Hauntology

Hauntological music
Stylistic origins	Electronic music library music soundtrack psychedelia dub musique concrète found sound public broadcasting pulp literature noise
Cultural origins	Early 2000s, United Kingdom
Other topics
Hypnagogic pop cultural memory

Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology) is a concept coined by philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. The term refers to the situation of temporal, historical, and ontological disjunction in which the apparent presence of being is replaced by an absent or deferred non-origin, represented by "the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive." The concept of hauntology is closely related to Derrida's deconstruction of Western philosophy's logocentrism, which results in the claim that any attempt to isolate the origin of identity or history must always find itself dependent on an always-already existing set of linguistic differences, thus making "haunting the state proper to being as such."

In the 2000s, the term was taken up by critics in reference to paradoxes found in postmodernity, particularly contemporary culture's persistent recycling of retro aesthetics and old social forms. Critics such as Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds have used the term to describe art preoccupied with this temporal disjunction and defined by a "nostalgia for lost futures."

The concept has its roots in Derrida's discussion of Karl Marx in Spectres of Marx, specifically Marx's proclamation that "a spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism" in The Communist Manifesto. Derrida also calls on Shakespeare's Hamlet, particularly a phrase spoken by the titular character: "the time is out of joint." Derrida's prior work in deconstruction, on concepts of trace and différance in particular, serves as the foundation of his formulation of hauntology, fundamentally asserting that there is no temporal point of pure origin but only an "always-already absent present.." The word functions as a deliberate near-homophone to "ontology" in Derrida's native French. Peter Buse and Andrew Scott, discussing Derrida's notion of hauntology, explain:

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