The Hauntology of Everyday

The Hauntology of
Everyday Life
Sadeq Rahimi
The Hauntology of Everyday Life
“Building an arc from Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life via Lacan,
Winnicott and Derrida to The Hauntology of Everyday Life, Rahimi lucidly traces the
trajectories through which hauntings have become the hallmark of today’s hyper-
mediated world. Highlighting a consequential shift from the spectacular violence of
traumatic events to the slow structural violence of today’s mediascapes in which
networked subjectivities are haunted by ghosts in the machine, he introduces his
readers to emergent spectral cyberworlds in which “deep fakes in swarming circula-
tion” host ghosts and revenants whose capacities reach far beyond the human
senses. In the shadow of AI, however, digital activisms emerge that harness the
powers of ghosts for the decolonization of haunted minds and everyday worlds.”
—Gabriele Schwab, PhD, Distinguished Professor, Department of Comparative
Literature and Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
“The Hauntology of Everyday Life is an original, insightful, and timely inquiry

into the spectrality of presence. Combining insightful philosophical, cultural, and
anthropological reflections with an engrossing psychoanalytic account of Jacques
Lacan’s theory of trauma, Sadeq Rahimi has written an intelligent meditation on
hauntological thinking that enriches our understanding of ghosts in lived experi-
ence, historical memory, the social world, and justice.”
—Marita Vyrgioti, Associate Lecturer, University of East London
“Sadeq Rahimi offers us a remarkably documented text that demonstrates an impres-

sive culture. His reflection around Hauntology is situated at the crossroad between
psychoanalysis and philosophy. In dialogue with Lacan, he takes up the idea that a
lack is inherent in desire and inscribes it in a broader theorisation: desire as well as
words and language, personal and collective representations are haunted by a lack,
an unreachable primitive signifier in quest for presentation. This introduces a kind of
“worryness” in our relationship to reality, including the very notion of Justice. At the
same time, such a worry translates into an ethical responsibility inviting to pay atten-
tion to the first signifiers haunting us and to lost voices. Such an approach raises an
original and important lighting on a world to become. This complex text is pre-
sented in a pedagogical mode that renders our navigation easy and inviting.”
—Ellen Corin, PhD, Psychoanalyst and Scientific Secretary, the Montreal
Psychoanalytic Society, Emeritus Researcher and Professor
in Psychiatry and Anthropology, McGill University
The everyday life is full of ghosts, which means full of petit objet a, full of emanet,
full of La Chose, das Ding, things-in-themselves that are not things at all, but the
haunting of their desire and the experience of their absence. Their assemblage
constitutes the hauntology of everyday life, Sadeq Rahimi argues in this elegantly
haunting volume. Reading the intergenerational transmission of affect as constitu-
tive of hauntology, Rahimi presents the complicated and dense texture of memory
by anchoring it in specific phantoms of the everyday—a half pack of cigarettes and
a ten-Franc coin, given as objects and claimed as mana, in words given as things
and claimed as ghosts, in the crypt of everyday language that constantly transfers
presence to and through absence, in the virtual subjectivities of the present and the
haunting presence of the pantemporal (war, colonialism, hunger, genocide, slav-
ery). “What haunts is not that which is gone, it is that which was expected to come
but whose condition of arrival has been foreclosed, and the ghost is an advocate of
the promised future that was unrightfully cancelled when the past was destroyed”
Rahimi writes, fixing thus time (and thus being) as a haunted concept. This is a
book that reweaves the warp and the weft of structuralism and symbolism by revis-
iting the trajectories of language theory and psychoanalysis, from Jacobson,
Sebeok, Derrida, and Kristeva through Freud, Victor Turner, Lacan, Raymond
Williams, and the political project of Protevi. It is a demanding book that rewards
the reader with nuanced and careful microreadings of grand theories.
—Neni Panourgia, PhD, Associate Professor, Institute for Comparative
Literature and Society, Columbia University
Sadeq Rahimi
The Hauntology
of Everyday Life
Foreword by Byron J. Good
Sadeq Rahimi
Harvard Medical School
Boston, MA, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-78991-6 ISBN 978-3-030-78992-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78992-3
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To the many ghosts, living and dead, who have left their marks on me.
And to the many whose lives my ghost will mark.
Living with Ghosts: Foreword to Sadeq
Rahimi, The Hauntology of Everyday Life
Anthropologists live with ghosts. Many of us live and work for important
periods of our lives in societies and communities in which spirits and
ghosts are part of the everyday social world, almost as present as family
members and neighbors, colleagues, and friends. Our driver in Bali honks
his horn for a moment as he passes certain crossroads or groves of trees to
show respect to the spirits he senses are there. Once driving at night, our
car engine simply stopped; while we checked the carburetor, he spent a
moment conveying his apology to a spirit he had offended by failing to
give proper acknowledgement. Fifteen minutes later we were on our way.
A Javanese friend, sleeping in a house we rented in Bali for a few weeks,
was troubled at night, until he enlisted Balinese friends in making an offer-
ing to the spirit that had been keeping him awake. A man in a village in
Java where our friends live sold a piece of his land for a cell phone tower.
Not long after, he went mad, being haunted by the spirit of the land he
sold without proper permission. My Javanese “god daughter” was lured
into marriage by an East Javanese man through love magic, her father
believes, and kept her in a violent domestic relationship by continuing to
carry out magical rituals, until her father finally enlisted a healer to help
free her. A physician friend was troubled by stones being thrown onto his
roof at night. Thinking they were being thrown by neighborhood youth,
he sent his night watch staff out to find who was doing it, only to learn
that no one was there, though the stone throwing continued. He called in
a Javanese paranormal, who told him his land was once a Chinese grave-
yard, and the ghosts were troubling him. The paranormal made offerings,
vii
viii LIVING WITH GHOSTS: FOREWORD TO SADEQ RAHIMI, THE HAUNTOLOGY…
and only then did things become quiet. A kiyayi, head of an Islamic resi-
dential school or pesantren, tells us how when he began clearing the bam-
boo along the river to make space to develop his school, he would hear the
spirits crying at night. The spirits, he told us, use this river as a highway to
pass back and forth from Mount Merapi, the sacred volcano north of
Yogyakarta, down to the sea to the south, where Nyi Roro Kidul, the great
Queen of the South Sea, resides. And so it goes.
Spirits, ghosts, and hauntings are part of everyday life in central Java,
where we have lived part-time and worked for the past 25 years. It is
through this lens, that of an anthropologist of Indonesia, that I read this
manuscript by Sadeq Rahimi on the hauntology of the everyday. It is also
through the lens of a friend and longtime collaborator in thinking through
the place of hauntology in anthropology, particularly psychological anthro-
pology (see Rahimi & Good, 2019). What is the place of hauntology as a
conceptual and interpretive construct for anthropology? Should hauntol-
ogy be focused on historical trauma and the politicization of memory?
What is special about hauntology in contexts in which ghosts and spirits
are a part of everyday life? How should anthropologists position them-
selves within local discourses of haunting ghosts? How do we theorize the
“subject” for whom haunting is a reality? Why and how is it that at certain
moments in the lives of individuals and societies there seems to be an
eruption of ghosts and haunting? And how do we understand responses to
such hauntings? This essay represents Sadeq’s formulation of the grounds
from which questions such as these might be addressed.
Long-standing forms of engagement with the spirit world, as well as
new and innovative forms, are as much a part of contemporary modernity
in Southeast Asia—and in many parts of the world—as are high-tech med-
ical care and science and engineering, forms of entrepreneurial capitalism,
contested legal practices, or constantly evolving religious activities.
Encounters with the spirit world may be deadly serious. At the same time,
playful engagements with the local world of ghosts and hauntings are key
domains of contemporary popular culture and cinema, certainly in
Indonesia and Thailand.1 Pocong, ghosts/corpses wrapped in white
shrouds that have mistakenly remained “tied” at burial, so that the spirits
remain captured rather than freed at burial and float about threateningly,
are standard figures in the most popular genre of Indonesian cinema. They
are also, quite often, vividly present in the hallucinations of those Javanese
suffering psychotic illnesses whom my colleagues and I have come to
know. And when Javanese urban kampung or neighborhoods charged
LIVING WITH GHOSTS: FOREWORD TO SADEQ RAHIMI, THE HAUNTOLOGY… ix
with COVID-19 control were closed to persons wishing to enter or leave,

streets entering the kampungs were often guarded by young men dressed
as pocong. Pocong are thus present as realities in everyday life and popular
culture, as well as in the direct experiences of those open to that part of the
world partially hidden but known to be present.
It is not surprising that spirits, ghosts, and haunting are common
sources of ethnographic writing in Southeast Asia. It is surprising, how-
ever, that analyses drawing on the writings on hauntology remain rela-
tively absent in anthropology until the last few years. Since the publication
of Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993, 1994 in English translation), hauntol-
ogy has been a key analytic project within cultural studies—indeed, so
central that in 2013 María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren drew
together a large anthology of essays, published between 1999 and 2011,
as The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary
Cultural Theory. In the Introduction to the volume, the editors pose the
central question of “how, at the end of the twentieth century, a specific
metamorphosis occurred of ghosts and haunting from possible actual enti-
ties, plot devices, and clichés of common parlance … into influential con-
ceptual metaphors permeating global (popular) culture and academia
alike” (p. 1). This metamorphosis, they note, was signaled by the “sudden
preference expressed in 1990s cultural criticism for the somewhat archaic
terms ‘specter’ and ‘spectrality’ over the mundane ‘ghost’ and ‘ghostli-
ness’” (pp. 1–2). While acknowledging publication of Specters of Marx as
being the catalyst for what some have called the “spectral turn,” they
describe the broader influences leading to this theoretical “metamorpho-
sis”—the crucial role of “trauma studies,” the larger Derridean corpus and
the emergence of deconstruction within literary criticism, as well as graphic
and photographic arts in which spectrality is a critical conceptual dimen-
sion. Representative essays that emerged within cultural studies from this
period are drawn together under headings such as “The Spectral Turn,”
“Spectropolitics,” “Spectral Media,” and “Haunted Historiographies.”
While “spectrality” framed a large body of writing in cultural studies
and literary criticism, “trauma” and “haunting” have been key terms
among anthropologists in the emergence of what Derrida called for under
the rubric of hauntology. Not surprisingly, given the ubiquity of settings of
conflict and unspeakable violence, newer generations of anthropologist
have increasingly found themselves working in what Michael Fischer
(1991) has called “post-trauma polities.” Anthropological writing in
which “haunting” figures prominently includes writing about societies in
x LIVING WITH GHOSTS: FOREWORD TO SADEQ RAHIMI, THE HAUNTOLOGY…
which a past history of violence seems to haunt the present in powerful

ways, as well as work undertaken in settings of recent or on-going conflict.
While images of haunting have long figured in writing about colonialism
(Good, Good, and Grayman, 2010), a more recent body of work has
focused on “historical trauma” within indigenous societies, where the
traces of violence of settler colonialism remain powerful. Explicit use of
the powerful metaphors of ghosts and haunting, linking the work directly
or indirectly to Derrida and classic works in hauntology, is found in titles
such as Ghosts of War in Vietnam (Kwon, 2008), War and Shadows: The
Haunting of Vietnam (Gustafsson, 2009), Haunting the Korean Diaspora:
Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Cho, 2008), Seeing Like a Child:
Inheriting the Korean War (Han, 2021), and Ghosts of the New City: Spirits,
Urbanity, and the Ruins of Progress in Chiang Mai (Johnson, 2014).
Other anthropological writing on haunting and hauntology has grown
out of ethnographers’ experiences working in conflict or post-conflict set-
tings or amidst unthinkable natural disasters. Certainly, that is true of my
own work, referenced by Sadeq in the Acknowledgements to this text. In
2005, following the Great Indian Ocean Tsunami that killed nearly
200,000 persons along the coasts of the Indonesian province of Aceh, on
the northern tip of Sumatra, my wife Prof. Mary-Jo Good and I began
collaborating with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in
developing mental health responses for communities of survivors. As we
write elsewhere, the great influx of humanitarian organizations in response
to the tsunami quickly faced the complexity of an on-going military con-
flict between the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian military.2
Though my initial use of the term haunting was in a presentation written
immediately after a trip to begin working on a post-conflict project with
IOM, which I titled “Haunted by Aceh,” my real commitment to making
hauntology a central concept in psychological anthropology grew out of
the next several years working directly in the field with persons who had
experienced horrifying violence from the Indonesian special forces (see
Good, 2015). There is something deeply disturbing about listening to
intense stories of interrogation and torture, challenging one to ask quite
fundamental questions about human nature. Ghosts there were—we
heard explicit stories about dreamtime visits of those killed in the tsunami
or the conflict. But haunting was present in the on-going experiences of
those who had deeply troubling intrusive memories of violence and tor-
ture witnessed or experienced personally, memories that would come over
and again, day and night, and experienced in the present tense. Our own
LIVING WITH GHOSTS: FOREWORD TO SADEQ RAHIMI, THE HAUNTOLOGY… xi
experiences were of course second hand, listening to stories as part of a

program of mental health outreach work into Acehnese villages we helped
IOM develop, a system of care that provided relief from the sense of
immediacy of the memories for many. However, throughout this work it
was hard to distinguish neatly between the “haunting” experienced by
those subjected to violence and the haunting we ourselves experienced, as
did the care providers. It is this sense of haunting that has served as the
basis for many of my own reflections about haunting and hauntology since
that time.
Living in the presence of everyday ghosts, as we do in Java and Bali and
elsewhere in Indonesia, living with the ghosts of violence in Aceh, similar
to the violence now being perpetrated by the same special forces in West
Papua, raises a host of problems for anthropological writing and analysis.
So too does living in the presence of that part of Indonesian history that
includes not only massive colonial violence but the killings of nearly a mil-
lion people in 1965, killings which were a part of the Cold War violence
throughout Southeast Asia but enacted by one wing of the Indonesian
armed forces that brought Suharto to power. On the one hand, such expe-
riences raise the question of the extent to which writing on hauntology
should be grounded in what del Pilar Blanco and Peeren call simply
“trauma studies.” Avery Gordon, in her classic Ghostly Matters: Haunting
and the Sociological Imagination (2008 edition), argues that “haunting is
one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and
their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over
and done with (slavery for instance) or when their oppressive nature is
denied…. Haunting is not the same as being exploited, traumatized, or
oppressed, although it usually involves these experiences or is produced by
them” (p. xvi). Clearly attention to haunting raises questions about the
urgent and haunting appearance of ghosts of multiple pasts, carried on as
forms of structural violence and suppressed memories. But asking about
the place of trauma studies in what Rahimi describes as the “hauntology of
everyday life,” as well as to the on-going “abusive systems of power,”
opens a wider set of issues.
On the other hand, living in the presence of ghosts raise other classic
issues of how we as ethnographers position ourselves in worlds in which
spirits, ghosts, and hauntings are part of everyday life, as well as in our
ethnographic texts. When I opened this Preface by saying that “anthro-
pologists live with ghosts,” I might have said “anthropologists live with
those who live with ghosts.” In an important paper on what they describe
xii LIVING WITH GHOSTS: FOREWORD TO SADEQ RAHIMI, THE HAUNTOLOGY…
as an effort to develop a “critical hauntology,” Martha Lincoln and Bruce

Lincoln (2015) distinguish provocatively between “primary haunting”
and “secondary haunting,” focusing particularly on distinguishing literal
haunting—by real ghosts—and metaphoric haunting, which refers (a la
Avery Gordon and others) to a wide range of phenomena that haunt soci-
eties and demand repair. Though not explicitly referenced is the question,
raised by recent proponents of the “ontological turn” in anthropology, of
the radical otherness of worlds, of those with ghosts versus those without
ghosts and spirits, for example. Do primary hauntings belong only to very
specific worlds, those in which “real” ghosts are present, while secondary
hauntings belong more broadly to all worlds, worlds “haunted” by histo-
ries of violence and structures of inequality? Does all anthropology have to
position itself within one “ontological” world or another?
Questions such as these make this book by Sadeq Rahimi so welcome.
In a few words, I want simply to give hints to the reader about how
Rahimi’s important text reframes ways we might address questions such as
these, while raising new questions. The text begins by puzzling why Freud
used as epigraph to his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life the two
lines from Goethe’s Faust, “Now the air is so filled with ghosts / that no
one knows how to escape them.” Rahimi’s answer frames the text that fol-
lows: “To be bold, the answer is because ghosts and haunting are so cen-
tral to Freud’s work that he could not avoid them … What The Hauntology
of Everyday Life is meant to put forward is that the very space of everyday
life is so filled with ghosts that nobody can avoid them—in fact, that the
very experience of everyday life is built around a process that we can call
hauntological, and whose major by-product is a steady stream of ghosts.”
One important implication of this claim is immediately apparent. As Freud
argued, if we are to understand the human subject, we must begin with
the everyday. And the everyday is filled with ghosts. Therefore, we must
base our understanding of human subjectivity on a “haunted” or “haunto-
logical” subject, on the acknowledgement that the subject can be and is
always haunted. What follows from this, in response to the Lincoln and
Lincoln suggestion that my Javanese friends live in a different ontological
world than do I, is that we all live in a world of ghosts. This is of course a
more classical anthropological understanding of the human subject as not
completely dependent upon diverse ontological worlds, with little to
bridge them (except metaphorically). Ghosts are part of everyday reality in
the very diverse worlds my Javanese and Indonesian friends live, as they
are in my own. Indeed, as suggested by Rahimi’s own epigraph, we all live
LIVING WITH GHOSTS: FOREWORD TO SADEQ RAHIMI, THE HAUNTOLOGY… xiii
in “subjunctive” worlds. As he quotes from John Caputo, “God [we

might also read ghosts, spirits] is not a ‘necessary being’ but a ‘maybe,’ a
‘perhaps,’ whose ‘might’ is the subjunctive might of the might-be it whis-
pers in my ear.” This actually fits with my ethnographic experience of most
Javanese I know, whose experiences of ghosts and haunting fit neither the
category of primary or secondary haunting, in the Lincolns’ terms, and
might be said to be in “the subjunctive mode” (Good & Good, 1994).
And so with such “bold” claims the fundamental arguments of this text
are launched.
I make no effort here to preview or summarize the arguments of this
text, but wish simply to point to a few of its provocations. I suggested
above that while relatively few anthropologists have fully engaged the par-
ticular theoretical corpus that much of the “spectrality” literature in cul-
tural studies draws on, that issues of haunting and ghosts are increasingly
making their way into anthropological writing via writings about historical
trauma and violence. While the text suggests the author agrees with those
who argue that hauntology should not be grounded narrowly in “trauma
studies,” The Hauntology of Everyday Life opens this argument in a num-
ber of complex and productive ways. Loss and absence is theorized here as
quite fundamental to developmental experience and subjectivity, in ways
consonant with Lacanian readings of developmental theory, as well as to
fundamental processes of symbolization and language. But loss is not
located chronologically in either developmental or historical terms, this
text suggests, but in pantemporality: “hauntology indicates a disjointing of
time where past and future are present, and present is absent,” and
“hauntology is a call to disavowal of ontologies of presence in the interest
of what one may think of as an ontology of absence.” It thus “merits great
emphasis that haunting is not simply brought about by the loss of an
object of desire, real or imagined. Haunting is about a nullified possible
future… What haunts is not that which is gone, it is that which was
expected to come but whose condition of arrival has been foreclosed, and
the ghost is an advocate of the promised future that was unrightfully can-
celled when the past was destroyed.” With framings such as these, any
simple arguments about our being haunted by traumatic violence of the
past, by historical trauma, are transformed into far more complex reflec-
tions about the temporality of loss and absence.
This then opens questions about the relations among ghosts and haunt-
ings. In Java, most ghosts, most spirits, do not haunt. Why and under
what conditions do they haunt? And similarly, as I ask elsewhere (Good,
xiv LIVING WITH GHOSTS: FOREWORD TO SADEQ RAHIMI, THE HAUNTOLOGY…
2019), why do ghosts—in Avery Gordon’s terms, “of slavery, for

instance”—seem to appear en masse, to haunt when they do? Eddie
Glaude, Professor at Princeton, gave a pithy answer to the question of why
ghosts haunt, in responding to Rachel Maddow (on MSNBC) in a discus-
sion of George Floyd’s death: “When folk don’t die right, they haunt!”
Not all ghosts haunt. So why do ghosts haunt when they do? At the soci-
etal level, why do ghosts appear en masse to haunt when they do, and what
are provoked by such hauntings? I believe we have limited theorization of
this issue. Rahimi’s text suggests that we think through these issues in rela-
tion to Freud’s theory of Nachträglichkeit—Freud’s observation that
“trauma experienced … in distant past may be evoked, or invoked, by
specific events, and people may be affected in unexpected ways by trau-
matic events that seem to have woken and returned from long forgotten
recesses of their history.” This “temporal dislocation” requires, Rahimi
argues, “that the past has to be present in some sense.” He goes on: “The
second important point here, at least for our discussion, is the notion of
the ‘missed’ or the lacking meaning, the part of the event that fails to be
translated into ‘understanding’ at the time of the event, and which can
come back later in time to possess the subject’s psyche – but only when the
subject is capable of processing and cogitating that missing part into the
symbolic order of meaning, and hence experiencing it in new terms.”
Here we might think of the ghosts of slavery appearing acutely during the
Obama presidency, or in the context of outrage at the George Floyd kill-
ing. But any notion that such an appearance will be therapeutic, releasing
the “secret” from its “crypt,” as is suggested by some readings of Abraham
and Torok’s classic text (2005), may ignore the resistance such appearance
will provoke. If Obama’s presidency made it seem safe for the ghosts of
slavery to appear and be addressed, #BlackLivesMatter may indeed evoke
(or invoke) other ghosts, those of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis, as we know
from the “Unite the Right” rally at Charlottesville, Virginia.
This text thus provides tools for framing issues related to trauma and
haunting in new ways. Framed, for example, in relation to Nachträglichkeit,
we are led to think about the haunting appearance of ghosts of historical
trauma, and the sometimes violent reactionary responses these provoke, in
terms of “afterwardness,” of “latency,” “retroactive temporality,” and the
close interactions of the psychological and the political. These are only
hints of new directions that may come out of our efforts to engage this
fascinating text. Ghosts and hauntings are everywhere present in this fas-
cinating work, theorized through Freud, Derrida, Lacan, and many
LIVING WITH GHOSTS: FOREWORD TO SADEQ RAHIMI, THE HAUNTOLOGY… xv
others. A brief example is provided from the author’s previous writings on

schizophrenia in Turkey. And the text points forward to analyses to follow
of how subjectivity may evolve in relation to “the transition of social and
personal interactions from the arena of physical presence to the domain of
virtual presence and virtual interactions.”
This is a major effort to construct a theoretical framework for address-
ing the “hauntology of everyday life.” It is clearly intended as a foundation
for a longer trajectory of theory-building. I commend it to the readers and
look forward to the conversations it provokes.
Cambridge, MA, USA Byron J. Good

May 10, 2021
Notes
1. See Steedly (2013) for an analysis of Indonesian filmic representations of
ghosts and haunting. Cf. Good and Good (2020) for a commentary.
2. For our work on Aceh, see Good (2015, 2019), Good and Good (2017),
Good, Grayman, and Good (2016), and Good, Good, and Grayman (2010).
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Johnson, A. A. (2014). Ghosts of the New City: Spirits, Urbanity, and the Ruins of
Progress in Chiang Mai. University Hawai’i Press.
Kwon, H. (2008). Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge University Press.
Lincoln, M., & Lincoln, B. (2015). Toward a Critical Hauntology: Bare Afterlife
and the Ghosts of Ba Chúc. Comparative Studies in Society and History,
57, 191–220.
Rahimi, S., & Good, B. J. (2019). Preface: Ghosts, haunting, and hauntology.
Ethos, 47(4), 409–410.
Steedly, M. M. (2013). Transparency and Apparition: Media Ghosts of Post-New
Order Indonesia. In P. Spyer & M. M. Steedly (Eds.), Images that Move
(pp 257–294). School for Advanced Research Press.
Acknowledgments
Like everything else, every book is first and foremost a palimpsest. And as
with every palimpsest, it will always be a futile effort to try and identify all
the traces left and faded over time. My interest in ghosts and haunting
started long ago in Shiraz, when, as an adolescent in post-revolutionary
Iran, I picked up the unusual hobby of hypnotizing friends and relatives,
and before long, learned that I could easily turn my hypnotized subjects
into mediums channeling various ghosts to speak through their mouths.
My cousin Davood was one of my best and most dedicated subjects, and
I will not even try to remember all the dead celebrities, ranging from
Genghis Khan and Stalin to Jesus, Elvis, and Albert Einstein, who showed
up and spoke to me through Davood. The days of seances and spirit
channeling eventually came to an end as the original curiosity wore off
and gave its place mostly to the fear of the unknown and the misunder-
stood. But as I sit down decades later to acknowledge my debts, intel-
lectual, and otherwise, for a book on hauntology, it is impossible not to
feel grateful to Davood for his transparent love, interest, and generosity
which helped graduate my curiosity about ghosts into new questions.
Decades later, my interest in ghosts and the spectral was sparked again,
this time in New Orleans, where I was invited to present on a panel about
the uncanny at the biennial conference of the Society for Psychological
Anthropology (SPA). I remain grateful to Sarah Pinto for inviting me to
join that panel. It was on that same panel that my dear friend and mentor,
Byron J. Good, presented a piece, brief and elegant as ever, but which
carried in it something different: an unspoken trace of trauma. Byron had
xvii
xviii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
just returned from fieldwork in Aceh, and his talk was aptly titled
“Haunted by Aceh.” I remember very well how what he communicated
that day went well beyond the short text of that talk, or even the cracking
voice or the tears in his eyes as he spoke of years of exposure to the after-
maths of multiple waves of trauma in Aceh ranging from decades of sav-
age warfare, large-scale murders, and widespread torture, to tsunamis and
earthquakes. He was genuinely haunted, even if by proxy, and his talk
brought the notion of haunting into strong resonation with my own find-
ings at the time about how closely the experience of the uncanny is tied
to the fundamental processes of ego formation. I was teaching cultural
psychiatry and psychological anthropology in Canada at the time, and it
did not take long after returning from New Orleans that I submitted my
first ethics application for a research project on ghosts and haunting. And
the rest is history, as they say. But Byron Good has continued to be a
source of inspiration and a wonderful colleague to dialogue with about
ghosts and haunting in all these years. We have had a number of seminars
and conferences on haunting and hauntology together since New Orleans,
including day-long conferences at Harvard and elsewhere, double-panels
at SPA, graduate courses on hauntology and postcolonial disorders, and
last year (2020) we co-edited a special issue of Ethos dedicated to haunt-
ing and hauntology. My gratitude to Byron is tremendous and on-going.
I would be remiss, however, if I did not mention Ellen Corin, another
substantial mentor and friend and one of the most inspiring psychoana-
lysts I have known, whose ideas have long inspired and guided me. Ellen’s
beautiful way of thinking about subjectivity and haunting, which is simul-
taneously poetic, clinical, and academic, has been a generous source of
learning for me. Michael M.J. Fischer, who has also been so kind to agree
to write an epilogue to this volume, has long been another source of bril-
liant inspiration for me. Mike’s awe-inspiringly vast and deep knowledge
covers so much that regardless of what topic I need to think about, he is
always one of the first people whose thoughts on the topic I want to hear.
And finally, I left my sons Reza and Kianoush for last, because to them
goes my most special gratitude and love. I am so grateful to Aatash Reza,
who so generously spent hours audio recording books and papers on
hauntology in his warm and professional voice, so that I can have the
luxury of listening to them on my walks or while driving. And I am deeply
grateful to Kianoush, who paid such close attention and care to this book
Acknowledgments xix
project and to me working my way through it. He put so much love into
motivating and pushing me to write at moments when I did not feel like
writing, and made sure that I met my deadlines like I should. Without his
caring, this book may not have been!
Contents
1 A Hauntology for Everyday Life 1
2 Meaning, Language, and Subjectivity 9
3 Ghosts, Metaphors, and Structures of Feeling19
4 The Haunted Objects of Desire49
5 Hauntology sans Exorcism, from Justice to Networked

Subjectivities67
6 Epilogue by Michael M.J. Fischer: Hauntology’s Genesis,

Catacoustics, and Future Shadows77
Index97
xxi
CHAPTER 1
A Hauntology for Everyday Life
Abstract This chapter outlines the basic objectives of the book and high-
lights the general theoretical grounds on which the book develops its cen-
tral argument that all human experience is fundamentally haunted. The
primary points of reference include psychoanalytic theory, specifically
Jacques Lacan’s object relational theory of ego development and his read-
ing and expansion of Freud’s theory of the psychic apparatus and its
dynamics; along with the Hegelian ontology of the negative and its later
modifications by twentieth-century philosophers such as Heidegger and
Derrida; and the semiotics of difference introduced by Saussure and
worked by Jakobson and others. Whereas ontology can be read as an
attempt to exorcise “reality as such” from the ambiguities that irreducibly
haunt human experience of reality, hauntology is described here as an evo-
cation that seeks not to exorcise, but simply to recognize and address the
endless ghosts that are created by the very act of human perception and
cognition, and hence subjective experience. Finally, hauntology is outlined
here as a mode of understanding power and its working in ways funda-
mentally different from historical, archaeological, or even a Foucauldian
genealogical modality, in that instead of attempting to establish that which
was, hauntological analysis seeks to recognize—to allow to come forward,
to speak—that which had been to be but was not, that which could have
been, the future that hailed the past but was forced to disappear from its
horizon.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
S. Rahimi, The Hauntology of Everyday Life,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78992-3_1
2 S. RAHIMI
Keywords Hauntology • Ontology • Ghosts • Exorcism • Subjectivity

• Psychoanalysis • Semiotics, Philosophy • Presence
I reimagine my haunting spirit not as an omnipotent God but as a

weak force, a quiet call, an invitation, a solicitation. This God is not a
“necessary being” but a “maybe,” a “perhaps,” whose “might” is the
subjunctive might of the might-be it whispers in my ear.
—John D. Caputo
When Sigmund Freud published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in

