Everyday Uncanny (2): “There is no Dasein of the spectre”

A train has stopped in the middle of the countryside, its engine overpowered by a blizzard. From the train carriage, a view opens on a house, in whose windows “sunlit bazaars in exotic cities throng with faces that were transparent masks for insect-like countenances; moonlit streets in antique towns harboured a strange-eyed slithering within their very stones; dim galleries of empty museums sprouted a ghostly mold that mirrored the sullen hues of old paintings…” (Thomas Ligotti).

“There is no Dasein of the spectre,” Derrida writes. Conceptually, the claim can be understood as a critique of phenomenology in its purported commitment to the unity of Dasein: a unitary phenomenon, which leaves no lacuna between being and world. Culturally, the formulation of Derrida’s notion of “Hauntology” has led to a disservice to the singularity of ghosts, effacing their phenomenal reality under the shield of a socio-political agenda. In each case, Derrida’s claim, and indeed his work on hauntology more broadly, overlooks phenomenology in its relation to the uncanny.

In the shadowless realm of the airport terminal, with its absence of alcoves and creaking staircases, flanked on all sides by a labyrinth of tourist shops and interchangeable cafés, the body finds itself in the midst of a “figure inexpressibly thin and pathetic, of a dusty leaden colour, enveloped in a shroud-like garment, the thin lips crooked into a faint and dreadful smile, the hands pressed tightly over the region of the heart” (M.R. James).

“There is no Dasein of the spectre.” Circumstantially, the claim can be disproved with recourse to §40 of Being and Time, where the reader will gain a sense of the transcendental structure of Da-sein as orientated toward uncanniness. But we need not even venture to Heidegger himself in order to gain a foothold in the spectrality of Dasein. After all, the rabid ideology linking Hauntology with spectrality positions the latter in a realm far removed from the everyday, treating ghostly matter as a rupture in the lifeworld. This is an error. Overlooked in Derrida’s critique of phenomenology is the agency of the (prepersonal) body as having the potential to estrange “being” from “there” (a point I examine in depth in The Memory of Place).

For now, things must necessarily remain vague. Yet the question of the body as rupturing has a lineage pointing back to its doubling and anonymity. In each case, the body undercuts personal being, establishing a trail of evidence at odds with “my” experience of the world. Levinas: “I do not stay awake: 'it' stays awake.” The body has withdrawn, and in doing so, the fabric of the world shudders with an abysmal force. Nicolas Abraham is correct: “What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.” Who are the others that secrete their secrets within the living? The question must be inverted: what is the otherness, from which gaps appear in the waking world, placing the ghost of the body within the placid domain of the everyday and familiar?