Afterword

Lubomir Doležel

pp. 233-238

in: Julian Wolfreys, Haunted selves, haunting places in English literature and culture, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

In conclusion, and as a way of opening up the question of selfhood's hauntedness, the Afterword begins by explaining why there can be no general theory of the spectral, no programmatic reading of the ghost. Picking up on the figure of singularity introduced in the introduction, and considering the self/other relation, the Afterword returns to the idea of givenness, Jean-Luc Marion's concept, which surfaces on a number of occasions throughout the book, and seek to think Marion and read him through particular remarks of Derrida's from De la grammatologie so as to suggest the thought of a spectropoiesis and the matter of lived experience and its temporalization. This is illustrated by a return briefly to Julian Barnes and an already cited remark concerning memory, as the figure of singular loss and hauntedness. I conclude with a brief dialogue between Agamben and Derrida, arguing that what makes literature haunted, and so that which allows it to disclose to the subject the hauntedness of Being, is literature's power (or gift) to reopen a breach in history, and so make truth. The making of truth is always, I argue, a haunting to come.