Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing

Abstract

She develops the theory of cryptomimesis, a term devised accommodate the convergence of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and certain stylistic, formal, and thematic patterns and motifs in Derrida's work that give rise questions regarding writing, reading, and interpretation. Using Edgar Allan Poe's Madeline and Roderick Usher, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Stephen King's Louis Creed, she illuminates Derrida's concerns with inheritance, revenance, and haunting and reflects on deconstruction as ghost writing. Castricano demonstrates that Derrida's Specters of Marx owes much the Gothic insistence on the power of haunting and explores how deconstruction can thought of as the ghost or deferred promise of Marxism. She traces the movement of the phantom throughout Derrida's other texts, arguing that such writing provides us with an uneasy model of subjectivity because it suggests that to be is haunted. Castricano claims that cryptomimesis is the model, method, and theory behind Derrida's insistence that learn live we must learn how talk Awith ghosts.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 71 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.