ETAT PRESENTHAUNTOLOGY, SPECTRES AND PHANTOMS

COLIN DAVIS

Hauntology, as a trend in recent critical and psychoanalytical work, hastwo distinct, related, and to some extent incompatible sources. The worditself, in its French form hantologie, was coined by Jacques Derrida in hisSpectres de Marx (1993), which has rapidly become one of the most con-troversial and influential works of his later period.1 Marxist and left-leaning readers have been less than enthusiastic about Derrida’s claimthat deconstruction was all along a radicalization of Marx’s legacy, theirresponses ranging, as Michael Sprinker puts it, ‘from skepticism, to ire,to outright contempt’.2 But in literary critical circles, Derrida’s reha-bilitation of ghosts as a respectable subject of enquiry has proved to beextraordinarily fertile. Hauntology supplants its near-homonym ontology,replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghostas that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive.Attending to the ghost is an ethical injunction insofar as it occupies theplace of the Levinasian Other: a wholly irrecuperable intrusion in ourworld, which is not comprehensible within our available intellectual frame-works, but whose otherness we are responsible for preserving. Hauntologyis thus related to, and represents a new aspect of, the ethical turn ofdeconstruction which has been palpable for at least two decades. It hasnothing to do with whether or not one believes in ghosts, as FredricJameson explains:

Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe eventhe future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the livingpresent: all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely asself-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density andsolidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us.3

The second, chronologically prior yet less acknowledged, source ofhauntology is the work of psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and MariaTorok, especially in some of the essays collected in L’Ecorce et le noyau

# The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for FrenchStudies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

1References are to Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris, Galilee, 1993).2 ‘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’sSpectres 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.

3 ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, in Ghostly Demarcations, pp. 26–67 (p. 39).

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and Torok’s work subsequent to the death of Abraham.4 In fact, Derridaplayed a key role in getting the work of Abraham and Torok known to awider audience. In 1976, the year after Abraham’s death, their radicalre-working of Freud’s Wolfman case study, Le Verbier de l’homme auxloups, appeared in the Flammarion ‘Philosophie en effet’ series of whichDerrida was one of the co-directors, and it was preceded by a long and influ-ential essay by Derrida entitled ‘Fors’.5 Derrida’s essay suggests some of thesimilarities between his thought and that of Abraham and Torok, but he hasnext to nothing to say about their work on phantoms and the marked differ-ences between their conception and his. Abraham and Torok had becomeinterested in transgenerational communication, particularly the way inwhich the undisclosed traumas of previous generations might disturb thelives of their descendants even and especially if they know nothing about theirdistant causes. What they call a phantom is the presence of a dead ancestorin the living Ego, still intent on preventing its traumatic and usuallyshameful secrets from coming to light. One crucial consequence of this isthat 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 havegone unheeded. On the contrary, the phantom is a liar; its effects aredesigned to mislead the haunted subject and to ensure that its secretremains shrouded in mystery. In this account, phantoms are not thespirits of the dead, but ‘les lacunes laissees en nous par les secrets desautres’ (L’Ecorce et le noyau, p. 427). This insight offers a new explanationfor ghost stories, which are described as the mediation in fiction of theencrypted, unspeakable secrets of past generations: ‘Le fantome descroyances populaires ne fait donc qu’objectiver une metaphore quitravaille dans l’inconscient: l’enterrement dans l’objet d’un fait inavouable’(L’Ecorce et le noyau, p. 427).

The ideas of Abraham and Torok have renewed psychoanalytic theoryand therapeutic practice dealing with transgenerational trauma and familysecrets.6 They have also appealed to some critics working on literature

4 References are to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L’Ecorce 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).

5 ‘Fors: les mots angles de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’, in Abraham and Torok, Cryptonymie: leverbier de l’homme aux loups, pp. 7–73.

6 For a review of work in this area, see Claude Nachin, Les Fantomes de l’ame: a propos des heritagespsychiques (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1993), pp. 175–202. See also Nachin, Le Deuil d’amour (Paris, Editionsuniversitaires, 1989); Didier Dumas, L’Ange et le fantome: introduction a la clinique de l’impense genealogique(Paris, Minuit, 1985); Serge Tisseron, Secrets de famille: mode d’emploi (Paris, Editions Ramsay, 1996);Serge Tisseron et al., Le Psychisme a l’epreuve des generations: clinique du fantome (Paris, Dunod, 1995,2000).

