Popular Ghosts

Located in the ambivalent realm between life and death, ghosts have always inspired cultural fascination as well as theoretical consideration. Ghosts are ubiquitous in contemporary critical theory and in current literary and visual culture. In psychoanalysis, for example, the ghost has been crucial to Freud's uncanny, Lacan's discussion of desire and Abraham and Torok's theory of intergenerational trauma. In literary studies, the ghost is integral to the field of Gothic studies, as its prime genre characteristic. With the appearance of Derrida's 1994 "Specters of Marx", moreover, the ghost not only acquired a deconstructive dimension, but was transformed into a methodology in and of itself: hauntology or spectral studies.