Re: [OPE-L] Derrida's ghosts

[Jerry Levy <Gerald_A_Levy@xxxxxxx>]

> The ghost as a cipher of iteration is particularly suggestive. At the
> beginning of Specters of Marx, Derrida talks about the way in
> which the anticipated return of the ghost may be mobilized on
> behalf of a deconstruction of all historicisms that are grounded in a
> rigid sense of chronology.
> 'Haunting is historical, to be sure', he writes, 'but it is not dated, it
> is never docilely given a date in the chain of presents, day after day,
> according to the instituted order of the calendar
> .' The question of the revenant neatly encapsulates deconstructive
> concerns about the  impossibility of conceptually solidifying the past.
> Ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the  present. However, the
> ghost cannot be properly said to belong to the past, even if the
> apparition represents someone who has been dead for many
> centuries, for the simple reason that a ghost is  clearly not the same
> thing as the person who shares its proper name. Does then the
> 'historical'  > person who is identified with the ghost properly belong
> to the present?  Surely not, as the idea of  a return from death
> fractures all traditional conceptions of temporality.
> The temporality to which  the ghost is subject is therefore paradoxical,
> as at once they 'return' and make their  apparitional debut. Derrida has
> been pleased to term this dual movement of return and inauguration
> a 'hauntology', a coinage that suggests a spectrally deferred non- origin
> within grounding  metaphysical terms such as history and identity."
> (Buse & Scott, 1999, p.10-11)

His is a conception of temporality, I think,  which is inconsistent with
_both_  temporalist _and_ simultaneous conceptions of value.  Perhaps
Derrida would have said that both TSS and SSS are locked into the
confines of "traditional schoilarship"?

In solidarity, Jerry