1907, he opted to open it with a two-line epigraph drawn from Goethe’s
Faust which, in first glance, strikes one as strangely irrelevant to the book’s
basic topic. “Now,” says Faust, “the air is so filled with ghosts / that no
one knows how to escape them” (Part II, Act V, Scene 5).1 Freud was
famously particular with his words, and still more so with his openings. So
why then, one might ask, would he choose to start a book about the
everyday life with a statement about ghosts filling the air? It is my inten-
tion through this book to make it clear how Freud’s reference to an air
filled with spooks is not only not irrelevant, but in fact about the most
appropriate epigraph he could have chosen to open a book about the fun-
damental processes of the human psychic apparatus.
Often identified as one of Freud’s most widely read and translated
books, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is dedicated to driving home
one basic idea: that a close study of the daily mental processes, specifically
slips and failures of the human mind, reveals that dreams and waking time
perceptions are governed by the same set of psychic processes. Freud then
uses this understanding to reach the foundational conclusion that the
boundary between the “normal” and “abnormal” states of subjectivity is
unclear, unstable, and as such, nonexistent. This is one of the most sub-
stantial contributions among Freud’s extraordinary array of ideas. The
notion of neuroticism, which is by far the hallmark of psychoanalytic
thought, is entirely dependent on this reading, as are such notions as
transference or the associative structure of psychic processes and hence the
very possibility of psychoanalysis as the “talking cure.”
But still, why would Freud open a book about the most foundational
features of “the psychic apparatus” with the image of a space so saturated
with ghosts that no one can avoid them? To be bold, the answer is because
1 A HAUNTOLOGY FOR EVERYDAY LIFE 3
ghosts and haunting are so central to Freud’s work that he could not avoid
them, just as I could not avoid naming or starting this book with the men-
tion of Freud’s work.2 What The Hauntology of Everyday Life is meant to
put forward is that the very space of everyday life is so filled with ghosts
that nobody can avoid them—in fact, that the very experience of everyday
life is built around a process that we can call hauntogenic, and whose
major by-product is a steady stream of ghosts.
One of the challenging revelations that the latter half of the twentieth-
century psychoanalytic theory had to deal with was due to the impressive
novel ideas that French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan managed to “pull”
out of Freud’s texts. Ideas that had apparently laid dormant inside Freud’s
text for decades now came out in ways that were simultaneously impossi-
ble to reject and troublesome to reconcile with the official canon that was
already built over Freud’s tomb. Around the same time, another French
philosopher, Jacques Derrida, was mapping his own rebellion, a map that
while clearly distinct from Lacan’s work, feels impressively “of the same
material,” if nothing else due to the fact that three major intellectual
streams: Freudian psychoanalysis of the unconscious, Hegelian metaphys-
ics of the spirit, and Saussurean semiotics of difference, saturate the warp
and weft of both textures. Much has been said and written on similarities
and differences between Lacan and Derrida, and it would be of little ben-
efit to repeat that here. It would be sufficient for my purposes here to
simply point out the common moment in which they thought and spoke,
the shared intellectual Geist that informed their ideations, despite the
many ways in which they aimed their thoughts toward distinct desired ends.
In order to argue for hauntology as the appropriate language for speak-
ing of basic human experiences, one may think of a few layers of signifi-
cance. At the very core of these so-called layers would be meaning and its
formation, which is so closely entangled with the formation of desire as to
be considered one and the same. This core duo sets the foundation of the
range of human subjective experiences including thought, speech, textual-
ity, and temporality, along with drive, affect, power, and politicality. The
ensemble of these effects translates in turn into what we identify as the
domain of ontology, and its subsidiary, epistemology. Simply put, the call
to hauntological thinking entails the call to a fundamentally different
mode of understanding the human subject, including what makes it tick,
what drives it, and what the nature of its experienced reality is. The differ-
ence is in fact so extensive as to offer a way to think about subjectivity
without a subject and free from an androcentric bias. This possibility
4 S. RAHIMI
promises a new theoretic frame of reference capable of accommodating

virtual or networked subjectivity as the outcome of predominantly online
human-human and human-machine interactions, socializations, and col-
laborations. If so, then a hauntological theory of subjectivity may also
offer the suitable conceptual framework for thinking about artificial sub-
jectivity—synthetic subjectivity without human agency. I hope to briefly
address this question in the final sections of this volume, but I intend to
tackle it more extensively in my upcoming volume on the notion of net-
worked subjectivity.
“Let us call it a hauntology,” says Derrida, “this logic of haunting
would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a
thinking of Being…It would harbor within itself, but like circumscribed
places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves.”3
Hauntology does not ask, “to be or not to be”; it claims instead the simul-
taneous playfulness of “to be and not to be.” Hauntology is always sub-
junctive, to go back to John Caputo’s poetic notion of God’s subjunctive
might,4 or to Byron and Mary-Jo Good’s ethnographic discovery of a
“subjunctive world, one in which healing is an open possibility, even if
miracles are necessary.”5 Hauntology may be understood as an act of read-
ing informed by the fact that the word is the death of the thing, as Hegel
emphasized. The word comes to be only after the death of the thing, yet
it is not the death of the thing that renders the word meaningful. The
word is a word only insofar as it is haunted by the spectral presence of the
dead thing—and other dead words. If the word is haunted, then the act of
reading can take two basic postures toward the text: as hauntology, or as
exorcism. There are of course different modalities of exorcism, as in one
that seeks to extract and conjure away a ghost that is deemed destructive,
polluting, pathogenic, or in any case unwanted; and another that seeks to
liberate, vindicate, revive, or in any case help the ghost leave the confine-
ments of a haunted place, person, society, or text. But whether sympa-
thetic or antithetical, while a hauntological reading would strive to admit
the presence of the ghost and seeks to unearth and unpack to the extent
possible a text’s layers and dynamics of spectral presences, an exorcism,
whether benign or aggressively postured, intends and attempts to sepa-
rate, to identify, to recover and release one or the other (the haunted, or
the haunter) by extracting and naming the ghost that haunts.
When hauntological reading is performed successfully, it manages to
animate a text/subject through an outpouring of ghosts and other spec-
tral entities from the otherwise silent depths of the text/psyche. In
Derrida’s words, the goal is to learn how to “let them [ghosts] speak or
how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself.”6 When exorcism is
successful, on the other hand, the specter is separated (forcefully or peace-
fully) from the body or the word it has been haunting, and it is banished
(or released) either to go away, or to reclaim its presumed rightful position
of narrative power—in either case, to cease haunting and to stop existing
as a ghost. We can consider ourselves fortunate then, that no act of exor-
cism can ever be completely successful. Exorcisms, regardless of their
avowed intention and despite their most sincere emancipatory agendas,
always aspire to establish a specific order of power/meaning, and they seek
to put an end to the fact that the text, “like all ghosts,” is never complete,
and always errant.7 The logic of hauntology serves and yet subverts both
these agendas. The logic of hauntology belies any established order of
power/meaning, insofar as it recognizes as haunted (and hence always
duplicitous) the very “essence” of reality, and perhaps more importantly,
insofar as it simultaneously defies the most foundational tenets of both
Utopianism and Messianism. In the broadest sense, the discursive practice
known as ontology needs therefore to be understood as the fruit of a sus-
tained collective effort to exorcise life itself: “Ontology opposes [hauntol-
ogy] only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration.”8
It is a practitioner of this hauntology that Derrida aspires to be, as he
makes amply clear in his reading of Hamlet where he has Marcellus fore-
shadow “the coming, one day, one night, several centuries after,” of a
different breed of “scholar.” The new scholar would finally be capable,
“beyond the opposition between presence and non-presence, actuality
and inactuality, life and non-life, of thinking the possibility of the spectre,
the spectre as possibility.”9 Only this kind of scholar, a hauntologist, would
know how to speak to spirits, as they realize that “such an address is not
only already possible, but that it will have at all times conditioned, as such,
address in general.”10
Ghosts do not belong to the past. But they do not belong to the pres-
ent either. Ghosts represent the past, but they are not from the past.
“Everything,” says Derrida, “begins by the apparition of a specter. More
precisely, by the waiting for this apparition.” And that is why “it is neces-
sary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of
every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time.”11 One of
the main questions that I address in this book is this enigmatic assertion
that not only every concept and hence all meaning, but also time itself, and
6 S. RAHIMI
hence being as such, are all haunted. And this is precisely why we are not
justified but obligated to speak of a hauntology of everyday life.
In a most basic sense, two features of hauntology have direct implica-
tions for the concepts of being and time. First, hauntology indicates a
disjointing of time where past and future are present, and present is absent,
and consequently it necessitates a pantemporal formulation of human
thought and experience. Secondly, hauntology is a call to disavowal of
ontologies of presence in the interest of what one may think of as an
ontology of absence (not to be confused with negative ontology as a mir-
rored image of ontology). Needless to say, both of these implications have
vast consequences in terms of the being of the human subject, along with
its experience of self, reality, and temporality. But in order to address
those, one would need first to address the more fundamental question of
what exactly it means for a concept, for all concepts, to be haunted, and
how such haunting may come to be. Where Derrida leaves us alone as he
refuses to bring himself down to the nuts-and-bolts level of “how” a con-
cept comes to be haunted, we run, serendipitously enough, into others
like Jacques Lacan who is in fact quite eager to delve into the micrody-
namics of sense making from a psychoanalytic point of view, and who has
left us a fantastic set of concepts with which to work our way through this
exact question.
In the coming pages I will lean on that line of thought to take a closer
look at the semiotic/psychoanalytic explanations of how “all concepts”
are haunted and why they have to be haunted before they can become
concepts. The core question asked here boils down to the mechanisms
through which symbolic processes involved in production of meaning
(primarily semiotic and linguistic), and physical processes associated with
the body (needs, drives and phenomenological experiences) are woven
into each other. The core idea here is that the interface of the physical and
the symbolic is where both meaning and ghosts are born.
It merits great emphasis that haunting is not simply brought about by
the loss of an object of desire, real or imagined. Haunting is about a nul-
lified possible future that a bygone existence (be it the self or an other) was
experienced to promise. What haunts is not that which is gone, it is that
which was expected to come but whose condition of arrival has been fore-
closed, and the ghost is an advocate of the promised future that was
unrightfully canceled when the past was destroyed.
Above all else, hauntology has a promise of its own, a promise deeply
political and deeply concerned with the notion of justice, yet illusively free
from any political allegiance or moral point of reference beyond the subver-
sively simple idea of acknowledging the presence of the absents, and hear-
ing the voices of the silenced. But what could possibly be more impactful,
politically impactful, than to understand and unpack the present for what it
is and for all that it is? In order to select strategic social or political lines of
move, or to design effective interventions, we need to first understand the
possibilities, hopes and desires that were once and are no longer available
to the public conscious, to unearth and exhume crypts in which suppressed
dreams of past communities and their lost moments are trapped. This is
clearly a different strategy from history, from archaeology, and even from a
Foucauldian genealogy, in that instead of attempting to establish that
which was, hauntological analysis seeks to know—to allow to speak, to be
more specific—that which was to be, that which could have been but never
was, the future that hailed the past but then disappeared from the horizon.
Not a search for the truth, this is a hunt for the non-Truth, for the absent
force whose effect can be seen, but not its source, its shape, its location or
its time even, except in the form of an “imagined” spectrality. “Can we,
should we, try and excavate utopia?” asks Owen Hatherley at the begin-
ning of Militant Modernism.12 And that is perhaps a question that we all
need to be asking, whether we are in the business of excavating and eman-
cipating or simply waiting for utopias to show on the horizon, or in the
work of heeding and warning and seeking to prevent them.
Notes
1. Nun ist die Luft von solchem Spuk so voll / Daß niemand weiß wie er ihn
meiden soll (Goethe, 1862).
2. See pp. 17–20 of Mary S. Gossy’s (1995) book, Freudian Slips: Woman,
Writing, the Foreign Tongue, for another interesting account of Freud’s
epigraph to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
3. Derrida, 1994, p. 10.
4. Caputo, 2012, p. 33.
5. Good and Good, 1994, p. 839.
6. Derrida, 1994, p. 221.
7. Derrida, 1981, p. 144.
8. Derrida, 1994, p. 202.
9. Derrida, 1994, p. 13.
10. Ibid.
11. Derrida, 1994, p. 202, emphasis mine.
12. Hatherley, 2009, p. 3.
8 S. RAHIMI
References
Caputo, J. D. (2012). Teaching the Event: Deconstruction, Hauntology, and the
Scene of Pedagogy. In C. W. Ruitenberg (Ed.), Philosophy of Education
(pp. 23–34). Philosophy of Education Society.
Derrida, J. (1981). Dissemination. Trans. B. Johnson. Continuum.
Freud, S. (1901). The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: Forgetting, Slips of the
Tongue, Bungled Actions, Superstitions and Errors. In J. Strachey (Ed. &
Trans.), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
(Vol. VI, pp. VII-296). The Hogarth Press.
Goethe, J. W. (1862). Faust. D. Nutt.
Good, B. J., & Good, M.-J. D. (1994). In the Subjunctive Mode: Epilepsy
Narratives in Turkey. Social Science and Medicine, 38(6), 835–842.
Gossy, M. S. (1995). Freudian Slips: Woman, Writing, the Foreign Tongue.
University of Michigan Press.
Hatherley, O. (2009). Militant Modernism. Zero Books.
CHAPTER 2
Meaning, Language, and Subjectivity
Abstract This chapter focuses on the core idea that the production of
meaning is a hauntogenic event, as the process that creates meaning also
creates spectral traces of the original events and entities that are made
sense of. As infants develop they master the creation of symbols to repre-
sent sense impressions of external and internal events, entities and experi-
ences; followed by the ability to communicate such representations in the
social space of a symbolic system. Through each wave of elevated repre-
sentation spectral traces of the signified entities and experiences are also
produced, silent/negative references to an original object which “haunt”
the new signifier. The process of transformation of a “thing in itself” to a
signifier is examined here with specific attention to the role played by pho-
nemes, which serve as gateways between somatic and cognitive levels of
experience. The discussion continues with an examination of the psycho-
analytic notion of Nachträglichkeit. Freud introduced Nachträglichkeit to
explain the clinical observation that some old and forgotten events find a
way of returning to life to assert traumatic impact, often with more devas-
tating force than did the actual experience. This chapter will serve as the
foundation for upcoming discussions of the higher levels of representa-
tion, as these semiotic structures make possible the emergence of desire
and its psychological economy in tandem with death drive through higher
level linguistic functions such as metaphoricity and metonymy.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78992-3_2
10 S. RAHIMI
Keywords Semiosis • Hauntogenesis • Phoneme • Representation •

Symbols • Signifiers • Nachträglichkeit • Trauma • das Ding
All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear,
All intellect, all sense, and as they please,
They limb themselves, and colour, shape, or size,
Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare.
—John Milton
Hauntology has quickly exploded to become an almost ubiquitous descrip-

tor in certain lines of inquiry, specifically those concerned with the topics
of historical memory and trauma. Such dedicated usage introduces at least
two challenges: needless to say, it risks fixating the term’s conceptual refer-
ence within a narrow field of investigation; and perhaps more importantly,
the somewhat self-obvious relevance of the term to the fields of history
and especially trauma in a somewhat metaphoric sense can lead to a less-
than-rigorous attention to the broader mechanisms involved and the gen-
uinely ubiquitous relevance of hauntology to “everyday life.” By “broader
mechanisms” I am referring primarily to the semiotic and linguistic pro-
cesses that make possible the very experience of haunting and, due to their
foundational status, necessitate a hauntological model of not just subjec-
tive experience, but epistemology and in fact ontology as such. I will
attempt to outline a semiotic and linguistic discussion of these processes in
this and the next chapter respectively, which will hopefully drive home
why a hauntological analysis needs to understand “haunting” in terms
more detailed than historical or individual events and their specific social
or psychological aftermath. To do so, I will discuss the hauntogenic nature
of foundational semiotic processes as they translate and deliver sense
impressions of events and substances to abstract sensa and perceptual
meaning, which in turn make possible the subjective experience of desire
and its extensive psychological economy. This formulation provides a core
argument for why features of this operation not only set the stage for, but
in fact necessitate a hauntological analysis of subjective experience as such.
As I will describe in this and the next chapter, it is precisely this haunto-
genic process that makes possible the later appearance of objet a, the object
cause of desire, and the so-called death drive, leading to the formation and
emergence of subjective experience as such.
2 MEANING, LANGUAGE, AND SUBJECTIVITY 11
It is now almost a truism to say that human subjectivity, and the very
capacity for subjective experience as we know it, are not simply associated
with but fundamentally dependent on the capacities of production and
processing of meaning, and the presence of a structured symbolic order
for the communication of that meaning, language serving as a most imme-
diately observable example. It is, after all, the evolutionary emergence of
the ability to create, process, and communicate symbols, and the emer-
gence of an inter-personal structure that guides and orders the communi-
cation of such symbols, that marks the basic turning point in the appearance
of Homo sapiens and what we understand as human social subjectivity. If
we were to graph a basic trajectory tracing the progression of solid, lifeless
matter to the human subject in its social and symbolic complexity, we can
simply plot a graph with time on one axis, and abstraction as the other.1
The evolutionary process that has led to the contemporary state of human
subjectivity, in other words, can be traced in terms of a consecutive set of
elevations in abstract representation and the means of communicating the
resulting information. I don’t intend to engage the broad question of
abstraction as an evolutionary development, but the developmental pro-
cess of abstraction, which also holds a foundational place in current theo-
ries of human development,2 offers important concepts for a hauntological
model of subjectivity which we need to understand. Consider the basic
process through which internal physical and chemical experiences are
abstracted and merge with the collectively maintained systems of mean-
ings to produce thoughts and emotions, for instance. Psychoanalytic
thought over the past century has developed a solid array of concepts for
examination of this process, laid originally by Freud and later refined and
expanded by Lacan.
Phonemes and Things

The concept of das Ding, “the Thing,” is one such concept around which
to set up this discussion, even if, ironically enough, the most accurate
description of the Thing might be that which is a no-thing. As we will see
in this chapter, this adds a whole new level of meaning to the basic defini-
tion of language as a means of communicating that which is absent. The
“absent” in this sense goes well beyond the absent sun about which I can
use language to tell stories at night. This sense of absent refers to the idea
that language as such is the result and the manifestation of a fundamental
absence: the absence of the self to itself. The so-called signifier, that is to
12 S. RAHIMI
say, is the vehicle, a signifier, of a thing that is absent not just in the physi-
cal or even phenomenological sense of absence, but in the ontological
sense of an absent “something” that cannot be signified and yet whose
absence can only be experienced through the act of signification. The sig-
nifier serves to mark an imagined location dedicated to that unknown
(unknown insofar as it cannot be signified and made sense of) which is
sought. The core, in other words, around which I have just proposed to
cast the hauntological understanding of language and meaning, is a hol-
low one. This is of course not my innovation: “through the word, which
is already a presence made of absence,” says Lacan, “absence itself comes
to have a name.”3 As frustratingly vacuous and circular as what I have just
outlined may seem, through another well-established tradition, the work
of Hegel may be able to help better understand this central piece of the
puzzle. Specifically, consider Hegel’s elaboration of the process whereby
the thing “in itself” (an sich) is elevated to the “for itself” (für sich).
In a passage in his Encyclopedia,4 where Hegel elaborates the progres-
sion from abstracted imagination to thought, he offers an analysis of the
process through which a “thing,” that is, a thing as it is in itself, becomes
an object—object of understanding to a human subject. “The name,” he
says, is “the thing so far as it exists and counts in the ideational realm.”5 As
a “thing in itself” is transformed to, or rather replaced by, an “object”
within the “ideational realm,” the new object, which is now identified
with “word”, is simultaneously “the death of the thing,” while retaining
nonetheless a certain relation with the thing. To borrow from Heidegger
reading Kant: “Kant does explicitly distinguish between the thing as an
appearance (Erscheinung) and as thing-in-itself (Ding an sich). But the
thing-in-itself, i.e., detached from and taken out of every relation of mani-
festation for us, remains for us a mere x [and] in every thing as an appear-
ance we unavoidably think also of this x.”6 Even if the hark back to this
unknown “x” may be inevitable, that does not necessitate an awareness of
such relation by the subject—this is a spectral relation, as Derrida would
later describe it. And to be sure, “we think in names.”7 In other words,
insofar as thought is the dynamic articulation of and the interaction
between words (i.e. mental objects), all thought is already haunted by the
ghost of the thing. In the words of Maurice Blanchot, “death alone allows
me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they
can have meaning.”8
As compelling as the accounts provided by Hegel—and others—of the
transformation of a thing to object/word, or sensa to sense9 may be,
layering in a linguistic/semiotic reading of the process can add substantial,

and perhaps more accessible, texture to the psycho-philosophical account.
Consider phonemes,10 for instance, which are generally understood as the
basic building block of language, since they are the last identifiable “units”
as we unpack what language is made of. “Philosophical terminology,” says
Jakobson, “tends to call the various sign systems languages, and language
properly so-called word language.”11 But, he goes on to add, “it would
perhaps be possible to identify it more accurately by calling it phoneme
language. This phoneme language is the most important of the various
sign systems, it is for us language par excellence, language properly so-
called, language tout court.”12 And this is so for the basic reason that pho-
nemes are the smallest units of language before you are no longer dealing
with “language,” before you enter the realm of purely affective and
somatic forces, the realm of the “imaginary,” in Lacanian jargon. It is this
last feature, the borderline location of phonemes, that is of interest to me
here, as it establishes the paradoxical character of phonemes, “which
simultaneously signify and yet are devoid of all meaning.”13
Insofar as language consists of a system of signs built on the principle of
binary oppositions,14 phonemes carry the task of laying a broad and finely
pixelated groundwork of phonic oppositions that are then used to pro-
duce higher level combinations such as graphemes and morphemes or
words. Phonemes, said Saussure, are “above all else oppositive, relative
and negative entities.”15 This basic feature of phonemes as part physical
(sounds) and part symbolic (signs indicating opposition), makes them the
ideal mediator between the visceral and the symbolic, both of which realms
are also organized in terms of oppositions and associations, albeit in differ-
ent modalities of organization. While it is sufficiently easy to identify the
nature and the role played by oppositions in the physical/acoustic level of
phonemes, however, it is somewhat unclear how a relation of association
comes to be established between phonemic opposing binaries. As Hegel
has elaborated,16 internal concepts stand in relation to each other through
a network of associations that establishes the whole of the psychic/percep-
tual edifice, in a “relation of necessary implication.”17 Such relation of
necessary implication is precisely the modality that Saussure borrowed
from Husserl in describing his structural semiotics. Ironically enough,
however, Jakobson demonstrates that at the lowest physical stratum of the
linguistic sign system, phonemes in fact fail to adhere to this basic struc-
tural principle: unlike the broad relation of implication that holds within
the psychic apparatus as well as within the linguistic system of signs, he
14 S. RAHIMI
finds it impossible to attribute a self-evident system of relationality beyond

oppositionality to phonemes.18 Rather than simply opening a case of
exception for phonemes, however, Jakobson is able to identify a separate
set, a set of phenomenological oppositions that tie phonemes together in a
relation of implication. What makes this surprising find especially relevant
for us is that these relations are primarily based on bodily conditions of
production/articulation of phonemes, such as the shape of lips, tenseness
or laxity of muscles, degree of air pressure, location of articulation (buccal
resonator), and so on. In addition to providing a clear system of binaries,
in other words, these oppositions highlight the physical and embodied
locatedness of phonemes as parts of a whole (a phenomenological gestalt),
and thence an associative network of “necessary implications” among
them: tenseness is necessarily related to laxness, back of buccal resonator
automatically stands in opposition to and in association with its front, and
so on. So here we have a clear situation where physical phenomenological
experience interfaces and merges with the symbolic meaning system
through the “two faced” function of phonemes. I will present a similarly
Janusian characteristic later, when examining metaphors as a higher level
gateway connecting phenomenological sensa and linguistic sense, as
Ricoeur has demonstrated. But what I would like us to take away from
Jakobson’s discovery concerning this Janusian function of phonemes is
the role it plays in the production of language as a symbolic system that is
always already “haunted” by the biological, or to bring this back to the
psychoanalytic jargon, by das Ding.
In short then, here at the level of phonemes we find the opportunity to
observe the linguistic and phenomenological roots of a capacity or quality
that permeates the edifice of “language” as such, insofar as language is the
space where das Ding is (re)created. But, while Jakobson’s elaborations on
sound and meaning give us a clear way of understanding and formulating
phonemes and their amphibian performance as the “hinge” around which
somatic and semiotic registers are fused together, we still need to layer this
further with a psychosemiotic model of the birth of desire and the mecha-
nisms through which individual ego manages to anchor itself within the
fluid ocean of meanings, in order to complete a map of the way das Ding
ends up haunting the sign, the language, and the subject as such. Let us
pause here and ponder for a moment as we move into the psychoanalytic
discussion, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis that “the philosophy of Freud is not
a philosophy of the body, but of the flesh.”19
Nachträglichkeit
Freud introduced the term Nachträglichkeit as he struggled to develop a
model for trauma. Specifically, he struggled to conceptualize his own and
others’ recurrent observation that trauma experienced—or imagined to
have been experienced—in distant past may be evoked, or invoked, by
specific events, and people may be affected in unexpected ways by trau-
matic events that seem to have woken and returned from long-forgotten
recesses of their history. While it seems to have aroused much interest
across other fields, Nachträglichkeit has received far less psychoanalytic
attention than many of Freud’s conceptualizations, a fact in part respon-
sible also for the lack of a standardized translation of the word in litera-
ture. Nachträglichkeit has been translated into an array of different terms
depending on context and usage, such as “latency,” “retroactive temporal-
ity,” “retrospective attribution,” “belatedness,” “delayed onset trauma,”
“deferred action,” “après-coup,” and “afterwardsness”.20 As I mentioned,
Freud developed the idea as he struggled to make sense of the observation
that many of the cases of “hysteria” seemed to be in fact caused by evoca-
tions of old and long-forgotten traumatic events, with the basic model
emerging that even a small event could trigger memories of old and for-
gotten traumatic events, often from childhood, which would now be
interpreted and re-experienced in much stronger traumagenic terms by
the adult person. An old, dormant if you like, trauma would thus be
invoked to life, and while it may not have had much of an impact on the
person’s mind during its first occurrence, in its second coming it could
exert a fully-fledged traumatic impact. It is this second coming and its
aftermath that Freud called Nachträglichkeit.21 In Freud’s own words,
Nachträglichkeit is the process “of a memory arousing an affect which it
did not arouse as an experience, because in the meantime the change
[from the early self that experienced the event to the current one that
remembers it] had made possible a different understanding of what was
remembered.”22 The temporal dislocation of an experience (or of its
impact, to be precise) is the central piece in this formulation—in order for
the nature and aftermath of a past event to change in the present, the past
has to be present in some sense. The second important point here, at least
for our discussion, is the notion of the “missed” or the lacking meaning,
the part of the event that fails to be translated into “understanding” at the
time of the event, and which can come back later in time to possess the
subject’s psyche—but only when the subject is capable of processing and
16 S. RAHIMI
cogitating that missing part into the symbolic order of meaning, and
hence experiencing it in new terms.
You may have noted that this missed part, this left out “thing” is in
many ways reminiscent of the idea of das Ding, the part of the actual expe-
rienced event or sensed thing that fails to make it to the mental or linguis-
tic object and which “stays back” to lurk somewhere below the symbolic
register. The “traumatic” event in fact has remained a non-event because
the traumagenic elements have remained outside the subject’s domain of
symbolic interpretation/understanding. As a result the event is not in a
position to effect any consequences—not until a version of the subject
comes along that is capable of recognizing and decoding the missing even-
tuality of the event, and channels the dormant event into the realm of
meaning and consequences, and hence gives it the voice to claim and
demand a consequence using its newly-gained power as a legitimate part
of the symbolic order. In his work, Jean Laplanche has conceptualized this
same notion in the form of a question, an unanswerable question, that a
child picks up early in life, but which they may never find an answer to.
Laplanche borrows Lacan’s terms to call the so-called question an enig-
matic signifier, which is passed on to the child by adults through what he
describes as a “primal seduction,” and thenceforth serves to intrigue and
motivate the child’s psychic development as they undertake a quest to
arrive at the missing meaning.23 I don’t intend to enter a closer reading of
Laplanche here, but simply to point out the obvious point in his account,
namely the significant developmental role played by a missing something
as we grow and learn to transform/translate physical experiences and phe-
nomenological sensa to the realm of mental objects, cognitive representa-
tions, and linguistic sense.
The Thing, das Ding, is a part of what is sensed and subsequently trans-
formed from pure materiality to abstracted (prelinguistic) perception
which fails to “make it” through such transformation and thus remains
associated with the abstracted image (if we can call it that) in the form of
an unconscious reference. Now, das Ding, however, is only half way
through the process of symbolic representation.
Notes
1. See for instance the works of Jakob von Uexküll (e.g. Von Uexküll, 2013);
Thomas Sebeok (e.g. Sebeok, 2001); or Kalevi Kull (e.g. Kull, 1999; Kull
et al., 2011).
2. E.g. Piaget, 2014; Sigel, 2013.
3. Lacan, 1953, p. 228.

