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What we now call “hauntology” in critical and cultural studies arises from attempts by critics and theorists to articulate the relation between textuality and materiality. Some are particularly interested in the new world order after the world-wide events of 1989 — a “time [which] is out of joint”, as Jacques Derrida calls it, citing Shakespeare’s Hamlet.1 In my study of the spectral city in Hong Kong cinema, the invocation of the ghostly has provided us with a means through which the shock impact of the urban phantasmagoria can be restored to itself by way of the things made strange, by ostranenie, which the formalists call “defamiliarization” (see Shlovksy, 1994; Thompson, 1988).2 This sense of estrangement from the world can therefore be seen as a moment of aestheticization when allegories are screened. If the turn to ghosts, spectres or apparitions offers tools of “defamiliarization” for artists, spectral analysis in the present context is in no way an attempt to focus on metaphysics and mysticism. On the contrary, it follows the post-metaphysical strain in philosophical thinking, and in the recent trend of spectral analysis to trace and track the material conditions of everyday life in the mundane space of the city (see Paetzold, 2000; Gordon, 1997; Pile, 2002). In some cases, visible and invisible cross-cultural flows of various kinds have shaped what one critic calls the “global uncanny” in the deterritorialized space of the city (Wilson, 2005). When Walter Benjamin remarked on the French 10 On Spectral Mutations: The Ghostly City in The Secret, Rouge and Little Cheung Esther M. K. Cheung* * Research for this paper was completed with the generous support from the “General Research Fund” of Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project no. HKU 7416/05H). ch10(169-191).indd 169 25/05/2010 3:04 PM 170 Esther M. K. Cheung Surrealists in the 1920s, he wrote poetically, “No face is surrealistic in the same degree as the true face of a city” (Benjamin, 1978, p. 182). As ghostly appearances always challenge linear time, temporality in our analysis is more kairotic than chronological. In Greek, kairos and chronos are two concepts of time. As opposed to chronos, which refers to sequential chronological time, kairos is associated with an opportune moment in which something critical and special happens.3 The surreal,then,alwaysintrudesatkairotictimes,timesthat“areoutofjoint”.Instead of occultism and mysticism, one may then speak of a special kind of “profane illumination” that Benjamin observes in the work of the French Surrealists: “There, too, are crossroads where ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the order of the day” (Benjamin, 1978, p. 183). Intricately put, the sense of ghostliness is felt in the everyday, mundane space of post–World War I Paris. When critical changes are happening, some “materialist anthropological inspiration” can be derived from the profane urban space. As Benjamin suggests, the city is “the region from which the lyric poetry of Surrealism reports” (Benjamin, 1978, p. 183). Almost a century apart from Benjamin’s time, the trope of the spectral city in contemporary Hong Kong cinema carries the resonances of everydayness and profanity at a different time and space. Such a different time and space of course require specific contextualization of the rise and popularity of what critics now call the “New Hong Kong cinema”. Not only does the cinema provide intriguing texts for spectral analysis; it is in fact a product of Hong Kong’s changing cultural space, as an aesthetic ostranenie emerging out of the intersecting filmic space of art and industry. In this chapter, by reading three versions of the spectral city in contemporary Hong Kong cinema, I attempt to trace how various moments of disjointed time in Hong Kong history are associated with the expression of a sense of ghostliness, alienation and homelessness. My aim is to explore the possibility of writing a meta-history of Hong Kong over the past thirty years or so through a hermeneutical reading of the cinematic depictions of space. Writing a concise meta-history of space, this chapter asks two related questions: Does 1997 matter? What concerns us after the 1997 handover is over? In asking these seemingly macroscopic questions, the emphasis is on how an allegorical reading of the ordinary, quotidian aspects of urban life offers us chances to understand the effects of eventful changes. Just as “the eternal would be the ruffles on a dress rather than an idea...

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