Haunt; Etymology: Middle English (in the sense ‘frequent (a place’)): from Old French hanter, of Germanic origin; distantly related to home.
The word haunt has roots from old French and English, a combination of haunter and home, meaning to frequent a place, distantly related to home. A haunted place is a frequented place, one visited, one like home. Frequented by what? one may ask: the answer is by memories.
To be haunted is to remember. Much in the same way people are haunted by the past, places are too. For it is true that places have memory and feelings in the same way as humans. We are equally extensions of nature and nature itself, beyond the modern connotation, reaching deeply back to the Greek and Latin origin of the word: to be born, to arise--and in the sense of how I choose to translate Laozi’s 道. We may arise from such ideas of how we view nature, but many things arise from us too, some positive and some deeply negative. It is often these births that a place can remember.
The Overlook Hotel, though fictional, is a place with a history. It is haunted, not in the sense of direct ghosts or creepy twins, but in a Geschichte-verfolgt style. The weight-of-history is felt in every room, an echo, a reminder of what happened there.
As a young person, you likely had a crush. If you were lucky, you may have begun a successful courtship. If you were a youngman, perhaps you fancied a younglady. You went to her house, and in the living room is a deeply personal object, a chair. There is nothing special about this chair other than the weight of its history. You know this is The Father’s chair. There’s nothing to indicate it. No beer stains. No sweat-torn leather. Perhaps He’s no longer around. There is only the chair. But this chair is haunted, haunted by a Geschichtsgeist, a remainder--the truest kind there is.
The most haunted places in our perverted Western understanding of the paranormal are prisons, asylums, sanatoriums; places where history has been so heavy, emotions so strong, actions so desperate, there’s no way it couldn’t leave a stain. It’s hard to forget so many people’s plight, it’s hard to forget all the suffering. So the place has no choice but to remember. But when you venture into these places and feel a chill or a deeply unnerving feeling, it’s not some figure in a sheet, it’s the echoes-of-history, the memory-of-suffering tickling at your spine.
“What is anachronistic about the ghost story is its peculiarly contingent and constitutive dependence of physical place and, in particular, on the material house as such. No doubt, in some pre-capitalist forms, the past manages to cling stubbornly to open spaces, such as gallows hill or a sacred burial ground; but in the golden age of this genre, the ghost is at one with a building of some antiquity.”
-- Federic Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining”
In this way, it’s important that we understand ghosts not as individuals but as collectives, and not as spectres in the strictly paranormal sense, but as memories. Places, objects, all things as nature can be haunted.
Let us quickly return to the above etymology. The second piece of the puzzle rests on the distinct relation to “home.” This is not to say homes are the most haunted places, though to an individual that statement may ring true, instead the idea is positioned alongside the memories that haunt. This place is the home to the Geschichtsgeist, it’s where these memories belong. They were created here and so they stay, a cut-out stencil leaving behind a distinct shape, however invisible it may be to the naked eye. Ghosts cannot roam, they cannot leave rooms or go to different houses, different cultures, they are intrinsically tied to the places where they were formed.
The Geschichtsgeist, the memories, do not have a natural morality. They are amoral. However, there is certainly a distinction to be made between good and bad memories, and even more important to remember that memories can and do harm.
We must remember that all things remember. It’s the same reason I dread looking into mirrors. What might I see? What might this object have remembered? It may be the present moment as we expect (slightly delayed through the processing of our optic nerve), or it might have a deep and powerful memory intact, one we wouldn’t like to see. A truth we wouldn’t want to know.
This is the meaning of a ghost. It’s a naturalistic imprint, a haunting of a person, of a place, even ideas in this way can fall prey to phantoms. It is not our job to be afraid of ghosts, but instead to learn from them; because if a memory is strong enough to persist, there must be some merit in its initial occurrence.
Derrida played with this idea in his funxional establishment of hauntology, and in Spectres of Marx. In there, he argued that even ideas, movements, and full histories haunt (though this is not really the point he’s getting at), and that modern culture is defined by the Geschichtsgeist that invisibly moves objects about the marketplace of ideas like a mischievous poltergeist. This Geschichtsgeist is, of course, just as relevant in the conservative movements, comments of Francis Fukuyama, and any other Western chauvinists as it is in those still fervently dedicated to the preservation of the original, apparently fallen, ideal.
In this way, ghosts, as we have come to understand them now in a more funxionally useful way, have greater bearing on our everyday lives than we might ever imagine. For instance, many of the policies and platforms of the American Republican party are fundamentally shaped by the Geschichtsgeist left by Reagan in the 80s, and the Society of the Spectacle, as Debord terms it, established in the Reagan era, reached its practical zenith with the presidency of Donald Trump and the subsequent 2020 election.
The purpose of the supposition presented here is not to impact your understanding of a certain political landscape nor to provide an obscure philosophical reading list, but instead to change your way of thinking about the paranormal. To look at the idea of ghosts in a less traditional sense, and to instead understand that all things-in-nature, from mirrors at night to words we use in conversation, are haunted, Geschichte-verfolgt, by that which precedes them--be that history, connotation, reputation, etc. And, a deeper understanding of these aspects, will help you to better understand the arrival at the present. After all, etymology is too a hauntological field of study. For nothing can arrive at what it is now without being what it once was, those remainders, those memories, that history, is as frightening a ghost as Hollywood or Stephen King could ever conjure.
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