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 left-leaning 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 Torok, especially in some of the essays collected in L'Écorce et le noyau and Torok's 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 Abraham's death, their radical re-working of Freud's Wolfman case study, Le Verbier de l'homme 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 influential essay by Derrida entitled ‘Fors’.5 Derrida's 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 differences 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 laissées en nous par les secrets des autres’ (L'Écorce et le noyau, p. 427). This insight offers a new explanation for ghost stories, which are described as the mediation in fiction of the encrypted, unspeakable secrets of past generations: ‘Le fantôme des croyances populaires ne fait donc qu'objectiver une métaphore qui travaille dans l'inconscient: l'enterrement dans l'objet d'un fait inavouable’ (L'Écorce et le noyau, p. 427). The ideas of Abraham and Torok have renewed psychoanalytic theory and therapeutic practice dealing with transgenerational trauma and family secrets.6 They have also appealed to some critics working on literature and popular culture.7 A notable success in this domain was scored by the psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron in his book Tintin chez le psychanalyste (1985). Analysing a sequence of Tintin albums in which Captain Haddock is haunted by the ghost of an ancestor, Tisseron speculated about a possible connection between the ghost's illegitimate origins and a drama of legitimacy in the family history of Tintin's creator Hergé. Subsequent biographical research undertaken after Hergé's death showed that Hergé's father was indeed the illegitimate child of an unknown father; and in subsequent publications Tisseron took credit for deducing this secret purely from the analysis of the fictional albums, even though he had in fact been mistaken in suggesting that the illegitimacy was most probably on Hergé's mother's side of the family. Literary critical work drawing on the thought of Abraham and Torok most frequently revolves around the problem of secrets, even if it generally neither achieves nor seeks the biographical confirmation found by Tisseron. The work of Nicholas Rand, especially his book Le Cryptage et la vie des œuvres (1989), deserves particular mention here. Rand was instrumental in demonstrating the relevance of Abraham and Torok for literary criticism, and he also helped extend their work through his later direct collaborations with Maria Torok.8 The other major study that should be mentioned in this context is Esther Rashkin's Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (1992). This book offers what is still the best short account of Abraham and Torok's concept of the phantom and an attempt to develop a critical approach on the basis of it through readings of Conrad, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Balzac, James and Poe. Rashkin is keen not to set up a prescriptive model for interpretation, but to attend to the specificity of each individual text. The works she studies are ‘in distress’, harbouring secrets of which they are unaware, but which the reader or critic may be able to elicit. Her readings track down secrets and bring them to light. In her chapter on Balzac's ‘Facino Cane’, for example, she endeavours to make intelligible Cane's ‘perplexing obsession’ with gold (Family Secrets, p. 82). She finds a possible solution in what she suggests is the secret drama of his Jewish origins, and this in turn is reflected in the narrator's unconscious desire to know the story of his own origins. ‘Facino Cane’ is not explicitly a ghost story, but in Rashkin's reading it revolves around the transmission of phantoms and family secrets in the sense of Abraham and Torok. Despite the intellectual vigour of works by Rand, Rashkin and others, the direct impact of Abraham and Torok on literary studies has in fact been limited, perhaps because the endeavour to find undisclosed secrets is likely to succeed in only a small number of cases. By contrast, Derrida's Spectres de Marx has spawned a minor academic industry.9 His hauntology has virtually removed Abraham and Torok from the agenda of literary ghost studies; or, to be more precise, when Abraham and Torok are now discussed by deconstructive-minded critics, their work is most frequently given a distinctly Derridean inflection. It is to say the least striking that the only mention of Abraham and Torok in Spectres de Marx is in a footnote which refers the reader to Derrida's essay on them, ‘Fors’ (Spectres de Marx, p. 24). In fact, Derrida's spectres should be carefully distinguished from Abraham's and Torok's phantoms (which is why the title of the present article maintains the distinction between them, even if the authors themselves are not always consistent).10 Derrida's spectre is a deconstructive figure hovering between life and death, presence and absence, and making established certainties vacillate. It does not belong to the order of knowledge: C'est quelque chose qu'on ne sait