Introduction: A Future for Haunting

Mundane hauntings: commuting through the phantasmagoric working-class spaces of Manchester, England

“…60 Subject to constant deferral, like all signs, they are 'haunted by a chain of overdetermined readings, mis-readings, slips and accretions'. 61 Modern urban spaces are particularly suffused with a temporal ambiguity, whereby the present succeeds the past, and yet that present is saturated with illegible traces, memories and forms of hearsay from the past that continue to make their mark. And these traces are as likely to testify to the future as the present and the past, for as Jacques Derrida remarks, 'a phantom never dies, it remains always to come and to come back' 62 for totalizing closures of historical processes fail to consider how the past is always-already in the midst of the present.…”

A geography of ghosts: the spectral landscapes of Mary Butts

“…The spectral, rather than the magical or spiritual or demonic, has gained recent scholarly currency. If Buse and Stott begin their collection Ghosts: deconstruction, psychoanalysis, history by suggesting that 'to be interested in ghosts these days is decidedly anachronistic', 8 their collection rides academic interest, prompted by Derrida's Spectres of Marx: 'Spectrality and haunting continue to enjoy a powerful currency in language and in thinking, even if they have been left behind by belief '. 9 Buse and Stott set up their project as moving beyond histories of a neglected 'outside of reason' (the occult, spiritualism etc.…”

Spectres of migration and the ghosts of Ellis Island

“…78 Ghosts are a problem for historicism precisely because they disrupt our sense of a linear teleology in which the consecutive movement of history passes untroubled through the generations. 79 Spectropolitics… is always with us. Whether as benign spirits or frightening spectres, or, most likely, some uneasy combination of the two that we find hard to disentangle, those dead will continue to haunt us and to defer the possibility of any end to history….…”

“…As Buse and Stott succinctly articulate it: 'the question of haunting neatly encapsulates deconstructive concerns about the impossibility of conceptually solidifying the past'. 84 Spectres are such a prevalent and productive trope in both popular and scholarly spheres because in their amorphous ethereality they are paradoxically able to 'represent' the fatally flawed nature of historicism that postmodern critics (with their incredulity towards meta-narratives) often summon. Caught in an eternal and simultaneously present and absent moment, spectres are able to transgress the prisms of time and space that often imprison history, precisely because of their very unknowable and irresolvable nature.…”