Hauntography: Object-Oriented Ontology and the Ghost Story
摘要
While poststructuralism has all but disappeared, “hauntology”—Jacques Derrida’s coinage for the principle that to be is to be haunted—remains popular. Over the last fifteen years, a new school of philosophy has emerged, one which, like poststructuralism before it, understands ghosts and the ghostly to be principally ontological figures. Riding the crest of the “nonhuman turn”, Speculative Realism (SR)—and, in particular, a sub-branch known as Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)—argues for a return to objects, things, and the richness of the nonhuman. OOO’s founder, Graham Harman, calls this approach “ontography”—a term he borrows knowingly from the M.R. James ghost story “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” (1904). Bringing ontography into contact with theoretical work on the spectral, this chapter lays the foundations for an ontographic hauntology, or hauntography. Through a series of case studies, I use ontography to reconsider the aesthetics of time, space, eidos, and essence in the literary ghost story.