French Studies, Vol. LIX, No. 3, 373 379 doi:10.

1093/fs/kni143

ETAT PRESENT HAUNTOLOGY, SPECTRES AND PHANTOMS

COLIN DAVIS

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 inuential works of his later period.1 Marxist and leftleaning readers have been less than enthusiastic about Derridas claim that deconstruction was all along a radicalization of Marxs legacy, their responses ranging, as Michael Sprinker puts it, from skepticism, to ire, to outright contempt.2 But in literary critical circles, Derridas 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 gure 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-sufcient 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 LEcorce et le noyau

References are to Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris, Galilee, 1993). Introduction, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Spectres de Marx, ed. by Michael Sprinker (LondonNew York, Verso, 1999), p. 2. For political responses to Derridas 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. 3 Marxs Purloined Letter, in Ghostly Demarcations, pp. 26 67 (p. 39).
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and Toroks 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 Abrahams death, their radical re-working of Freuds Wolfman case study, Le Verbier de lhomme 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 inuential essay by Derrida entitled Fors.5 Derridas 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 laissees en nous par les secrets des autres (LEcorce et le noyau, p. 427). This insight offers a new explanation for ghost stories, which are described as the mediation in ction of the encrypted, unspeakable secrets of past generations: Le fantome des croyances populaires ne fait donc quobjectiver une metaphore qui travaille dans linconscient: lenterrement dans lobjet dun fait inavouable (LEcorce 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

4 References are to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, LEcorce et le noyau (Paris, Flammarion, 1987; rst published 1978). See also Abraham and Torok, Cryptonymie: le verbier de lhomme aux loups (Paris, Flammarion, 1976). 5 Fors: les mots angles de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok, in Abraham and Torok, Cryptonymie: le verbier de lhomme aux loups, pp. 7 73. 6 For a review of work in this area, see Claude Nachin, Les Fantomes de lame: a` propos des heritages psychiques (Paris, LHarmattan, 1993), pp. 175 202. See also Nachin, Le Deuil damour (Paris, Editions universitaires, 1989); Didier Dumas, LAnge et le fantome: introduction a` la clinique de limpense genealogique (Paris, Minuit, 1985); Serge Tisseron, Secrets de famille: mode demploi (Paris, Editions Ramsay, 1996); Serge Tisseron et al., Le Psychisme a` lepreuve des generations: clinique du fantome (Paris, Dunod, 1995, 2000).

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and popular culture. 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 ghosts illegitimate origins and a drama of legitimacy in the family history of Tintins creator Herge. Subsequent biographical research undertaken after Herges death showed that Herges 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 ctional albums, even though he had in fact been mistaken in suggesting that the illegitimacy was most probably on Herges mothers 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 conrmation found by Tisseron. The work of Nicholas Rand, especially his book Le Cryptage et la vie des uvres (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 Rashkins Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (1992). This book offers what is still the best short account of Abraham and Toroks concept of the phantom and an attempt to develop a critical approach on the basis of it through readings of Conrad, Villiers de lIsle Adam, Balzac, James and Poe. Rashkin is keen not to set up a prescriptive model for interpretation, but to attend to the specicity 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 Balzacs Facino Cane, for example, she endeavours to make intelligible Canes perplexing obsession with gold (Family Secrets, p. 82). She nds a possible solution in what she suggests is the secret drama of his Jewish origins, and this in turn is reected in the narrators 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, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton University Press, 1992); Nicholas Rand, Invention poetique et psychanalyse du secret dans Le Fantome dHamlet de Nicolas Abraham, in Le Psychisme a` lepreuve des generations, pp. 79 96; Nicholas Rand, Le Cryptage et la vie des uvres: etude du secret dans les textes 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 sce`ne de ses enjeux dans luvre dHerge (Paris, Aubier Montaigne, 1985), and Tintin et le secret dHerge (Paris, Hors Collection Presses de la Cite, 1993); Colin Davis, Charlotte Delbos 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 Rashkins 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 nd undisclosed secrets is likely to succeed in only a small number of cases. By contrast, Derridas 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 inection. 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 Derridas essay on them, Fors (Spectres de Marx, p. 24). In fact, Derridas spectres should be carefully distinguished from Abrahams and Toroks 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 Derridas spectre is a deconstructive gure hovering between life and death, presence and absence, and making established certainties vacillate. It does not belong to the order of knowledge:
Cest quelque chose quon ne sait pas, justement, et on ne sait pas si precisement cela est, si ca existe, 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 dun absent ou dun disparu ne ` releve pas du savoir. Du moins plus de ce quon croit savoir sous le nom de savoir. On ne sait ` pas si cest vivant ou si cest mort. (Spectres de Marx, pp. 2526; emphasis in original)