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and popular culture.7 A notable success in this domain was scored by thepsychoanalyst Serge Tisseron in his book Tintin chez le psychanalyste(1985). Analysing a sequence of Tintin albums in which Captain Haddockis haunted by the ghost of an ancestor, Tisseron speculated about apossible connection between the ghost’s illegitimate origins and a dramaof legitimacy in the family history of Tintin’s creator Herge. Subsequentbiographical research undertaken after Herge’s death showed that Herge’sfather was indeed the illegitimate child of an unknown father; and in sub-sequent publications Tisseron took credit for deducing this secret purelyfrom the analysis of the fictional albums, even though he had in fact beenmistaken in suggesting that the illegitimacy was most probably onHerge’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 itgenerally neither achieves nor seeks the biographical confirmation foundby Tisseron. The work of Nicholas Rand, especially his book Le Cryptageet la vie des œuvres (1989), deserves particular mention here. Rand was instru-mental in demonstrating the relevance of Abraham and Torok for literarycriticism, and he also helped extend their work through his later direct col-laborations with Maria Torok.8 The other major study that should bementioned in this context is Esther Rashkin’s Family Secrets and the Psycho-analysis of Narrative (1992). This book offers what is still the best shortaccount of Abraham and Torok’s concept of the phantom and an attemptto develop a critical approach on the basis of it through readings ofConrad, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Balzac, James and Poe. Rashkin is keennot to set up a prescriptive model for interpretation, but to attend to thespecificity of each individual text. The works she studies are ‘in distress’,harbouring secrets of which they are unaware, but which the reader orcritic may be able to elicit. Her readings track down secrets and bringthem to light. In her chapter on Balzac’s ‘Facino Cane’, for example, sheendeavours to make intelligible Cane’s ‘perplexing obsession’ with gold(Family Secrets, p. 82). She finds a possible solution in what she suggestsis the secret drama of his Jewish origins, and this in turn is reflected inthe narrator’s unconscious desire to know the story of his own origins.

7 For criticism drawing on the work of Abraham and Torok, see, for example, Esther Rashkin, FamilySecrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton University Press, 1992); Nicholas Rand, ‘Inventionpoetique et psychanalyse du secret dans “Le Fantome d’Hamlet” de Nicolas Abraham’, in Le Psychismea l’epreuve des generations, pp. 79–96; Nicholas Rand, Le Cryptage et la vie des œuvres: etude du secret dans lestextes de Flaubert, Stendhal, Benjamin, Stefan George, Edgar Poe, Francis Ponge, Heidegger et Freud (Paris,Aubier, 1989); Serge Tisseron, Tintin chez le psychanalyste: essai sur la creation graphique et la mise en scenede ses enjeux dans l’œuvre d’Herge (Paris, Aubier Montaigne, 1985), and Tintin et le secret d’Herge(Paris, Hors Collection – Presses de la Cite, 1993); Colin Davis, ‘Charlotte Delbo’s Ghosts’, FS, LIX

(2005), 9–15.8 See in particular Maria Torok and Nicholas Rand, Questions a Freud: du devenir de la psychanalyse (Paris,

Les Belles Lettres, 1995).

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‘Facino Cane’ is not explicitly a ghost story, but in Rashkin’s reading itrevolves around the transmission of phantoms and family secrets in thesense 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 factbeen limited, perhaps because the endeavour to find undisclosed secrets islikely to succeed in only a small number of cases. By contrast, Derrida’sSpectres de Marx has spawned a minor academic industry.9 His hauntologyhas virtually removed Abraham and Torok from the agenda of literaryghost studies; or, to be more precise, when Abraham and Torok are nowdiscussed by deconstructive-minded critics, their work is most frequentlygiven a distinctly Derridean inflection. It is to say the least striking thatthe only mention of Abraham and Torok in Spectres de Marx is in a footnotewhich refers the reader to Derrida’s essay on them, ‘Fors’ (Spectres de Marx,p. 24). In fact, Derrida’s spectres should be carefully distinguished fromAbraham’s and Torok’s phantoms (which is why the title of the presentarticle maintains the distinction between them, even if the authors them-selves are not always consistent).10 Derrida’s spectre is a deconstructivefigure hovering between life and death, presence and absence, andmaking established certainties vacillate. It does not belong to the order ofknowledge:

