Hauntology: What Haunts Your Field?
Neither present nor absent — the spectre disrupts the stable ontology of the canon.
Session Map
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life — selected chapters. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx — excerpts. Haunting reflection due — bring or post to Moodle before class.
~1 page, informal. Identify one haunting in your field — something that keeps returning unresolved. Perusall annotation: Fisher’s most useful analytical concept applied to your research.
Hauntology Rapid Presentations — 3 min each, no slides. Spectral connection responses from the group. Group map of hauntings on the board.
Exam List due before Week 8. Use today’s haunting to identify gaps or absences in your current list. What has your field suppressed that your list should surface?
Reading Guide
- Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life — selected chapters
- Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx — excerpts
Fisher uses Derrida’s “hauntology” — the state of being haunted by what never arrived — to describe cultural paralysis. Derrida’s spectre is neither present nor absent. Read them in dialogue: where do they agree? Where does Fisher flatten what Derrida leaves open?
The condition of being haunted by what was possible but never arrived — Fisher uses it to describe a culture that can no longer imagine futures different from the present.
Derrida: neither present nor absent, living nor dead. Disrupts stable ontologies. Returns without being invited, cannot be fully expelled.
Fisher’s account of cultural paralysis: mourning not what we had and lost, but what we were promised and never received.
- Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments — practices what Fisher and Derrida theorize
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” — asks what we want from reading, directly in dialogue with hauntology as method
- Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever — shorter than Specters, more methodologically tractable
Pre-Class Tasks
Ask yourself: What is the haunting? Why does it keep coming back? What would it mean for the field to actually reckon with it? Post to Moodle before class, or bring a hard copy. You will present this today — 3 minutes, no slides.
What does it let you see that you couldn’t see before?
Guiding Questions
Hauntology Rapid Presentations
3 minutes each · No slides · Just talk · Share your hauntingEach person speaks for 3 minutes: name the haunting, explain why it keeps coming back, say what it would mean to actually reckon with it. No slides. Speak from your reflection.
One person offers a “spectral connection” — a place where this haunting resonates with their own field or research. Then a brief open response before moving to the next presenter.
Group Mapping
Which hauntings seem like they could become dissertation projects? How does naming the haunting change your relationship to it? Fisher suggests that naming the loss is the first step toward imagining beyond it.
Your haunting is the negative space of your research — what your field has refused to fully address. It belongs in your exam list rationale. Use it when you write your rationale paragraph before Week 8.
Looking Ahead
- Your exam list draft is the reading this week
- Structured peer review in pairs, then full-group discussion
- Come prepared to defend the logic of your list
- Not “these are important texts” — but why these texts, in this configuration, for this project? Use your haunting, your Canon Audit, and your Federici annotation as evidence.
With a one-paragraph rationale explaining the organizing logic. Upload to Moodle or bring to class. Worth 25% of final grade. It does not need to be final — it needs to be real.
“Neither present nor absent — the spectre disrupts the stable ontology of the canon. Your exam list is your argument about what should be present.”