G H O S T DA N C E – E X T R AC T S JACQUES DERRIDA (voice over): To be haunted by a

N I G H T L I G H T # 3 — E D I T E D B Y F R E D C AV E , W E R K P L A AT S T Y P O G R A F I E — J U N E 2 0 14

KEN MCCULLEN ghost is to remember something you’ve never lived

through, to have the memory of what has essentially
WOMAN NARRATOR: When two people have inter- never been present.
course, there are always four people watching. For
it is at moments of great intimacy and vulnerability MAN NARRATOR #1: She met him many times. She
that the internalised figures from the past become asked him about Kafka, Heidegger, Marx and Freud.
present. But these four ghosts bring along their When she left, she was never sure who she’d been speaking
internalised ghosts and so on, and so on. And this to. She was left with an after image that seemed to be
is how the generations going back to the sea-shore, drawing her own phantoms out of herself.
and perhaps before, make their presence known
beside us. PASCALE: I’d like to ask you something. Do you believe in
ghosts?
MAN NARRATOR #1: Long before memory
In a past without form JACQUES DERRIDA: I don’t know, that’s a difficult
They began to appear question. Firstly, would you ask a ghost whether he
In the darkness of the night believes in ghosts? Here, the ghost is me. Given that
Then as memory began I’ve been asked to play myself in a film which is
To screen them out more or less improvised, I feel as if I’m letting a
They slipped into language ghost speak for me. Paradoxically, instead of playing
Hiding between letters and jumping out between words myself, I let a ghost ventriloquize my words, speak in
my place. And it’s that that is maybe most amusing.
1 – R I T UA L S O F R AG E The cinema is the art of ghosts. And I believe that the
R I T UA L S O F D E S I R E cinema, when it’s not boring, it’s the art of allowing
ghosts to come back. That’s what we’re doing right
MAN NARRATOR #1: In an age of darkness, long ago here. Therefore, if I’m a ghost, meaning if right now,
and far away, during periods of mourning, the living believing that I’m speaking with my own voice, it is
would attack the dead, throwing stones at them, hurling precisely because I believe that it’s my own voice
abuse at them, spitting and screaming with rage. For they that I allow it to be taken over by another’s. Not
felt they’d been abandoned to the terrors of the night. just any other voice, but that of my own ghosts. So
At first, it was thought that ghosts ghosts do exist. And it’s they who will answer you.
would be forgotten in this new electronic age, but as Perhaps they already have. All this, it seems to me,
things turned out, they began to use electronic gadgets has to be treated in an exchange between the art of
for their own purpose. Now they often jump on radio the cinema in its most original, unedited form and
waves. There are many recorded cases of ghosts appearing an aspect of psychoanalysis. Cinema plus psychoa-
in electrical shops. nalysis equals the Science of Ghosts. You know that
Freud, all his life, had to deal with ghosts.
WOMAN NARRATOR: I dreamt that I was talking to
myself. Then something happened, and ‘I’ and ‘me’ (Interrupted by a telephone call.)
became different people. We were walking through
a city. Night was falling and the sky was becoming So, that was the phantom voice of someone I don’t
radiant with electric lights. We started to walk know. He could’ve told me any old story. That he’s
towards the ocean. Suddenly, people were rushing arrived from the USA and says he knows a friend of
in the opposite direction. There was terrible panic. mine… Well, what Kafka says about correspondence,
But the people that were rushing towards us were about letters, about epistolary communication, also
the dead of centuries that had gone before. Their applies to telephonic communication. And I believe
crushing weight turned into a tidal wave. It hit us. that modern developments in telecommunication,
And only one of us survived. instead of diminishing the realm of ghosts, as we
might believe, that any scientific or technical thought
leaves behind the age of ghosts, the feudal age with she moved into a gap, between ‘I’ and ‘Me’. For it’s well
its somewhat primitive technology as a certain peri- known that the social decay produces psychic fragmenta-
natal age. Whereas I believe that the future belongs tion. The more things break up, the more myths flourish.
to ghosts and that the modern technology of images, Attempting to make historical sense out of historical
cinematography and telecommunication, enhances chaos. She began to feel the presence of so many others
the power of ghosts and their ability to haunt us. In inside her, as if they were clawing away at her flesh from
fact, it’s because I wished to tempt the ghosts out the inside.
that I agreed to appear in a film, saying to myself that
maybe, maybe we will all have the chance to evoke MAN NARRATOR #2: Masuda was an extraordinary
the ghosts: the ghost of Marx, the ghost of Freud, woman. I met her on a film set, when she was advising on
the ghost of Kafka, the ghost of that American, even native costume, on a film about ‘cargo cults’ of the Far-East.
yours! I only met you this morning, but to me you’re she was able to move with ease between two completely differ-
already permeated by all sorts of phantom figures. ent cultures, as if part of her was at home in the rich world
So, I don’t know if I believe in ghosts or not, but I and part of her was at home in the poor. She told me about
say: “Long live the ghosts”. And you, do you believe a village by a river that had been periodically invaded by an
in ghosts? army of rats. The villagers were afraid of them, but they also
worshipped them.
PASCALE: Yes, certainly...
Yes, absolutely... WOMAN NARRATOR: I wouldn’t close my eyes if I
Now I do, absolutely... were her. They can still see you, even if you can’t
Now, certainly. see them. Trying to pretend that they’re not there
won’t help her.
WOMAN NARRATOR: History’s gone and can never
be relived. MAN NARRATOR #2: They believed that the rats embodied
the ghosts of their ancestors. By their speed and guile they had
MAN NARRATOR #1: History’s just a point of view, been able to run through time to visit their homeland. Years
like anything else. It changes according to where you before, when their land and wealth had been taken from
happen to be standing. them, a strange event had taken place there.

