Ghosts—in Theory—in Theater

For a moment, near the turn to the twenty-first century, theory seemed to die. In addition to the proclamations of pundits, even those most invested in its projects—broadly defined—adopted a more critical and reflective attitude towards theory’s already critical and reflective questions.¹ The death of theory—like the death of God or the author—is of course never quite a death, yet the phrase does tellingly articulate a prevalent critical posture of mourning or nostalgia. Theory of course persists and returns, in its life or its afterlives, and the so-called death is just one trajectory of thought in a heterogeneous terrain. And this recent death-inflected stance also rhymes with older, familiar positions such as Paul de Man’s in “The Resistance to Theory” in which theory’s obstacles actually re-energize the activity they propose to interrupt.

Somewhat appropriately, after theory’s only seeming death, ghosts (as objects or actors) and haunting (as a system of relations) have gained a curious currency in and beyond a strictly theoretical discourse. To begin the 2013 Spectralities Reader, María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren argue that ghosts have become “conceptual metaphors permeating global (popular) culture and academia alike” (1). But with their proliferation and diffusion, ghosts have lost their functional coherence and agency as ghosts; Blanco and Peeren passingly acknowledge the possibility of haunting becoming “over-stretched” (15). In this essay I heed and extend their warning to show how haunting indeed has been overstretched with ghosts becoming part of a troublingly imprecise vocabulary that serves to disembody and disengage theory. I then proceed to propose that theater studies—conspicuously absent from the Blanco and Peeren collection and the critical conversation more broadly—provides a productive framework to recover and to better understand the ghost’s powerful and crucially unstable position in contemporary thought.

A language of ghosts, specters, and apparitions—and the variations are telling—has come to summarize and symptomatize the big questions that high theory seeks to address.² Theater critic Alice Rayner describes some of these stakes: “Ghosts animate our connections to the dead, producing a visible, material, and affective relationship to the abstract terms of time and repetition, sameness and difference, absence and presence” (xiii). Rayner names but a few of the aporetic pairings that haunting has been invoked to describe, animate, or mediate. Elsewhere, ghosts have been summoned to speak to any number of other topics of theoretical concern: speech and writing, fact and fiction, mind and body, archive and repertoire. But with critics deploying ghosts as heuristic for such a wide set of objects and inquiries, ghosts quite simply have ceased to be ghosts. Standing in for other questions, ghosts begin to lose both their identity and their difference, their uncertain substance and their certain agency. Subsumed into a semiotic economy, the ghost becomes a sign without a referent, and haunting a metaphysical exercise rather than a transformative encounter between the living and the dead.

With special guidance from how the ghost has been thought in theater—and particularly in Hamlet—this essay follows the ghost through the death of theory, as the death of theory, and instead of the death of theory. My interest is in maintaining the ghost’s alterity, its resistance, and its agency, as a figure of life-and-death that resists and renews thought.³ The ghost’s stubborn obscurity and its resistance to reading make us read ourselves—and our position in reading—differently. If and when a ghost appears on stage, in and among the materials of the world, it tests credibility and it induces doubt and wonder, and that does something—or at least it seems to. Theater and theory, through what follows, share a persistent curiosity about and a commitment to what seems.

I begin by acknowledging the ghost’s role as a figure—“It is perhaps the hidden figure of all figures”—in philosophical thought and I then describe its recent, disengaged invocations (Derrida, Specters of Marx 150). Along this trajectory, a note in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s 1944 The Dialectic of Enlightenment provides...