Specters of Marx

Is that how you understand it?

Yeah, it's a really interesting term, isn't it? Because like you say, it comes from Derrida's Spectres of Marx.

And then it was Mark Fisher who popularized it really in various of his books.

But Ghost of My Life was kind of the predominant one.

We've talked about it, but Mark Fisher was a major proponent to that, but he didn't come up with it.

The guy who did was Jacques Derrida in a book, Specters of Marx, with the understanding that communism, this idea that we're going to have a world revolution, the idea that we're going to have a utopia if we just get rid of this group or if we just do this.

And every other time that it's ever been implemented, they didn't do it right, which is what the guy in New York, Mom Donnie.

I think I've heard that either from him or his supporters, the people who follow his ideology, but they say they just didn't do it right in any of those other places.

Well...

So it's just

crazy because somebody wrote a book titled Gender and Drone Warfare, a Hauntological Perspective by Lindsay C. Clark.

Fascinating that I had to look into this because they used all of these words in the same book.

Oh, yeah, this came from...

Well, the idea came from Derrida originally, from Spectres of Marx.

Derrida talks about a spectre always being a revenant, something that, quote, begins by coming back.

And I'd always noticed with site-specific theatre that, and Shakespeare in particular, that when you watch a play or you put on a play that is engaging with its site of performance, there seems to be something, I don't know, something Shakespearean about it.

But then we see it doesn't really die there.

Like, it's also what Derrida, right, in Specters of Marx argues that, like, there is this kind of almost conjuration by post-socialist memory regimes, where they kind of declare the death of socialism, and they do it over and over again as parts and parcel of decommunization policies, but not so much in order to really kind of attest the death of socialism, but rather to reassure themselves that it's really death and will not return.

So for that reason, I think this kind of, like, a framing of death and life is beyond being a provocative reply to her.

Also, really useful framework for my own book.

But hontomancy, whereas like hauntology is very much a description or prescription of a symptomatic kind of philosophical resolve for empire at large, hontomancy is actually an application or a pragmatic, ritualistic, active praxis.

And yes, using the philosophy from Derrida, Pharmacon, Specters of Marx, and this idea of lost futures and putting that into a personalized atmosphere in the specter working of lost futures of self or like forgotten tangential maybes and avenues of a history that you could have had and working to work in congress with them again and to utilize, you know, the instruments and the artistic tools of those times to temporally, you know, relocate into a prismatic self that's like both here and there in this prismatic kind of congress, you know, excavation that unearths new things and creates novel and new things.

It's never about just fucking sauntering off and masturbating into the past, you know, just because to sad baby, you know, cry boy over, you know, spoiled milk from years ago.

It's about learning to dance with those regrets and those missed things and figure out what kind of, you know, metaphorical food it needs to be nourished and to work in congress so that you might be relieved to create new and novel things.