder is attempting to install its neo-capitalism and neo-liberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of Marx’s ghosts” (Derrida, 1994, p. 45–46).
The unfinished business of history continues to shape our lives, Derrida, therefore, sought to process the inheritance of Marx, in an era of the West’s evangelisation of neoliberalism. The haunting persists in all hegemonic structures, each ‘end-stage’ is haunted by the specters of history, the specters continue to haunt us, and since we can not kill what is already dead, the ghost of Marx revisits us on earth.
Bibliography
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Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
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Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1995). The Communist Manifesto. Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Nietzsche, F. (1997). Twilight of the Idols. Hackett Publishing Company.
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Originally published at https://resonanz.substack.com.
