hauntology
noun
- the idea that the present is haunted by the metaphorical "ghosts" of lost futures
- musical genre that took hold in the early aughts that evokes cultural memory and aesthetics of the past
Wiktionary
Pronunciation: /hɔːnˈtɒlədʒi/
noun
Etymology: Borrowed from French hantologie: equivalent to haunt + -ology, and a near-homophone to ontologie (“ontology”); apparently coined by Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx (1993).
- A concept involving the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past.
“So immersed is Marx's rhetoric in the Gothic that Derrida in Specters of Marx creates a neologism for Marx's ontology, transforming it into “hauntology.” Marx argues that in a market economy a ghostly web of simulacra of relationships, exchanges, and circulation hovers over the whole system, indicating that people have had their humanity drained out of them by capitalism and that they are left as ghostly shells.”
“The suspicion is inescapable: part of the reason why hauntology should appeal to us so much now is that, unconsciously, and increasing consciously, we suspect that something has died.”