Hauntology and Cognition: Questions of Knowledge, Pasts and Futures

Abstract

This article presents the major aspects of hauntology, highlighting the impact of spectrality studies on contemporary redefnitions of knowledge and cognition. Referring predominantly to Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx (1993), we discuss the ways in which the spectral turn has led to a “cognitive crisis” of sorts by radically questioning the existing procedures of knowing and re-confguring the prevalent conceptualization of time and history. Approaching the spectre as a conceptual site of difference and otherness, we comment on the ethical dimensions of spectrality studies and the questions of (in)visibility, representation of as well as responsibility for the Other, the marginalised or the silenced. We also stress the contribution of the psychoanalytic concepts explaining psychological reactions to loss—the metapsychic phantom and the intrapsychic crypt—to the development of trauma and memory studies. In all of these concerns, we are primarily interested in outlining the transformative potential of the fgure of the spectre and its influence on methods of study in contemporary scholarship.