4. Hegel, 1975.
5. Hegel, 1975, p. 219.
6. Heidegger, 1967, p. 128.
7. Hegel, 1975, p. 220.
8. Blanchot, 1981, p. 43.
9. See Ricoeur, 2003. I will reintroduce this connection later in discussing
metaphoricity.
10. “Phonic elements by means of which words are differentiated [but] have
no positive and fixed meaning of their own.” (Jakobson, 1978, p. 69)
11. Jakobson, 1978, p. 67.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. See Saussure, 1959.
15. Quoted in Jakobson 1978, p. 76.
16. Hegel (1975), see also Boothby (2001) for a detailed elaboration of
this theme.
17. “If one of the terms is given, then the other, though not present, is evoked”
(Jakobson, 1978, p. 76).
18. See e.g. Jakobson 1978, pp. 76ff.
19. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 270.
20. Eickhoff, 2006.
21. See for instance Freud 1894, 1895, 1896 for earlier development of the
term. His earliest use of the term has been traced to his letters to Fliess, he
used the notion quite often through his later works. See Laplanche, 2005,
pp. 377–79.
22. Freud, 1895, p. 356. See case of Emma.
23. See e.g. Laplanche, 1999.
References
Blanchot, M. (1981) “Literature and the Right to Death,” “The Gaze of Orpheus”
and Other Literary Essays. Trans. L. Davis, ed. P A. Sitney. Station Hill Press.
Boothby, R. (2001). Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan.
Psychology Press.
Eickhoff, F.-W. (2006). On Nachträglichkeit: The Modernity of an Old Concept.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 87, 1453–1469.
Freud, S. (1894). The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.),
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol.
III, pp. 45–61). The Hogarth Press.
18 S. RAHIMI
Freud, S. (1895). Project for a Scientific Psychology. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.),
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. I,
pp. 281–397). The Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1896). Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defense. In
J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud (Vol. III, pp. 162–185). The Hogarth Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1975). Logic, Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences. Trans. W. Wallace. Clarendon Press.
Heidegger, M. (1967). What Is a Thing? Trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and V. Deutsch.
Gateway Editions.
Jakobson, R. (1978). Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. Trans. J. Mepham.
MIT Press.
Kull, K. (1999). Biosemiotics in the Twentieth Century: A View from Biology.
Semiotica, 127(1–4), 385–414.
Kull, K., Deacon, T., Emmeche, C., Hoffmeyer, J., & Stjernfelt, F. (2011). Theses
on Biosemiotics: Prolegomena to a Theoretical Biology. In Towards a Semiotic
Biology: Life Is the Action of Signs (pp. 25–41). World Scientific Publishing/
Imperial College Press.
Lacan, J. (1953/1996). The function and field of speech and language in psycho-
analysis. In J. Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, Trans. B. Fink,
H. Fink and R. Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 197–268.
Laplanche, J. (1999). Essays on Otherness. Routledge.
Laplanche, J. (2005). Deferred Action. In A. D. E. Mijolla (Ed.), International
Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (pp. 377–380). Macmillan.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. A. Lingis.
Northwestern University Press.
Piaget, J. (2014). Studies in Reflecting Abstraction. Psychology Press.
Ricoeur, P. (2003). The Rule of Metaphor. Routledge.
Saussure, F. D. (1959). Course in General Linguistics. Trans. W. Baskin.
Philosophical Library.
Sebeok, T. A. (2001). Global semiotics. Indiana University Press.
Sigel, I. E. (Ed.). (2013). Development of Mental Representation: Theories and
Applications. Psychology Press.
Von Uexküll, J. (2013). A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a
Theory of Meaning (Vol. 12). University of Minnesota Press.
CHAPTER 3
Ghosts, Metaphors, and Structures of Feeling
Abstract This chapter builds on and expands the earlier discussion of

haunted nature of meaning, as physical reality is translated into symbolic
meaning, focusing on higher-level processes of linguistic communication
and subjective experience, such as the metaphoric and metonymic modali-
ties of language, intersubjective and intergenerational transmission of
affective patterns. I draw on the theoretic discussions including the notion
of hauntology advanced by Jacques Derrida, structures of feeling outlined
by Raymond Williams, phantoms and cryptonymy by Nicolas Abraham
and Maria Torok, along with Freudian, Object Relational, and Lacanian
psychoanalytic models of ego formation to drive home the fundamental
role played by the negativity (the lack of the Thing) which, as discussed in
the last chapter, is introduced into the very structure of consciousness
from the earliest stages of production of meaning. This chapter also dis-
cusses the pantemporality of subjective experience and the relationship of
this fact to the hauntological nature of meaning, and the phenomenon of
death drive postulated by Freud. The chapter ends with a discussion of
political subjectivity and the implications of hauntological theory of expe-
rience for social and generational transmission of patterns of political
affect, as well as a brief examination of the relevance of this
An earlier version of this chapter has been published in the journal Subjectivity
(see Rahimi, 2016)

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78992-3_3
20 S. RAHIMI
conceptualization for emerging modalities of subjectivity, including net-

worked human subjectivity or the possibility of artificial subjectivity.
Keywords Metaphoricity • Metonymy • Structures of Feeling • Objet

a • Desire • Pantemporality • Death Drive • Political Affect •
Palimpsest • Intergenerational Transmission
When I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of
my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things
gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it;
dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old
half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and
night…shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.
—Virginia Woolf
In his seminal work, Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams describes

“structures of feeling” as “social experiences in solution.”1 In contradis-
tinction to “precipitated” affective experiences and semantic formations
that are immediately available to conscious interpretation, the so-called
structures of feeling exert a true influence on a society’s general modalities
of action and affective experience while sitting “at the very edge of seman-
tic availability,”2 appearing as articulations only occasionally. Even without
delving into Williams’ discussion of these spectral “structures,” it is easy to
notice intriguing connections between the idea of structures of feeling and
such notions as hauntology as detailed by Derrida or the crypt and cryp-
tonymy as developed by Abraham and Torok3 in addressing intergenera-
tional transmission of affective experiences. Lurking at the very edge of
conscious availability, the ghost appears occasionally to represent another
time and another place, and, when it haunts, even when it fully occupies
the ego, it is perceived as imposing its structure on the here and now of
subjective experience from the outside of the now and the here. While the
double for instance can be seen as the figuration of individual, internal and
intra-psychic processes,4 the ghost is the manifestation of an affectively
charged figuration borne of the collective, external and inter-psychic pro-
cesses and representing the structural configurations of another time and
hence another place—a fact that further highlights their relevance to the
notion of structures of feeling.
3 GHOSTS, METAPHORS, AND STRUCTURES OF FEELING 21
Sitting at the heart of this general discussion are at least three basic
features that appear unanimously in Williams, Derrida, and Abraham and
Torok. First, in all three accounts the lingering figurations by definition
defy both the assumption that subjective experience is centered within the
individual and the assumption that experience takes place and is completed
in a given moment in time. “In most description and analysis,” says
Williams, “culture and society are expressed in an habitual past tense. The
strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is this
immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products.”5
Second, all three accounts locate the ghostly structures deep within mean-
ing systems: structures of meaning including language and text provide
the primary medium through which pre-emergent affective structures6
and ghosts of all varieties find their ways from the past of the collective
history into the present of subjective experience. While Williams’ account
is explicitly constructed around literary analysis, Abraham and Torok’s
psychoanalytic account also locates the ghostly structures of affect buried
in text, so that the analyst’s task becomes “to excavate in a text a system of
expressive traces that betray the existence of a crypt and a phantom in the
subject,” and to investigate “subterranean expressive traces [that] work
against signification and undermine the apparent meaning of the text.”7
Derrida too, arguing in a related vein, insists that the “character’s secret,”
the ghost, does not exist outside of the text. There is no substance outside
the literary phenomena. The strange secret of the text is that everything is
secret in it, and yet there is no secret behind it.8 Or as Davis puts it, the
ghost’s secret needs to be thought of as “the structural openness or address
directed towards the living by the voices of the past or the not-yet formu-
lated possibilities of the future.”9 Finally a third common point in all three
accounts is that they all lead to a conceptualization of meaning, experi-
ence, and therefore subjectivity as such as fundamentally “haunted” pro-
cesses that are never simple, never limited to a basic “here and now,” and
which always expand beyond the edges of direct social, semantic, semiotic,
or psychological accessibility. A relationship of haunting, asserts Derrida,
is “constitutive of every logic.”10 All meaning is therefore haunted, and all
stories are ghost stories, as Wolfreys puts it, “to tell a story is always to
invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns.”11
I have chosen to open this chapter by laying side by side Williams’
structures of feelings and the concepts of ghosts and hauntology, mainly
to initiate the discussions with reference to the intergenerational transmis-
sion of affect and affective patterns understood in such contexts as trauma
22 S. RAHIMI
and traumatic experiences, class-based patterns of affective experience, or

simply social attitudes and political affect. A major motivation for the rise
of interest in the notion of subjectivity in social and psychological litera-
ture has been the failure of traditional theories of the person to anticipate
social behavior and political affect.12 If the failure of traditional theories
can be attributed to the inability of those theories to recognize and effec-
tively incorporate on the one hand the collective (read political) and on
the other hand the temporal (the historical as well as the imaginary) in
their formulation of the human subject, its desire and its affect, then the
search for a theory of the subject capable of accommodating those dimen-
sions would seem only reasonable.
While a strong and growing stream across social sciences and humani-
ties has already carved a visible track for the understanding of subject and
subjective experience in terms of collective processes such as meaning and
power, theories capable of incorporating the multi-temporal nature of
subjectivity and subjective experience are yet to emerge and flourish. To
be fair, grand Hegelian narratives notwithstanding, a line of down-to-
earth and research-driven debates on analytic approaches to the temporal-
ity of human experience in the framework of “structure” has continued to
survive, at least in the margins. Unfortunately, however, many of these
theories have remained limited for the most part to a discussion of such
basic questions as whether a social or semiotic system should be approached
as a synchronic or a diachronic phenomenon, typically starting from a
position based on a mutually exclusive synchronic/diachronic opposition.
In the following pages I will argue for a reconsideration of the notions
of diachronicity and synchronicity specifically concerning the questions of
subjectivity and temporality as an aspect of human subjectivity. I will con-
struct my arguments on the basis of a conceptualization of individual sub-
jectivity as an articulation/enunciation of collective systems such as politics
and language; and a conceptualization of the psychic apparatus as funda-
mentally atemporal, or more accurately, pantemporal. Based on this I will
suggest that the notion of diachronicity and its usage in analysis of and
working with human experience should be liberated from the reductive
binary model that either searches for the expression or revelation of a
structured totality that unfolds in time, or investigates meaning systems as
flat, static structures complete in “now” and independent of the flow of
time. Instead, I will argue, we need to understand the fundamental pan-
temporality of subjective experience—and of meaning systems as the
immediate domains of subjective experience, as opposed to meaning
systems as linguistic systems abstracted from the living experience of the

subject—and to develop our theories and our analyses of experience and
subjectivity accordingly. We need, in other words, to understand and
incorporate into our formulation of subjective experience the fact that
meaning as such is always-already haunted, and that we need to reformu-
late the two main outcomes of semiosis, namely temporality and desire,
accordingly.
Desire, Meaning, and Time

The following quotation from the Austrian theologian, Friedrich von
Hügel,13 which Victor Turner once used to conclude a lecture on what he
called “images of anti-temporality” would serve us as an apt point of entry
into this question. Von Hügel wrote:
Eternal Life, in the fullest thinkable sense, involves three things –the plenti-
tude of all goods and of all energizings that abide; the entire self-
consciousness of the Being Which constitutes and Which is expressed by all
these goods and energizings; and the pure activity, the non-successiveness,
the simultaneity, of this Being in all It has, all It is. Eternal Life, in this sense,
precludes not only space, not only clock time- that artificial chain of mutu-
ally exclusive, ever equal moments, but even duration, time as actually expe-
rienced by man, with its overlapping, interpenetrating successive stages …
The Simultaneity is here the fullest expression of … the unspeakable
Concreteness … and is at the opposite pole from all empty unity … any or
all abstractions whatsoever.14
I don’t intend to address the topics of temporality and atemporality

from a metaphysical point of view, nor even a philosophical one for that
matter. Indeed one point that I would hope to at least implicitly drive
home is the need for freeing the notion of atemporality from those exotic
domains and bringing it into the very heart of the daily experience of
human life, where social, political, ethnographic, and clinical inquiries
typically look for their material. To put this in other words, rather than
addressing such questions as the nature of time, whether it is continuous
or discrete, or whether it is real or illusory, I addresses what Hegel termed
“human time” or “historical time.” What I am interested in addressing is
the question of temporality and atemporality as experienced by the human
mind, and the implications of that modality of experience for research and
24 S. RAHIMI
analysis, and more importantly for this book, its relevance to the notion of
hauntology as an “everyday” process.
The excerpt Turner chose to quote from von Hügel addresses two
notions that are fundamental in a discussion of human temporality. The
first is what he terms “unspeakable concreteness,” and the second, stand-
ing in opposition to the first, he describes as “any abstraction whatsoever.”
The evolutionary graph I discussed earlier and the trajectory of abstraction
vs. concreteness aside, anyone familiar with the Lacanian school of psycho-
analysis would be well aware of the significance these same two concepts
hold in Lacan’s thought, albeit articulated under the rubrics of “the real”
and “the symbolic.” Once juxtaposed with that frame of reference (a jux-
taposition that does not require a real stretch of either idea, and thus
elaboration here), we can simply read von Hügel to be stating that time is
a product of symbolization, or in any case that time exists only within the
order of the symbolic.15
The idea that temporality is a product of symbolization and meaning-
making is both the basic point of departure for my discussion and a guid-
ing principle. Before entering the discussion, however, it may be useful to
set up another basic point of reference through another highly abbreviated
account of the originary trajectory of the human subject from a Lacanian
object relational point of view.16
Briefly (and again, not unrelated to the evolutionary graph I mentioned
in the earlier chapter), the so-called trajectory can be thought to start with
the serene, relatively static, and unconscious state of existence of the fetus
growing as a purely physical/biological extension of the body of the
mother, followed by a course of development culminating in a fundamen-
tal and violent separation from the mother’s body initiated through a trau-
matic passage into the harsh and dynamic external world of sensations,
images, objects, and eventually ideas, and of course symbols, language,
subjects, and power. As humans we therefore start our individual journey
from materiality to subjectivity with a package deal built around a pro-
found separation/loss, a traumatic initiation, and an urgent need to
develop novel capacities and behaviors such as breathing air, ingesting
food, perceiving and recognizing “external” images and objects, and mak-
ing noises and gestures to represent and to communicate our inner experi-
ences, in order to survive through various levels of interaction with the
material and the symbolic environments.
The “internal” force of biological survival appears to command and
unfold its ways (from breathing air, ingestion of food and expulsion of
feces, to crying and the range of pre-symbolic interactions) almost regard-

less of what else may be taking place in the environment. Yet that same
internal force eventually conjoins the pre-existing external forces of the
social realm (expressed through language and other symbolic structures),
and together these two forces lead the human infant to submit to and to
“internalize” cognitive and behavioral systems of meaningful action and
communication—that is to say, to becoming a human social subject.
We can identify in this process of initiation of the infant within the
realm of meaning and social self-consciousness two tendencies in different
directions. The two tendencies are associated with and oriented on the
one hand by a fundamental “separation” (think of both the literal trajec-
tory of organic unity and eventual separation from mother’s body, and the
process of transformation of bodily sensation to symbolic and mental rep-
resentations discussed in the last chapter) and the loss and “lack” which is
created in its wake of and, and on the other hand by our species’ evolved
capacity to transform/replace that absence into the experience of a lost
“object” (remember das Ding) and re-creating (representing) that “imag-
ined” lost object within a realm of abstractions, the realm of symbolic
reality, or meaning. Due to their seemingly differing orientations,17 these
two forces push or pull in different directions: one continuously “urges”
or “pushes” the subject to venture further and further into the symbolic
realm, or, in von Hügel’s language, to the realm of “empty unity and
abstraction,” while the other constantly “harks” or “pulls” the subject
back toward an imaginary silent “home” of unmediated presence—what
von Hügel termed “unspeakable concreteness.” These two forces are two
basic elements that need to be deeply understood and theorized in devel-
oping a sense for the role of temporality in human experience, and in
outlining a hauntological theory of subjective experience. Let’s take a
closer look.
The first force, born out of loss and manifested in the dynamics of
abstraction and symbolization, is the force that drives the subject cease-
lessly forward “in time,” chasing after the ever elusive goal of reaching or
reuniting with the lost object (arriving at satisfaction in various aspects of
life, or arriving at a final and complete meaning in understanding of the
self or the world). The missing “thing” is not an “actual” lost object of
course, insofar as the so-called lost object itself is a product of the appear-
ance of imagination and symbolization—again, think both the organic
development of the infant’s ego, and the semiotic emergence/expression
of meaning and language. In both cases, the “Thing” in question is an
26 S. RAHIMI
always-already abstracted and represented lost object which is continu-

ously reproduced through the projection of our lack of and hence our
desire for it onto the world, in the fashion of a mirage—a mirage that, like
any mirage, will never actually stand still and wait for us to reach it, because
it does not really “exist,” and so it can never be captured. I will return to
this notion in more detail later (see Chap. 4) in discussing objet a. This is
the process that Lacan is speaking about when he writes, “symbol mani-
fests itself first of all as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the
endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire,”18 or to go further back to the
original idea, this is what Hegel means when he suggests, “all conceptual
understanding is equivalent to a murder.”19
Note that what I have just described includes a number of references to
movement. Movement is a significant aspect of this force, in at least two
respects: in the linguistic sense of the slippage of meaning, and in the psy-
choanalytic sense of the deference of desire. This is one field of subjective
experience in which the private/psychological and the collective/linguis-
tic coincide, specifically in terms of the continuous push of desire and the
“movement” of meaning. The movement of meaning, or the “slippage of
the signified” as Lacan put it,20 is the incessant escape of the desired mean-
ing through chains of metonymic association, and our continuous mental
movement after the eternally deferred Meaning and its promise of the
Truth. The psychological expression of this effect we term desire, and the
linguistic effect is best captured under the rubric of metonymy. This also
appears to be where the human experience of temporality is born. As a
matter of fact, Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel21 offers a very clear
and useful interpretation of the interconnectedness of desire, symbolic
projection, and time, which merits quoting in some detail before moving
on to the linguistic interpretation of this account in terms of the logic of
metonymy. Hegel, says Kojève,22 argues that human subject’s time (which,
as mentioned earlier, he calls historic time, as opposed to biological or
cosmic time) is characterized by the primacy of the future in its construc-
tion. He writes:
In the Time that pre-Hegelian Philosophy considered, the movement went

from the Past toward the Future, by way of the Present. In the Time of
which Hegel speaks, on the other hand, the movement is engendered in the
Future and goes toward the Present by way of the Past. And this is indeed
the specific structure of properly human —that is, historical—Time. In fact,
let us consider the phenomenological (or better, anthropological) projection
of this metaphysical analysis of Time. The movement engendered by the

Future is the movement that arises from Desire. This means: from specifi-
cally human Desire –that is, creative Desire—that is, Desire that is directed
toward an entity that does not exist and has not existed in the real natural
World. Only then can the movement be said to be engendered by the
Future, for the Future is precisely what does not (yet) exist and has not
(already) existed… As a matter of fact, Desire is the presence of an absence:
I am thirsty because there is an absence of water in me. It is indeed, then,
the presence of a future in the present: of the future act of drinking….The
being that acts thus, therefore, is in a Time in which the Future takes pri-
macy. And inversely, the Future can really take primacy only if, in the real
(spatial) world, there is a being capable of acting thus….Now, if Desire is the
presence of an absence, it is not –taken as such—an empirical reality: it does
not exist in a positive manner in the natural – i.e., spatial—Present. On the
contrary, it is like a gap or a “hole” in Space: an emptiness, a nothingness….
Desire that is related to Desire, therefore, is related to nothing. To “realize”
it, therefore, is to realize nothing. In being related only to the Future, one
does not come to a reality, and consequently one is not really in motion…
therefore, in order to realize itself, Desire must be related to a reality; but it
cannot be related to it in a positive manner. Hence it must be related to it
negatively. Therefore Desire is necessarily the Desire to negate the real or
present given. And the reality of Desire comes from the negation of the
given reality. Now, the negated real is the real that has ceased to be: it is the
past real, or the real Past…Therefore, generally speaking: the historical
movement arises from the Future and passes through the Past in order to
realize itself in the Present or as temporal Present. The Time that Hegel has
in view, then, is human or historical Time: it is the Time of conscious and
voluntary action which realizes in the present a Project of the future, which
Project is formed on the basis of knowledge of the past.23
What is detailed by Kojève here lies at the core of Lacan’s semiotic con-
ceptualization of desire—and of temporality. It includes the role of met-
onymic force in the dynamics of lack and the projection of the desired
within the symbolic realm through the function of metonymy, but also the
role of the metaphoric function, though it is not explicitly detailed here.
“Metonymic structure,” says Lacan, indicates “the signifier-to-signifier
connection that allows for the elision by which the signifier instates lack of
being [le manque de l’être] in the object-relation, using signification’s
referral [renvoi] value to invest it with the desire aiming at the lack that it
supports.”24 With Lacan, Hegel, and Derrida, here we are at the center of
where it all happens. It is this close understanding of the formation of
28 S. RAHIMI
desire and the role of the “lost” object which allows an appreciation of the
true sense of hauntology as a descriptive formulation of meaning, time,
and subjective experience as such—a hauntology that is relevant not just
to grand events and traumatized minds, but to the everyday human expe-
rience of time and meaning.
The Metonymic Function

The basic idea of movement as an aspect of symbolization and expressed
through the metonymic function directly associates the metonymic func-
tion with time and temporality, in multiple respects. Temporality of sub-
jective experience is born out of the symbolization process not only in
terms of the production/projection of the future and thus the establish-
ment of the “future-past-present” cycle (which is of course experienced as
a linear past-present-future by the subject), but also in terms of the intro-
duction of a sense of a lost object in the past tense on the one hand, and
the repeated deferral into future of meaning across the chain of signifiers
on the other; as well as both the physical and syntactical expressions of the
metonymic function, namely that it is only through the unfolding in time
of meaning along sets and units of signification, such as a sentence, a
word, or even a phoneme, that meaning is communicated. Signification
proceeds in a linear timeline before its meaning is complete,25 a temporal-
ity that “seem[s] oddly smooth and characterless – ‘pure’ displacement,
‘pure’ continuity, a slippage or a passage that moves ahead with unstop-
pable fluency.”26 Meaning and the communication of it are possible only
in time, and this is what Lacan means when he says, “the name is the time
of the object.”27 The name, or the word, to go back to Hegel, kills the
object, but gives it time and sets the stage for its return through the
haunted meaning. Of interest in this formulation of desire, meaning, object
and subject is also an idea not examined by Kojève, but later picked up by
Lacan, namely objet a. Closely tied to das Ding in its formation and func-
tion, objet a can be understood as a projected object of desire which is
unreal insofar as it is a creation of fantasy, and yet real enough insofar as it
functions both as desire’s point of reference (or its cause, as Lacan likes to
put it) in future, and as the pivot around which meaning is anchored.
Objet a’s unique ontology (its hauntology, to be precise) lends itself
directly to a powerful formulation of ghosts and the phenomenon of
haunting as caused by abrupt disruptions of objet a, which I will address in
the next chapter.
To recap the basic points of interest here then, a projective force is rec-
ognizable in the metonymic function of the order of signification, and the
ever-lasting slippage away of the object cause of desire through an endless
deferral of meaning on the axis of metonymy. This is precisely what Lacan
means when he asserts boldly that “desire is a metonymy.”28 This is also
the ultimate “deception” of the symbolic order, whose endless labyrinth
we naively and eagerly spend our lives searching for the lost “beloved,” to
borrow from poetic and religious terminology—the beloved that never
was, indeed whose very existence has become possible through our capac-
ity to produce and to engage the so-called labyrinth. This is the force that
has pushed us forward to create more and more complicated mazes of
ideas and concepts, to philosophize, to think up more lofty and more
intricate logical edifices, with the insatiable hope/desire of someday some-
how arriving at the lost object of our imagination, typically personified in
utopian terms such as paradise, love, happiness, justice, freedom, the class-
less society, the pure society, et cetera.
The Metaphoric Function

Let us consider now what I described earlier as a second force. This force
functions and pulls in what appears as a radically different direction, by the
fascinating effect of “cutting” or “jumping” through the layers of signifi-
cation, and offering the promise of thus connecting us in an immediate
fashion to that which we have lost, and which we somehow experience as
belonging in “the past” and located in “the deep.” This second function
is different from the metonymic function in that, rather than urging to go
further and to construct more complex layers of abstraction in search of
that which we have supposedly lost, it harks back to a mysterious place
associated more with depth than height, more with darkness than light,
with past than future, with nostalgia than anticipation, and, to go back
again to von Hügel, with the concrete than with the abstract. This second
force can be recognized at work in what Lacan identifies as the metaphoric
function, which differs from the metonymic function primarily in terms of
its relationship to the real: “no one,” insists Lacan, “has yet validly articu-
lated what links metaphor to the question of being, and metonymy to its
lack.”29 The very fact that such a question should arise, however, is suffi-
ciently telling for the purposes of our discussion, namely the divergent
“directions” of the two forces: whereas metonymy unfolds in time and
constitutes the death of the object, metaphor offers to somehow “link
30 S. RAHIMI
back” to the lost object, and promises the timeless. Little wonder that
metaphor so often serves across literary genres as a favorite gateway for
ghosts to return and haunt—literally or metaphorically.
Metaphor, believes Lacan, functions like a “spark,” leaping across two
signifiers that are not otherwise associated, and in so doing it cuts across
the linear relations that govern the metonymic system. But more impor-
tantly, metaphor also breaks through the “bar” that separates the signifier
from the signified, the subject from its experience.30 What is most rele-
vantly significant about this aspect of metaphor is that in its performance
it breaches the boundaries of the purely symbolic register and reaches
through the so-called imaginary order toward von Hügel’s total concrete-
ness, or the real, as Lacan would name it. You may recall from the last
chapter that this resonates clearly with the more basic function served by
phonemes as they bridge the bodily order to the linguistic order to make
possible the linguistic function as such. Metaphors seem to perform a sim-
ilar bridging task, albeit at a higher level of organization. Like the phone-
mic function which serves as both constituent and a gateway for the
“ghost” of the thing to haunt meaning, the metaphoric function serves as
both constituent and a gateway for the ghost of the lost object (of imagi-
nation and desire) to haunt the subject’s thought and experience.
Ricoeur, even though looking at metaphors from a substantially differ-
ent angle, describes them in terms directly relevant to and resonant with
this formulation. “Thanks to its character as half thought and half experi-
ence,” he writes in The Role of Metaphor, “metaphor joins the light of
sense with the fullness of the image.” And he goes on to add, “in this way,
the non-verbal and the verbal are firmly united at the core of the image-
ing function of language.”31 What Ricoeur addresses in this formulation is
a fundamental aspect of metaphor that makes possible its role in a process
through which meaning is completed—the same process through which
the quality of pantemporality is introduced into the otherwise linear tem-
porality of the metonymic function. That fundamental aspect is due to the
amphibian or liminal nature of metaphor: it simultaneously belongs to the
symbolic and the imaginary orders of perception. In fact Ricoeur later
dedicated a full article to expanding on this basic quality of the metaphoric
process.32 He insists that the nature of metaphor constitutes a case against
the “well-established dichotomy” between “sense” as the objective con-
tent of an expression and “representation” as the “mental actualization …
in the form of image and feeling.”33
Thanatos and Eros

Before examining the relevance of metonymic and metaphoric functions
to the question of pantemporality in more detail, another feature of this
dichotomy merits mention, namely its apparent coincidence with Freud’s
famous yet less understood binary, Thanatos and Eros. A detailed com-
parative examination would fall beyond the interest of my discussion, but
the way in which the two binary pairs can be readily tied to each other is
sufficiently significant (and evident) to be addressed in passing. Here is
how Freud originally introduced the idea:
On the basis of theoretical considerations, supported by biology, we put

forward the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead
organic life back into the inanimate state; on the other hand, we supposed
that Eros, by bringing about a more and more far-reaching combination of
the particles into which living substance is dispersed, aims at complicating
life and at the same time, of course, at preserving it.34
At the first glance this passage appears to coincide quite seamlessly with
the two forces I have described in terms of the metonymic and metaphoric
functions: the metaphoric function seems to coincide with Thanatos or
the “death instinct,” pulling as it does toward an origin of concrete, life-
less serenity; while the metonymic function sounds like another way of
describing Eros, the “life instinct” continuously producing “more and
more far-reaching combination of the particles.” In fact elsewhere Freud
speaks still more specifically of this binary opposition between a force that
pushes toward complexity and abstraction, and one that pushes toward a
return to the original state of concrete substance (and let’s not ignore the
strong resonance here with Von Uexküll). Freud writes:
The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the
action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception. It may perhaps
have been a process similar in type to that which later caused the develop-
ment of consciousness in a particular stratum of living matter. The tension
which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeav-
ored to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the
instinct to return to the inanimate state.35
We would be well advised of course to avoid rash leaps here. It is impor-

tant, for instance, to recall that both the metaphoric and the metonymic
32 S. RAHIMI
functions come to exist and function within the realm of the symbolic (the
“Janusian” function of metaphor notwithstanding), while Eros and
Thanatos have to be conceptualized as primal processes far predating the
appearance of the (human) symbolic order. Given the clear parallelism
between the structural functions and directions of the two forces, how-
ever, it does appear safe to hypothesize the metaphoric and metonymic
forces as counterparts to Thanatos and Eros respectively, within the regis-
ter of abstractions. In other words, while the metonymic force may be
understood as the expression of the negative (see Kojève above) through
the function of Eros, the metaphoric force can be thought of as the expres-
sion of the negative through the function of Thanatos. If such formulation
appears too paradoxical to hold, it might be helpful to recall Freud’s own
assertion that “the aim of all life is death”36 and compare that with the
earlier description here, that both the metaphoric and the metonymic
forces are indeed aiming at a return to the “original” state. The paradox,
it seems, is integral to the process in a fundamental way.
Elsewhere, in Civilization and its Discontents, Freud sets the basic force
that causes the development of the ego and leads to the creation of law,
order, and civilization as such, against a second force that draws some to
“a sensation of eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded,
something oceanic.”37 In fact Freud uses the coexistence of the two ten-
dencies and the two modalities of experience to outline a pantemporal38
psychic apparatus in which “the original type of feeling survives alongside
the later one.”39 He goes into some length to argue for the existence of
such pantemporality by drawing analogies from the simultaneous presence
of qualities belonging to various stages of evolution/history in the same
species or the same place. He uses the powerful imagery of “the Timeless
City” to drive the point home: “the fantastic supposition that Rome were
not a human dwelling-place, but a mental entity with just as long and
varied a past history: that is, in which nothing once constructed had per-
ished, and all the earlier stages of development had survived alongside the
latest.”40
The “creative spark” of metaphor, elaborates Lacan, is not created by
the simple juxtaposition of two images or two signifiers. The spark flashes,
he says, “between two signifiers, one of which has replaced the other by
taking the other’s place in the signifying chain, the occulted signifier
remaining present by virtue of its (metonymic) connection to the rest of
the chain.”41 Consider the idea that an “occulted signifier” remains “pres-
ent” through the new signifier, and the implications of this in terms of
temporality, in the sense that something of the supposedly bygone past

remains present outside of the expected flow of time—leaving us little
choice but to think about ghosts and haunting.
The Haunted Metaphor