2 – MYTH MAN NARRATOR #1: You cannot sleep forever. Even

T H E VO I C E O F D E S T RU C T I O N though to wake is to fall, its better to fall once and get it
T H E VO I C E O F D E L I V E R A N C E over with, than to stay fast asleep forever. You’re on the
point of waking. You’re standing on the edge of a division
WOMAN NARRATOR: I was walking through a desert that may never be healed. To fall is to pass between. To
when I came across the ruins of an ancient seaport. fall is to touch but never make contact. To fall is to fail
But the sea had dried up many centuries before. At and succeed at the same time. To fall is to enter a darkness,
first, I could see myself clearly as if I was standing darker than all the places in your dreams. To fall is to be
in front of a mirror. Then I vanished and all I could real. For a moment. Forever.
see was the grey-black sand which was beginning
to cover everything. Then the voices started. At first, MAN NARRATOR #2: One night, the rats had eaten the
they seemed like the insects that were crawling in woman who was lying asleep by the river. They had ripped
the sand. Then they seemed to be coming from me. off her clothes, and by the time she’d woke up, it was too
They were living inside me, but they were watching late. They had entered her body by every possible opening.
me at the same time. Then they took me out of She began to shout and scream. But the voices that came out
myself and I could see myself clearly walking away of her were the voices of the dead.
on the horizon.
MAN NARRATOR #1: To be inside and outside at the
MAN NARRATOR #1: She thought of herself as ‘I’, but same time. To be the one who sees, and the one who is
the more she encountered the decay around her, the more seen. To enter the place where space becomes time and
time stops still. To escape from time forever. during a process of mourning that doesn’t develop
All rituals are an expression of this normally, that is to say, a mourning that doesn’t
wish. But it is a wish you cannot succomb to, for if you work well, there is no true internalisation. There is
don’t wake soon, all your choices will diminish, and what Abraham and Torok call ‘incorporation’. That
you’ll return to the place you came from, without even a is to say, the dead are taken within us, but don’t
moment of knowing. become us. They occupy a particular place in our
bodies. They can speak for themselves. They can
MAN NARRATOR #2: She began to shout and scream. But haunt and ventriloquise our speech. So, the ghost is
the voices that came out of her were the voices of the dead. enclosed in a crypt, which is our body. We become a
The rats ate all her flesh from the inside, until all that was sort of graveyard for ghosts. A ghost can be not only
left was a clean, white skeleton. Then the dogs came out and our unconscious, but more precisely, its someone
ripped the bones apart. But the rats returned, and set upon else’s unconscious. Its someone else’s unconscious
the dogs, leaving nothing of them remaining except their tails. that speaks in our place. It is not our unconscious,
Suddenly, a big black bird flew out of the sky. it is the unconscious of the other which plays tricks
The bird swept down and ate up all the on us. It can be terrifying. But that’s when things
rats. Then the bird changed and assumed the form of two start to happen.
women, both of whom were beautiful. And when they were
