Spectrality: A Critique of intra-temporality

(some notes on Derridean hauntology)

Jacques Derrida is perhaps, one of the best among the many readers of Hegel and Heidegger on concept of time and critique of metaphysics of presence. Derrida’s famous essay ‘Ousia and Grammē’ suggest not only a hint towards an aporia when we think of time: the aporiatic in presenting presence and the now, but also critique of intra-temporality in Hegel. This essay is reading together of hauntology a concept that appears in Spectres of Marx and ‘Ousia and Grammē’, an essay that appears in Margins of Philosophy.

Before beginning let us begin simply: what is hauntology? Derrida uses the concept of ontology and haunting together. But how does it haunt? What is haunting here? As what site do we see irruption of such a haunting which is so deep that it is ontological. Is haunting phenomenological or structured?

Philosophy, as it is popularly known, survives on an omission, suspension- it is the omission between presencing present and the now, as eternity. If the problem of now which makes time possible and the already now in which thinking about time is made possible exists, it exists only because— ‘it is too late to think of the question of time’, or we are already into it. To think about time is to be already in time- that which makes presence or non-presence, manifest absence possible. Philosophy, that is to say, has only been conceived in this metaphysics of presence: ousia, being, logos, fin, meaning allude to this metaphysics.

Time for Derrida, borrowing from Shakespeare is ‘out of joint’. What does it mean? It simply means, not only is there no pure linear continuum of but also there is no one time as measure. How can we make sense of this? If time is a present, it is ‘within’ time itself— but, neither as measure nor as manifest absence, a maintainant (maintaining this maintainant) which maintains several time together- which is never self-present. It avoids figuration- not as spirit but as spectre. Morfino disagrees with this position as citing it as imaginary against the the time of Capital, to which we can return in another paper.

Haunting is a play in ‘within timeness’— between presencing present and the now as eternity. Without this omission, repression, or better, suspension-how could an ontology be possible. It is here Derrida hauntology can be identified. What becomes of this spectrality is for Derrida not something which is in life and in death, but as something which is between life and death. As not merely existentiell but also that which is conditioned on an structure, in a contingency. Let us close by saying if there is a critique of intra-temporality in Derrida as that which spectralizes it is par excellence in the critique of any anticipation of futurity— as a function of time.