Specularizing the Object Cause of Desire of the Dead Other: A Ghost Story

Abstract The ghost that haunts is usually understood as the return of a subject that has lived and died, and yet it, or some representation of it, has refused to leave. Such refusal to leave, however, should not be understood as the manifestation of an agency that wills to stay—at least not in the traditional sense in which we think of the agency of the subject. This article uses a case study of psychosis to trace the ghost's persistence to the semiotic processes that underlie haunting as a phenomenological experience. It examines the psychoanalytic notion of objet petit a as the object cause of desire of an individual or a group of people, left unanchored by certain circumstances. The orphaned objet petit a thus represents the unfulfilled desire of dead subject(s) that lingers in the shared symbolic space demanding heed from the subjects of that symbolic order. As the specularization of such demand, the ghost may represent an individual or a group of people, an era, or a historical past as such. The ghost in this sense provides a window to the process of subjectivity as a pantemporal articulation of meaning, power, and history and hauntology a grammar promising to unpack that otherwise cryptic language.