together, they had magical powers. They told the villagers that MARIANNE: How can it be that in this age of electric
the new era was to begin and they would be joined by all buildings, prude beliefs of the Middle Ages are poking their
their ancestors. But some of the villagers who had commited heads out of the gutters of time?
crimes and bad deeds with the wives of the dead were so
afraid of their return that they tricked the women into going 5 – WITNESS
down to the sea where a great wave took them away. T H E O N E W H O B E C O M E S W H AT H E H E A R S
She told me myths have the same quali-
ties as radio waves. When they arrive in a village, they seem WOMAN NARRATOR: When two people have inter-
to have come from nowhere. Thats why, so often, they are course, there is always one other present. But this
credited with supernatural origins. other takes on a form that cannot be described, it is
Masuda told me not to scoff at her story. the trauma itself. The witness.
It contained more truth than might at first appear. For things It is between and it is excluded. A
are not always what they seem. They also have an inner life noise that breaks the enigma of the night. A mirror
of their own. that refuses to confirm existence. An encounter with
a form of sexuality that signifies death.
3 – HISTORY
G H O S T S T H AT E M E R G E I N DAY D R E A M S 6 – TRIAL
POWER THROUGH ABSENCE
JACQUES DERRIDA: Freud, we were talking about
the ghost of Freud earlier. You know, ghosts don’t JACQUES DERRIDA: A year ago. Exactly a year ago.
just appear, they come back. In French, they are I went to Prague to take part in a private seminar
the ‘ones that returned’. So that presupposes a with some dissident Czech philosophers who
memory of the past that has never taken the form were banned from the universities. I was followed
of the present. But I’ve been intrigued by a par- the whole time by the Czech secret police, who
ticular theory which some psychoanalyst friends by the way, made no secret about it. So, after the
of mine, Nicolas Abraham, who’s now dead, and seminar, I went for a walk round the home town of
Maria Torok, developed from Freud. Their theory Kafka as if I was in pursuit of Kafka’s ghost, who
of ghosts is based on a theory of mourning. In was in fact himself, pursuing me. I went in front
normal mourning, Freud says one internalises the of Kafka’s houses, there are two in Prague. And I
dead. One takes the dead into oneself and assim- went to his grave. I found out the next day, when I
ilates it. This internalisation which is at the same was arrested for smuggling drugs supposedly, that
time an idealisation accepts the dead. Whereas it was at the exact time that I was at Kafka’s grave,
and so preoccupied with Kafka’s ghost, that the
Czech secret police entered into my hotel room
and planted a small packet of drugs in my brief-
case as a pretext for my arrest the next day. When
I was interrogated by the police as to why I was in
Prague, I answered that I was preparing a paper on
Kafka, which was the truth, on an extract from ‘The
Trial’ called ‘Before the Court’. And so throughout
my short interrogation and imprisonment, Kafka’s
ghost was effectively present. And the script written
by Kafka was manipulating the scene, which was a
scene from ‘The Trial’ in a way, as if we were all
acting in a film controlled by Kafka’s ghost.