In a separate remark paralleling the assertion I mentioned earlier, that
“desire is a metonymy,” Lacan also asserts “the symptom is a metaphor”42
or elsewhere, “metaphor [is] but a synonym for the symbolic displacement
brought into play in the symptom.”43 Compacted in these statements is a
formulation that connects metaphor directly to repressed concepts, expe-
riences and memories, and more generally to ghosts, to times out of joint,
and a past that is present. As indicated earlier in passing, the idea of pres-
ent pasts had been expressed powerfully by Freud on numerous occasions
where he insisted on the pantemporality (atemporality, to use his own
words) of the psychic apparatus. He writes in Civilization and Its
Discontents:
Since the time when we recognized the error of supposing that ordinary
forgetting signified destruction or annihilation of the memory-trace, we
have been inclined to the opposite view that nothing once formed in the
mind could ever perish, that everything survives in some way or other, and
is capable under certain conditions of being brought to light again, as, for
instance, when regression extends back far enough.44
What Lacan’s work has made possible for us, however, is a closer and
clearer formulation of the mechanics of this pantemporality, specifically in
linguistic and semiotic terms, and specifically through the intersections of
the metaphoric and metonymic functions. To go back to Ricoeur, the
major function of metaphor is creating a shortcut in the temporal/spatial
distance between two terms:
It is as though a change of distance between meanings occurred within a

logical space. The new pertinence or congruence proper to a meaningful
metaphoric utterance proceeds from the kind of semantic proximity which
suddenly obtains between terms in spite of their distance. Things or ideas
which were remote appear now as close . . . [a] move or shift in the logical
distance, from the far to the near.45
34 S. RAHIMI
Insofar as the psychological functions are concerned then, specifically

insofar as “feelings” are directly associated with and connected to these
semiotic “terms” that metaphor magically ties to one another, the meta-
phoric function constitutes a semi-permeable passage through which “the
past” is able to invade or possess the present at any given time. This is
precisely what makes the psychoanalytic function of transference, this
most basic function observable in the clinical setting, possible. On the
other hand, what constantly resists and stops such invasion of the past
from a full takeover of the present is the force of the syntactic cohesion of
language/thought held together through “chains” of signification. The
primary force of binding that links the terms of these so-called chains
together is provided through the metonymic function, which constantly
“struggles” to avoid, to cover, and to deny the existence of the real as that
which calls from the past and the depth of language through the imagi-
nary. Ironically, of course, the metonymic function alone is not capable of
holding the system of thought and meaning together in the live sense that
is experienced by the subject, it is only with the intervention of the meta-
phoric function that the ensemble of language as a combination of la
langue and parole46 is mobilized, specifically around objet a and through
the anchoring function of points de capiton.47 To recap then, metonymy
functions on the horizontal axis,48 works/unfolds through time, sustains
the experience of linear temporality, and perpetuates the work/flow of
desire in a never ending deferral of sense; while metaphor functions on the
vertical axis, cuts/jumps through experienced temporality, is closely asso-
ciated with the psychic functions of condensation, repression, and trans-
ference, and acts as a time tunnel or a palimpsest always-already
“symptomatic,” always-already haunted.
It would be useful to reiterate here the basic feature of metaphor that is
central to this discussion, namely that metaphors are simultaneously lin-
guistic tropes and seats of experience. Metaphor, according to Ricoeur,
achieves a modality of “fusion” between “sense [meaning] and sensa
[sense data]”49 or of “sense and the imaginary”50 or, as he elaborates else-
where, of “thinking and feeling.”51 To translate Ricoeur’s idea into the
Lacanian triadic model, we can say metaphor has two faces, one of which
appears in the realm of the imaginary, the other in the realm of the sym-
bolic. This is exactly why and how for Lacan “symptom is a metaphor,” in
the sense that it is not simply a representation of a psychic fact or past
experience, it is simultaneously a representation (of the past) and an expe-
rience (in presence). Or to go back to Victor Turner’s work, this is the
feature that allows the “anti-temporal stretch” of liminality to function as

metaphor, to connect the two realms of the temporal and ordered (the
symbolic) and the atemporal and not ordered according to the norms
(imaginary), and also to invest signifiers with “other” meanings.52 Let us
remember here also that for Lacan one of metaphor’s major functions is
condensation: “what Freud calls condensation is what in rhetoric one calls
metaphor.”53 Calling to mind Freud’s work on the pantemporality of con-
densation (as in his discussion of the Timeless City, etc.), we seem to have
arrived at a model capable of detailing the mechanics by which the quality
of pantemporality becomes possible in an otherwise linear process of sig-
nification and subjective experience, and along with it, the inescapably
haunted nature of meaning and subjective experience. We are, in other
words, at the point of making better sense of Virginia Woolf’s
lamentation:
When I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my
life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far,
gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too,
things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts
who keep up their hauntings by day and night…shadows of people one
might have been; unborn selves.54
Walter Benjamin says in one of his typically powerful observations,

“allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of
things.”55 Let us not miss the point that allegory is a supreme form of
metaphor. Allegory, says Craig Owen, is “defined as a single metaphor
introduced in continuous series.”56 And let us also keep in mind that alle-
gory literally means “the other speaking.”57 It is, in other words, the
repressed voice of an “other” signifier that haunts the signifier to turn it
into a metaphor. Allegory, that elongated metaphor, says Owens, is “an
attitude as well as a technique,” “a perception as well as a procedure.”58
This is the function that renders metaphoricity an important point of
interest in research, treatment and analysis of subjective experience as fun-
damentally haunted.
36 S. RAHIMI
Political Affect
Due to its linguistic nature, metaphor also serves the important purpose of
anchoring the subjective experience within the collective frame of refer-
ence. Lest we should forget, a “competition” between the metonymic and
the metaphoric forces, said Jakobson “is manifest in any symbolic process,
be it intrapersonal or social.”59 No less significantly, however, due to its
unique temporal disposition as a palimpsest, metaphor also holds the sub-
ject and subjective experience afloat in a pantemporal universe where all
past is always present. One feature of metaphor that becomes clear from
these facts is that the past that inhabits metaphor is not simply the personal
past or the past of speech (parole), but also the collective past, the past of
language (la langue). This significant feature takes us back to the discus-
sions with which this chapter opened, namely the hauntological natures of
political affect and intergenerational transmission of affect.
In his book, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic,
John Protevi proposes to develop a way to think of human subjects as
simultaneously collective and emotional but also individual and rational,
by using the notions of “political physiology” and “political affect.”60 The
notion of political physiology, he explains, submerges the field of “affec-
tive neuroscience” into a political context that recognizes “emergent
social groups” and other “heterogeneous assemblages” above and along-
side the subject.61 Building strongly on the texts and theoretic models of
Gilles Deleuze, Protevi suggests politics intersects with psychology and
physiology via a “socially embedded and somatically embodied affective
cognition.”62 The somatic, in other words, plays a central role in Protevi’s
understanding of the political and the affective. The affective is somatically
based, and the political reaches and shapes the affective not through the
symbolic system, but through the structuration of the somatic (hence the
foundational place of “political physiology”). Even though in first glance
Protevi’s work seems to resonate closely and lend direct support to the
notions of political subjectivity and political affect as formulated here, a
closer look will show some conflicting premises, which may be helpful to
clarifying my point here. One of the ways in which Protevi’s approach
contradicts what I am outlining here is explicitly stated in Political Affect.
After describing his stance as one based on the “neomaterialist standpoint
of Deleuze,” he emphasizes that such a standpoint requires “that we turn
away from a postphenomenological stance in which the real is only a ret-
rojected effect of entering signifying systems.”63 While Protevi’s reference
in this passage is most likely to the line of work and ideas associated with
Don Ihde’s postphenomenology and techno-bodies,64 it collides also with
the underlying premises here, specifically those formulated within a
Lacanian model of the relationship between the real, the imaginary, and
the symbolic registers. The contrast becomes sharp around the role of the
symbolic order and various semiotic mechanisms in formation of experi-
ence and subjectivity, and hence the formulation of the ways in which
temporality, power, and the political find their ways into the subjective and
the experiential, specifically within the framework of hauntology.
Protevi’s work is by far too intricate to be briefly reacted to here, and
too sophisticated to be simply set up in contrast to an aspect of my discus-
sions here, but I have nonetheless decided to address it because it provides
an important point of reference for anyone interested in this rapidly evolv-
ing conversation on subjectivity and political affect. Whereas in the con-
text of my work65 subjectivity is the point of interest for studying the
relationship between the political, the psychological, and the historical,
Protevi clearly claims that when it comes to basic affect “the conscious
subject is bypassed in favor of an immediate link between a social trigger
and a somatic mechanism.”66 The political, in this model, influences sub-
jectivity not through higher level symbolic (semiotic, linguistic, etc.)
mechanisms, but by directly impacting the body and “triggering” affects
through its somatic impact. As I have discussed in the last chapter, the
somatic undoubtedly continues to exert an influence within the symbolic
realm, but the key difference would be that its influence is exerted through
forces of spectrality, and via the hauntological nature of meaning, as we
have seen for instance in examining phonemes and metaphors. The attri-
bution of a direct interaction between the somatic and the political, how-
ever, is what Protevi calls “my claim to originality,” and describes in terms
of grounding individual rights and common good in “affective cognition
as the sense-making of bodies politic rather than in a rational cognitive
subject as the political subject.”67
In short, while the notion of political affect as developed by Protevi
clearly recognizes the formative role of structures of power in the work of
affect, the idea of political affect as outlined here remains distinct from
Protevi’s, at least insofar as the nature and mechanisms of its politicality
are concerned. Having said that, it is worth mentioning that some recent
lines of work, such as Lisa Blackman’s intriguing notion of “immaterial
body”68 seem to go a long way in addressing precisely the gaps between
these two modalities—keep in mind the emphasis placed here on the role
38 S. RAHIMI
of metaphor and its nature, as it ties the somatic to the symbolic via the
spectral—an emphasis that may connect the two models in more ways
than meets the eye.
The notion of affect as used here could perhaps be understood most
accurately in terms employed by Raymond Williams, as he formulated his
notion of “structures of feeling” as a collectively informed (infra)structure
that regulates our subjective modes of experience and modalities of par-
ticipation in social processes. Significantly, this approach would bypass the
discussion of what precisely constitutes affect, to address the mechanisms
involved in the formation of affect, and hence of subjective experience.
Structures of feeling in Williams view are “social experiences in solution,
as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipi-
tated and are more evidently and more immediately available.”69 As the
discussion brings us back to the questions of hauntology and transmission
of affect, I would like also to make an undeservedly brief mention of the
work of Mark Fisher here, in which we can find the beginnings of an ideal
convergence of these themes of interest toward a more comprehensive
model for hauntology.
Networked Subjectivity and Virtual Agency

In his brilliant treatment of what one might think of as a stoppage of rapid
change, and an abrupt end to the twentieth century’s defining fantasy of
“progress,” Mark Fisher traces a picture of the twenty-first century as a
haunted era, one in which a more or less finite set of structures of feeling
continue to be reproduced by each coming generation, as if haunted by a
history that has just fallen victim to its unanticipated end—to the cancel-
lation of its future. The reliance of contemporary artists on styles and
modalities that have been established long times ago, he says, is an indica-
tion of the fact that “the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostal-
gia.”70 Due to the fundamental changes in the very structure of our
subjective experience caused specifically by new technologies and post-
capitalist modes of production, culture has “lost its ability to grasp and
articulate the present,” he believes.71 I would suggest it is this very capac-
ity of “grasping and articulating the present” that has always enabled cul-
ture to produce unique and temporally distinct sets of structures of affect,
which would serve in turn to produce the internal, subjective experience
of movement in time and the unfolding of history. It is also due to this
specific dysfunction of culture (as the source and holder of sign systems,
and hence as the “enactor” of our collective fantasies) that we are witness-
ing a breakdown of “the very distinction between past and present,” and
a social reality in which “cultural time has folded back on itself, and the
impression of linear development has given way to a strange simultane-
ity.”72 And it is in terms of this formulation of the post-capitalist state of
culture that hauntology offers the most appropriate conceptual tool in
analysis of culture and subjectivity, even as the uncanny is no longer
implied by the disjointment that is becoming the norm of our temporality.
This hauntology may no longer be associated with (or at least limited to)
the metaphysical and the supernatural, but nor is it simply a figure of
speech: this hauntology is a means of addressing one of the foundational
qualities of human subjectivity—a quality that has always lied at the core
of what it is to be human, but is now, due to new technologies of informa-
tion and new modalities of production, emerging as a defining feature of
the twenty-first-century experience of networked subjectivity.
An effective approach to conceptualization of hauntology may be found
in what Fisher calls “the agency of the virtual.”73 Such conceptualization
has direct utility in analyzing technology’s role in subjective experience,
specifically toward the development of an analytic model for the emerging
networked subjectivity, and perhaps beyond that, for conceptualization of
artificial subjectivity. I consider both the emerging phenomenon of net-
worked subjectivity and the theoretical conceptualization of artificial sub-
jectivity important topics, to which I intend to dedicate more detailed
attention in a future volume. More immediately, however, Fisher’s notion
of the agency of the virtual is also quite useful in conceptualization of
ghosts as virtual agents of structures of feeling whose agency is effectuated
not through biological/concrete existence, but through the virtual work
of culture and fantasy, specifically the work of language and the symbolic
system through such functions as metaphoricity, desire and objet a; but
also through newly available modes of virtuality due to technologies of
information, communication, and perception. It is also in precisely this
sense that we recognize the close ties of the notion of intergenerational
transmission of trauma with hauntology, structures of affect, and subjec-
tive experience. Both Freud and Marx, claimed Fisher, “had discovered
different modes of this spectral causality.”74 Recalling the two forces sug-
gested earlier, one may say that while Marx built his future-oriented the-
ory on the ghosts of things to come (as in the specter of communism,
anticipation of the effects of abstracted capital, and so on), Freud’s haunto-
logical edifice concerned itself with the past: (un)dead memories and
40 S. RAHIMI
moments, and the effect held on the present of the subject by ghosts of
the object lost to the past. With the deep entrenchment of the postmod-
ern condition in contemporary experiences of human subjectivity, it is no
longer simply through the mechanisms identified by Marx and Freud, but
more substantially through new technologies of virtuality and post-
capitalist modes of production, meaning, and consumption that the ques-
tion of hauntology gains new significance. Put in other words, it is as the
transmission of affect becomes the central (if circular and networked)
mode of (re)production of political affect and (a)historical memory in
what one might consider the event horizon of human history, that hauntol-
ogy, or the need for a hauntological understanding, rises to great urgency
unlike ever before. And it is in recognition of the emergence of new
modalities of human temporality that the notion of pantemporality of
experience moves to take the center point as a quality understanding
which is the prerequisite to developing new ways of understanding the
subject of contemporary human experience.
We have long faced accumulating evidence that the processes of inter-
generational transmission of affect, specifically unprocessed affect associ-
ated with collective experiences of strife and trauma (war, genocide,
slavery, colonialism, etc.), greatly contribute to psychological, social, and
political experiences at both group and individual levels. The lines of work
spearheaded by Byron J. Good in cultural and psychological anthropol-
ogy,75 or those by Valerie Walkerdine and Lisa Blackman in social psychol-
ogy, body, and media studies76 offer brilliant examples of such evidence. In
parallel with—and as a result of—that advancement, however, we have
also been facing the growing awareness that we do not have either theo-
retical or methodological approaches capable of accounting for the day-
to-day process of intergenerational transmission of affective and subjective
patterns; and that what we do have, such as cognitive and behavioral or
even traditional psychoanalytic models, are simply not effective or specific
enough to give us clear methodological and analytic roadmaps. In fact
basic technological and historical developments seem to have brought us
to a point that leaves no option but to take seriously the hauntological
nature of human subjectivity at large, and “the agency of the virtual,” or
at any rate, the incessant work of virtual agents in patterning our psycho-
logical processes and our political affect. We are at a point where we can
no longer ignore the need for theories and models that would enable us to
understand “the specificity of material and discursive conditions under
which lives are led,” as Walkerdine puts it, “the practices and embodied
and affective responses that ensue, the ways that those embodiments are
passed down generations, and the practices, tropes, and fantasies that both
sustain and break apart communities and families.”77 We are, in other
words, in need of a hauntological theory of the everyday life.
Insofar as the semiotic and symbolic underpinnings of the processes
addressed here constitute the foundational mechanisms of subjectivity,
this model has two basic corollaries: (1) it seamlessly connects individual
experience not simply to the personal past but also to the collective past,
and (2) it brings the theory of that relationship down to the level of every-
day life. Even without delving deeply into these two important implica-
tions, it is easy enough to see the direct relevance of this model to the
study and analysis of topics ranging from political subjectivity and inter-
generational transmission of (political) affect to issues of collective trauma,
ghosts and haunting, political group processes and impact of history on
current affairs, and more. These topics have traditionally been thought of
as “analyzable” in association with outstanding and excessive events of
history—again, in both the clinical sense of personal history and the
anthropological sense of collective history, such as great loss and mourn-
ing, personal trauma, as well as colonialism, natural disasters, wars, geno-
cides or what Michael M.J. Fischer has called “post-trauma societies.”78 A
hauntological understanding of the linguistic/semiotic underpinnings of
pantemporality as outlined here, however, makes it clear that the process
is by far more ordinary and abundant than are such grand events, insofar
as it is the very basic condition for the appearance and functioning of
meaning, time, and subjective experience. As indicated in passing here and
also hinted at by Mark Fisher’s reference to “spectral causality” in Freud,79
it is possible for instance to argue for an identification of the metaphoric
function almost directly with the process of transference, the foundational
modality of subjective experience in psychoanalytic work. The “magic”
that makes possible the function of transference is precisely the same magic
that makes possible the function of metaphor. After all, in both processes
one object, one signifier, is possessed by another and is understood in
terms of the other. “What are transferences?” asked Freud in Fragment of
an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, and he then answered himself:
[Transferences] are new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and fanta-

sies …. but they have this peculiarity which is characteristic for their species,
that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician. To put
42 S. RAHIMI
it another way: a whole series of psychological experiences are revived, not

as belonging to the past, but as applying to the person of the physician at the
present moment. Some of these transferences have a content which differs
from that of their model in no respect whatever except for substitution.
These then –to keep to the same metaphor—are merely new impressions or
reprints.80
In his later work and through abundant experience Freud realizes the
predominance of the mechanism of transference as a foundational aspect
of everyday cognition and subjective experience as such. In An
Autobiographical Study, for instance, he speaks of transference as a “uni-
versal phenomenon of the human mind” that “dominates the whole of
each person’s relations to his human environment.”81
The scope and reach of the notion of pantemporality as the phenome-
nological stage on which hauntology emerges are simply too far reaching
to exhaust here. For that same reason, however, it is also imperative that
we arrive at a robust understanding of the processes involved, that we
theorize them extensively, and that we introduce them into our analytic
methodology at a foundational level. If this chapter has made one point
only, I would want that to be the need for releasing our conceptualization
of temporality in subjective experience from the reductive synchronic-vs.-
diachronic binarism, and to consider the abundant evidence that pantem-
porality is a fundamental feature of human experience of meaning and
subjectivity. The need has become similarly inevitable, I hope, for a model
of subjectivity that liberates the subject from the binds of individual vs.
collective dualism and recognizes the subject as that which is the interface
of the two. In light of this reading, such enigmas as ghosts, haunting, and
present pasts can finally be rightly understood to be not just about exotic
places, exotic histories, excessive events, or severe psychological states, but
about here and now, about me and about you, and present at the most
basic levels of culture and history. The time, we need to learn to appreci-
ate, is always out of joint in some sense, and everything that we have to say
about the now would be grossly incomplete, until we locate and outline
that now in the presence of its numerous pasts. As the past is accountable
to the present, so the present is accountable to the past—through
the future.
Notes
1. Williams, 1977, p. 133.
2. Ibid.
3. See Abraham and Torok, 1994, 2005.
4. See Rahimi, 2013.
5. Williams, 1977, p. 128.
6. Williams, 1977.
7. Berthin, 2010, pp. 5–6.
8. Derrida, 2001a, p. 398.
9. Davis, 2007, p. 13.
10. Derrida, 2001b, p. 42.
11. Wolfreys, 2002, p. 3.
12. Blackman et al., 2008.
13. Friedrich von Hügel, aka Baron von Hügel (1852–1925), Austrian Roman
Catholic theologian.
14. Quoted in Turner, 1982, pp. 264–5.
15. I would like to emphasize once more that this and all future references to
“time” need to be read as “time as experienced by the human subject,” and
not the general concept of time as such.
16. I will refrain from discussing in great details or extensive referencing in the
interest of brevity here, but interested readers can consult for instance
Freud (1900), Jones (1948), Klein (1939, 1952, 1975), Bion (1962a, b),
Lacan (1981a, 1996), or Kristeva (1989) for elaborations on these
concepts.
17. Even though for all intents and purposes these are one and the same force,
simply expressed in different directions. Think of the two sides of a single
arch in a magnetic force field, which appear as if organized by two distinct
forces flowing in different directions.
18. Lacan, 1953, p. 262.
19. Kojève 1969, p. 140.
20. Lacan, 1957, p. 419.
21. Kojève, 1969.
22. It may be worth mentioning that this segment of Kojève’s course is sup-
posedly his re-articulation of a reading of Hegel done by yet another
Franco-Russian Hegelist, Alexandre Koyré.
23. Kojève 1969, pp. 134–6.
24. Lacan, 1957, p. 428.
25. Albeit not before the intervention of metaphor through what Lacan
termed points de capiton. See below.
26. Bowie, 1991, p. 179.
27. Lacan, 1988, p. 169.
44 S. RAHIMI
28. Lacan, 1957, p. 439.

29. Lacan, 1957, p. 439.
30. Lacan, 1957, p. 422.
31. Ricoeur, 1975, p. 253.
32. See Ricoeur (1978) The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination,
and Feeling.
33. Ricoeur, 1978, p. 144.
34. Freud, 1923, p. 40.
35. Freud, 1920, p. 32.
36. Freud, 1920, p. 32.
37. See Freud, 1929, pp. 3ff.
38. Pantemporality is not Freud’s terminology.
39. Freud, 1929, p. 3.
40. Freud, 1929, pp. 4–5.
41. Lacan, 1957, p. 422.
42. Lacan, 1957, p. 422.
43. Lacan, 1957, p. 216.
44. Freud, 1929, p. 4.
45. Ricoeur, 1978, p. 147.
46. Saussure, 1959.
47. See next chapter for further discussion.
48. The double-axes model referred to here is derived originally from the
teachings of de Saussure and used then by both Jakobson and Lacan. The
model consists of a horizontal axis, A-B, which Saussure termed the axis of
simultaneities, and a vertical axis, C-D, which he termed the axis of succes-
sions (see Saussure, 1959, pp. 78ff). Whereas the axis of simultaneities
“stands for the relations of coexisting things” (i.e. signifiers in a system of
signs), on the axis of successions “only one thing can be considered at a
time, but upon [it] are located all the things on the first axis together with
their changes” (Ibid., p. 79). The setup and theorizing of these axes and
their function have changed from Saussure to Jakobson to Lacan, and
remain a point of occasional dispute. The discussion in this text is built
around the Lacanian model.
49. Ricoeur, 1975, p. 250.
50. Ricoeur, 1975, p. 253.
51. Ricoeur, 1978, p. 147.
52. Turner, 1982, p. 250.
53. Lacan, 1981b, p. 252.
54. Woolf, 2005, p. 775
55. Benjamin, 1998, p. 178.
56. Owens, 1980, p. 72.
57. From Greek: allos (other) + -agoria (speaking).
58. Owens, 1980, p. 68.

59. Jakobson, 1956, p. 258.
60. Protevi, 2009, p. 186.
61. Protevi, 2009, p. 188.
62. Protevi, 2009, p. vii.
63. Protevi, 2009, p. vii.
64. See e.g. Ihde 1995, 2002.
65. See for instance Rahimi, 2015a, b.
66. Protevi, 2009, p. 187.
67. Protevi, 2009, p. 185.
68. E.g. Blackman, 2012; Blackman and Venn, 2010.
69. Williams, 1977, pp. 133–134.
70. Fisher, 2014, p. 30.
71. Fisher, 2014, p. 31.
72. Fisher, 2014, p. 33.
73. Fisher, 2014, p. 47.
74. Fisher, 2014, p. 47.
75. See e.g. Good, 2015, 2019; Good and DelVecchio-Good, 2008.
76. See e.g. Walkerdine, 2015; Walkerdine et al., 2013; Blackman, 2012, 2019.
77. Walkerdine, 2015, p. 169.
78. Fischer, 1991.
79. Fisher, 2014, 47.
80. Freud, 1905, p. 116.
81. Freud, 1925, p. 42.
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CHAPTER 4
The Haunted Objects of Desire
Abstract This chapter continues the examination of haunting as a foun-

dational element of the emerging subjective experience, specifically desire
and political subjectivity. The discussion here builds on and extends the
earlier chapters: Chap. 2 highlighted the ghostly traces left by concrete
substance and internal physical experience as they are rendered meaningful
through the semiotic transformation of “things” to signifiers; Chap. 3
investigated the role played by high-level linguistic processes of metapho-
ricity and metonymy in ego formation with specific reference to the notion
of death drive; and this chapter examines higher-level psychological pro-
cesses whereby semiotic and linguistic underpinnings make possible the
emergence of desire, which serves in turn as an anchoring point of inten-
tionality and social engagement for the edifice of subjectivity. I use here a
clinical example drawn from a psychotic patient’s case study to discuss the
psychoanalytic notion of objet a, aka the object cause of desire, and its
relevance to hauntology by conceptualizing the ghost as a decoupled objet
a (of an individual or a group of people, an entire era, or even a historical
past as such) which “floats” in the symbolic space because of a culturally
unsanctioned termination of the original subject. The orphaned objet a
An earlier version of this chapter has been published in the journal Ethos (see
Rahimi, 2019).

