Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (review)

This book is about ghosts or, more precisely, it is about films about ghosts, stories about ghosts and, most especially, theories about ghosts. As Colin Davis argues, one might reasonably have expected the emphasis laid on rationality in the Enlightenment to kill ghosts off for once and for all. So how then can we account for the fact that they have outlived our belief in them, indeed, that they continue to wield an unfailing fascination notwithstanding our professed incredulity? For survive they do, and across a wide variety of forms of discourse: Davis unburies ghosts in a spectrum of representations ranging from the early vampire films of Feuillade and Murnau across works by Sartre and Delbo to the theories of De Man, Levinas and Agamben, the psychoanalysts Torok and Abraham, and Jacques Derrida. As the subtitle signals, these last three names haunt the book most strongly in that their thinking provides both an object of analysis —at the same level as Sartre's script for the film Les Jeux sont faits or Agamben's analysis of Auschwitz —and the overall theoretical framework through which the others' ghosts are viewed and analysed. The core of the argument concerns the difference in the status of the ghost between deconstruction on the one hand and psychoanalysis, especially as instantiated by Torok and Abraham, on the other. One of the book's many welcome aspects is its consideration of these latter thinkers' contribution, still today inadequately appreciated. Torok and Abraham envisage the secret to whose existence the ghost's appearance attests as a secret ultimately capable of being revealed. For Derrida, in contrast, the phantom is evidence of a secret which can never be made known. He emphasizes less the secret than the unfathomable secrecy which inescapably attaches to the ghost. Thus, as Davis puts it schematically, 'deconstruction is about learning to live with ghosts, psychoanalysis is about learning to live without them' (p. 89). This schematism does not come at the price of being simplistic, however; it is complemented by a close attention to detail, with the result that the thinking of Torok, Abraham and Derrida is brought alive, dare I say, for the reader in a highly clear, accessible way. Notwithstanding the laudable attention paid to spectrality across the spectrum, the real meat in the book, if the inappropriateness of saying that a book about ghosts is meaty can be excused, lies in the theoretical sections which are the focus of the author's most intense engagement. Indeed, at the end of the book Davis himself refreshingly revises his initial impression of an 'intriguing continuity between the ghosts and undead of recent successful films and some aspects of high theory' (p. 157), suggesting that the discrepancy is in fact greater than the similarity. He thus invites us to read the book itself as a ghost, a presence that outlived its own beginnings. This is both a clever, self-aware book and an eminently readable one which will undoubtedly prove extremely useful for both academics and students alike.