MAN NARRATOR #1: A sea of electric eels. Sea of

unknown movements far below the surface. Sea of primi-
tive desires. Sea of endless triangles. Sea of ritualistic
murder. Sea of history. Sea of greed. Sea of guilt. Sea of
eight million false faces. Sea of lost hopes. Sea of despair.
Sea of occasional reason. Sea without time.

MARIANNE: Do I have any choice but to suffer my own

history? It feels like some mysterious figure is directing every-
thing I do. Someone who hasn’t been present for a very long
time.

MAN NARRATOR #1: They’re coming closer. I’ve been

expecting them. They really don’t know what’s happening.
They don’t know the end. There’s not much time left. The
wish to stop time is a deathly wish. They’re going to see
an image of their own struggle with their own persona,
they’ll be left with that. I’ll leave them that at least.
SPECTROGRAPHIES series of more or less equivalent words that accurately des-
A N I N T E RV I E W B E T W E E N B E R N A R D ignate haunting, specter, as distinct from ghost, speaks of
S T I E G L E R A N D JAC Q U E S D E R R I DA the spectacle. The specter is first and foremost something
visible. It is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is
BS: We have talked a lot about Barthes, whom I the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and
would like to cite so that I may then cite you, not blood. It resists the intuition to which it presents itself, it
from a book, but from a film in which you played is not tangible. Phantom preserves the same reference to
yourself — Ghostdance  — and in which you say a phainesthai, to appearing for vision, to the brightness of
number of things about film and ghosts. There is a day, to phenomenality. And what happens with spectrality,
thematic of the ghost and of the specter which is with phantomality — and not necessarily with coming-
at the very heart of your book on Marx, but which back [revenance] is that something becomes almost visible
has been insistent in your work for a very long time, which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and
which incessantly comes back there. Barthes writes, blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technol-
in Camera Lucida: ‘’From a real body which was ogy of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in
there proceed radiations that come to touch me, a night body, it radiates a night light. At this moment,
I who am here. The duration of the transmission in this room, night is falling over us. Even if it weren’t
doesn’t matter. The photo of the departed being falling, we are already in night, as soon as we are captured
comes to touch me like the delayed rays of a star. by optical instruments which don’t even need the light of
A kind of umbilical cord ties the body of the photo- day. We are already specters of a ‘televised’. In the noc-
graphic thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, turnal space in which this image of us, this picture we are
is really a carnal medium here, a skin that I share in the process of having ‘taken’, is described, it is already
with the one who was photographed... The bygone night. Furthermore, because we know that, once it has
thing has really touched, with its immediate radia- been taken, captured, this image will be reproducible in
tions (its luminances), the surface that is in turn our absence, because we know this already, we are already
touched by my gaze.” Commenting on these lines, haunted by this future, which brings our death. Our dis-
you have written that “the modern possibility of the appearance is already here. We are already transfixed by
photograph joins, in a single system, death and the a disappearance [une disparition] which promises and
referent.“ Already in this commentary, you spoke of conceals in advance another magic ‘apparition’, a ghostly
the “phantomatic effect”, which Barthes himself had ‘re-apparition’ which is in truth properly miraculous,
put forth. In the film, in which you play yourself, you something to see, as admirable as it is incredible [incroy-
say to Pascale Ogier, your partner: “To be haunted able], believable [croyable] only by the grace of an act of
by a ghost is to remember what one has never lived faith. Faith which is summoned by technics itself, by our
in the present, to remember what, in essence, has relation of essential incompetence to technical operation.
never had the form of presence. Film is a ‘phan- (For even if we know how something works, our knowl-
tomachia’. Let the ghosts come back. Film plus edge is incommensurable with the immediate perception
psychoanalysis equals a science of ghosts. Modern that attunes us to technical efficacy, to the fact that ‘it
technology, contrary to appearances, although it works’: we see that ‘it works’, but even if we know this, we
is scientific, increases tenfold the power of ghosts. don’t see how ‘it works’; seeing and knowing are incom-
The future belongs to ghosts.” Might you elaborate mensurable here.) And this is what makes our experience