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78992-3_4
50 S. RAHIMI
lingers in the shared symbolic space seeking heed from the living—be it in
the form of personal haunting or messianic or utopian ideological desire.
Keywords Desire • Objet petit a • Subjectivity • Emanet • Lost Object

• Object Cause of Desire • Cultural transmission
Ghosts come into and pass out of being whether or not man knows of
their being, whether he gives much or little thought to them. Because of
man, ghosts exist. While man continues as a thinking being and has
desires, ghosts will continue to exist.
—H. W. Percival
British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott famously wrote, “should an adult

make claims on us for our acceptance of the objectivity of his subjective
phenomena, we discern or diagnose madness.”1 As truistic as Winnicott’s
statement may sound, however, it does not appear to hold in the case of
ghostly experiences. Even in our post-industrial societies, we do not rush
to diagnose psychosis when an adult claims to have seen or felt the pres-
ence of a ghost. There is perhaps something significant about our collec-
tive permissiveness when it comes to ghosts and haunting. The majority of
us no longer call people who claim speaking to or receiving orders from
God prophets and treat them with reverence; we are more likely to suspect
psychotic illness, and to convince or force them to undergo medical treat-
ment. But people who claim speaking or receiving messages from ghosts
of dead people continue to enjoy popular million-dollar businesses, and
TVs and internet sites are littered with highly popular fiction and reality
shows built on precisely that claim. It is perhaps also related to this same
fact that cultural and even psychological anthropologists pay generally
little attention to this real and significant phenomenon. But while in the
first casual glance ghosts may appear as insignificant oddities on the periph-
eries of our anthropological and psychological radars, a second look would
swiftly recognize them as much more significant and pervasive, as soon as
we realize the ways in which both the phenomenon and the conceptual
method we term “hauntology” connect to the most foundational pro-
cesses in human subjectivity and the psychic apparatus, as we saw in the
last chapter. Ghosts and hauntings have the extraordinary capacity of
opening on us a window straight to the core of deeply encoded messages
4 THE HAUNTED OBJECTS OF DESIRE 51
that have silently driven our social and political processes throughout his-
tory. And hauntology, as an analytic language and as a methodological
approach, holds the promise of enabling us to decode the assemblage of
our symbolic order in ways that has not been available to us thus far. In
this chapter I will address another instance of the ways in which develop-
ing a closer understanding and a more cohesive theory of ghosts and
haunting would immediately serve the objective of gaining a more robust
theory of subjectivity, and a better appreciation of the hauntological nature
of subjective experience as such.
Objet a, the Object Cause of Desire

I will use as my point of entry a story that showcases one of the founda-
tional concepts in hauntology, that is, the semiotic object cause of desire,
which, as mentioned earlier, Jacques Lacan has termed objet a.2 The story
belongs to Ahmet, whom I met in Turkey many years back during field-
work on schizophrenia and political subjectivity. Ahmet is a young Turk of
Kurdish descent who migrated with his family to Switzerland. He is
brought back to Istanbul by his family to be cured from a severe case of
junoon that the doctors in Europe have not been able to deal with. He is
hospitalized in a private psychiatric hospital in Istanbul, diagnosed with
Schizophrenia. Ahmet, however, considers himself majnoon (mecnun, in
Turkish), as do his parents. The word majnoon has three simultaneous
senses: being afflicted with junoon or madness; being struck by the invisi-
ble creatures called the jinn; and falling madly in love like Majnoon, which
is the epithet of the legendary character Qais, who lost his sanity when he
was cruelly denied access to his beloved, Layla. Becoming majnoon is a
common form of madness across the Muslim world. The jinn are ghostly
creatures living side by side of the human race on earth. They do not usu-
ally meddle with our lives and prefer to remain invisible to human eyes,
but they are real, as real as you and me, as explicitly stated in the Quran
and the Hadith,3 and confirmed by both Sunni and Shia ulama.4 Once in
a while the jinn do meddle with humans, with typically severe conse-
quences for humans, specifically insanity or junoon. The state of being
majnoon therefore indicates a juxtaposition of being struck by the jinn
and being traumatized by the (unfair) loss of a passionately desired love
object, a situation of love possession, if you like. I have unpacked the story
of Ahmet’s love possession elsewhere,5 and I will not recap that here, but
I would like to use his story to address an important feature common to
52 S. RAHIMI
his and many similar cases. That feature is the central role of desire in the
most basic patterns of haunting and possession, or to be more precise, the
role of objet a, formulated as “the object cause of desire,”6 in the forma-
tion of these experiences.
Ahmet, a 27-year-old man, was only 2 years old when his father left the
family to work in Switzerland. Two decades later he finally reunited with
his father in Switzerland, where before long he fell madly in love with “the
Swiss woman.” Things did not go too well with the Swiss woman, how-
ever, and by the end she did not seem to be as interested in Ahmet as he
was in her. She left him, and he spiraled into a psychotic nightmare replete
with Islamic characters and symbols, where God and Satan (and their
respective underlings, the angels and the jinn) collude in an ambiguous
dance, conspiring to ruin him in an uncanny space of horror where “noth-
ing is moving in the direction it is supposed to.”7
Ahmet’s story is a strong instance of the deeply intertwined and intri-
cate roles played by national and international politics, religion, and cul-
ture in shaping an individual’s personality makeup, their inherited patterns
of social and political affect, and indeed the psychological workings all the
way into their psychotic experiences. Ahmet’s and his family’s narrative
and experience of what has gone wrong in his life are generally formulated
on a culturally available semiotic grid, but, more specifically relevant to the
present discussion, they are built around the local idiom of love madness,
according to which Ahmet is now a majnoon, a narrative which is in turn
built around the notion of emanet, as I will explain below.
Ahmet’s story of his affliction begins in a time when “everything was
going well,” as he repeatedly emphasizes. But that was only “until I met
the Swiss woman.”
A: […] then I met a lady, a Swiss lady…We talked, we were nice to each
other, chatted … now in the restaurant, over there, there was one
other person. He was Satan [Şeytan]…Roki.
S: What was that?
A: Roki. He himself was Satan I mean. I mean a nation worshiping
Satan I mean. I mean the Christian world.
The plot is not too thick: Ahmet desires the Swiss woman and he is
about to have her, but Satan, represented by a man called Roki who also
represents the Christian world, steps between Ahmet and the object of his
desire, interrupts his love affair and blocks his attempt at reaching the
beloved. “From there on,” he says, “unhappiness fell between us.” From
this point on is also where his storyline becomes more intriguing as things
take a mysterious turn that leads eventually to disarray in the very order of
the universe.
A: The lady was no good for me. She constantly caused pain, pain after
pain; she made me run after her. Since then I’ve been after the thing
I left with her as emanet. If I can get it back from her, then maybe…
What I’m trying to say is that maybe millions of people know this,
but of course mankind cannot understand it. But when I get it back,
then everything will be normal again. It seems that way to me. The
world will then return to its normal standard state. Because, as long
as I don’t have it back I can never find peace. Also, the people around
me are also becoming restless and confused. The people that I know
and strangers, they are all mixed. I can’t see or find the thing that I
left with her. That is the reason why I am with the doctors, that I
am unwell.
At the center of this turn is a fascinating trope: the lost “thing,” the
emanet, which is what he now seeks in place of the Swiss woman, plays the
role of the object cause of desire—objet a. In Ahmet’s opinion, this lost
object is the cause of his madness and so long as the Swiss woman does not
return it to him, he will continue to be haunted by her memories and his
mind will remain possessed. It is easy and tempting to dismiss Ahmet’s
formulation of the cause of his love possession as psychotic talk—and his
own doctors both in Europe and in Turkey have done exactly that, after
all. But what renders his exaltation of the missing object quite difficult to
dismiss from such vantage points as cultural psychiatry or psychological
anthropology is the clear way in which this formulation recreates powerful
local cultural models including both the story of Majnoon and the notion
of junoon, as well as the prominent Islamic concept of emanet. Before I
address the notion of emanet in more detail, consider the following excerpt
where I try to gain a more concrete understanding of what he means by
“emanet”:
S There is one thing that I can’t quite understand and I want to ask
you. You said if you get your emanet back, then everything will be
straightened out.
A Yes everything will be straightened out.
S How will everything be straightened out?
54 S. RAHIMI
A It all becomes normal then. In my view everything will become nor-

mal. But as long as she has not given it back, nothing will come to its
normal state.
S Yes, so for example what will become normal?
A Life, life will become normal
S For instance?
A For example life, people always do things together, they talk, work,
struggle together. There are factories, I go back to my own work, I
work in the factory, I do this, I do that. Then it’s normal. But when
the emanet isn’t there, my environment, the surrounding that I face,
is not right, it breaks down. When I say breaks down, my environ-
ment gets disordered, and the nation breaks, no one remains peace-
ful. No, there is nothing, none. All sorrow, depression, pain. It all
piles up on top of each other. But once I get my emanet back, I will
gladly love again, from the depth of my soul. We’ll say thanks to
Allah we are saved, we are freed from this emanet thing. After that
everything will be fine, I mean good, I mean really normal…I will
find myself another woman. Understand?
S Understand.
A […] I said, I said I left emanet with you this pack of cigarettes and 10
francs, here, take this and get lost, I don’t love you anymore. Ich liebe
dich nicht. I don’t love you. I’m sorry, I have friends and family, leave
me free from shame and humiliation, and I will be thankful […] But
that emanet, give that to me, that is something very valuable, I mean
it constantly distresses me.
S Why is it so valuable?
A When I say valuable [değerli], it’s because I left it as an emanet with
her. I said, one of these days I will be in a hospital, either a hospital
or a prison, I will escape the factory. That was on my mind. Then
from there I ran off to Satan. He took the things I left…
You might be surprised—unless you are a psychoanalyst, perhaps—to

learn that, when at some point Ahmet’s family managed to convince the
so-called Swiss woman (who was understandably quite frightened by this
point) to actually come visit Ahmet and give his “emanet” back to him,
Ahmet refused to meet with her and said he no longer wanted or needed
his emanet back. Of course he then picked up the emanet discourse once
again, as soon as the literal possibility of acquiring the “actual” object [a
half pack of cigarettes and a coin of ten Swiss francs] no longer existed.
“They assure themselves,” wrote Kristeva in an insightful discussion of the

lost objet and its melancholic seekers, “of an inaccessible…ascendancy
over the archaic object that thus remains, for themselves and for all others,
an enigma and a secret.”8
What Ahmet is seeking can in fact be understood in both Western psy-
choanalytic and Eastern philosophical terms, with comparable results. In
both traditions the human’s capacity of being human, specifically insofar
as it is a meaning-making social subject whose sense of self and self-
consciousness ultimately depends on the ability to function in a realm of
shared symbolic abstractions, depends on “losing” something, the dis-
comforting experience of which loss then becomes the wellspring of moti-
vation: motivation to love, motivation to think, motivation to project
ideas (meaning, peace, power—homes, destinations, utopias) onto the
future and move forward after that projection. This is what I addressed in
some detail in the last chapter. It is in fact this fundamental, existential
necessity of the lost object that drives Ahmet to disallow the return of the
actual pack of cigarettes and 10 francs—the emanet needs to remain lost.
Ahmet’s problem is not that the emanet continues to remain lost, but that
the Swiss woman has refused to accept it for what it means, or even
acknowledge its existence, and in doing so, she has effectively subverted
the reality and the order of his world, or more importantly, she has fore-
closed the possibility of his desire.
I will try to flesh out this confounding idea shortly, but let me connect
this account to the question of ghosts and hauntology before doing so.
What is haunting Ahmet is not simply that his love is unrequited, but that
his object cause of desire is lost in a realm of uncertainty, thus foreclosing
the possibility of his world to find its structural equipoise. To make better
sense of this we may need to bring back the Islamic notion of emanet. The
term emanet is used frequently in the Quran and holds a special place in
Sufi philosophy. Of specific interest to Sufis is the following passage of the
Quran, where God describes how and why he ended up leaving the ema-
net with humans:
Verily We offered the emanet to the heavens and the earth and the moun-
tains, but they refused to bear its load and were frightened by it. Man
accepted [to shoulder] the burden. Surely he [Man] is unaware and
ignorant!9
56 S. RAHIMI
Intriguingly, what exactly this emanet is remains completely obscure

and unspoken in the Quran. Humans alone of all of God’s creations,
according to the Sufi reading of the verse, were “crazy” enough to choose
the impossible task of carrying the emanet,10 because humankind alone is
self-conscious and exists on the eternal line of struggle between desire and
inhibition. Emanet is a part of God, which is left with humans and which
commits mankind to an eternal experience of loss which ceaselessly gener-
ates a burning desire to reunite with its origin—all earthly love and desire
is a manifestation of this desire, and all sorrow and longing is a manifesta-
tion of this separation (and hence valuable). Mankind in this account will
never arrive at peace until the emanet is returned to its origin, to God,
which is possible only in death, or in any case in annihilation of the ego.
Now, it is intriguing to note how this account ties almost seamlessly with
the Lacanian formulation of desire, and, as we discussed in the last chap-
ter, with the primacy of lack as a prerequisite to the establishment of both
meaning and desire, and hence the symbolic order as such. And let’s not
forget, there can be no means for the subject to distinguish reality from
the imaginary before a symbolic order is established and internalized. Or
as André Green put it, “it is only in the field of the symbolic that the third
term, which is indispensable for the structuring of the psychic process,
appears.”11 Emanet in this sense can be identified as the source which
enables the function of objet a. Objet a, Lacan insists, should not be mis-
taken for the desired object, in fact it is not an object: it is the psychic/
semiotic object cause of desire, which is injected into (or projected onto, if
you prefer) external objects (including signs and other subjects) by the
subject, thus turning those into desired objects. “Included in objet a is
agalma, the inestimable treasure that Alcibiades declares is contained in
the rustic box the figure of Socrates is to him. But let us note that a minus
sign (-) is attributed to it.”12 Think of the minus sign as the fact that, just
like emanet, this is a special type of object that in fact signifies not a pres-
ence but an absence, not a positivity, but a negativity. Just as emanet indi-
cates the absence from God and a separation from the original union (a
literal, physical separation, and an “emptiness” that inorganic objects,
mountains, rocks and stars do not carry, it is the side effect, if you like, of
the capacity to abstract and to symbolize), objet a is “the negative of the
body.”13 And like objet a, emanet is located somewhere between reality
and fantasy, between symbolic and real, between self and other (keep in
mind also earlier discussions on the functions of phoneme and metaphor).
It is a part of the real that gets carried by the imaginary, and haunts the
symbolic. Or, if you prefer, it is a part of God that humans carry within
them. In part for that reason it is that the function of objet a can persist,
with or without the subject or its desired object. Objet a is at once “abso-
lute and inapprehensible, an element necessarily lacking, unsatisfied,
impossible, and misconstrued.”14 Because it does not refer to any actual
object yet it assumes the semiotic guise of a “thing,” it cannot be grasped
and described, and for the same reason, it cannot be erased and forgotten
either. Ahmet laments repeatedly, “if I could forget that emanet, it would
be so nice! If I forget, it will be good for me, but I can’t even forget that,”
or alternatively, “once I get my emanet back… we’ll say thanks to Allah we
are saved, we are freed from this emanet thing.”
A striking feature of Ahmet’s story is the clarity with which the entire
narrative of his possession is constructed around the function of
emanet/objet a. Ahmet’s object cause of desire has somehow remained
“stuck” in limbo, apparently still in the possession of the originally desig-
nated object of desire, the Swiss woman. Given the vital role of objet a in
holding together the fabric of our symbolic system,15 so long as it is not
released to him, the world will be out of order, and he unable to love again:
when the emanet isn’t there, my environment, the surrounding that I face,
is not right, it breaks down. When I say breaks down, my environment gets
disordered, and the nation breaks, no one remains peaceful. No, there is
nothing, none. All sorrow, depression, pain. It all piles up on top of each
other. But once I get my emanet back, I will gladly love again, from the
depth of my soul.
Of special interest to me in the account of Ahmet’s love possession

(junun) is the motility of objet a. At the base of the idea that Ahmet’s
emanet, a half-empty pack of cigarettes and a 10-franc coin, would exert
such extraordinary power over not only his health and well-being but also
the order of his universe, lies the implicit assumption that objet a is distinct
and can in fact be separated not just from the designated object of desire,
but also from the desiring subject—albeit at the high cost of the subject’s
structural disintegration, in the latter case. But how can we actually make
sense of such an unusual idea?
58 S. RAHIMI
The Floating Objet a

“As Hegel would have put it,” writes Slavoj Zizek, “the excess of the
beloved, what, in the beloved, eludes my grasp, is the very place of the
inscription of my own desire into the beloved object.”16 This idea speaks
to the relation of objet a with the object lost to death. Or, to take this back
to Lacan, “the work of mourning,” he says:
appears, in a clarification at the same time identical and contrary, as a work

that is done to maintain and sustain all these links in detail, in effect, toward
the end of restoring the link with the veritable object of the relation, the
masked object, the objet a.17
The subject’s main objective in the work of mourning, in other words,

is to reconstitute the link with the now-orphaned objet a, which it had
vested in the now-lost object of desire. Notice again that, as in Ahmet’s
emanet, here too we are speaking of an objet a that can survive the death
of the object of desire, and needs to be recollected and “brought in,” or
as Lacan puts it, linked back with. What we are receiving from Lacan is in
effect a new reading of mourning and melancholia, which distinguishes
between melancholia and successful mourning in terms of the subject’s
success in retrieving its objet a. Ahmet’s relentless emphasis on his madness
and the fate of his pack of cigarettes and the 10-franc coin finds new justi-
fication in this formulation of mourning, given the significant role of objet
a in holding together the metonymic successions of the symbolic order.
Furthermore, and more directly relevant to the discussion of ghosts
and hauntology, the notion of an orphaned or floating objet a offers a
powerful path forward in a hauntological formulation of ghosts and the
experience of haunting. In their discussions of the loss of the object of
desire and the ensuing process, both Freud and Lacan have concentrated
exclusively on the living person’s work of mourning. The conceptualiza-
tion of objet a as a special class of psychosemiotic objects that can persist
suspended in the collective space of shared meaning (call it the symbolic
space, and think of language or culture), independent of both the desired
object and the desiring subject,18 opens important options in thinking
about the nature of ghosts and haunting. It gives us the option, for
instance, of thinking of a ghost as the phenomenological manifestation of
an orphaned objet a—the object cause of desire of a dead subject which
persists beyond the subject’s demise, encrypted in cultural, linguistic, and
semiotic codes and “floating” in the virtual space of collective meanings,
waiting for the right subject to “link” it back to the register of lived experi-
ence. Think of Abraham and Torok’s notion of the “crypt,”19 and the
intergenerational transmission of the phantom which is captured in that
crypt and is “transmitted” via the collective space of the symbolic order,
specifically language, from one generation to the next. Little effort is
required to conceptualize the psychosemiotic process whereby an objet a,
orphaned due to the (typically abrupt and/or culturally un-processable,
unjustifiable) destruction of its original subject, would remain unpro-
cessed and unfinished, floating in the “limbo” of collectively shared sym-
bolic space until the “right” subject shows up to experience or even own
it (be haunted by it), decode its semiotic content into subjective experi-
ence, and possibly even process and resolve it and thus liberate the “ghost”
to move on to the realm of the dead. Keep in mind that, as André Green
emphatically put it, “objet petit a is strictly not specularizable,” and that,
going back to Lacan’s somewhat cryptic words in his seminar on
Identification, the “image” that results from such specularization20 “is nei-
ther the image of the [desired] object nor a representation [of objet a], it
is another object which is not the same.”21 The point to take away here is
the clarification that objet a is an “object” that exists outside the subject’s
“head,” yet has no essential ties to any external objects, nor even a specific
image—it can lend itself to various objects, and various acts of
specularization.
In her work on mourning and melancholia, Kristeva too arrives at the
account of ghosts that haunt the living subject through a language that is
dead to them. In her jargon, objet a or emanet become La Chose, the
French version of the Thing, das Ding. The melancholic subject, the sub-
ject for whom the process of mourning of the loss of the object of desire
has not happened properly, she says,
experiences difficulty integrating the universal signifying sequence … the

dead language they speak … conceals a Thing buried alive. The latter, how-
ever, will not be translated in order that it not be betrayed; it shall remain
walled up within the crypt of the inexpressible affect.22
The emanet too is an imageless object of a spectral nature in many

senses of the word. It is located somewhere between reality and fantasy,
between symbolic and real, between self and other, and as we saw in the
case of Ahmet, as a non-existent object that needs to be linked-to for sym-
bolic order to be restored. Here again one arrives at the fact that ghosts
and hauntings take place precisely at the interface of the individual and the
60 S. RAHIMI
collective—and nowhere else: if the experience is exclusively internal and

private, it will be psychotic, and if it is exclusively external and collective,
it will be metaphoric. It is also thanks to this feature that the emanet per-
sists beyond temporality. Because it does not refer to any specific object
yet it assumes the semiotic guise of a “thing,” it cannot be grasped and
described, and for the same reason, it cannot be erased and forgotten
either. It functions like a ghost, in other words. And at the core of what I
aim to drive home here is that this similarity is neither superficial nor coin-
cidental. They are similar because they are the phenomenological and psy-
chological outcomes of the same set of processes—and what’s more, a set
of processes that are foundational to the very sense of existence and self-
hood and the everyday experience of the social subject.
The Stone Tape

In the Christmas of 1972, the British Broadcasting Company aired as its
Christmas ghost story a teleplay called The Stone Tape,23 which was des-
tined to become a classic cross-genre cult film—wedding science fiction
and ghost lore. The Stone Tape captures the story of a team of scientists
working on developing new recording technology who, thanks to their
wealthy lead scientist, get to move their lab into a renovated Victorian
mansion. They soon learn, however, that the mansion has a reputation for
being haunted—specifically a large room at the center of the mansion,
with stone walls that are remnants of the original building and founda-
tions that date back to the Saxon era. Before long team members experi-
ence sounds and visions that confirm the building’s reputation. With their
scientific expertise, however, they are able to crack the secret of the build-
ing’s ghosts in a way that locals have not: they discover that the sounds
and visions are in fact replays or “projections” of “excessively strong emo-
tions” that have been “encoded” into objects—specifically the ancient
stone walls of the haunted room—and hence the film’s title. “It’s the
room! Just the room, itself, nothing else!” insists Peter, the lead scientist:
There’s no ghost [everybody objects]. OK, try this for science: the room
holds an image, and when people go in they pick it up. What you hear, or
what you see, is inside your own brain. That’d be why the sounds don’t echo
and why we can’t locate them. That’ll be why they don’t record on our
machines… Don’t you get it yet? It must act like a recording. Fixed in the
floor and the walls. Right in the substance of them a trace of what happened
there. And we pick it up. We act as detectors, recorders, amplifiers.
Even though the desires and emotions of the dead are encrypted into
the environment, people who step into the room do not “sense” the
recordings to the same degree. While Jill (who is a medium outside of her
day job as a scientist) and one other team member both hear and see the
screaming ghost, Peter and some others can only hear the screams, and
still others do not see or hear anything. Peter says of one man who cannot
hear or see the screaming ghost: “He’s ghost proof. Like color blind!”
Interestingly, The Stone Tapes was inspired by the writings of
T.C. Lethbridge, a British anthropologist-turned-parapsychologist.
Drawing analogy from his contemporary TV broadcasting technology,
Lethbridge had theorized ghosts sighted by living individuals as “pictures
projected by somebody else,” through a process in which the viewer is
“nothing more than the receiving set.”24 The ghost, in this way, can be
understood as a message inscribed in an invisible signal originating from a
dying person and suspended in air or some as-yet-unknown medium,
which is then reproduced as spectral visions or even somatic experiences
by “the sensitive’s mind.”25 Ghosts, he wrote, can be given “some rudi-
mentary existence,” or “some kind of substance,” which, he was quick to
qualify, “is created by thought.”26 Admittedly, the idea of some rudimen-
tary existence or some kind of substance created by thought comes as
close as any definition that I know to the idea of “spectrality.”
In a basic sense, when I say I am haunted by another subject’s ghost,
unless I am speaking metaphorically, I am saying my subjectivity is fre-
quented by an other’s subjectivity. I am, in other words, conveying a pro-
cess in which the other’s objet a has substituted mine or is incorporated
into mine in a discernible way, in effect imprinting the dead person’s desire
upon my own. Insofar as “subjectivity” can be understood as an apparatus
the function of which is seeking to attain the “lost” object of desire, when
I am haunted, I am taken over (possessed) by the subjectivity that was an
other’s. In Abraham and Torok’s words, “the phantom’s periodic and
compulsive return lies beyond the scope of symptom formation in the
sense of a return of the repressed; it works like a ventriloquist, like a
stranger within the subject’s own mental topography.”27
It is no coincidence that the single most common theme in our lore and
our associations to haunting is that of the spectral remainder of a dead
person that has stayed back to haunt, in a quest to have an unfulfilled
desire of the dead subject fulfilled through the living. Ghosts, says Dr.
James Harvey, the “ghost psychiatrist” in the 1995 popular movie Casper,
“are known for haunting us. My question is, what is haunting them? It’s a
62 S. RAHIMI
lack of resolution! Ghosts are simply spirits without resolution, with unfin-
ished business. And it’s my job to find out what that is.” The highly suc-
cessful American TV series Ghost Whisperer, which ran on the CBS channel
for over five years,28 was constructed entirely around the basic theme of
wandering ghosts of dead subjects in need of a surrogate subject to man-
age their unfinished desires. Melinda Gordon, the main character (acted
by Jennifer Love Hewitt), is “cursed” by her sensitivity to picking up
ghosts’ presence where others are just too thick or insensitive (“ghost
proof,” as The Stone Tape’s Peter would put it) to perceive them. She tries
in each episode to help another ghost get his or her dead subject’s unful-
filled desires processed so that they can move on to their next natural
order of existence as dead subjects. Once there is no longer a desire in
need of fulfillment, the wandering objet a automatically dissolves and dis-
appears, it “goes away.”
As I have pointed out earlier, one important aspect of theorizing ghosts
and haunting from a hauntological point of view, that is, in terms of objet
a, is that in this way haunting is formulated as a phenomenon bound to
collective processes, specifically through the symbolic systems of meaning.
Remember Ahmet’s lament in describing what has been affected by the
loss of his emanet:
A For example life, people always do things together, they talk, work,
struggle together. There are factories, I go back to my own work, I
work in the factory, I do this, I do that. Then it’s normal. But when
the emanet isn’t there, my environment, the surrounding that I face,
is not right, it breaks down. When I say breaks down, my environ-
ment gets disordered, and the nation breaks, no one remains peaceful.
This is why ghosts act or speak in terms of a local cultural logic which
may not be easily decoded cross-culturally. When an individual life is ter-
minated, it is the local cultural logic that determines whether that subjec-
tivity has been extinguished appropriately and whether the lost subjects’
objet a shall be reintegrated back within the collective space, or if that
termination has been unjust, untimely or otherwise inappropriate, in
which case an objet a may be incapable of reabsorption into the collective
space, and may remain as a dis-embodied object cause of desire which will
stay dormant (or encrypted, to use Abraham and Torok’s terminology) in
the collective space of language and cultural memory. Think of the float-
ing bits of genetic code we call viruses, and the way they can remain dor-
mant for long periods of time until they encounter and “possess” the
living body of a suitable host, which will then serve as a vehicle through
which the virus manages to express and complete its genetic desire.
“Language itself becomes haunted,” writes Gabriele Schwab, who then
lists a range of semiotic tropes that can contain the lost signification,
including metaphors, metonymies, homophonies, homonymies, puns,
semantic ambiguities, malapropisms, anagrams, rebuses and other such
tropes that “combine concealment and revelation.”29 The dormant object
cause of desire can then turn into a “ghost” if and when a correctly posi-
tioned subject reacts to it, adopts it, and brings back to the social arena the
orphaned objet a. Like geological “hotspots” in the arena of continental
drift, “the sensitives” are first to react to the forces repressed by conflicting
tectonic encounters, and they become volcanic vents for the pressure of
the orphaned objet a. To make things yet more interesting, consider also
that an orphaned objet a does not need to be literally born of an individual
death: it can be created in the process of mass destruction born out of
large-scale atrocities committed in political turmoil, genocides, or even
natural disasters such as massive earthquakes or tsunamis as many report
from around the world. We may have lacked a good theoretical framework
to explain how or why, but we have nonetheless noticed that throughout
history waves of ghost sightings and hauntings have often followed such
unexpected and unaccepted mass atrocities and mass destructions.30
The “wrongful death” in these situations may or may not be traceable
back to specific individuals, and the ghosts that haunt the survivors may or
may not appear known or familiar to them.31 That the ghosts emerging
out of collective atrocities and grief are no longer easily tied to individual
desires points the way back to the sociopolitical relevance of haunting and
the significance of theorizing ghosts from a hauntological point of view.
“Being with” specters, says Derrida, calls on “a politics of memory, of
inheritance, and of generations”32 which stretches well beyond the simple
algorithms of psychological genealogy. Like ghost encounters and indi-
vidual hauntings, the resurfacing of historical ghosts and the haunting of
living societies by otherwise forgotten (read repressed, if you prefer) dis-
courses and affective patterns of past generations are simultaneously indi-
vidual psychological phenomena insofar as the effect can be identified at
the individual affective level, and sociopolitical processes with broad col-
lective impact and manifestations. It is most certainly not a “random”
effect that certain groups of individuals, certain cultural environments or
certain historical periods are more prone to “picking up” and even enact-
ing a specific dormant often obscured set of desires of the presumed-dead
64 S. RAHIMI
pasts of their history. And it is perhaps time for our social and human sci-
ences to take note of this problem and realize the need for understanding
it. And it is also time for us to take note of the uniquely “hauntological”
logic that underlies the vast range of phenomena from broad sociopolitical
movements and events to individual everyday affects, perceptions, and
decision making.
Notes
1. Winnicott, 1953, p. 96.
2. The term, often read “objet petit-a” literally means “object little-a,” with
“a” standing for autre (other) in French and therefore technically translat-
able as “object o” or “object little-o.” Lacan, however, has famously
requested of his readers to avoid translating this term and for it to be used
in its original French form, “thus acquiring the status of an algebraic sign”
(Lacan, 1977, p. xi). Respecting his advice, I have chosen to present the
term as objet a throughout this book.
3. Second in significance only to the Quran, the Hadith comprise a body of
narratives recounting the words, actions, and habits of prophet Muhammad,
his direct heirs, and, for the Shia, 12 of his descendants.
4. Literally “the learned ones,” ulama are scholars recognized as main author-
ities of reference in questions of Islamic tradition, hermeneutics, and
jurisprudence.
5. Fragments of Ahmet’s story presented here are drawn from my 2015 book,
Meaning, Madness and Political Subjectivity (see pp. 155–198). To gain a
more meaningful appreciation of his intricate story, I strongly recommend
reading the full case analysis.
6. See for instance Lacan, 1981, or Žižek, 1992.
7. This and following excerpts are quoted from Rahimi, 2015, pp. 155–198.
8. Kristeva, 1989, p. 64.
9. The Quran, Ch. 33, Verse 72.
10. Divan of Hafez, Ghazal 338: The heavens were too weak to shoulder the
load of emanet / So the lot fell upon me, the crazy one (translation mine)
11. Green, 1966, p. 17.
12. Lacan, 1957, p. 699.
13. Dosse, 1997, p. 243.
14. Manon, 2012, p. 40.
15. The anchoring work of les points de capiton, according to Lacan, is possible
due to the function of objet a. “It is the loss of objet petit a as an object that
provokes desire and as an object of desire per se that both makes the sub-
ject speak and is that about which he will speak, while always eluding him”
(Dosse, 1997, p. 244).
16. Žižek, 2006, pp. 355–356.