Derrida calls on us to endeavour to speak and listen to the spectre, despite the 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 Derridas Ghost Writing (MontrealKingstonLondonIthaca, McGill-Queens University Press, 2001); Nancy Holland, The Death of the Other/Father: A Feminist Reading of Derridas 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, Assia Djebar: Speaking to the Living Dead, Paragraph 26:3 (2003), 34 50; Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2002). For critical discus sion of Derridas hauntology, see Slavoj Zizek, Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology, in Mapping Ideology, ed. by Slavoj Zizek (London and New York, Verso, 1994), pp. 1 33. It should be stressed that interesting work is being done on ghosts which does not draw explicitly or signicantly on the work of Derrida or Abraham and Torok; see, for example, Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (MinneapolisLondon, University of Minnesota Press, 1997), and Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (CharlottesvilleLondon, University Press of Virginia, 1998). 10 Nicholas Royle also comments on Derridas surprising lack of reference in Spectres de Marx to Abraham and Torok; see Phantom Text, in The Uncanny, pp. 279 80 and, on differences between Derridas and Abraham and Toroks conception of the ghost, see pp. 281 83.

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challenge it may pose to them: Or ce qui para t presque impossible, cest toujours de parler du spectre, de parler au spectre, de parler avec lui, donc surtout de faire ou de laisser parler un esprit (Spectres de Marx, p. 32; emphasis in original). Conversing with spectres is not undertaken in the expectation that they will reveal some secret, shameful or otherwise. Rather, it may open us up to the experience of secrecy as such: an essential unknowing which underlies and may undermine what we think we know. For Abraham and Torok, the phantoms secret can and should be revealed in order to achieve une petite victoire de lAmour sur la Mort (LEcorce et le noyau, p. 452); for Derrida, on the contrary, the spectres secret is a productive opening of meaning rather than a determinate content to be uncovered. Elsewhere, in a move of key importance for literary hauntology, Derrida associates this kind of essential secret with literature in general:
La litterature garde un secret qui nexiste pas, en quelque sorte. Derriere un roman, ou un ` poeme, derriere ce qui est en effet la richesse dun sens a interpreter, il ny a pas de sens ` ` ` secret a chercher. Le secret dun personnage, par exemple, nexiste pas, il na aucune ` epaisseur en dehors du phenomene litteraire. Tout est secret dans la litterature et il ny a ` pas de secret cache derrie`re elle, voila le secret de cette etrange institution au sujet de ` laquelle, et dans laquelle je ne cesse de (me) debattre. [. . .] Linstitution de la litterature reconna t, en principe ou par essence le droit de tout dire ou de ne pas dire en disant, donc le droit au secret afche.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 signicant difference between the approach inspired by Abraham and Torok and poststructuralist hauntology can already be seen in Nicholas Royles response to Rashkins 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. 16162). 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 innite, but in practice she closes down that process by assigning determinate meanings to identiable 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
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Papier machine (Paris, Galile e, 2001), p. 398; emphasis in original.

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(This is Not a Review, p. 35). Jodey Castricano makes a similar point in her Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derridas Ghost Writing (2001): I nd [Rashkins] 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). Royles musing and Castricanos 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 specicity, 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 Wolfreys 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 reproductions 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. 13). 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 Abrahams and Toroks 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 ghosts secret is not a puzzle to

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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 spectres ethical injunction consists on the contrary in not reducing it prematurely to an object of knowledge. Derridas 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 signicant 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. ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON