Hauntology

[2] While Christine Brooke-Rose had previously punned "dehauntological" (on "deontological") in Amalgamemnon (1984),[3] Derrida initially used "hauntology" for his idea of the atemporal nature of Marxism and its tendency to "haunt Western society from beyond the grave".

[2] The concept is derived from deconstruction, in which any attempt to locate the origin of identity or history must inevitably find itself dependent on an always-already existing set of linguistic conditions.

[6] In the 2000s, the term was applied to musicians by theorists Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher, who were said to explore ideas related to temporal disjunction, retrofuturism, cultural memory, and the persistence of the past.

[10] Derrida's prior work on deconstruction, on concepts of trace and différance in particular, serves as the foundation of his formulation of hauntology,[2] fundamentally asserting that there is no temporal point of pure origin but only an "always-already absent present".

[12] His writing in Spectres is marked by a preoccupation with the "death" of communism after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, in particular after theorists such as Francis Fukuyama asserted that capitalism had conclusively triumphed over other political-economic systems and reached the "end of history".

[5]In the 2000s, the term was taken up by critics in reference to paradoxes found in postmodernity, particularly contemporary culture's persistent recycling of retro aesthetics and incapacity to escape old social forms.

"[15] Justin Armstrong, building on Derrida, proposes a "spectral ethnography" that "sees beyond the boundaries of actually spoken language and direct human contact to the interplay between space, place, objects, and temporality".

As a case study, they use the example of Ba Chúc's secondary haunting, in which the state-controlled museums display the skulls of the dead and memorabilia, as opposed to traditional Vietnamese burial customs.