Hauntology
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Hauntology is an idea within the philosophy of history introduced by Jacques Derrida in his 1993 work Spectres of Marx. The word, a combination of the word haunt and the suffix -ology, and a near-homophone to ontology in Derrida's native French, deals with "the paradoxical state of the spectre, which is neither being nor non-being", according to Lisa Gye in her project Halflives: A Mystory.
The term goes back to 1848 when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels stated: “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism” in the incipit to The Communist Manifesto.
In music criticism
From 1995 onwards, the term hauntology has popped up in the British music press and blogosphere. The first to use the term were Ian Penman ‘([the Phantoms of] TRICKNOLOGY [versus a Politics of Authenticity]’ in The Wire from 1995) and David Toop (Haunted Weather : Music, Silence, and Memory (2004)). In the musical blogosphere it has been most ardently used by K-Punk, Woebot, Simon Reynolds and Padraig in connection to dubstep artists such as Kode9 and Sam Shackleton. In 2008 there was a Hauntology Now! symposium.
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