17. Lacan, 2004, p. 387.
18. “Objet a is a lost object, an object that the subject separates itself from in
order to constitute itself as a desiring subject” (McGowan, 2012, p.6).
19. Abraham and Torok, 1994.
20. In the process of infant’s identification with the image in mirror, for
instance.
21. Green, 1966, p. 28.
22. Kristeva, 1989, p. 53.
23. British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972.
24. Lethbridge, 1961, p. 9.
25. Lethbridge, 1961, p. 24.
26. Lethbridge, 1961, p. 46.
27. Abraham and Torok, 1994, p. 173.
28. Dishner and Love Hewitt, 2005–2010.
29. Schwab, 2010, p. 54.
30. See for instance Good, 2015; Good and DelVecchio-Good; 2008;
Goulding, 2017; Parry, 2017; Varley et al., 2012.
31. See for instance Leshkowich, 2008.
32. Derrida, 1994, p. xviii.
References
Psychoanalysis (Vol. 1). Trans. N. T. Rand. University of Chicago Press.
British Broadcasting Corporation. (1972). The Stone Tape. BBC2 Studio.
Dishner, J., & Love Hewitt, J. (Producers) (2005–2010). Ghost Whisperer. CBS
Paramount Network Television.
Dosse, F. (1997). History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966 (Vol. 1).
Good, B. J., & DelVecchio-Good, M. J. (2008). Indonesia Sakit: Indonesian
Disorders and the Subjective Experience and Interpretive Politics of
Contemporary Indonesian Artists. In M.-J. DelVecchio Good, S. Hyde,
S. Pinto, & B. J. Good (Eds.), Postcolonial Disorders (pp. 62–108). University
of California Press.
Goulding, C. (2017). Living with Ghosts, Living Otherwise. In (Re) Constructing
Memory: Education, Identity, and Conflict (pp. 241–268). Sense Publishers.
66 S. RAHIMI
Green, A. (1966). L’objet (a) de J. Lacan, sa logique et la théorie freudienne.

Cahiers pour l’analyse, 3, 15–37.
Kristeva, J. (1989). Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Columbia
University Press.
Lacan, J. (1957/1996). The Instance of the Letter, or Reason Since Freud. In
J. Lacan (Ed.), Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English (pp. 412–441).
W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (1977). Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. A. Sheridan. Tavistock.
Lacan, J. (1981). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI, the Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis. W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (2004). Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre X: L’Angoisse.
Editions de Seuil.
Leshkowich, A. M. (2008). Wandering Ghosts of Late Socialism: Conflict,
Metaphor, and Memory in a Southern Vietnamese Marketplace. The Journal of
Asian Studies, 67(1), 5–41.
Lethbridge, T. C. (1961). Ghost and Goul. Routledge and K. Paul.
Manon, H. S. (2012). Partition and Desire in the Films of Joseph H. Lewis. In
G. Ryodes (Ed.), The Films of Joseph H. Lewis (pp. 38–61). Wayne
University Press.
McGowan, T. (2012). The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan. SUNY Press.
Parry, R. L. (2017). Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster
Zone. MCD.
Rahimi, S. (2015). Meaning, Madness and Political Subjectivity: A Study of
Schizophrenia and Culture in Turkey. Routledge.
Rahimi, S. (2019). Specularizing the Object Cause of Desire of the Dead Other:
A Ghost Story. Ethos, 47(4), 427–439.
Schwab, G. (2010). Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational
Trauma. Columbia University Press.
Varley, E., Isaranuwatchai, W., & Coyte, P. C. (2012). Ocean Waves and Roadside
Spirits: Thai Health Service providers’ Post-Tsunami Psychosocial Health.
Disasters, 36(4), 656–675.
Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A
Study of the First Not-Me Possession. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,
34, 89–97.
Žižek, S. (1992). Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular
Culture. MIT press.
Žižek, S. (2006). The Parallax View. MIT Press.
CHAPTER 5
Hauntology sans Exorcism, from Justice

to Networked Subjectivities
Abstract In this closing chapter I briefly recap the book’s basic formula-
tion of the different layers of abstraction via which original lifeless sub-
stance is transformed and transmitted into conscious communication of
symbolic representations, highlighting the ubiquity with which the
hauntogenic process appears to be at work across diverse developmental
paths to human subjectivity. I then indicate two significant implications of
hauntological understanding of everyday life: the question of justice, and
the future of subjectivity. Given that any dominant discourse and any
regime of truth have to establish a systemic repression of other meanings
in order to become the dominant discourse or the regime of truth, a
hauntological point of view understands justice as an expression of lost
voices. A hauntology of everyday life is not meant to exorcise the everyday
life or to heal it, nor does it pursue a specific political order or have in mind
an attainable and defined formulation of justice. Hauntology upsets the
political order and the normative notion of justice as an end attainable
through law, and it is through such destabilization, of the law, the lan-
guage, and the regime of truth as such, that justice emerges as an articula-
tion of lost meanings. The chapter and this book end on a brief discussion
of the relevance of hauntological theory to theorizing the emerging forms
of subjectivity and subjective experience, specifically the already-in-place
networked subjectivity, but also perhaps the capacity to anticipate and
theorize the possibility of artificial subjectivity, subjectivity that depends
on and is contained within the synthetic networks of artificial agents

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78992-3_5
68 S. RAHIMI
capable of sensing, perceiving, and conceptualizing the physical reality and

communicating that information via super-compact symbolic forms.
Keywords Justice • Law • Exorcism • Regimes of truth • Networked

subjectivity • Artificial subjectivity
The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
—Italo Calvino
I think of ghosts and haunting as just being alert. If you’re really alert,
then you see the life that exists beyond the life that is on top. It’s not
spooky necessarily--might be--but it doesn’t have to be. It’s something I
relish rather than run from.
—Toni Morrison
In a paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, an interna-

tional team of astrophysicists from the Keck Observatory report their
intriguing observation that a star named PG 1610+062 has been hurled
across the Milky Way galaxy in a slingshot move around the gravitational
core of a black hole—an event challenging all of astronomy’s familiar ejec-
tion mechanisms.1 I have no intention of committing the common error
of a direct comparison across such diverse areas of understanding, but the
idea of a black hole and its gravitational force offers a great analogy for the
function of the void created through the process of loss frequently
addressed in this book, whereby, as Hegel put it, substance becomes sub-
ject, and the “pure simple negativity” that is born of that process.2 Not
unlike the black hole around which a star was slingshot, objet a serves as “a
pivot made of nothing” in the physics of symbolic semiosis. Even though
it can best be described as the imaginary location of a lack projected onto
an external object, objet a is able to produce an immense amount of psy-
chic gravity around which desire can then “sling” and find its way back to
the subject, creating the effect of an anchor point within the otherwise
unraveling fabric of a system of meanings—what Lacan calls a point de
capiton. Unlike the Milky Way’s black hole story which depicts an uncom-
mon event, however, the slingshotting of desire around a pivot created by
objet a needs to be understood as a basic and recurrent mechanism that
constitutes points of anchorage that hold together the structure of mean-
ing, make possible the outward expression of desire, and beget subjective
5 HAUNTOLOGY SANS EXORCISM, FROM JUSTICE TO NETWORKED… 69
temporality. Jacques Lacan produced substantive elaborations on the

mechanisms involved in the creation and the role of objet a, and even
though especially toward the end of his life he developed a renewed inter-
est in the dynamics and the implications of objet a, it would be safe to say
he has left us with only the beginnings of a full account of the generativity
of trauma, the apparatus that transforms loss into meaning, and more
importantly, the microdynamics of subjective experience or social affect.
What I have aimed to highlight here in terms of a hauntology of everyday
life is simply the pragmatic everyday relevance of such a theory, and the
urgent need for this line of investigation. In the progressive stages of
abstraction from pure materiality of lifeless substance to the abstract virtu-
ality of networked subjectivity, with each increment of abstraction required
to form a new register of representation comes an inevitable amount of
“loss,” as something of the original “thing/object” fails to fully translate
into the new register. That loss is subsequently incorporated in the new
system as spectrality, an absent presence, a negativity. But the absent pres-
ence is not inert, it engages the dynamics of representation as a ghost, and
it causes substantial effect. And it is not the unfamiliarity, but the ubiquity
of this basic process that we need to be astounded by. As Toni Morrison
put it, “if you’re really alert, then you see the life that exists beyond the life
that is on top. It’s not spooky necessarily--might be--but it doesn’t have
to be.”3
Consider the psychoanalytic object relational model of development, in
which each “giving up” of bits and pieces of an original register in order
to arrive at the next more distinct and better defined unitary ego leaves a
trace in what remains to be a part of the emerging self. This applies to all
“lost” objects, be it the physical body of the mother lost gradually through
fetal development and finally at birth, or the breast, or the numerous
internal experiences later “lost” to symbolization. These various objects
gradually become externalized and no longer experienced by the maturing
ego as parts of itself, but each and all of them have left traces carved into
the complex layers that form the resulting subject. Each object lost/ceded
in each stage from the materiality of physical experience to the phenome-
nality of sensual and affective perception to the virtuality of symbolic and
cognitive experience leaves its own respective type of trace on the subject.
This is the generativity of trauma. This is a story of loss serving as “work,”
in the Hegelian sense of work: as it destroys something to the infant, it
serves to propel the infant toward subjecthood. One could read Hegel’s
formulation of the role of work in creating the very subjectivity of the
70 S. RAHIMI
subject as if he was writing about the role of ceding in the object relational
development of the infant’s ego. It is, according to Hegel, in the act of
negating physical reality (think of negating the original form of a rock to
produce a sculpture), that an individual creates his or her subjectivity. This
is captured perhaps best in Alexander Kojéve’s reading of Hegel, who
emphasizes, “negating action is not purely destructive, for if action
destroys an objective reality…it creates in its place, in and by that very
destruction, a subjective reality.”4
The ubiquity with which the hauntogenic process appears to be at work
across diverse developmental paths to human subjectivity is the single
most convincing argument for and evidence of the need for a coherent
hauntological theory of subjectivity and subjective experience. If this book
has been able to drive this single point home, then it has succeeded to do
what it was meant to. A hauntology of everyday life is not meant to exor-
cise the everyday life or to heal it, nor does it pursue a specific political
order or have in mind an attainable and defined formulation of justice. As
a matter of fact, hauntology upsets the political order and the normative
notion of justice as an end attainable through law. Just as the ghost “upsets
all calculations, interests, and capital,”5 hauntology upsets the order of
things and subverts the very regime of truth within which justice may have
been sought and defined. Hauntology upsets the political order of mean-
ing as it upsets the foundational binaries that underlie what we understand
as modern thought. It undermines the epistemological structure on which
our knowledge and our order of power are constructed. By driving home
the simple fact that any dominant discourse and any regime of truth in
order to be a dominant discourse or to become the regime of truth, has to
establish a systemic repression of other meanings, hauntology becomes a
de facto revolutionary theory. But not a revolution seeking to replace a
dominant order with another, it becomes a theory of eternal revolution, if
you like, since every meaning, every order, and every representation is
haunted by that which it has failed or refused to represent, that which is
not meant, that which is not specularized, and which is therefore a poten-
tial victim in need of a voice, and a potential contender for a regime of its
own. Justice in this sense then belongs to the order of imaginary, justice
belongs to the same order of things as did emanet and objet a. Justice
resides outside the law. While the law is constructed and hence decon-
structable, justice is not constructed and hence it is not deconstructable.
Justice can only be approached, never reached, as a form of liberation of
that which has been suppressed and yet has survived the suppression and
its ghostly presence haunts the law of the land. By deconstructing the law,
the language, the regime(s) of truth, justice emerges as an expression of
lost voices. Just like language, or any symbolic structures for that matter,
law has ghosts trapped in it. There is, in every system of law, “a silence
walled up in the violent structure of the founding act; walled up, walled in,
because this silence is not exterior to language.”6 This is precisely what
brought Italo Calvino to insist, “the more enlightened our houses are, the
more their walls ooze ghosts. Dreams of progress and reason are haunted
by nightmares.”7
Hauntology does not seek to exorcise, extract, expel, or heal the ghosts
of everyday life, and nor does it promise a utopian justice, yet once we
awake to the spectral nature of such notions as healing or justice, it
becomes impossible to imagine any effective action toward either without
a deep understanding of the hauntological nature of our truth or, more
importantly, without roadmaps for healing and for justice that lead to
nowhere. I feel the need to insist on the idea that a truly hauntological
understanding will not attempt to exorcise experience, language or the
law, because two distinct readings of hauntology are circulating in parallel.
Let me explain what I mean by these two readings through a juxtaposition
of the theories of Derrida and Abraham and Torok.8
When Abraham and Torok tell us how the phantom can work its way
across generations through crypts embedded in the text or the psyche
which remain unnoticed and unspoken unless discovered and opened up,
they offer to give us a method of making readable that which would oth-
erwise remain unreadable within the text of a literary piece or a person’s
life narrative. In the sense that it is generally understood, cryptonymy is
thus “useful” in contexts where we are dealing with states of collapsed
meaning—not something applicable to all meaning. From this point of
view a text may or may not carry crypts. According to Abraham and Torok,
the crypt forms as the result of the traumatic insertion of a “secret” into
the stream of an otherwise consistent symbolic system flowing in time, and
as a result, “the topography is fragmented by the secret. The cryptic
enclave…forms inside the general space of the self.”9 The self in this way
constitutes “within itself the crypt as an outer safe,” and the crypt will
then function as an “artificial unconscious.”10 The crypt works through
linguistic mechanisms to hide the footprints of an event in the past. A
crypt represents a specific case of suffering unspoken, and a phantom
guards a specific case of injustice from being spoken.
72 S. RAHIMI
For Derrida, on the other hand, a text, a life narrative, an identity, is

always already haunted as we have seen here, with no hope for a final inter-
pretation or decryption. This is the sense in which hauntology is a theory
not of haunted texts, but of text as such, a theory of reading rather than
one of readability, a theory of the everyday life. For Derrida the ghost is
“the hidden figure of all figures.”11 Or as he says elsewhere, “spectral logic
is de facto a deconstructive logic. It is the element of haunting in which
deconstruction finds its most hospitable place, at the heart of the living
present, in the most lively pulsation of the philosophical.”12 Compare that
to Esther Rashkin’s declaration, for instance, who, following Abraham and
Torok, asserts “not all texts have phantoms.”13
If the right/ethical move for Abraham and Torok is to try to uncover
the phantom and expose its secrets, and to bring it back into the order of
knowledge, for Derrida in fact the ethical injunction is not to attempt to
impose a final interpretation on the specter. The secret of the ghost, says
Colin Davis, “is not a puzzle to be solved; it is the structural openness or
address directed towards the living by the voices of the past or the not-yet
formulated possibilities of the future.”14 In fact, Jacques Lacan’s wisdom
also offers useful insight in addressing this ethical and theoretical dilemma.
“Post-Freudian analysis” says Lacan, “had come to focus on the imaginary
and, as a result, psychoanalytic practice had failed to grasp the fundamen-
tal principles of psychoanalysis, which lay in the symbolic.”15 This argu-
ment works well in addressing the difference between a Derrida’s reading
of ghosts and Abraham and Torok’s: in the latter the analysis remains at
the level of the imaginary, fails to seek and recover the concept in the sym-
bolic register—and hence, despite its clearly linguistic seat, the phantom is
conceptualized within the individual realm, existing and acting in some
sense unrelated to the broader, political system of power and meaning that
constitutes the symbolic realm. While Abraham and Torok’s formulation
of the phantom may work perfectly well in psychotherapy, it offers limited
help in formulating broader collective processes such as sociopolitical and
historical realities. The important advantage of formulating the ghost at
the collective level of the symbolic register is that such an understanding
releases the phantom from a position of being silent by nature and an
inherent tendency toward deception, to a political position of having been
silenced by the structures of meaning and power. Needless to say, such an
approach will also open the discussion of ghosts and haunting to a much
more prolific line of social and historical inquiry in theory, in research and
in clinical encounters.
Lastly, I would like to end this book by referring back to a brief discus-
sion in Chap. 3 concerning the relevance and implications of hauntology
for the emerging modes of experience including the notion of networked
subjectivity and even artificial subjectivity. Consider the rapid transition
we are currently witnessing, the transition of social and personal interac-
tions from the arena of physical presence to the domain of virtual presence
and virtual interactions. Note that this transition exemplifies another
“step” in what I had suggested earlier as a series of steps or stages of aug-
mented abstraction—though with different implications, Jean
Beaudrillard’s layers of simulacra may offer a useful point of orientation
here.16 Not only much of what traditionally took place in the physical
space, such as shopping, reading the newspaper, socializing with friends
and speaking to strangers has transitioned into cyberspace, but even pro-
cesses that were already “abstract” such as speech, film, texts and so on,
have now acquired further levels of abstraction with new realities, so that
textuality has been replaced by hypertextuality, long-lasting TV series have
become bingeable, facial gestures and body language have been replaced
by emoticons and emojis, and much more. While none of this may sound
particularly new or intriguing, I am listing them to call your attention to
two points: first, as the basic paradigm and parameters of subjectivity and
certainly of social subjectivity have drastically shifted, the obvious question
rises as to what the impacts of this new paradigm of subjective experience
may be, for the individual and for the society—what mechanisms will drive
those, and what dynamics can we expect to emerge? What does/will this
mean for the dynamics of desire, structures of feelings, and patterns of
affect—subjective features that determine not simply our individual expe-
rience, but also our consumption patterns, our political orientations and
ideological moorings, not to mention the type of “alternative facts” we
end up perceiving the world through. Needless to say, reality is as always
ahead of us, as the pressing questions and bewilderment caused by the
American social and political mayhem during the last five or six years con-
firm. Real life has gone well ahead of our theories to show us what it really
looks like when a society’s dominant regime of truth falls apart and alter-
native truths come out to openly compete for power, leaving little room
for doubt that the epistemologies of old are no longer capable of explain-
ing, much less determining or even containing the “reality” of our age.
These are fascinating and powerful events a detailed unpacking of which I
have to leave to a future occasion, but I bring this up simply to state that
hauntology in fact offers a most powerful tool for engaging these new
74 S. RAHIMI
realities, insofar as it comes prepared for understanding the spectrality of

desire, the ex-centricity of the networked subject, and the endless nature
of metonymic deferment. And perhaps more importantly, hauntology
would aptly start by asking the question of what is lost in the transition of
so much of our everyday experience from the physical space to the virtual,
and what modalities of desire may that loss give rise to—a question hardly
conceivable outside the hauntological formulation of loss and desire, and
well positioned to also point the way toward a conceptualization of what
a conscious artificial agent may desire.
Notes
1. Irrgang et al., 2019, see also a brief report on this paper at Keck Observatory’s
website: https://keckobservatory.org/blackhole-slingshot/
2. Hegel describes “Spirit” (Geist) as substance that has become subject, and
emphasizes: “as subject, substance is pure simple negativity” (Hegel,
2018, p. 11).
3. Morrison, 2004.
4. Kojève, 1969, p. 4.
5. Derrida, 1994, p. 171.
6. Derrida, 1990, p. 242.
7. Calvino, 1987, p. 19
8. Colin Davis (2013) has written a wonderful examination of this difference
which I recommend to anybody interested in the topic. The following
discussion includes excerpts from an article of mine published earlier in
Psychoanalytic Discourse (Rahimi, 2015).
9. Derrida, 1986, p. xix.
10. Abraham and Torok, 1994, p. 159.
11. Derrida, 1994, p. 150.
12. Derrida and Stiegler, 1996, p. 131, quoted in Davis, 2007, p. 75.
13. Rashkin, 1992, p. 12.
14. Davis, 2013, p. 58.
15. Rodriguez, 2001, p. 190.
16. Baudrillard, 1994.
References
Psychoanalysis (Vol. 1). Trans. N. T. Rand. Chicago University of Chicago Press.
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press.
Calvino, I. (1987). The Uses of Literature. Harcourt Brace.
Davis, C. (2007). Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return

of the Dead. Palgrave Macmillan.
Davis, C. (2013). Etats Présent: Hauntology, Spectres, and Phantoms. In M. del
Pilar Blanco & E. Peeren (Eds.), The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting
in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Bloomsbury.
Derrida, J. (1986). Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.
Trans. B. Johnson. Foreword to N. Abraham and M. Torok, The Wolf Man’s
Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. University of Minnesota.
Derrida, J. (1990). Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”.
Cardozo Law Review, 11(5/6), 919–1045.
Derrida, J., & Stiegler, B. (1996). Echographies: De la Television. Galilée / Institut
national de l’audiovisuel.
Hegel, G.W.F. (2018). The Phenomenology of Spirit: Translated with Introduction
and Commentary. Ed./Trans. M. Inwood. Oxford University Press.
Irrgang, A., Geier, S., Heber, U., Kupfer, T., & Fürst, F. (2019). PG 1610+062:
A Runaway B Star Challenging Classical Ejection Mechanisms. Astronomy &
Astrophysics, 628, L5. Online Access: https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/
full_html/2019/08/aa35429-19/aa35429-19.html
Kojève, A. (1969). Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the
Phenomenology of Spirit. Cornell University Press.
Morrison, T. (2004). Toni Morrison’s ‘Good’ Ghosts [Radio Broadcast]. NPR
Morning Edition Interview Broadcast on September 20, 2004. Audio and
Transcript Available Online: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/3912464
Rahimi, S. (2015). Ghosts, Haunting, and Intergenerational Transmission of
Affect: From Cryptonymy to Hauntology. Psychoanalytic Discourse, 1(1), 39–45.
Rashkin, E. (1992). Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative. Princeton
University Press.
Rodriguez, S. (2001). Subject. In H. Glowinski, Z. M. Marks, & S. Murphy
(Eds.), A Compendium of Lacanian Terms (pp. 192–197). Free
Association Books.
CHAPTER 6
Epilogue by Michael M.J. Fischer:

Hauntology’s Genesis, Catacoustics,
and Future Shadows
Abstract Hauntology has gone through three major historical formations

indexed by dreamwork, electronic music, and algorithmic simulacra. Rahimi
introduces the first with: a story of a mentally disturbed man as a kind of
midrash (often a story mode of biblical or qur’anic interpretation); the sec-
ond with the analogy of justice as a slingshot around a black hole; and the
third with an invocation of emergent cyberworlds and virtual reality as new
forms of power relations depending less on information than on data and
simulacra. Hauntology itself is the undoing of all ontology, all singularities,
all claims to singular origins; of singular sovereignties, of the unified self, and
of European philosophy as a restricted language game. Behind every claim of
“how things are” lie shadows, ghosts, temporary suppressions of alternatives
and contestations in the rich possibilities of life, history, politics, justice, and
desire. The first horizon, of psychoanalysis before 1970, is evoked in the rich
metaphorical languages drawn from Genesis, the Qur’an, the poetry of
Hafiz, and the seventeenth-century Golem at the dawn of the scientific revo-
lution. The horizon of the 1970s is evoked through electronic music and
sampling in popular music, playing upon the sonic (blue note) difference
between ontology and hauntology. The music scene in England in particular,
Michael M.J. Fischer is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, and

Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78992-3_6
78 S. RAHIMI
beginning with the Thatcher-Reagan era articulated a sense that the past as
cultural resource was nearing exhaustion, that all past senses of the future
were being foreclosed, and that the new digital worlds threatened to be sub-
ject to neoliberal manipulation as datafication and gamification became tools
of replacing the welfare state and social democracy. The emergent third hori-
zon of contemporary cyberworlds is one of contending with “operational
images” (legible to machines more than to humans), “modeling,” and self-
generating digital and biological networks, over which we need to take con-
trol choreographically, to produce decolonial pluri-worlds and what Andean
nations (among other places) are producing under the banners of, in
Quechua, sumak kawsay (Spanish, buen Vivir; English: good or beautiful
life). These are not mere slogans but have brought an indigenous president
to power in Bolivia, changed the terms of politics in Peru, and are being
struggled over in decentralized health care in Columbia, as well as municipal
experiments in Barcelona. All are struggles in process, all are haunted by
pasts. These pasts and hauntologies may not operate as they have in the past.
Keywords Hauntology • Memory disorders • Electronic music and

sampling • Gamification and datafication • Pluri-culturalism • Social
democracy and buen vivir (sumak kawsay) • Hauntogenesis • Golems
and artificial intelligence (AI) • Operational images and simulacra •
Dreamwork and algorithms
Derrida: The Deposit (Emanet) and the Alphabet

of Truth (Emet), Genesis of Hauntology
haunting is historical … but not dated. always more than one.

—Derrida, Specters of Marx
In his beautiful midrash, Sadeq Rahimi tells us the story of Ahmet, a

young majnoon (a person crazy for an elusive object of desire), who speaks
in tongues or through a symbolic order fractured by an imaginary, about
which he is both lucid and unaware. He seemingly is unaware that he is
recycling a Qur’anic, Sufi, and Jewish set of ideas. He is, we might say,
haunted by a semiotic discourse. He feels that this discourse expresses his
deepest feelings. And although he insists that he needs the packet of ciga-
rettes and ten francs that he left with a Swiss woman, Sadeq Rahimi sug-
gests that we understand this metaphorically and psycho-dynamically as
wanting back his deposit (Turkish emanet, Persian/Arabic amanat,
6 EPILOGUE BY MICHAEL M.J. FISCHER: HAUNTOLOGY’S GENESIS… 79
Hebrew amanah). Emanet, Rahimi reminds us, appears in the Qur’an,

verse 33:72, which Rahimi further unpacks with a verse of the Persian poet
Hafez (Ghazal 338) in which only humans are “crazy enough” (divaneh
or majnoon, in love with God enough) to choose the impossible task of
carrying the emanet which God wishes to deposit with them.
Any reader of the bible (Hebrew, torah) will recognize this as a repeti-
tion of the story of Moses at Mt. Sinai. Even as a telephone game version
(slightly muddled in transmission), nonetheless the story is potent, legible
across variants, and psycho-dynamically of value to Ahmet. In the bible, it
is the children of Israel who are the only ones God can find to take up his
commandments. More importantly, the story is connected with the break-
ing of the first set of tablets, repeated in Islam through the theological
understanding that the Qur’an is but a transcript, an unordered set of
revelations, recited first to companions, and only later written down, and
ordered by length. The Qur’anic text (however sacred the Arabic is con-
sidered) is but a transcript in human language of the divine language
beyond full human comprehension of the Qur’an in heaven. In both cases,
the moral is that humans are in charge of their own interpretive fates. The
task is to interpret without letting moral and psychological worlds become
untethered and amoral, corrupt, and mere power games. The task is not
mere intellectual play (justice in principle) but with social justice in
practice.
Sigmund Freud would be tickled. Or rather, Slavoj Zizek, the Lacanian
exegete, would be tickled on Freud’s behalf. Freud probably would be
irritated to be recalled into Jewish traditions he tried to sublimate, but in
whose loops of semiotic-desire he, like Ahmet, is always already trapped.
Hafiz, as Rahimi hints, elaborates on the diversions in Shiraz’s taverns,
(wine, entrancements) that metaphorize the dissolution of the big Self:
the illusion of a rational Ich (ego), the irrational das Es (id), and the
repressive norms of the Über-Ich (super-ego) and freedom from society’s
repressions.
Ahmet or Ahmad, is a variant of the name Mohammad, and means “the
praiseworthy.” Mohammad is the “seal” (the last) of the many prophets
recognized in Islam, the first of whom was Adam, made from earth and
imbued with living breath. He is thus also the seal (certifying stamp) of
haq, truth. Might emanet be also a slippage (of either the Freudian or
Lacanian sort), a misprison (à la Harold Bloom) of the Hebrew emet?
Emet means truth or life. The two words are not philologically related, but
80 S. RAHIMI
it is his life, his truth, his deposit, that Ahmet wants back, not its substi-
tutes, its deferrals, its floating placeholders, or its cigarettes and francs.
Emet is what the sixteenth-century Marahal, Rabbi Judah Loew ben
Bezalel, of Prague, inscribed on the forehead of the golem to animate it;
and then would erase the first letter to de-animate it (met, “dead”), either
for the sabbath or when it might go out of control. The golem, although
the word is used only once in the torah to mean “the unformed,” has a
long history of extension and contraction. The contemporary variant is
what computer scientists call AI (artificial intelligence), with aspirations to
download the brain into silicon, create avatars, intelligent robots, smart
cities, and informated environments. Indeed Zizek jokes, why not allow
computational machines to vote for us, since soon our quantified selves,
our preferences (tallied continuously by Amazon), and interests (tallied by
Google) will make machines know us better than we can ourselves (and
will save needless anxiety, fretting, and depression about who to vote for
among unpalatable choices, or what policies to advocate for in increasing
double-bind choices of conflicting imperatives). We thus already have
multiple ghost selves operating in the machines (networks, servers, data
banks) beyond our ken. The Marahal’s golem was an iRobot-like servant
for the Marahal, a protective fantasy for a Jewish community repeatedly
subjected to pogroms, and a cautionary figure regarding man’s hubris in
trying to compete with God in creation (as one leaves a flaw in a carpet to
show this is not one’s intent and that perfection is not attained). But, per-
haps most interestingly and proleptically, it was created at the beginning of
the scientific revolution at the central European (Prague) court of Rudolph
II, at the time of Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, and David Gans (who brought
the geodetic tables to Latin Europe from Judeo-Arabic Spain, Neher
1986). Human-created things can go out of control and become destruc-
tive (Fukushima and Chernobyl, terminator seeds, industrial pollution, of
which Frankenstein and Dr. Mabruse are also popular memes). But the
story of the golem is not a call against the drive to create, only to try to
avoid hubris in doing so, and thus learning to value the imperfections that
allow infinite learning, feedback, responsibility, and responsiveness.
The golem’s Jewish medieval history, as Gershom Scholem excavates,
was primarily a mystical meditation protocol on animation and de-
animation without (and even forbidden to have) practical purpose (beyond
producing awe for God’s or nature’s power of creation). It could only be
practiced by two scholars together, never by one alone. In earlier times,
back to the creation of Adam, there are both tellurgic and pneumatic
sources: adam is made of earth or clay (adamah) but also breath (ruh,
nefash); Adam in one version was at first cosmically large stretching across
the earth, and later reduced to human size, his breath only added at the
very end of creation lest he claim to be a co-creator.
In Chinese one might call this qui-shen: “contractions-expansions,”
“outreach-return” of the winds and movements of the universe; or in min-
iature, more intimate, and everyday form, “ghosts and spirits” (Wang 2021).
The sixteenth century golem is said to be put away in the attic of the
Altneu Synagogue of Prague next to the graveyard with 12,000 well-
worn, crowded, overlapping, falling over, gravestones from 1439 to 1787,
a veritable society of ghosts, traumatic memory, determined survival, or
“living on” as Derrida might say, a site of hauntogenesis like many other
such graveyards such as the great Bukit China in Malacca, the mummies in
many Catholic catacombs and saints bones in altar-foundations of
churches, or the hungry ghosts of the Vietnam War about which Heonik
Kwon has written, including those of unidentified American or other for-
eign soldiers who also need care even if they were the enemy.
Genesis, the Greek word for Bereshit, the first word (and therefor the
name) of the first book of the torah is haunted with the contradictions and
alternative stories. It begins, after all, with Bereshit (“in the beginning”),
with the second, not the first letter of the alphabet, shades of emet/met of
the golem, but also shades of the separation of darkness from light, waters
from the land, male from female, like, as Rahimi reminds us, the binary
oppositions that make phonemes and thus spoken words, speech, parole.
Not only are there two stories of Eve, one of the rib and one of full equal-
ity with Adam, not to mention Lilith; but there are also two stories of
Adam, one a cosmogonic telluric giant of clay (Gen 1:24 “Let the earth
bring forth living soul”), the other a pneuma (neshumah) blown into him.
And all is shadowed or haunted by, infinite interpretations, partially col-
lected in the talmud, the midrashim, and the agada, continuing into pres-
ent day debates. Interpretive methods were generated in the “Babylonia”
of the Persian Empire (today’s southern Iraq), along with the contempo-
raneous and consociate interpretive traditions of Islam, disciplined by
inductively established rules of logic and rhetoric, and by translations from
the Greek disciplines of logic, rhetoric, and poetics.
Other perennial narrations, chasing present time rather than origins,
Rahimi reminds us, are to be found in Shakespeare (Hamlet, three ver-
sions) and Goethe (Faust, and the predecessors from which Faust is drawn:
the alchemist Johann Georg Faust, the playwright Christopher Marlowe,
82 S. RAHIMI
the saga of Hrolf Kraki, the legend of Amieth in the thirteenth-century

