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Jacques Derrida introduced the term in 1993 in  ‘Spectres of Marx’. According to him the present does not exist ‘on its own’ but that it necessarily contains in it the remainers ( using ‘remainder as a reference ot Mc Carthy’s book) of the pastand simultaniosly glances of the future.

His essay was written after 1989 and as, the title suggests it refers the opening words of the Communist Manifesto. Btw. Derrida obviously at that point stands paradoxically with regressives like Fukuyama since he actually in a way recognises the ‘end of history’. As one would expect, in order to immagine the future Derrida is looking once again like so many philosphers of history  into the past and believes that after the demise of the ‘real socialisms’ in Europe now there will be a spectre again that will be haunting the capitalist West and slowly gain new strenght. Could we  invoke here is some actual prospective political thinking? Can we escape the ‘leftist melancholia’ as Wendy Brown frased it so well? Should we call the ghosts of the past? How are they talking to us today? Are they appearing as ‘dopplegangers’, the doubles’ , the ‘mirror images’? What is the ‘double’? Should we look into that that is ‘hidden’ rather into the symptoms? Is Congo the mirror image of Thames? Is the Canary Warf  the real image of , i don’t know which other poor South London (immigrant) neighboorhood?

And finally -  if Marx is appearing again, obvioulsy not for real (?!) but as his own ghost (spectere) how should we interpret what he himself said – that every historical figures appears twice in histry,  first time as tragedy and second time as farse?

How to understand hauntology then? It has been was suggested that the notion of hauntology can be seen as ‘describing the fluidity of identity among individuals, marking the dynamic and inevitable shades of influence that link one person’s experience to another’s, both in the present and over time’.

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In the fifteen years since Derrida first used this term, hauntology, and the related term, hauntological, have been adopted by the British music critic Simon Reynolds to describe a recurring influence in electronic music created primarily by artists in the United Kingdom who use and manipulate samples culled from the past (mostly old wax-cylinder recordings, classical records, library music, or postwar popular music) to invoke either a euphoric or unsettling view of an imagined future. The music has an anachronistic quality hinting at an unrecognizable familiarity that is often dreamlike, blurry, and melancholic—what Reynolds describes as “an uneasy mixture of the ancient and the modern.”…

the enigma of place and placelessness, memorial and longing, transitional beings, displacement and disappearance, demonic manifestations, auras, elegies of nature, and the translucency of the psyche (http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/hauntology)

Hauntology is essentially the science of spooking. Jacques Derrida first coined the word in 1993 in the book Spectres of Marx. He used the term to illustrate how communism’s failed Utopian ideals haunt capitalist society in a way that not only upsets the easy progression of time, but also accommodates a radical critique of the present (http://www.artslant.com/sf/articles/show/18041)