Preface: where ghosts live

As they say, “we’ve got a ghost story on our hands here all right” (The Truth in Painting) and, indeed, this Special Issue of Derrida Today speaks on the theme of “where ghosts live”. “where ghosts live” is a title, a warning sign, a speculation, some kind or more than one kind of conjuration. The contributors here join Derrida in attending to the language of ghosts, the voice that “already haunts any said real or present voice” (Memoires for Paul de Man). They are always aware that, though Derrida may seem to follow the ghost most closely in its hauntological appearance on stage in Specters of Marx, the ghostly presence is there also when he writes of the crypt and the coffin, of spectrality, the revenant, the phantasm, the spirit, or of mourning, of tele-technology, of telepathy, and then again when he writes of the impossible, or of the undecidable, which “remains caught, lodged, at least as a ghost—but an essential ghost—in every decision, in every event of decision” (“Force of Law”).Ghosts, as it were, appear at different places, in different times and spaces. They appear throughout Derrida’s writing. After all, the “future can only be for ghosts. And the past” (Specters of Marx). The title “where ghosts live,” therefore (which is perhaps both a statement and a question and also, since it hardly constitutes a sentence, may have no meaning at all), enjoins us to think of where ghosts might be in time and space. It might be that this is a time where the ghost (the apparition, simulacrum, synthetic image, virtual event, the speculation) seems to be everywhere, on screens, in buildings, on the other side of the telephone line, in answering machines, in computers, in books, in the street and in the self.The title “where ghosts live” asks us also to think of what it might mean for a ghost (“which is neither present or absent, neither alive nor dead”) to live (“Following Theory”). It might be hoped that ghosts, the dead living, can teach us something significant about living and not living, and especially about those things which are intangibly present in our lives: love, friendship, hospitality, justice, knowledge, forgiveness, responsibility. It might be hoped that this lesson could be heard now especially, when so much of what was to come remains or now exists forever ghostly, as potentiality cancelled. Ghosts oversee our current micro- and macro-economic and environmental crises. Is “this” place “here” “now” “where” “ghosts” are making themselves (into) “ghosts”?

In this preface to the issue, the editors Graham Allen and David Coughlan introduce the issue in relation to the questions and speculations above.