on this statement: “The future belongs to ghosts”? so strange. We are spectralized by the shot, captured or
possessed by spectrality in advance.
JD: When Barthes grants such importance to touch in What has, dare I say, constantly
the photographic experience, it is insofar as the very haunted me in this logic of the specter is that it regularly
thing one is deprived of, as much in spectrality as in the exceeds all the oppositions between visible and invis-
gaze which looks at images or watches film and televi- ible, sensible and insensible. A specter is both visible and
sion, is indeed tactile sensitivity. The desire to touch, the invisible, both phenomenal and nonphenomenal: a trace
tactile effect or affect, is violently summoned by its very that marks the present with its absence in advance. The
frustration, summoned to come back, like a ghost [un spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic. It is in the
revenant], in the places haunted by its absence. In the element of haunting that deconstruction finds the place
 most hospitable to it, at the heart of the living present, in over, at least thirty times, at the request of the filmmaker,
the quickest heartbeat of the philosophical. Like the work she says this little sentence: “Yes, now I do, yes”. And
of mourning, in a sense, which produces spectrality, and so, already during shooting, she repeated this sentence at
like all work produces spectrality. least thirty times. Already this was a little strange, a little
To come back to the Ghostdance expe- spectral, our of sync, outside itself; this was happening
rience, I regret the expression that came to me while several times in one. But imagine the experience I had
improvising (the scene you cited was improvised) from when, two or three years later, after Pascale Ogier had
start to finish. I remember it from this one sentence died, I watched the film again in the United States, at
because it was a rather singular experience with Ken the request of students who wanted to discuss it with me.
McMullen, the English filmmaker: we had studied that Suddenly I saw Pascale’s face, which I knew was a dead
morning, in the bar of the Select, for an hour, a scene woman’s face, come onto the screen. She answered my
which lasted a minute, and which we repeated, repeated, question: “Do you believe in ghosts?” Practically looking
repeated to the point of exhaustion. Then, that afternoon, me in the eye, she said to me again, on the big screen:
in my office, conversely, we improvised from beginning to “Yes, now I do, yes”. Which now? Years later in Texas. I
end a completely different scene, it was very long, which had the unnerving sense of the return of her specter, the
Ken McMullen kept almost in its entirety and in which specter of her specter coming back to say to me — to me
tbe exchange you mentioned was shot. Thus I impro- here, now: “Now... now... now, that is to say, in this dark
vised this sentence, “Psychoanalysis plus film equals... a room on another continent, in another world, here, now,
science of ghosts.” Of course, upon reflection, beyond the yes, believe me, I believe in ghosts”.
improvisation, I’m not sure I’d keep the word ‘science’; But at the same time, I know that the
for at the same time, there is something which, as soon first time Pascale said this, already, when she repeated
as one is dealing with ghosts, exceeds, if not scientific- this in my office, already, this spectrality was at work. It
ity in general, at least what, for a very long time, has was already there, she was already saying this, and she
modeled scientificity on the real, the objective, which knew, just as we know, that even if she hadn’t died in the
is not or should not be, precisely, phantomatic. It is in interval, one day, it would be a dead woman who said, “I
the name of the scientificity of science that one conjures am dead,” or “I am dead, I know what I’m talking about
ghosts or condemns obscurantism, spiritualism, in short, from where I am, and I’m watching you”, and this gaze
everything that has to do with haunting and with specters. remained dissymmetrical, exchanged beyond all possible
There would be much to say about this. exchange, eye-line without eye-line, the eye-line of a gaze
With regard to emanations and the that fixes and looks for the other, its other, its counterpart
very beautiful text by Barthes which you cited, rather [vis-a-vis], the other gaze met, in an infinite night.
than problematize what he says, I would like to tell
you what happened wirh this film, Ghostdance. Having BS: History itself is an effect of spectrality. The
invented this scene wirh Pascale Ogier, who was sitting return of the Romans in the French Revolution
across from me, in my office, and who had taught me, would belong to a mode of spectral transmission
in the intervals between shots, what in cinematic terms which overdetermines all historical events, and this