pas, justement, et on ne sait pas si précisément cela est, si ça existe, si ça répond à un nom et correspond à une essence. On ne le sait pas: non par ignorance, mais parce que ce non-objet, ce présent non-présent, cet être-là d'un absent ou d'un disparu ne relève pas du savoir. Du moins plus de ce qu'on croit savoir sous le nom de savoir. On ne sait pas si c'est vivant ou si c'est mort. (Spectres de Marx, pp. 25–26; emphasis in original) La littérature garde un secret qui n'existe pas, en quelque sorte. Derrière un roman, ou un poème, derrière ce qui est en effet la richesse d'un sens à interpréter, il n'y a pas de sens secret à chercher. Le secret d'un personnage, par exemple, n'existe pas, il n'a aucune épaisseur en dehors du phénomène littéraire. Tout est secret dans la littérature et il n'y a pas de secret caché derrière elle, voilà le secret de cette étrange institution au sujet de laquelle, et dans laquelle je ne cesse de (me) débattre. […] L'institution de la littérature reconnaît, en principe ou par essence le droit de tout dire ou de ne pas dire en disant, donc le droit au secret affiché.11 The attraction of hauntology for deconstructive-minded critics arises from the link between a theme (haunting, ghosts, the supernatural) and the processes of literature and textuality in general. In consequence, much of the most committed work in this area combines close reading with daring speculation. The significant difference between the approach inspired by Abraham and Torok and poststructuralist hauntology can already be seen in Nicholas Royle's response to Rashkin's Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative. In her conclusion, Rashkin conceded that uncovering textual secrets always brings to the fore other enigmas which might demand, but not be susceptible to, solution (Family Secrets, pp. 161–62). Royle marks the key difference between critics inspired by Abraham and Torok and those of a more Derridean and poststructuralist bent: in principle, he suggests, Rashkin argues that the process of meaning may be open-ended and infinite, but in practice she closes down that process by assigning determinate meanings to identifiable secrets. Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative is thus ‘a more disruptive, housebreaking book than it seems prepared to admit’ (‘This is Not a Review’, p. 34). Whereas Rashkin insists that ‘Not all texts have phantoms’ (Family Secrets, p. 12), Royle wonders whether ‘every text, including a book review, has phantoms’ (‘This is Not a Review’, p. 35). Jodey Castricano makes a similar point in her Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing (2001): ‘I find [Rashkin's] assertion that “not all texts have phantoms” to be problematic because her assertion marks a division between texts which reveal “secrets” and those that do not (presumably those that do not harbour an unspeakable secret are transparent)’ (Cryptomimesis, p. 142). Royle's musing and Castricano's observation provide a clue to the theoretical ambitions of literary hauntologists. Ghosts are a privileged theme because they allow an insight into texts and textuality as such. Rashkin deliberately restricts the scope of her approach in the name of attentiveness to the secrets of individual texts. Whilst remaining eager to respect specificity, the hauntologists also aspire to extend the validity of their enquiry to embrace a greater level of generality. As Buse and Stott put it in the introduction to the essays collected in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ‘modern theory owes a debt to ghosts’ (p. 6). Some critics have repaid this debt by dramatically escalating the claims made for the spectral, and by association for their own work. Julian Wolfrey's Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (2002), for example, opens with a series of increasingly bold assertions about the importance of literary ghosts. Ghosts ‘exceed any narrative modality, genre or textual manifestation’; the spectral ‘makes possible reproduction even as it also fragments reproduction and ruins the very possibility of reproduction's apparent guarantee to represent that which is no longer there fully’; in consequence ‘all forms of narrative are spectral to some extent’, and ‘the spectral is at the heart of any narrative of the modern’; moreover, ‘to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns’, so that ‘all stories are, more or less, ghost stories’ (Victorian Hauntings, pp. 1–3). In this breathtaking display, ghosts progress rapidly from being one theme amongst others to being the ungrounded grounding of representation and a key to all forms of storytelling. They are both unthinkable and the only thing worth thinking about. The crucial difference between the two strands of hauntology, deriving from Abraham and Torok and from Derrida respectively, is to be found in the status of the secret. The secrets of Abraham's and Torok's lying phantoms are unspeakable in the restricted sense of being a subject of shame and prohibition. It is not at all that they cannot be spoken; on the contrary, they can and should be put into words so that the phantom and its noxious