Daily Dialectic

My aim in this talk is to make a serious case for the existence of ghosts. Ghosts may or may not be, but they exist in either case, and they haunt us. I want to argue for a haunting that permeates the spacio-temporal dimensions of the intersubjective encounter in the same way that Shakespeare’s ghost of Hamlet’s father can pass through walls. I also want to argue for the existence of a plurality of ghosts, some beneficent, others malevolent; some affecting a specific target population, and others less discriminating.

The heart of the dialectic is the tension between the chosen actions of two autonomous individuals in the face to face encounter on one hand, and on the other, the shadow cast by these ghosts’ haunting, and the degree to which that constrains each individual’s ‘autonomy’. My primary theoretic points of reference are Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. I will try to demonstrate how my ideas hold in the light of the recently publicised killings of unarmed black men by white police officers in the United States.