Gesta Danorum, and the tragic dramas of melancholy and insanity of the
sixteenth century). In Hamlet time is over-anticipated, and in Faust it
becomes indebted.
Hauntology, as Derrida introduces it to us in 1994, is a French hom-
onym for ontology that is the undoing of all ontology, all singularities, all
claims of singular origins, of singular sovereignties, of the unified self, and
of European philosophy as a restricted language game. Behind every claim
of “how things are” lie shadows, ghosts, temporary suppressions of alter-
natives and contestations in the rich possibilities of life, history, politics,
justice, and desire. The word comes from Old German via Old French. A
haunt is a place one frequents, a Heim or home, hence the importance of
the unheimlich, that which seems familiar, but not quite, the uncanny.
The uncanny is often located in dream, but today is increasingly experi-
mented with in future horizons: in English electronic music, in the
“uncanny valley” in the theater of robotics, and in future thinking art
works using generative algorithms and simulators. Unlike in the restricted
language game of Greek-based European philosophy where ontology in
the singular referred to the grounds of being (a challenging concept in
languages without a copula), computer scientists have introduced us to
plural ontologies, composed in object-oriented languages (like Java script).
Objects or protocols or machine instructions are given a cover term,
allowing them to be moved about as units without having to rewrite the
code each time. Ontologies are created by command lines. As computer
algorithms begin to drive more and more of our world, will this create a
flat world without shadows or ghosts, even as computer programs are built
up over generations with updates and patches and rewrites, and these can
create their own glitches, bugs, mis-directions, and openings for hackers,
and perhaps alternatives that are not washed out by redundancies, or fixed
by new generations of forensic mathematicians.
Might a primary solution to injustice and bias in the use of algorithms
be to have them written by the communities they are intended to help,
rather than by universality/ objectivity obsessed computer scientists, not
just so-called open source, or even free software. Does hauntology have a
place (or even a role in creating) future imaginaries, and what is the syntax
of that?
Mark Fisher: Hauntological Music, Times Out

of Joint, and Gaming for Justice
You don’t have to believe in the supernatural to recognize that the

family is a haunted structure. p 43
Where the unconscious was, there CGI (3-D computer generated

imagery) shall be. p. 215
what is being longed for in hauntology is … the resumption of the

processes of democratization and pluralism (27)
—Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life
Justice, Rahimi following Derrida suggests, is like a sling shot around a

black hole, always only approaching the goal, and hence keeping things in
play, for the next shot at justice around the black hole of Kafka’s trials,
always trying to remedy the last injustice. And this Rahimi reminds us is
not just justice for individuals, but the more serious business of social jus-
tice. The ghosts of histories past enact obscured sets of desires. “The
important advantage of formulating the ghost at the collective level of the
symbolic register is that such an understanding releases the phantom from
a position of being silent by nature and an inherent tendency toward
deception, to a political position of having been silenced by the structures
of meaning and power.” Indeed, says Avital Ronell, “at the origin of the
political superego is a kind of mourning . . . Freud includes on the list of
irretrievably lost objects one’s own or adopted country, a country that has
disappointed or betrayed or whose professed ideals have perished” (p 79).
One thinks of the political struggles for self-determination, the historical
traumas of slavery and racism, of nationalist nostalgias (the pasts that never
existed), of repressions of cultures and languages, of fragile democratic
gains slipping into tyrannies.
For the England of Mark Fisher, for example, “the past as a resources
of British culture” (the Empire, the postwar social democracy) “is reach-
ing a point of exhaustion” (76) and the zeitgeist is hauntological in the
depressive mood that all past senses of the future have been foreclosed,
“haunted by events that had not happened, futures that failed to material-
ize” (106). He claims here to be invoking Derrida, but Derrida is far less
84 S. RAHIMI
depressive and thinking of the democracy to come. The music Fisher

invokes begins to explore the idea of minds as data-scapes that can be
infiltrated, that are open to neoliberal manipulation, quite different from
the imaginary of social democracy. The neoliberal imaginary is a techno-
logical flatness devoid of any charge of the uncanny, “where the uncon-
scious was, there CGI [3-D computer generated images] shall be” (215),
the mind as a military zone rather than post-1960s’ psychodelia.
Psychoanalysis becomes self-help inception. Fisher picks the year 1985 as
a key turning point, when the times became obviously out of joint: the
year of the bitter defeat of the Miners’ strike , a year after the Handsworth
riots (documented in John Akmofrah and the Black Audio Film Collective’s
Handsworth Songs), and political collectivities violently being decom-
posed, soon after the 1979 election of the austerity government of
Margaret Thatcher (and the “long grey winter” begun with the 1980 elec-
tion of Ronald Reagan), when the old world (social democracy, industrial
job security for life, union organizing) ended and a new world (neoliberal,
consumerist, informatic) began to insidiously infiltrate and occupy the life
world. Council flats (postwar public housing) were being sold off and not
replaced, audit culture began to reformat the universities, and assembly
lines became informatics operating at a distance. A world that had been on
speed (drugs celebrating fast connections) sank into downers, depression,
and breakdown. Solipsism and global harmonization, Zizek concluded,
began to coincide, with personhoods shrinking into monads interacting
alone in front of laptop screens: “No sex please, we are posthumans” (riff-
ing off the 1973 British comedy, “No Sex Please, We are British”). And
indeed as Freud had once said of the drives operating beneath the surface,
both sexual orgasm and epileptic fit remind us of our substrate organic
beings (Emmanuel Levinas and Existentialism used nausea as the example
of the “riveting” to the body). Trauma and its hauntings operate as forget-
ting and recall, repression and return, in Nachträglich time, a belated or
suddenly re-triggered response to something that happened in a different
time or place.
Electronic music plays with these senses of sound and timing, trigger-
ing distortions and rerouting memory. Unlike the silence of shadows,
specters, and many ghosts, sonic hauntology begins with a sound (in the
beginning, in English especially, was the aspirated or silenced “h”). Noting
Derrida’s distinction between hauntology and ontology, the late English
music critic and K-punk blogger, Mark Fisher writes that “hauntology has
an intrinsically sonic dimension,” and further that the voice is no longer a
guarantor of presence (“nothing here but us recordings” (2014: 120). His

quasi “autobiography,” Ghosts of My Life, is named after Rufige Kru (refu-
gee crew)’s 1993 album Ghosts of My Life. He describes Rufige Kru (Sylvain
Batt Sylvain) as a mixed race, former graffiti artist formed by hip-hop
culture and then altered by Rave’s “collective delirium,” before the slow-
ing of Thatcherism. Rufige Kru (à la Goldie, Metalheadz, etc.) sings, “Just
when I think I’m win-ning/ when I’ve broken every door/ the ghosts of my life
blow wild-er/ than the win-d.” All imagined futures seemed foreclosed.
Throughout the twentieth century, Fisher writes, “music culture was a
probe that played a major role in preparing the population to enjoy a future
that was no longer white, male or heterosexual . . . and relinquishing iden-
tities that were in any case poor fiction” (28). But in the twenty-first cen-
tury, it had been “reduced to being a mirror held up to late capitalist
subjectivity” (ibid.).
Hauntology was the term that Fisher and a few other music critics
adopted/adapted (a blue note difference) from Derrida (like his différance
that extends the note, deferring, differing) to designate both the mood
and the sonic experimentation with the nervous system. The ghosts here,
he writes, are not supernatural, but the traumatically Real in the Lacanian
sense, having to do also with the link between social anomie and psycho-
pathology, depression, and breakdown, linked in the political economy
and individual mental health. He illustrates the traumatic Real with the
memory block and double bind in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The
Shining: killing yourself and family is not the sort of thing you would for-
get, and not the sort of thing you could possibly remember (i.e., that
which must be repressed). Killing hope for the future is what haunts Fisher
and his readings of popular music from 1980 to 2010, the mood of futures
foreclosed (“being haunted by events that had not happened, futures that
failed to materialize” as he quotes Derrida) (2014: 106). “What is being
longed for in hauntology is … the resumption of the processes of democ-
ratization and pluralism” (27).
Fisher’s arguments are fascinating, all the more so, because of his own
temporality. Just as Fisher writes that neither Derrida, nor Jean Baudrillard,
would live to see the full effects of cyberspace or techno-tele-discursivity
and simulacra that they wrote about (and that he suggests Specters of Marx
is importantly about), so too Fisher’s analyses feel very much still waiting,
anticipating, trying to forecast from the present side of a digital transition
that is still emerging. He underscores the fascination of the artists of this
period in prior forms of recording and particularly the 1970s, the sounds
86 S. RAHIMI
of television, audio tape, and vinyl. He chronicles a time before MP3 and
full digitalization. He identifies of what he calls capitalist realism with
Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of
History (nothing outside of capitalism can exist), though this seems both
ideologically distorted, and running against his own curiosity about new
technological affordances within (in the cracks of, the blue notes in) digi-
tal worlds.
Sonic tracings of times out of joint as a stratigraphy of the present,
Fisher shows, are available in electronic popular music. They provide a
series of experiments with sounds that had no pre-existing correlates
(much like Baudrillard’s definition of simulacra as copies with no original).
These experiments tested also how memory is technologically materialized
in different time-stamped moments of music history (“a staining of place
with particularly intense moments of time, a poetry of dates” (191). Using
time-stretching, rhythms that no human could play, metallic sounds, slow-
ing down samples of breakbeats, using crackle (the surface noise made by
vinyl), and filling in gaps with software, Fisher writes that the impression
given was of special effects operating as “electro-libidinal currents” that
accelerate metabolisms and reconstruct the nervous system, a kind of arti-
ficial intelligence that turns humans into inorganic circuitry operating
under human masks (Rufige Kru used an android death’s head as his logo,
and follows in this the earlier David Bowie and artpop’s play with the
alien, androids, the cognitively strange, technological new, and emergent
social relations). The line from the 1982 film “Blade Runner” was recircu-
lated in several of the artists song samplings: “If only you could see what
I can see through your eyes,” invoking also “time paradoxes and fatal
strategies” from various previous lyrics. In part this was “engineering by
street science” bringing in the sounds of the underside of the urban world.
In part it was also the autodidacticism of working-class boys, experiment-
ing, mixing literary references with do-it-your-self sampling.
There was experimentation with memory disorders and perceptual re-
engineering—challenges for twenty-first-century surveillance and civic
resistance. For instance fragments of melody would be audible coming
through an audio quagmire, such that even if you listen over and over, you
still are not able to remember when particular memories will come in. The
mood registered depression and suicide, but also jouissance born of a
“libidinization of anxiety, turning fight/flight responses of fear into enjoy-
ment” and the “lure of the dark,” captured especially by Dark Jungle
music. This was, he suggests a striking contrast to punk outrage against
injustice and corruption, instead marshaling those things as evidence of a

foreclosed world.
It is this jouissance and the resumption of the processes of democratiza-
tion and pluralism, longed for in hauntology—including its engagements
with the Real, and its surfacing of affects that seem to be signals from an
emerging future—that is continued today in the electronic arts but also in
a growing mood of active decolonial movements and insistence on restor-
ing the commons, ecological sustainability, public goods, and community
solidarities.
Hito Steyerl: Future Hauntologies,

and the Challenges of Buen Vivir (sumak kawsay)
Change the shadow and then the object will change.

—Hito Steyerl, “Decolonize the Digital Sphere and Transition it Towards
the Commons” (MIT, 2021)
Rahimi ends with a nod to the emergent cyber worlds of internet and
virtual reality, new forms of power relations depending less on information
than on simulacra: big data sets mined by machine learning algorithms,
accelerated visual and sonic impressions, deep fakes in swarming circula-
tion, memes that become data attractors and aggregators (collecting senti-
ments), networks (and data storage) hosting ghosts and revenants and
doubles or multiples of ourselves, beyond explainability, but knowing
(nudging, seducing, enticing) ourselves better than we ourselves ever can,
hidden in plain sight but coded, embedded, encrypted, and flying by in
signaling beyond the capacities of human senses. We are thus recruited
also into the gamification of reality, the destabilization of time with prolif-
erating apps ever forcing us into missing one another, the juxtapositions of
increasingly inequalities, and above all, the further loosening of any links
between the two meanings of “representation” in art and politics.
If one asks an Artificial Intelligence the old scholastic question, how
many angels can dance on the head of a pin, as Hito Steyerl says she did
(2019a), the answer it calculated, as did a friend, physicist of quantum
entanglements, was 8.67 times ten to the 49th power. This assumes the
angels dance at slightly less than the speed of light, because at any slower
speed they will collapse into a black hole. Angels after all are pure intelli-
gence or pure light. So if you ask an easier question such as, “does AI have
88 S. RAHIMI
a shadow?”, the AI machine might say that angels don’t have shadows.
Still, says Steyerl, while we don’t know what an AI is, the shadow of AI is
already visible. (One of the key dilemmas of machine learning algorithms
is that they are opaque to human intelligence. We can put them in motion
and we can see what their outputs are, but mostly not how they get there.).
The AI shadow moving ahead of our understanding is what we call “mod-
eling” or “gaming”. So the real question is not a quantitative one (i.e.
about how many angels) but the nature of the dance or choreography.
And one of the key features is about making things disappear and reap-
pear, and often fragmenting time in the process.
And yet one of the key affordances of AI being utilized by scientists and
artists alike is the self-generating ability to expand into the future, for
instance using GANS technology (generative adversarial networks), a
more sophisticated version of what used to be called A-Life or cellular
automata (John H. Conway’s 1970 Game of Life) and neural networks.
Steyerl trains neural networks to extend images of flowers and plants,
sometimes producing beautiful light sculptures. But primarily she is inter-
ested in whether one can grow a different kind of space (a latent or virtual
space of potentialities), and then if one might be able to extend the grow-
ing of space to the physical world. Further, could one make the growing
of spaces do some social justice work and help us toward new decolonized
commons (as in her Free Plots/Pots project described below), or what in
indigenous resistance and constitutional movements in the Andean coun-
tries of Bolivia, Columbia, and Ecuador is called in Quechua sumak kaw-
say or in Spanish buen vivir (creating the good life) in contrast to the
production of waste and inequality by runaway capitalism.
How do we get there? One of Steyerl’s recent projects, Free Plots/Pots
is a standing riposte to the spread of Free Ports (and other invisibilizations
of the infrastructure such as ports that no longer are open to citizen
inspection and conviviality but are outside cities in gated, securitized
spaces). One of Steyerl’s videos was sold by her Paris gallerist for a sizeable
sum to a French Art Foundation, and as she looked at the invoice, she was
startled to see that the Foundation is incorporated within Geneva’s
Freeport (it is not the only such art foundation to be so incorporated).
Made uncomfortable by this vehicle of tax evasion, avoiding paying taxes
on artworks and thereby withholding funds from the French health care
and cultural institution systems, Steyerl reinvested the money in two tons
of composted horse manure which she donated to a community garden in
Berlin, providing them also Freeport shaped planters. The community

garden is tended and grown by middle aged immigrant ladies, who plant
beans that remind them of those from their homeland in Panama. The
project has iterations in Spanish Harlem with immigrants from Puerto
Rico, in Park Dale (Toronto), Amsterdam, and Luxembourg, all in com-
munity garden sites squeezed by gentrification Steyerl 2019a, b, c
and 2021.
Taking pictures of the plants and supplementing them with an Oxford
University flower data set, Steyerl trained another neural network to grow
what she calls her own latent space of Free Plots, a probability space of all
possible permutations of flowers grown in the Free Plots up to now. She
discovered in so doing a layer of irises which she suggests might allude to,
or in moebius strip fashion, return us to the Iris Data Set, devised by
English statistician and eugenicist Ronald A. Fisher, that is still used to
train students in the statistics for machine vision (and was critical to the
development of socio-biology that reduced evolutionary models to selfish
gene selection). Steyerl pushes this a bit further by saying this makes her
think that Fisher’s irises are stand-ins for human skulls, that “if one can
discriminate flower species by superficial measurements” (his categories
are things like petal size), “then one can also prove the existence of so-
called races by just looking at people or measuring skulls or other visual
criteria.” The longer the process of growing flowers in Free Plots contin-
ues, she suggests, “we will essentially replace the standard academic
Oxford data set with our own vernacular home grown flowers.” But more
importantly, the process is also one of growing physical spaces, which
“compost” the Freeport-art-money world and constitute artificial territo-
ries elevated in mobile planters for urban community use. Moreover, she
says, this is ideologically the extreme opposite of any kind of blood and
soil idea of territory. And although ideas of organic agriculture and alter-
native ecologies are (and were in the past) captured by the right wing, this
is not a given, not a datum (something “given”) but a factum (something
humanly made), and thus constitutes a different notion of truth and of
territories, one dependent on the social activities of making by middle
aged migrant ladies, growing their own “social spaces and community,
with a certain autonomy and food sovereignty attached to it.” The com-
munity gardens and Free Plots are spaces for story-telling, some of which
Steyerl records and then plays from the Free Planters, but more important
is their signifying of a social kind of photosynthesis: just as sunlight
90 S. RAHIMI
provides the “Power Plant” for life on earth processed by plants in photo-
synthesis, so too the Power Planters are social generators.
As the next step, since the money from the Freeport has run out, and
new revenues are needed, she is devising a series of new “artworlds for
compostation,” or composting, via a blockchain Fintech device, perhaps
using the cheese cryptocurrencies devised with a friend in Spain who owns
sheep (shades of the “carbon coin” in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for
the Future, 2020) with which he speculates one could re-engineer the
banking system to incentivize global climate warming reversal. Or perhaps
Steyerl will use NTFs (non-fungible tokens) much talked about for selling
in digital art markets. (NTFs exist in the Ethereum blockchain. You can
store extra information so that when an artwork is downloaded not only
does it operate as an authenticity certificate, but has extra value, and at
each subsequent sale, the artist gets a percentage.)
But to return to the important issue of haunting and disappearance and
return, and not only as speculative bubbles in the financial markets or
gentrification as the displacement and disappearance of the poor, there is
the more general problem of creative destruction which Steyerl explores in
pieces called The Language of Broken Glass (2019), Factory of the Sun
(2015), How Not to Be Seen (2013), and two videos about her childhood
friend Andrea Wolf (November, and Lovely Andrea). As 17-year-olds, they
used super-8 video to “shoot” feminist martial arts films; in 1988 Andrea
(“Ronahi”), a sociologist writing a book on the PKK (the Kurdish guerilla
party), was killed with 40 others in Çatak, southeast of Van, Turkey, in
what Steyerl calls an “extra-judicial killing” by Turkish army forces, ironi-
cally enough, using guns from Germany. Asked about dealing with grief in
her films, Steyerl, twenty years later, says that in the films Andrea is an
imaginary figure albeit based on a real person, represented on a poster as
a martyr. How does that relate to the fact that they made all these martial
arts films together? But yes, the figure of Andrea follows Steyerl through-
out her work, including an anime figure in Factory of the Sun. The ques-
tion of what happened in 1988 catalyzed many other inquiries, and she
gives a version of Freud’s mourning and melancholia: “it is about not
allowing grief to just take hold of yourself but just trying to transform it
into lots of other situations.” It is similar to the process of composting the
Freeport into Free Plots. The ideas of energy (sunlight, photosynthesis,
catalyst or catalyzing) and material realities constantly reforming and com-
posting each other through acceleration and slowing are continuities in
Steyerl’s speculative re-imaging (in video) and re-imaging (in text) the
potentialities of the world within which we are embedded, framed,

degraded, and transformed, like poor images that gain circulatory power
as they lose resolution, and can be passed from person to person, and node
to node, and images that walk through screens to into reality Steyerl 2009,
2013a, b, 2016a, b.
Language of Broken Glass (2019), with its powerful title alluding to the
Night of Broken Glass or Kristalnacht in November 1938) juxtaposes
engineers in Cambridge, England, smashing thousands of windows — in
order to train their AI to recognize the sound of breaking windows to put
in home security devices to automatically alert the police — with commu-
nity activists in New Jersey painting boarded up windows in a blighted
area. Extrapolating and projecting the proliferation of such devices (also
ring video home security devices that surveil the area in front of the door)
Steyerl imagines market “win-win” incentives leading to a haunted ecol-
ogy of increasing inequalities, defunding of services including police in
favor of private militias to protect gated communities, or what she calls a
luxury version of a war zone.
Factory of the Sun, picks up on the photosynthesis thread, and was
inspired partly by Donna Haraway’s, “our machines are made of pure
sunlight” coding all information as well as human pain; partly by high
frequency stock market trading and a faux report from CERN that they
had made a particle accelerate beyond the speed of light (it was a loose
cable); and partly by the lives of Julia and her brother, the dancer, TSC
who appear in the film reprising some of their biographies. The video
explores the technologies of motion capture, virtual reality 3600 video
immersive media, and bubble vision, updating the Holodeck 3-D technol-
ogy in Star Trek; and thereby attempts to “materialize” alternative worlds
by animating futures with speculative visual technology experiments
(Steyerl 2016, 2017, 2018). Real lives intertwine, not only with the actors,
but also with the Ukrainians who worked on the postproduction anima-
tion. The video, in part, is set in a labor camp and Stalin’s head explodes
when shot by Julia, an effect that takes a lot of labor to pre-break it, but
the head is cheap to buy on the Internet. Uncannily, its postproduction by
Ukrainians in Karkov is being done under the shadow of the Russian inva-
sion from the east. The Ukrainians are good both at rendering tanks as
well as, for European clients, luxury hotels, malls, and gated communities
(they actually look like Singapore more than Europe). Factory of the Sun is
set in a motion capture studio (a labor camp of sorts in which everything
is lighted and visible) and uses motion-movement-detection [MMD),
92 S. RAHIMI
staging the notion of “operational images,” images made to be legible to

machines more than to humans. But that shows how our sense of realism
is increasingly gamified both visually and through the fact that everything
collapses into a number, the score, that you achieve by your actions or
inactions, whether you know it or not (credit scores for instance, or
China’s efforts at rolling out social credit scores). Like Haroun Farocki
(from whom she takes the term “operational images”, with its dual use in
war targeting and post-traumatic stress disorder therapy) and Xu Bin’s
Dragonfly Eyes (a film and narrative composed completely with surveil-
lance images), Steyerl in How Not to Be Seen (partly a tribute to a Monty
Python piece from 1970) plays with how to disappear into the image,
achieving invisibility even as one is being surveilled and monitored. The
dark underside of this playful game, however, is not merely the gamifica-
tion of remote control targeting from drones, but as a voice-over says,
in the decade of the digital revolution 170,000 people disappear: disap-

peared people are annihilated, eliminated, irradicated, deleted, dispensed
with, filtered, processed, selected, separated, wiped out. Invisible people
retreat into 3-D animation, they hold the vectors of the nation to keep the
picture together, they re-emerge as pixels, they merge into a world made
of images.
As these lines are said, women in black burkas twirl on a chessboard-like

platform in a desert. Steyerl comments:
It’s been that way for quite a while, but I think now, not only images, but
all kinds of information are mostly made for machines by machines and they
are coded in a way that is inaccessible to human senses altogether. So basi-
cally we live within this kind of chaos of signals zipping by which are abso-
lutely inaccessible to human senses, so that basically most everything that
could potentially be visible is completely removed from the reach of human
senses … eyes or ears are not able to sense most relevant things anymore.
And yet, as Steyerl points out, while we like to think everything is mon-
itored, there are vast unmonitored spaces. An airliner she notes can just
disappear; there are spaces in Google Earth and Google Maps that are
blank, just not there, impossible to access. There are over-monitored
spaces and under-monitored ones. And our task is to grow the social
spaces, the spaces that can flourish outside digital platforms formatted and
owned by capitalist corporations and the military-art-complex. The
international artworld of Biennales and fossil fuel flying around the world
for shows has come to an end, she predicts. Interestingly, like Mark Fisher
she has a date, his was 1985, hers is 2016, when the world began to
change. “Progressive international art” needs to shift, she suggests, to
both urban localities and to more rural and less populated areas, the latter
for democratic decentralization, the former because cities have become
themselves internationally diverse, and there is less need to network else-
where, more need to build connections among citizens locally (“just go
out, look around, say ‘hello’”).
There are prototypes she says for the detaching, de-colonizing, of digi-
tal platforms. Best known perhaps is the one led by Francesca Bria in
Barcelona to municipalize data services and administer it through coop-
eratives. Politically more expansive is the constitutional drive in the Andean
countries for sumak kawsay (the good life) in Quechua and buen vivir in
Spanish and for “pluri-culturalism,” terms which have been inserted into
the Constitutions of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Columbia as counter-slogans
and critique against extractive capitalism and neoliberal “development”
plans (which usually involve the defunding of human services, education,
health care, or their privatization for profit at the expense of the poor).
And it is grounded in what are thought of as ancestral indigenous knowl-
edges, metaphorized and spoken of as living in concert, dialogue, and
engagement with the spirits of the non-human world. This idiom com-
petes for political hegemony in designing public goods and public spaces,
and in protecting the environment. It acts as a check on half-way measures
of hegemonic power structures that tout benevolence in the form of phi-
lanthropy (instead of social infrastructure), socially responsible corporate
investments (while protecting profits), providing individual choice (instead
of protection of community and social solidarity), individual insurance
plans (instead of public health).
Whether or not the spirit worlds are hauntological may be a matter of
opinion, but they have to do with the familiar haunts of living with nature,
ecological forces, and symbiosis; they are guided and reinforced by rituals
that engage the spirit worlds, often in healthier ways than prosperity reli-
gions, witch-hunts, or other us-them panics. Efforts to decolonize the
media have been on-going as well both in the struggle for use of Linux
and open software rather than large corporate systems (Microsoft) in gov-
ernment bureaucracies in various parts of Latin America, including Peru.
Among the most interesting of the struggles to see how one might inte-
grate sumak kawsay and public health is an on-going dialogue in Columbia
94 S. RAHIMI
with competing understandings not just of health care but of local auton-
omy and sovereignty over future lives. This is not just a matter of slogans,
and certainly not simple-minded nostalgia for the past, but hard efforts to
work across practicalities, and social justice, what Lyotard meant perhaps
by “just gaming” (gaming for justice, just play as mode of learning) and
Harocki by “Serious Games.” The power of such revival of another way of
thinking (which themselves are plural) may in the case of biology have an
interface with new interests in signaling among trees, concern with ghost
species (which continue to exist but are past the point of population col-
lapse), or even the reanimation of extinct species (as in the Siberian project
to use mammoth DNA to breed elephants that can withstand extreme
cold and help restore the softening tundra bogs, before they release vast
amounts of methane). AI systems are often replacements by cost-cutting
anti-conservation governments for on-the ground experimental knowl-
edge, and such rapprochement with people who want to live in situ as
stewards of the earth and its hauntologies could be invaluable.
Conclusion: Bereshit, Catacoustics, and Shadows