C’est quelque chose qu’on ne sait pas, justement, et on ne sait pas si precisement cela est, si caexiste, si ca repond a un nom et correspond a une essence. On ne le sait pas: non par ignorance,mais parce que ce non-objet, ce present non-present, cet etre-la d’un absent ou d’un disparu nereleve pas du savoir. Du moins plus de ce qu’on croit savoir sous le nom de savoir. On ne saitpas si c’est vivant ou si c’est mort. (Spectres de Marx, pp. 25–26; emphasis in original)

Derrida calls on us to endeavour to speak and listen to the spectre, despitethe reluctance inherited from our intellectual traditions and because of the

9 See, for example, Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. by Peter Buse and Andrew Stott(Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999); Jodey Castricano, Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s GhostWriting (Montreal—Kingston—London—Ithaca, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001); NancyHolland, ‘The Death of the Other/Father: A Feminist Reading of Derrida’s Hauntology’, Hypatia, 16(2001), 64–71; Jean-Michel Rabate, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville, University Press of Florida,1996); Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford, Blackwell, 1991),The Uncanny (Manchester University Press, 2003), and ‘This is Not a Book Review: Esther Rashkin,Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative’, Angelaki, 2 (1995), 31–35; Emily Tomlinson, ‘AssiaDjebar: Speaking to the Living Dead’, Paragraph 26:3 (2003), 34–50; Julian Wolfreys, VictorianHauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2002). For critical discus-sion of Derrida’s hauntology, see Slavoj Zizek, ‘Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology’, in MappingIdeology, ed. by Slavoj Zizek (London and New York, Verso, 1994), pp. 1–33. It should be stressedthat interesting work is being done on ghosts which does not draw explicitly or significantly on thework of Derrida or Abraham and Torok; see, for example, Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters:Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis—London, University of Minnesota Press, 1997),and Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature(Charlottesville—London, University Press of Virginia, 1998).

10Nicholas Royle also comments on Derrida’s surprising lack of reference in Spectres de Marx toAbraham and Torok; see ‘Phantom Text’, in The Uncanny, pp. 279–80 and, on differences betweenDerrida’s and Abraham and Torok’s conception of the ghost, see pp. 281–83.

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challenge it may pose to them: ‘Or ce qui paraıt presque impossible, c’esttoujours de parler du spectre, de parler au spectre, de parler avec lui, doncsurtout de faire ou de laisser parler un esprit’ (Spectres de Marx, p. 32;emphasis in original). Conversing with spectres is not undertaken in theexpectation that they will reveal some secret, shameful or otherwise.Rather, it may open us up to the experience of secrecy as such: anessential unknowing which underlies and may undermine what we thinkwe know. For Abraham and Torok, the phantom’s secret can and shouldbe revealed in order to achieve ‘une petite victoire de l’Amour sur laMort’ (L’Ecorce et le noyau, p. 452); for Derrida, on the contrary, thespectre’s secret is a productive opening of meaning rather than a determi-nate content to be uncovered. Elsewhere, in a move of key importancefor literary hauntology, Derrida associates this kind of essential secretwith literature in general:

La litterature garde un secret qui n’existe pas, en quelque sorte. Derriere un roman, ou unpoeme, derriere ce qui est en effet la richesse d’un sens a interpreter, il n’y a pas de senssecret a chercher. Le secret d’un personnage, par exemple, n’existe pas, il n’a aucuneepaisseur en dehors du phenomene litteraire. Tout est secret dans la litterature et il n’y apas de secret cache derriere elle, voila le secret de cette etrange institution au sujet delaquelle, et dans laquelle je ne cesse de (me) debattre. [. . .] L’institution de la litteraturereconnaıt, en principe ou par essence le droit de tout dire ou de ne pas dire en disant,donc le droit au secret affiche.11