effects on the living can be exorcized. For Derrida, the ghost and its secrets are unspeakable in a quite different sense. Abraham and Torok seek to return the ghost to the order of knowledge; Derrida wants to avoid any such restoration and to encounter what is strange, unheard, other, about the ghost. For Derrida, the ghost's secret is not a puzzle to be solved; it is the structural openness or address directed towards the living by the voices of the past or the not yet formulated possibilities of the future. The secret is not unspeakable because it is taboo, but because it cannot not (yet) be articulated in the languages available to us. The ghost pushes at the boundaries of language and thought. The interest here, then, is not in secrets, understood as puzzles to be resolved, but in secrecy, now elevated to what Castricano calls ‘the structural enigma which inaugurates the scene of writing’ (Cryptomimesis, p. 30). Hauntology is part of an endeavour to keep raising the stakes of literary study, to make it a place where we can interrogate our relation to the dead, examine the elusive identities of the living, and explore the boundaries between the thought and the unthought. The ghost becomes a focus for competing epistemological and ethical positions. For Abraham and Torok, the phantom and its secrets should be uncovered so that it can be dispelled. For Derrida and those impressed by his work, the spectre's ethical injunction consists on the contrary in not reducing it prematurely to an object of knowledge. Derrida's reading of Abraham and Torok in ‘Fors’ emphasizes how their work involves attentiveness to disturbances of meaning, the hieroglyphs and secrets which engage the interpreter in a restless labour of deciphering. In the process, Derrida underplays the extent to which Abraham and Torok attempt to bring interpretation to an end by recovering occluded meanings, and his reading has had a significant impact on the more general understanding of their work. Their phantoms and his spectres, though, have little in common. Phantoms lie about the past whilst spectres gesture towards a still unformulated future. The difference between them poses in a new form the tension between the desire to understand and the openness to what exceeds knowledge; and the resulting critical practices vary between the endeavour to attend patiently to particular texts and exhilarating speculation. As far as I know, the ghost of a resolution is not yet haunting Europe, or anywhere else. References are to Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris, Galilée, 1993). ‘Introduction’, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's ‘Spectres de Marx’, ed. by Michael Sprinker (London—New York, Verso, 1999), p. 2. For political responses to Derrida's Spectres de Marx, see the essays in this collection; see also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Ghostwriting’, Diacritics, 25 (1995), 65–84, and Ernesto Laclau, ‘The Time is Out of Joint’, Diacritics, 25 (1995), 86–96. ‘Marx's Purloined Letter’, in Ghostly Demarcations, pp. 26–67 (p. 39). References are to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L'Écorce et le noyau (Paris, Flammarion, 1987; first published 1978). See also Abraham and Torok, Cryptonymie: le verbier de l'homme aux loups (Paris, Flammarion, 1976). ‘Fors: les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’, in Abraham and Torok, Cryptonymie: le verbier de l'homme aux loups, pp. 7–73. For a review of work in this area, see Claude Nachin, Les Fantômes de l'âme: à propos des héritages psychiques (Paris, L'Harmattan, 1993), pp. 175–202. See also Nachin, Le Deuil d'amour (Paris, Éditions universitaires, 1989); Didier Dumas, L'Ange et le fantôme: introduction à la clinique de (Paris, Serge Secrets de (Paris, Éditions Serge Tisseron et Le à des clinique du fantôme (Paris, For drawing on the work of Abraham and Torok, for example, Esther Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative Nicholas Rand, et du secret dans de Nicolas in Le à des pp. Nicholas Rand, Le Cryptage et la vie des du secret dans les de et (Paris, 1989); Serge Tintin chez le la et la en de dans (Paris, and Tintin et le secret (Paris, de la See in particular Maria Torok and Nicholas Rand, à du de la (Paris, Les for example, Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. by Buse and Stott Jodey Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing ‘The of the A of Derrida's The Ghosts of of Nicholas and on the The Uncanny and is Not a Esther Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of (1995), to the Julian Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature For critical of Derrida's hauntology, see The of in ed. by and York, Verso, pp. It should be that work is being on ghosts which does not explicitly or on the work of Derrida or Abraham and for example, Ghostly and the of and Ghosts and in Literature of Nicholas Royle also on Derrida's of in Spectres de Marx to Abraham and see in The pp. on differences between Derrida's and Abraham and Torok's conception of the see pp. (Paris, Galilée, p. emphasis in

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