Hauntology
Back in 1993, during a lecture at a scientific meeting at the University of California, French thinker Jacques Derrida, although a bit hesitant at first, spoke of ghosts for two sessions. He was the first to introduce hauntology.
There, Derrida wanted to point to the century we live in and express his concern for what might happen in the future, as well as for the memory of a population that was "first and foremost displaced" in the areas of violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, economic oppression.
Derrida said justice was to be learned "from the ghost." He had to learn to live by learning how to talk to ghosts or how to let them talk.
"Ghosts in the skin, they are always there, even if they don't exist, even if they don't exist anymore, even if they don't exist yet," he said in a book published the following year.
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Ghosts come from the past and appear in the present. However, it would not be correct to say that the ghost belongs to the past. The idea of returning from the dead falls outside the traditional understanding of temporality. The ghost, in temporality, is paradoxical, and seldom do they 'return' to be seen by anyone.
Heidegger has placed our future in our present. He saw that he would die one day and advised us to live accordingly.
So it's kind of the idea of dying before you die. In other words, it means what it will be like when a person dies and encounters the truth, what he wishes he had done or not done, should do them already because death has the power to take everything from us without leaving anything behind. Therefore, we cannot protect anything from death that we cannot include in our inner journey.
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Who were the ghosts, neither dead nor alive, staring but unseen, that haunted Derrida?When cancer, which caused his death in the future, settled in his body, Derrida became closer to his own ghost. Autobiographical elements such as the deaths of his close friends were also influential in the philosopher's concentration on this subject.
He wanted to show us what was wrong in the world with the help of ghosts and demanded that justice be served. That's why he asked us to listen to ghosts.
In fact, Derrida believed that his own ghost was watching him during the years he was writing Specters of Marx. And to the ghosts that haunted him, he dedicated this book, the product of his thought journey.
In Specters of Marx, Derrida, inspired by William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, put forward the idea that space and time do not move in a straight line, using "ghosts" as a metaphor that oscillates between existence and non-existence.
Hauntology has replaced the importance of being and presence with the figure of the ghost, who is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive.
Hauntology was a search for a place where we could question our relationship with the dead, examine the elusive identities of the living, and explore the boundaries between thought and the unthought.
Derrida coined Deconstruction, a new and critical way of reading ethics-political issues against Western metaphysics. He advocated for "justice," the only concept that could not be fully "deconstructed." That's why he suggested "ghostology" instead of ontology.
It is "ghostology" that wanders between the past, present, and future, does not deny ghosts, talks to them, cares about them, breaks the joints of time, blurs the boundaries of the past, present, and future, makes time "out of joint," that is, "fucks away" and differentiates time.
It conveys a debt felt for the past and a demand for justice for the future, with Derrida's "ghostology," which he reached based on Marx and Shakespeare. And it is an attempt to show us that something is wrong in the present persistently.
Derrida defends the rights of the dead by taking Levinas's desire for responsibility and justice to the next level.
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Well, why does Derrida bring up "ghosts" even though he knows they will never be accepted in the academic community after all these years when he is struggling with burning problems? Derrida has an expectation from his ghosts: "Learning to live."
Nietzsche said that the taste of death in his mouth taught me to live.
Derrida put it this way:
"If it is possible to learn to live, it can only happen between life and death. That is, it does not happen in life or death alone. Just like between life and death, what goes on between the two is imaginary or nothing more than talking to ghosts. So it will be necessary to learn about spirits," he says.
We are learning to live with ghosts on the border. In other words, it does not teach us how to live better, but how to live more fairly and with them.
11 years after Derrida wrote the book, at the age of 74, struggling with his illness, he wrote in Le Monde:
"No, I never learned to live. No way! Learning to live and to die is to accept absolute mortality without salvation, resurrection, or salvation for all humanity, for yourself or others.
I have not learned to accept death. We're all survivors of procrastination... But I'm still untrainable in dying-learning. I haven't learned anything about it yet, I haven't gotten any information."
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On another note, the blessing of the existence of the "cold war" and "capitalism" by some, while poverty, hunger, and misery were rife in the world, was unacceptable by Derrida. The loss of people of his generation and the poverty caused by the bloody wars in the Balkan geography were the reasons for bringing the traces of Derrida's ghosts into cinema. He taught us that this art is a form of tracking.
"Cinema is an art of ghosts and a battleground of ghosts. Cinema equals ghost science," Derrida said.
Art is only an element of bringing the ghosts together with the audience thanks to the capacity to record the image and transmit it to distant places, thanks to the possibilities of the technique.
The works of art, in a sense, cause the ghosts of the past to be remembered with the subjects they deal with.
Visual culture is anything created, produced, interpreted, and seen with aesthetic or functional concern, images of immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees who constantly haunt the borders.
These people are ghosted because their movement at the border is a matter of visibility or invisibility.
For this reason, works of art strive to make visible what is ignored and shown differently than it is.