The attraction of hauntology for deconstructive-minded critics arisesfrom the link between a theme (haunting, ghosts, the supernatural) and theprocesses of literature and textuality in general. In consequence, much ofthe most committed work in this area combines close reading with daringspeculation. The significant difference between the approach inspired byAbraham and Torok and poststructuralist hauntology can already be seenin Nicholas Royle’s response to Rashkin’s Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysisof Narrative. In her conclusion, Rashkin conceded that uncovering textualsecrets always brings to the fore other enigmas which might demand, butnot be susceptible to, solution (Family Secrets, pp. 161–62). Royle marksthe key difference between critics inspired by Abraham and Torok andthose of a more Derridean and poststructuralist bent: in principle, hesuggests, Rashkin argues that the process of meaning may be open-endedand infinite, but in practice she closes down that process by assigning deter-minate meanings to identifiable secrets. Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis ofNarrative is thus ‘a more disruptive, housebreaking book than it seemsprepared to admit’ (‘This is Not a Review’, p. 34). Whereas Rashkininsists that ‘Not all texts have phantoms’ (Family Secrets, p. 12), Roylewonders whether ‘every text, including a book review, has phantoms’

11Papier machine (Paris, Galilee, 2001), p. 398; emphasis in original.

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(‘This is Not a Review’, p. 35). Jodey Castricano makes a similar point inher Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (2001): ‘Ifind [Rashkin’s] assertion that “not all texts have phantoms” to be proble-matic because her assertion marks a division between texts which reveal“secrets” and those that do not (presumably those that do not harbour anunspeakable secret are transparent)’ (Cryptomimesis, p. 142).

Royle’s musing and Castricano’s observation provide a clue to the theo-retical ambitions of literary hauntologists. Ghosts are a privileged themebecause they allow an insight into texts and textuality as such. Rashkindeliberately restricts the scope of her approach in the name of attentivenessto the secrets of individual texts. Whilst remaining eager to respect speci-ficity, the hauntologists also aspire to extend the validity of their enquiryto embrace a greater level of generality. As Buse and Stott put it in the intro-duction to the essays collected in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis,History, ‘modern theory owes a debt to ghosts’ (p. 6). Some critics haverepaid this debt by dramatically escalating the claims made for thespectral, and by association for their own work. Julian Wolfrey’sVictorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (2002),for example, opens with a series of increasingly bold assertions about theimportance of literary ghosts. Ghosts ‘exceed any narrative modality,genre or textual manifestation’; the spectral ‘makes possible reproductioneven as it also fragments reproduction and ruins the very possibility ofreproduction’s apparent guarantee to represent that which is no longerthere fully’; in consequence ‘all forms of narrative are spectral to someextent’, 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 spacethrough which something other returns’, so that ‘all stories are, more orless, ghost stories’ (Victorian Hauntings, pp. 1–3). In this breathtakingdisplay, ghosts progress rapidly from being one theme amongst others tobeing the ungrounded grounding of representation and a key to all formsof storytelling. They are both unthinkable and the only thing worththinking about.

The crucial difference between the two strands of hauntology, derivingfrom Abraham and Torok and from Derrida respectively, is to be foundin the status of the secret. The secrets of Abraham’s and Torok’s lyingphantoms are unspeakable in the restricted sense of being a subject ofshame and prohibition. It is not at all that they cannot be spoken; on thecontrary, they can and should be put into words so that the phantom andits noxious effects on the living can be exorcized. For Derrida, the ghostand its secrets are unspeakable in a quite different sense. Abraham andTorok seek to return the ghost to the order of knowledge; Derrida wantsto 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

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be solved; it is the structural openness or address directed towards the livingby 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 theboundaries of language and thought. The interest here, then, is not insecrets, understood as puzzles to be resolved, but in secrecy, now elevatedto what Castricano calls ‘the structural enigma which inaugurates the sceneof 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 boundariesbetween the thought and the unthought. The ghost becomes a focus forcompeting 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 injunc-tion consists on the contrary in not reducing it prematurely to an object ofknowledge. Derrida’s reading of Abraham and Torok in ‘Fors’ emphasizeshow their work involves attentiveness to disturbances of meaning, thehieroglyphs and secrets which engage the interpreter in a restless labourof deciphering. In the process, Derrida underplays the extent to whichAbraham and Torok attempt to bring interpretation to an end by recoveringoccluded meanings, and his reading has had a significant impact on the moregeneral understanding of their work. Their phantoms and his spectres,though, have little in common. Phantoms lie about the past whilst spectresgesture towards a still unformulated future. The difference between themposes in a new form the tension between the desire to understand and theopenness to what exceeds knowledge; and the resulting critical practicesvary between the endeavour to attend patiently to particular texts and exhi-larating speculation. As far as I know, the ghost of a resolution is not yethaunting Europe, or anywhere else.

ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

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