From: Jerry Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Fri Oct 28 2005 - 09:04:53 EDT
> The ghost as a cipher of iteration is particularly suggestive. At the > beginning of Specters of Marx, Derrida talks about the way in > which the anticipated return of the ghost may be mobilized on > behalf of a deconstruction of all historicisms that are grounded in a > rigid sense of chronology. > 'Haunting is historical, to be sure', he writes, 'but it is not dated, it > is never docilely given a date in the chain of presents, day after day, > according to the instituted order of the calendar > .' The question of the revenant neatly encapsulates deconstructive > concerns about the impossibility of conceptually solidifying the past. > Ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the present. However, the > ghost cannot be properly said to belong to the past, even if the > apparition represents someone who has been dead for many > centuries, for the simple reason that a ghost is clearly not the same > thing as the person who shares its proper name. Does then the > 'historical' > person who is identified with the ghost properly belong > to the present? Surely not, as the idea of a return from death > fractures all traditional conceptions of temporality. > The temporality to which the ghost is subject is therefore paradoxical, > as at once they 'return' and make their apparitional debut. Derrida has > been pleased to term this dual movement of return and inauguration > a 'hauntology', a coinage that suggests a spectrally deferred non- origin > within grounding metaphysical terms such as history and identity." > (Buse & Scott, 1999, p.10-11) His is a conception of temporality, I think, which is inconsistent with _both_ temporalist _and_ simultaneous conceptions of value. Perhaps Derrida would have said that both TSS and SSS are locked into the confines of "traditional schoilarship"? In solidarity, Jerry
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