Ghosts and specters, the eerie and the occult. Why is contemporary culture so preoccupied by the supernatural, so captivated by the revenants of an earlier age, so haunted? The concept of Hauntology has evolved since first emerging in the 1990s, and has now entered the cultural mainstream as a shorthand for our new-found obsession with the recent past. But where does this term come from and what exactly does it mean? This book seeks to answer these questions by examining the history of our fascination with the uncanny from the golden age of the Victorian ghost story to the present day. From Dickens to Derrida, MR James to Mark Fisher; from the rise of Spiritualism to the folk horror revival, Hauntology traces our continuing engagement with these esoteric ideas. Moving between the literary and the theoretical, the visual and the political, Hauntology explores our nostalgia for the cultural artifacts of a past from which we seem unable to break free.

Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values. In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, 'Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, 'Specters of Marx', delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.

This volume develops a comprehensive framework for applying the theory of hauntology to everyday life from ethnographic and clinical points of view. The central argument of the book is that all human experience is fundamentally haunted, and that a shift from ontological theory of subjective experience to a hauntological one is necessary and has urgent implications. Building on the notion of hauntology outlined by Derrida, the discussions are developed within the frameworks of psychoanalytic theory, specifically Jacques Lacan’s object relational theory of ego development and his structural reading of Freud’s theory of the psychic apparatus and its dynamics; along with the Hegelian ontology of the negative and its later modifications by 20th century philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida; and the semiotics of difference introduced by Saussure and worked by Jakobson and others. This book argues and demonstrates the immediate relevance of hauntological analysis in everyday life by providing a microanalysis of the roles played by power, meaning and desire; and by using vignettes and data from ethnographic research and clinical settings, as well as references to literature, movies and other cultural products.

This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.

Post-millennial writings function as a useful prism through which we can understand contemporary English culture and its compulsion to revisit the immediate past. The critical practice of hauntology turns to the past in order to make sense of the present, to understand how we got to this place and how to build a better future. Since the Year 2000, popular culture has been inundated with representations of those who occupy a space between being and non-being and defy ontological criteria. This Pivot explores a range of contemporary English literatures - from the poetry of Simon Armitage and the drama of Jez Butterworth, to the fiction of Zadie Smith and the stories of David Peace - that collectively unite to represent a twenty-first century world full of specters, reminiscence and representations of spectral encounters. These specters become visible and significant as they interact with a range of social, political and economic discourses that continue to speak to the contemporary period. The enduring fascination with the spectral offers valuable insights into a contemporary English culture in which spectral manifestations signal towards larger social anxieties as well as to specific historical events and recurrent cultural preoccupations. The specter confronts the contemporary with the necessity of participation, encouraging the realisation that we must engage with it in order to create meaning. Narrative agency is the primary motivating force of its return, and the repetition of the specter functions to highlight new meanings and perspectives. Harnessing hauntology as a lens through which to consider the specters haunting twenty-first century English writings, this Pivot examines the emergence of a vein of hauntological literature that profiles the pervasive presence of the past in our new millennium.

Higher Education Hauntologies considers how higher education might benefit from thinking about Derrida’s notion of hauntology and its implications for a justice-to-come. It contributes to the imperative to rethink the university across and with/in global geopolitical spaces and thus, has appeal for both Southern and international contexts. The book includes ideas which push boundaries that previously served higher education teachers and scholars and proposes new imaginaries of higher education. Additionally, the collection makes a contribution to ongoing debates about the epistemological, ethical, ontological and political implications of hauntology in higher education policies and practices, particularly in line with contemporary concerns for more socially just possibilities and visions in higher education. This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and postgraduate students of posthumanism and new materialism who are looking for new perspectives to engage with, and for those who are concerned about a justice-to-come in education, higher education, and educational theory and policy.

“Avery Gordon’s stunningly original and provocatively imaginative book explores the connections linking horror, history, and haunting. ” —George Lipsitz “The text is of great value to anyone working on issues pertaining to the fantastic and the uncanny.” —American Studies International “Ghostly Matters immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all fields. The sheer beauty of her language enhances an intellectual brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of us can remember to find a more important book.” —Charles Lemert Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Avery Gordon demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations. Avery F. Gordon is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Janice Radway is professor of literature at Duke University.