Hauntology
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In its origins hauntology is Jacques Derrida’s neologism which is, in French, a pun on ontology and refers to, in the words of the Halflives website: “the paradoxical state of the specter, which is neither being nor non-being.”
Besides by K-Punk (here in a piece on Kubrick), hauntology is also used by Simon Reynolds here and by Woebot here.
No doubt the term goes back 1848 when Marx and Engels stated “A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism.” Haunting is about ghost, and one of the first people to use the word in a musical context was David Toop’s Haunted Weather : Music, Silence, and Memory (2004). (oops, I am wrong here, it was Ian Penman in ‘[the Phantoms of] TRICKNOLOGY [versus a Politics of Authenticity]’ in The Wire from 1995)
About four weeks ago, The Existence Machine also wondered just what is hauntology.
K-Punk thinks this is a good summary of the concept.
Someone wrote an Wikipedia entry on hauntology in October of this year but it was deleted by consensus.