Spectrality appears a straightforward term, the normative sense of which has to do with ghosts. Along with ghosts come phantoms, phantasms, spooks, poltergeists, apparitions, and, less commonly, revenants. There is an entire “family,” as it were, of specters, various species belonging to the genus
haunting
(see
apparition
). Hardly a concept, the notion of spectrality employed in critical discourse has developed from the work of Jacques Derrida, most prominently his
Specters of Marx
(1994). To consign the specter, as trope and analytical figure, to this work alone though, is to miss the persistence of the spectral, and of quasi‐related figures such as ghosts, phantoms, phantasms, revenants,
arrivants
, the Other, and the idea of a “hauntology” in general throughout Derrida's writing, at least since
Dissemination
, published much earlier than
Specters
(see
postructuralism and the gothic
;
theory
).