the future of emancipation
In fact, when it comes to that question, the keyword has already
been spoken: it is justice. In Derrida’s view, metaphysics and, more
specifically, ontology, comes down to the forceful application of simple
categories to an irreducibly dynamic multitude. And it is precisely this
irreducibility which is the common source, in Derrida’s thinking, for
hope, resistance, and justice. Faced with the ontological exclusive
alternative par excellence — Hamlet’s question, “to be or not to be,”
being present or being absent — Derrida proposes another type of
thinking which pays no heed to the supposedly absolute alternative of
the opposition but takes into reckoning what we might call a difference
of degree with regard to being and non-being, presence and absence:
namely, “a hauntology,” that is, a “logic of haunting” which would be
“larger [plus ample] and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking
of Being.”^11 The wideness of its scope and its power would derive from
the fact that it would be, quite simply, less exclusive with regard to
phenomenality in its most general sense — for what is it that really
appears to consciousness in our everyday being-in-the-world? What
is it that needs to be accounted for by an ontology? For Derrida, the
answer is clear: hauntology surpasses any traditional ontology in its
accountability towards not only whatever or whoever is immediately
present, here and now, but also towards whatever or whoever is outside
the present horizon. It comprises the present and the absent, both
those things that are and those things that are not (in the traditional
sense of the terms). In this manner, the very meaning of “is,” the very
meaning of being, is confounded and upset — to be or not to be, being
present or being absent, being alive or dead. The phantom takes the
place of the phenomenon, or, at the very least, starts to haunt it. And
it so happens, according to Derrida, that our reality, not least our
techno-scientific world with its apparently endless possibilities for
intermingling presence and absence, is in fact one in which this new
- Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and
the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York and London: Routledge,
1994, 10; Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: L’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la
nouvelle Internationale, Paris: Galilée, 1993, 31. Henceforth, page references to the
book are given in parentheses in the main text, providing both English and French
pagination.