It is uncanny (scarily similar, unnervingly different) how the three histori-
cal horizons with their different affordances and takes, sketched above,
deal differently with time, space, projection, melancholy-grief, socialities,
and assumptions of machine, human and biological capacities. From the
Nachträglichkeit (belated, triggered) repression-returns of Hauntology in
the Freudian-Lacanian era to the layering, sampling, rhythm disruptions
and reconstructions of the sonic Hauntology in the 1980s–2010s, to the
catalyzing and self-generating growth of new social processes to underpin
our expanding electronic arts and bioarts understandings of worlds where
the present is an unstable construct, realism is never natural but labored
and peopled, and where datum and factum oscillate making appearances
disappear and return otherwise in the uncanny, and the Real.
References
Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost
Futures. John Hunt Publishing.
Fisher, M. (2018). K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher
(2004–16). Repeater Books.
Neher, A. (1986). Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution of the Sixteenth
Century: David Gans, 1541–1613, and His Times. Oxford University Press.
Robinson, K. S. (2020). The Ministry for the Future. Little, Brown Book Group.
Ronell, A. (2002). Stupidity. University of Illinois Press.
Scholem, G. G. (1965). On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Steyerl, H. (2009). In Defense of the Poor Image. E-flux, No. 10, November.
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
Steyerl, H. (2013a). I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production.
Lecture, Former West Research Congress, Haus der Kulturen der West, Berlin.
Steyerl, H. (2013b). The Photographic University: Photography and Political
Agency? Lecture, New School for Social Research, New York. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=kqQ3UTWSmUc
Steyerl, H. (2013c). How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov
File. Art Forum. https://www.artforum.com/video/hito-steyerl-how-not-
to-be-seen-a-fucking-didactic-educational-mov-file-2013-51651
Steyerl, H. (2015). The Terror of Total Dasein. Lecture as Part of Former West
Public Editorial Meeting, Art and Labor after the End of Work, Museum of
Modern Art, Warsaw. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI0Mw7ASl3A
Steyerl, H. (2016). What Is Contemporary Art? A Conversation with Hito Seyerl.
Museum of Contemporary Art. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
sNW1PP-034Q
Steyerl, H. (2017 and 2018). Bubble Vision. The Serpentine Gallery, London
(2017). University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design (2018).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1Qhy0_PCjs
Steyerl, H. (2019a). The Language of Broken Glass. Haus der Kulturen der Welt,
Berlin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyyM4vDg0xw
Steyerl, H. (2019b). This Is the Future. Artist’s Talk at Art Gallery of Ontario.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts-dNHeBtdQ
Steyerl, H. (2019c). Power Plants, AI, and Music. Serpentine Galleries, London.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v08U5-B
Steyerl, H. (2021). Decolonize the Digital Sphere and Transition It Towards the
Commons. Closing address at MIT List Visual Arts Center Max Wasserman
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China’s Sound Art. Bloomsbury Academic.
Index1
A Alternative facts, 73
Abraham, Nicolas, xiv, 20, 21, 59, 61, Anticipation, 29, 39
62, 71, 72 Apparition, 5
Abrupt, 28, 38, 59 Appearance, xi, xiv, 10–12, 25,
Absence, xiii, 6, 11, 12, 25, 27, 56 32, 41, 94
Absent, ix, xiii, 6, 7, 11, 12 Archaic object, 55
Absent presence, 69 Articulation, 12, 14, 20, 22
Abstracted image, 16 Artificial subjectivity, 4, 39
Abstracted imagination, 12 Association, 13, 14, 26, 41, 61
Abstraction, 11, 23–25, 29, 31, 32, Astronomy, 68
55, 69, 73 Astrophysics, 68
Act, 4, 5, 12, 27, 34, 59, 60, 62, Atemporality, 23, 33
70, 71, 93 Attitude, 22, 35
Affective Awareness, 12, 40
affective cognition, 36, 37 Axis, 11, 29, 34, 44n48
affective experiences, 20, 22
affectively charged figuration, 20
affective neuroscience, 36 B
affective patterns, 21, 63 Basic building block, 13
Agency, 4, 38–42 Belatedness, 15
Ahmet, 51–55, 57–59, 62, 78, 79 Benjamin, Walter, 35
Allah, 54, 57 Black hole, 68, 83, 87
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78992-3
98 INDEX
Body, ix, x, 5, 6, 14, 24, 25, D

37, 40, 56, 63, 64n3, 69, Das Ding, 11, 14, 16, 25, 28, 59
73, 84 Davis, Colin, 72, 74n8
Buccal resonator, 14 Dead, 4, 50, 58, 59, 61, 62, 80
Death, xiv, 4, 10, 12, 26, 29, 31, 32,
56, 58, 63, 86
C Decision making, 64
Christian, 52 Deconstruction, ix, 72
Cigarettes, 54, 55, 57, 58, 78, 80 Delayed onset trauma, 15
Civilization, 32 Deleuze, Gilles, 36
Classless society, 29 Derrida, Jacques, ix, x, xiv, 3–6, 12,
Cognition, 42 20, 21, 27, 63, 71, 72, 78–85
Cognitive, 16, 25, 37, 40, 69 Designated object of desire, 57
Collective Desire, xiii, 3, 6, 7, 10, 14, 22–30, 33,
collective atrocities, 63 34, 39, 50–64, 68, 73, 74,
collective experiences, 40 78, 82, 83
collective permissiveness, 50 Desired object, 56–59
collective processes, 22, 62 Destruction, 33, 59, 63, 70
collective space, 58, 59, 62 Developmental, xiii, 11, 16, 70
Colonialism, x, 40, 41 Diachronicity, 22
Common, ix, 3, 21, 37, 51, 61, Diagnose, 50
68, 87, 88 Dichotomy, 30, 31
Communication, 11, 25, 28, 39 Discover, 60
Communism, 39 Distance, 33, 84
Conceptual, viii, ix, 4, 10, 26, 39, 50 Divergent, 29
Conceptualization, 15, 21, 22, 27, 39, Doctor, 51, 53
42, 58, 74 Dominant discourse, 70
Conceptualize, 15, 59 Dormant, 3, 15, 16, 62, 63
Condensation, 34, 35 Dreams, 2, 7, 35, 71, 82
Conflicting, 36, 63, 80 Drives, 3, 10, 23, 32, 60, 70, 73,
Consciousness, 31 80, 82, 93
Contemporary, viii, 11, 38, 40, Dynamics, 4, 12, 24, 25, 27, 69, 73
61, 80
Continuous, 23, 26, 35
Convince, 50, 54 E
Cosmic time, 26 Edifice, 13, 14, 29, 39
Crypt, xiv, 20, 21, 59, 71 Ego, 14, 20, 25, 32, 56, 69, 70, 79
Cultural, ix, xiii, 21, 39, 40, 50, 53, Elongated metaphor, 35
58, 62, 63 Emanet, 52–60, 62, 70, 79
Culture, viii, ix, 21, 38, 39, 42, 52, Embodiment, 41
58, 83–85 Emergence, ix, 10, 11, 25, 40
Cyberspace, 73, 85 Emotion, 11, 60, 61
INDEX 99
Empirical reality, 27 Fantasy, 28, 38, 39, 56, 59, 80

Emptiness, 27, 56 Faust, 2, 81, 82
Enable, 40, 56 Faust, Johann Georg, 81
Encounter, viii, 62, 63, 72 Feature, 2, 6, 10, 13, 21, 31,
Encyclopedia, 12 34–36, 39, 42, 51, 52, 57,
Enigma, 42, 55 60, 73, 88
Environment, 24, 25, 42, 54, 57, Feces, 25
61–63, 80, 93 Feeling, 19–42, 73, 78
Eros, 31–33 Fetus, 24
Erscheinung, 12 Film, 60, 73, 85, 86, 90–92
Eternal, 56, 70 Fischer, Michael M.J., ix, 41
Ethical, 72 Fisher, Mark, 38, 39, 41, 83–87, 93
Everyday life, vii–xv, 2–7, 10, 41, Floating, 58–60, 62, 80
69–72, 78–94 Flourish, 22, 92
Evidence, 40, 42, 70, 87 Flow, 22, 33, 34
Exception, 14 Food, 24, 89
Excess, 58 Formative, 37
Exert, 15, 20, 37, 57 Formulation, viii, 6, 10, 22, 23, 28,
Existential, 55 30, 32, 33, 37, 39, 53, 56, 58,
Exorcise, 5, 70, 71 69, 70, 72, 74
Exorcism, 4, 5 Foundational
Experience, ix–xiii, 3, 6, 10, 11, foundational concepts, 51
14–16, 20–26, 28–30, 32–42, foundational mechanisms, 41
50–52, 55, 56, 58–61, foundational modality, 41
69–71, 73, 74 foundational qualities, 39
Express, 63, 78 Fragment, 86
Expression, 22, 23, 25, 26, 28, 30, Freud, Sigmund, xii, xiv, 2, 3, 11, 14,
32, 68, 71 15, 31–33, 35, 39–42, 58, 79,
Expressive, 21 83, 84, 90
Expulsion, 24 Friends, vii, viii, xii, 54, 73, 90
External object, 56, 59, 68 Fulfilment, 62
Fundamental, x, xiii, 2, 6, 11, 22,
24, 25, 30, 32, 38, 42,
F 55, 72
Facsimile, 41 Für sich, 12
Fact, xii, 2–6, 10, 13, 15, 16, 20, 23,
26, 27, 29–32, 34, 36, 38, 40,
50, 55–57, 59, 60, 70, 72, G
73, 90, 92 Gap, 27, 37, 86
Fail, xiv, 13, 15, 16, 69, 72 Gateway, 14, 30
Failure, 2, 22 Genetic, 62, 63
Family, vii, 41, 51, 52, 54, 83, 85 Genocide, 40, 41, 63
100 INDEX
Ghost Historical memory, 10, 40

ghost lore, 60 Historic time, 26
ghost proof, 61, 62 History, x–xii, xiv, 7, 10, 15, 21, 32, 38,
ghost stories, 21, 60 40–42, 51, 63, 64, 80, 82, 83, 86
Ghostly Horizon, 7, 40, 82, 94
ghostly experiences, 50 Horizontal axis, 34
ghostly structures, 21 Human experience
God, xiii, 4, 50, 52, 55–57, 79, 80 human mind, 2, 23, 42
Good, Byron J., viii, x, xiii, 4, 40 human sciences, 64
Graph, 11, 24 human subjectivity, xii, 11, 22, 39,
Grasp, 12, 38, 58, 72 40, 50, 70
Gravitational, 68 human temporality, 24, 40
Grief, 63, 90 Humanities, 22
Growing, 22, 24, 40, 87–89 Hypertextuality, 73
Hysteria, 15
H
Hark, 12, 25, 29 I
Haunt, x, xii–xiv, 30, 59, 61, 63, 82 Ideational realm, 12
Haunted Illusory, 23
haunted era, 38 Image, 2, 6, 16, 23, 24, 30, 32, 59,
haunted meaning, 28 60, 84, 88, 91, 92
haunted objects, 50–64 Imaginary, 13, 22, 25, 30, 34, 35,
haunted subjects, viii, xi, 30 37, 56, 68, 70, 72, 78, 82, 84, 90
haunted texts, 72 Imagination, 12, 25, 29, 30
Haunter, 4 Imagined, xiii, 6, 7, 12, 15, 25, 85
Haunting, viii–xiv, 3–6, 10, 14, 21, Immediate, 21, 22, 29, 37
28, 33, 35, 41, 42, 50–52, 55, Impact, xi, 15, 37, 41, 63, 73
58, 59, 61–63, 72, 78, 84, 90 Implication, xii, 6, 13, 14, 23, 32,
Hauntogenesis, 81 41, 69, 73
Hauntogenic process, 10, 70 Implicit, 57
Hauntological, xii, 3, 4, 7, 10–12, 25, Impulse, 41
36, 37, 39–41, 51, 58, 62–64, Inanimate, 31
70, 71, 74, 83–87, 93 Incorporate, 22, 23
Hauntology, viii–xiii, xv, 2–7, 10, 20, Individual
21, 24, 28, 37–40, 42, 50, 51, desire, 63
55, 58, 68–74, 78–94 experience, 41, 73
Healing, 4, 71 Inert, 69
Health, x, xi, 57, 85, 88, 93, 94 Inexpressible affect, 59
Heart, 21, 23, 72 Infant, 25, 65n20, 69, 70
Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, 4, Influence, ix, 20, 37
12, 13, 23, 26–28, 58, 68–70 Initiation, 24, 25
INDEX 101
Injunction, 72 Lacanian triadic model, 34

Innovation, 12 Lack, 15, 25–27, 29, 56, 62, 68
Inorganic, 56, 86 Language, xiii, 3, 10–16, 21, 22,
Insight, 72 24, 25, 30, 34, 36, 39, 51,
Instinct, 31 58, 59, 62, 63, 71, 73, 79,
Intergenerational transmission, 20, 21, 82, 83
36, 39–41, 59 Laplanche, Jean, 16
Internal, 11, 13, 20, 24, 25, Law, 32, 70, 71
38, 60, 69 Lethbridge, Thomas Charles, 61
Internalize, 25 Linear, 28, 30, 35, 39
Interpretation, 16, 20, 26, 72, 81 Linear temporality, 30, 34
Intricate, 29, 37, 52, 64n5 Linguistics
Intriguing, 20, 37, 53, 56, 68, 73 linguistic effect, 26
Invade, 34 linguistic object, 16
Invisible, 51, 61, 92 linguistic order, 30
Invoke, xiv, 21, 84 linguistic sense, 14, 16, 26
Istanbul, 51 linguistic system, 13, 23
linguistic tropes, 34
Literary, ix, 21, 30, 71, 86
J Literature, xiii, 15, 22
Jakobson, Roman, 13, 14, 36 Lived experience, 59
Janusian, 14, 32 Living, vii–xv, 21, 23, 31, 51, 58, 59,
Jargon, 13, 14, 59 61, 63, 72, 79, 81, 93
Jinn, 51, 52 Local, viii, 53, 60, 62, 94
Junoon, 51, 53 Local idiom, 52
Justice, 6, 29, 68–74, 79, 82–88, 94 Logical space, 33
Juxtaposition, 24, 32, 51, 71, 87 Long-forgotten, 15
Loss, xiii, 6, 24, 25, 41, 51, 55, 56,
58, 59, 62, 64n15, 68, 69, 74
K Lost, 7, 29, 38, 51, 53–55, 58, 62,
Keck Observatory, 68 63, 69, 71, 74, 83
Kojève, Alexandre, 26–28, 32, lost object, 25, 26, 28–30, 53, 55,
43n22, 70 61, 65n18, 69, 83
Kristeva, Julia, 43n16, 55, 59
M
L Madness, 50–53, 58
Labyrinth, 29 Majnoon, 51–53, 79
Lacan, Jacques, xiv, 3, 6, 11, 12, 16, Marx, Karl, 39, 40
24, 26–30, 32–35, 43n16, Masked object, 58
44n48, 51, 56, 58, 59, 64n2, Mass destruction, 63
64n15, 68, 69, 72 Materiality, 16, 24, 69, 83
102 INDEX
Matter, 11, 23, 26, 27, 31, 70, N

71, 93, 94 Nachträglichkeit, xiv, 15–16, 94
Meaning, xiv, 3, 5, 6, 10–16, 21–30, Natural
33–35, 37, 40–42, 55, 56, 58, natural disaster, x, 41, 63
62, 68–72, 83, 87 natural order, 62
Meaningful, 4, 25, 33, 64n5 natural world, 27
Meaning-making, 24, 55 Nature, x, xi, 3, 10, 13, 15, 22, 23,
Meaning system, 14, 21, 22 30, 31, 35–38, 40, 51, 58, 59,
Mechanism, 6, 10, 14, 37, 38, 40–42, 71, 72, 74, 80, 83, 88, 93
68, 69, 71, 73 Necessary implication, 13, 14
Medium, 21, 61 Negate, 27
Melancholia, 58, 59, 90 Negating, 70
Melancholic, 55, 59 Negation, 27
Memory, viii, x, xi, 15, 33, 39, 40, 53, Negativity, 56, 68, 69, 74n2
62, 63, 81, 84–86 Network, 13, 14, 80, 87–89, 93
Mental, x, xi, 2, 16, 25, 26, 30, Networked subjectivity, 4, 38–42, 68–74
32, 61, 85 Normal, 2, 53, 54, 62
Mental objects, 12 Notion, xiv, 2, 4, 6, 15, 16, 17n21,
Messianic, 50 20, 22–24, 26, 36–40, 42, 52,
Messianism, 5 53, 55, 58, 59, 70, 71, 73, 89, 92
Metaphor, ix, x, 14, 20–42, 56, 63
Metaphoric function, 27,
29–31, 34, 41 O
Metaphoricity, 17n9, 35, 39 Object
Metaphysical, 23, 27, 39 object loss, xiii, 6, 58, 59, 64n15
Metonymic association, 26 object-relation, 27, 70
Metonymic force, 27, 32 Objet a, 10, 26, 28, 34, 39, 51–62,
Metonymic function, 28–31, 33, 34 64n2, 64n15, 68–70
Metonymy, 26, 27, 29, 33, 34, 63 Occulted signifier, 32
Mind, 2, 15, 23, 28, 33, 35, 37, Ontology, xiii, 3–6, 10, 28, 82, 84
42, 53, 54, 56, 59, 61, Opposition, 5, 13, 14, 22, 24, 31, 81
70, 84 Orientation, 25, 73
Mirage, 26 Original, 26, 31, 32, 56, 59, 60, 64n2,
Missing 69, 70, 86
missing eventuality, 16 Originary, 24
missing meaning, 16 Orphaned objet a, 58, 63
missing object, 53 Owens, Craig, 35
Modalities, 4, 13, 20, 23, 32, 34,
37–41, 74
Motivation, 22, 55 P
Mourning, 58, 59, 83, 90 Pain, 53, 54, 57, 91
Multi-temporal, 22 Palimpsest, 34, 36
INDEX 103
Pantemporal, 6, 22, 32, 36 Postphenomenology, 37

Pantemporality, xiii, 22, 30–33, Power, xi, 3, 16, 22, 24, 37, 55, 57,
35, 40–42 70, 72, 73, 79, 80, 83, 87,
Passage, 12, 24, 28, 31, 34, 37, 55 91, 93, 94
Past Power/meaning, 5
past event, 15 Practice, 5, 41, 72, 79
past experience, 34 Pragmatic, 69
past generations, 63 Predominance, 42
Patterns, 21, 22, 40, 52, 63, 73 Presence, xi, xiii, 4–7, 11, 12, 25, 27,
Perception, 2, 16, 30, 35, 39, 64, 69 32, 34, 42, 50, 56, 62, 69,
Perpetuate, 34 71, 73, 85
Persist, 57, 58, 60 Primacy, 26, 27, 56
Phantom, 21, 59, 61, 71, 72, 83 Primary force, 34
Phenomenological, 6, 12, 14, 16, 26, Primary medium, 21
42, 58, 60 Prison, 54
Phenomenon, 22, 28, 39, 42, 50, 62 Process, xii, xiii, 2, 3, 6, 10–13, 15,
Philosophical, 13, 23, 55, 72 16, 21, 22, 24–26, 28, 30–32,
Philosophy, 14, 26, 55, 82 35, 36, 38, 40–42, 50, 51,
Phoneme, 11–14, 28, 30, 37, 56, 81 58–63, 65n20, 68–70, 72, 73,
Phonemic opposing binaries, 13 83, 85, 87–90
Physical Production, 6, 11, 14, 28, 38–40, 88
physical presence, xv, 73 Progression, 11, 12
physical separation, 56 Projection, 26–28, 55, 60, 94
physical space, 73, 74, 89 Projective force, 29
Physician, vii, 41, 42 Protevi, John, 36, 37
Physics, 68 Psychic
Pivot, 28, 68 psychic apparatus, 2, 13, 22,
Political 32, 33, 50
political affect, 22, 36–38, psychic gravity, 68
40, 41, 52 psychic processes, 2, 56
political order, 70 Psychoanalysis, 2, 3, 24, 72, 84
political physiology, 36 Psychoanalytic
political subjectivity, 36, 41, psychoanalytic jargon, 14
51, 64n5 psychoanalytic sense, 26
Politics, 22, 36, 37, 52, 63, 82, 87 psychoanalytic theory, 3
Positive, 17n10, 27 psychoanalytic work, 41
Positivity, 56 Psychological
Possess, xiv, 15, 34, 62 psychological anthropologists, 50
Possession, 51–53, 57 psychological anthropology, viii,
Post-capitalist, 38–40 x, 40, 53
Post-industrial societies, 50 psychological functions, 34
Postphenomenological, 36 Psychopathology, 85
104 INDEX
Psycho-philosophical, 13 S
Psychosemiotic, 14, 58, 59 Satan, 52, 54
Pure, 16, 23, 28, 29, 68, 69, 87, 91 Saxon era, 60
Schizophrenia, xv, 51
Scholar, 5, 64n4, 80
Q Schwab, Gabriele, 63
Quran, 51, 55, 56, 64n3 Science, viii, 60, 64, 86
Scientist, 60, 61, 80, 82, 88
Secret, xiv, 21, 55, 60, 71, 72
R Semantic, 20, 21, 33, 38, 63
Rashkin, Esther, 72 Semiotic
React, 63 semiotic grid, 52
Readability, 72 semiotic object, 51, 56
Reading, xiii, xiv, 2, 4, 5, 12, 13, 16, Semi-permeable, 34
26, 42, 43n22, 56, 58, 70–73, 85 Sensitive, 61, 63
Real, x, xii, xiii, 6, 23, 24, 27–30, 34, Sensitivity, 62
36, 37, 50, 51, 56, 59, 73, 85, Separate, 4, 14, 30, 33, 65n18
87, 90, 91, 94 Separation, 24, 25, 56, 81
Reality, viii, ix, xii, 3, 5, 6, 25, 27, 39, Serve, 5, 12, 16, 23, 30, 36, 38, 51,
50, 55, 56, 59, 70, 72–74, 63, 68, 69
87, 90, 91 Severe, 42, 51
Realm, 13, 16, 25, 27, 32, 34, 35, 37, Şeytan, 52
55, 59, 72 Significant, 16, 26, 30, 31, 36, 50, 58
Reason, 13, 42, 53, 57, 60, 71 Signification, 12, 21, 27–29, 34, 35, 63
Recall, 30–32, 35, 84 Signifier, 11, 12, 16, 27, 28, 30, 32,
Recap, 29, 34, 51 35, 41, 44n48
Receive, 15 Signifying chain, 32
Recording, 60, 61, 85 Signifying system, 36
Recording technology, 60 Silence, 71, 84
Reformulate, 23 Simultaneity, 23, 39, 44n48
Regime, 70, 71, 73 Slavery, xi, xiv, 40, 83
Register, 14, 30, 32, 37, 59, 69, 72, 83 Slingshot, 68
Reiterate, 34 Slippage, 26, 28, 29, 79
Remnants, 60 Slips, 2
Render, 4, 35, 53 Social
Representation, 11, 16, 25, 30, 34, social experience, 20, 38
59, 69, 70, 87 social process, 38, 94
Retrojected effect, 36 social realm, 25
Retrospective attribution, 15 social sciences, 22
Ricoeur, Paul, 14, 30, 33, 34 social self-consciousness, 25
Roki, 52 social subjectivity, 11, 73
Ruins, 35, 52 social trigger, 37
INDEX 105
Socializing, 73 Symbolic
Somatic, 13, 14, 36–38, 61 symbolic displacement, 33
Soul, 54, 57, 81 symbolic order, xiv, 11, 16, 29, 32,
Sound, 13, 14, 31, 50, 60, 73, 37, 51, 56, 58, 59, 78
84–86, 91 symbolic process, 6, 36
Specter, ix, 5, 39, 63, 72, 84 symbolic realm, 25, 27, 37, 72
Spectral, ix, 4, 12, 20, 38, 39, 41, 59, symbolic register, 16, 30, 37,
61, 71, 72 72, 83
Spectrality, ix, xiii, 7, 37, 61, 69, 74 symbolic underpinnings, 41
Specularization, 59 Symbolization, xiii, 24, 25, 28, 69
Speech, 3, 5, 36, 39, 73, 81 Symptom, 33, 34, 61
Spirit, vii–ix, xi–xiii, 3, 5, 62, 81, 93 Synchronicity, 22
Spook, 2
Standpoint, 36
Star, 56, 68 T
Stone Tape, 60–64 Techno-bodies, 37
Stone walls, 60 Temporal
Stoppage, 38 temporal dislocation, xiv, 15
Stranger, 53, 61, 73 temporal disposition, 36
Strife, 40 Temporality, xiii, xiv, 3, 6, 15, 22–28,
Structural 30, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40, 42,
structural configurations, 20 60, 69, 85
structural openness, 21, 72 Tendency, 25, 32, 72, 83
structural semiotics, 13 Tenseness, 14
Subjective Termination, 62
subjective experience, 3, 10, 11, Text, x–xv, 3–5, 21, 36, 44n48,
20–23, 25, 26, 28, 35, 36, 71–73, 79, 90
38, 39, 41, 42, 51, 59, Textuality, 3, 73
69, 70, 73 Texture, 3, 13
subjective modes, 38 Thanatos, 31–33
subjective patterns, 40 Timeless, 30
subjective temporality, 69 Torok, Maria, xiv, 20, 21, 59, 61,
Subjectivity, xii, xiii, xv, 2–4, 10–16, 62, 71, 72
21–24, 36–42, 50, 51, 61, 62, Trace, x, 21, 38, 60, 69
68–74, 85 Tradition, 12, 55, 64n4, 79, 81
Substance, 10, 21, 31, 60, 61, 68, 69 Traditional, 22, 40
Sufi, 55, 56, 78 Transference, 2, 34, 41, 42
Suppression, 70, 82 Transform, 16, 25, 69, 90
Survive, 22, 24, 32, 33, 58 Transition, xv, 73, 74, 85
Sustain, 34, 41, 58 Translate, 3, 10, 16, 34, 69
Swiss, 52–55, 57, 78 Transmission, 20, 21, 36,
Switzerland, 51, 52 38–41, 59, 79
106 INDEX
Trauma, viii–xi, xiii, xiv, 10, 15, 21, Unknown, 12

39–41, 69, 83, 84 Unpack, 4, 7, 13, 79
Traumagenic, 15, 16 Unprocessed, 40, 59
Traumatic Unspeakable concreteness, 23–25
traumatic events, xiv, 15, 16 Utopia, 7, 55
traumatic experiences, 22 Utopian, 29, 71
traumatic initiation, 24
traumatic passage, 24
Treatment, 35, 38, 50 V
Trigger, 15, 37 Vehicle, 12, 63, 88
Trope, 34, 41, 53, 63 Virtual
Truth, 7, 26, 70, 71, 73, 78–82, 89 virtual agency, 38–42
Turk, 51 virtual presence, xv, 73
Turkey, xv, 51, 53, 90 virtual space, 58, 88
Virtuality, 39, 40, 69
Virus, 62, 63
U Visible, 22, 91, 92
Ubiquitous, 10 Vision, 60, 61, 89
Ubiquity, ix, 69, 70 Voice, 7, 16, 21, 35, 70–72, 84
Unconscious, 3, 16, 24, 71, 83, 84 Von Hügel, Friedrich, 23–25, 29, 30
Uncover, 72
Underpinnings, 41
Understanding, xii, xiv, 2, 3, 12, W
14–16, 22, 25–27, 36, 40–42, Wandering, 62
51, 53, 64, 68, 71, 72, 74, Williams, Raymond, 20, 21, 38
79, 83, 94 Winnicott, Donald, 50
Unfulfilled desire, 61, 62 Wolfreys, Julian, 21
Unique, 28, 36, 38
Unity, 23, 25
Universal, 42, 59 Z
Universe, 36, 53, 57, 81 Zizek, Slavoj, 58, 79, 80

The Hauntology of Everyday

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The Hauntology of

“The Hauntology of Everyday Life is an original, insightful, and timely inquiry

“Sadeq Rahimi offers us a remarkably documented text that demonstrates an impres-

ISBN 978-3-030-78991-6 ISBN 978-3-030-78992-3 (eBook)

Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan

with COVID-19 control were closed to persons wishing to enter or leave,

which a past history of violence seems to haunt the present in powerful

experiences were of course second hand, listening to stories as part of a

as an effort to develop a “critical hauntology,” Martha Lincoln and Bruce

in “subjunctive” worlds. As he quotes from John Caputo, “God [we

2019), why do ghosts—in Avery Gordon’s terms, “of slavery, for

others. A brief example is provided from the author’s previous writings on

Cambridge, MA, USA Byron J. Good

Good, B. J. (2019). Hauntology: Theorizing the Spectral in Psychological

1 A Hauntology for Everyday Life 1

2 Meaning, Language, and Subjectivity 9

3 Ghosts, Metaphors, and Structures of Feeling19

4 The Haunted Objects of Desire49

5 Hauntology sans Exorcism, from Justice to Networked

6 Epilogue by Michael M.J. Fischer: Hauntology’s Genesis,

A Hauntology for Everyday Life

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Keywords Hauntology • Ontology • Ghosts • Exorcism • Subjectivity

I reimagine my haunting spirit not as an omnipotent God but as a

When Sigmund Freud published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in

promises a new theoretic frame of reference capable of accommodating

Meaning, Language, and Subjectivity

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 9

Keywords Semiosis • Hauntogenesis • Phoneme • Representation •

Hauntology has quickly exploded to become an almost ubiquitous descrip-

Phonemes and Things

layering in a linguistic/semiotic reading of the process can add substantial,

finds it impossible to attribute a self-evident system of relationality beyond

3. Lacan, 1953, p. 228.

Ghosts, Metaphors, and Structures of Feeling

Abstract This chapter builds on and expands the earlier discussion of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

conceptualization for emerging modalities of subjectivity, including net-

Keywords Metaphoricity • Metonymy • Structures of Feeling • Objet

In his seminal work, Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams describes

and traumatic experiences, class-based patterns of affective experience, or

systems as linguistic systems abstracted from the living experience of the

Desire, Meaning, and Time

I don’t intend to address the topics of temporality and atemporality

feces, to crying and the range of pre-symbolic interactions) almost regard-

always-already abstracted and represented lost object which is continu-

In the Time that pre-Hegelian Philosophy considered, the movement went

of this metaphysical analysis of Time. The movement engendered by the

The Metonymic Function

The Metaphoric Function

Thanatos and Eros

On the basis of theoretical considerations, supported by biology, we put

We would be well advised of course to avoid rash leaps here. It is impor-

temporality, in the sense that something of the supposedly bygone past

The Haunted Metaphor

It is as though a change of distance between meanings occurred within a

Insofar as the psychological functions are concerned then, specifically

feature that allows the “anti-temporal stretch” of liminality to function as

Walter Benjamin says in one of his typically powerful observations,

Cambridge, MA, USA Byron J. Good

1 A Hauntology for Everyday Life 1

2 Meaning, Language, and Subjectivity 9

3 Ghosts, Metaphors, and Structures of Feeling19

4 The Haunted Objects of Desire49

5 Hauntology sans Exorcism, from Justice to Networked

6 Epilogue by Michael M.J. Fischer: Hauntology’s Genesis,

Jones, E. (1948). The Theory of Symbolism. In E. Jones (Ed.), Papers on Pycho-

the saga of Hrolf Kraki, the legend of Amieth in the thirteenth-century