is called the eye-line, that is to say, the fact of looking in an irreducible way. Perhaps one should say, fur-
eye to eye (we spent long minutes, if not hours, at the thermore, that this spectrality belongs to what could
request of the filmmaker, looking into one another’s eyes, be called a history in deferred time, a history in the
which is an experience of strange and unreal imensity: play of writing, which has the structure, it seems to
you can imagine what this experience of the eye-line me, with the exception of a few very particular cases
can be when it is prolonged and passionately repeated (such as signatures on contracts or events of the
between two actors, even if it is only fictional and ‘pro- clearly performative type), of an irreducible disten-
fessional’), and after she had taught me that, then, after sion between the event and its recording. It seems
I had said roughly what you repeated, I had to ask her: to me that, in an essential way, orthographic writing
“And what about you, do you believe in ghosts?” This is constitutes a deferred time. Today, we are living
the only thing the filmmaker dictated to me. At the end a number of events ‘live’, ‘in real time’. To what
of my improvisation, I was to say to her: “And what about extent — this is yet another extremely complicated
you, do you believe in ghosts?” And, repeating it over and question — is the spectrality at work in this kind of
transmission incommensurable with this spectrality should not lead us to efface or minimize the extraordinary
in deferred time? In other words, what is the prob- gulf separating what today we call real-time transmission
lematic of eventization that is taking shape around from what had been impossible before. I do not want to
this today? try to reduce all of technical modernity to a condition of
possibility that it shares with much more ancient times.
JD: In principle, every event is experienced or lived, as However, if we are going to understand the originality
one says and as one believes, in ‘real time’. What we are and the specificity of this technical modernity, we must
living ‘in real time’, and what we find remarkable, is not forget that there is no such thing as purely real time,
access precisely to what we are not living: we are ‘there’ that this does not exist in a full and pure state. Only on
where we are not, in real time, through images or through this condition will we understand how technics alone can
technical relation. There happen to us, in real time, events bring about the real-time ‘effect’. Otherwise we wouldn’t
that aren’t happening to us, that is to say, that we aren’t talk about real time. We don’t talk about real time when
experiencing immediately around us. We are there, in we have the impression that there are no technical
real time where bombs are exploding in Kuwait or in instruments.
Iraq. We record and believe that we are perceiving in an
immediate mode events at which we are not present. But
the recording of an event, from the moment that there
is a technical interposition, is always deferred, that is to
say that this ‘différance’ is inscribed in the very heart of
supposed synchrony, in the living present. Past events,
for example a sequence in Roman history such as it is
mimicked, reconstituted in simulacrum during the 1789
Revolution, are clearly something else, but something
else which tells us that what happened there, in Rome,
is the object of new recordings. We record again, this
happens to us again, and through historical reading, his-
torical interpretation, even through mimicry, the mimetic,
or simulation, we record what is past. The imprint, in
essence continues to be printed. The shortening of the
intervals is only a shrinking in the space of this ‘différance’
and of this temporality. As soon as we are able — this is an
effect of modernity, an effect of the twentieth century —
to see spectacles or hear voices that were recorded at the
beginning of the century, the experience we have of them
today is a form of presentification, which, although it was
impossible and even unthinkable before, is nonetheless
inscribed in the possibility of this delay or of this interval
which ensures that there is historical experience in gener-
al, memory in general. Which means that there is never
an absolutely real time. What we call real time, and it is
easy to understand how it can be opposed to deferred
time in everyday language, is in fact never pure. What we
call real time is simply an extremely reduced ‘différance’,
but there is no purely real time because temporalization
itself is structured by a play of retention or of protention
and, consequently, of traces: the condition of possibility
of the living, absolutely real present is already memory,
anticipation, in other words, a play of traces. The real-
time effect is itself a particular effect of ‘différance’. This
 "He is dead and he is going to die . . ”

A l ex a n d er G a r d n er : Po r t r a it o f Lew is Pa y n e . 18 6 5