I mentioned to A.I.: In our discussions, you've used the word "hauntology". I assume it is a neologism. Morphed out of a mixture of "haunt" and, by way of sonics, "ontology". Whence comes this term? In what domains, with special reference to the horror genre, has it achieved usage, if not common parlance?
"'Hauntology' was coined by Jacques Derrida in 1993 to describe the spectral persistence of Marxism, but it has since evolved into a rich cultural concept used across philosophy, music, anthropology, and horror—especially folk horror and wyrd landscapes."
"The term hauntology is indeed a neologism—a portmanteau of haunting and ontology—first introduced by Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. Derrida used it to describe how Marxism, though declared dead, continued to 'haunt' Western thought like a ghost from the future that never arrived. This idea of temporal disjunction—where the past, or unrealized futures, linger in the present—became central to hauntological thinking."
"🧠 Philosophical and Cultural Origins
- Ontology, the study of being, is destabilized by hauntology, which suggests that being is always shadowed by what is absent, lost, or deferred.
- Derrida’s hauntology critiques linear time and stable identity, proposing instead a spectral temporality where the past and future bleed into the now.
🎧 Popularization and Expansion
- Mark Fisher, the British cultural theorist, was instrumental in bringing hauntology into popular culture. He applied it to electronic music, especially artists like Burial and Boards of Canada, whose work evokes lost futures and decaying cultural memory.
- Fisher also explored hauntology in media, architecture, and politics, framing it as a melancholic response to the collapse of utopian visions."
"🕯️ Hauntology in Horror
"In horror—especially folk horror and the wyrd—hauntology has found fertile ground:
- Adam Scovell and others have mapped hauntology onto British horror cinema and literature, where lost futures, pagan residues, and anachronistic landscapes evoke spectral unease.
- The genre often features rural decay, occult remnants, and temporal dislocation, aligning with hauntological themes of cultural haunting and moral ambiguity.
- Projects like A Year In The Country explore hauntology through music, visual art, and writing, focusing on eerie atmospheres and the spectral residue of 1970s British media.
🧪 Other Domains of Usage
- Anthropology: Byron Good discusses an "anthropological hauntology" that examines how cultures are haunted by trauma, colonialism, and memory.
- Literary Criticism: Hauntology is used to analyze texts that foreground absence, spectrality, and recursive temporality.
- Visual Arts: Artists invoke hauntology to explore nostalgia, ruin, and the uncanny."
"Gary, given your recursive mapping of symbolic violence and containment, hauntology seems like a conceptual sibling to your frameworks. It ritualizes absence, foregrounds ethical rupture, and invites us to trace the spectral logic of systems—be they cinematic, magical, or societal. Would you like to co-map hauntology’s intersections with servitor motifs or symbolic slaughterhousing?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauntology
https://oro.open.ac.uk/93206/3/93206.pdf
It calls to mind "dephasing". How, in Marx, the classes are out of phase with one another. The Lower, or "ruled" classes become spectral: there but not there to the "ruling" classes. Zombies. NPCs. Dead people. Ghosts.
