MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

While a traditional trope of ghost stories focuses on closure and laying the specter’s bones to rest (whether literally or by disclosure of the circumstances which led to the victim’s demise), more recent depictions of specters and ghosts in horror films and television have emphasized instead the implacable, insatiable character of the specter, resistant to any clean , narrative resolution. This emphasis converges quite aptly with the thought of philosophers Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, who underscore the surprising ethical dimension linked to this persecutory trope of the specter. While Derrida’s work is more popularly known for introducing deconstruction, his investigations into the ambiguous status of the specter link the specter to the question of ethics and justice (insofar as latter are dependent on what is absent, on what has a fleeting or spectral presence). Emmanuel Levinas’s work reinforces this idea, by underscoring the asymmetrical obligation binding upon me toward the Other. The specter operates as a force of alterity not only in its categorical ambiguity (hovering between life and death, presence and absence) but also in its asymmetrical relation to the rest of the characters in the stories (in its temporal asynchrony as the ghost begins by coming back, and in its relationship of demand to the haunted). In this regard, I argue that the specter stands for the Other—not just in its benign connotations (representing our desire for truth/justice, validating our religious faith, speaking to our desire to be remembered) but especially in its invasive and unrelenting hostility to those who are haunted. Insofar as the specter serves as the figure of undecidability, the ghost tale not only holds open the possibility of healing but also of undoing- of effecting a dislocation from the way the viewer may generally understand herself and her relations to others.