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Davis, Colin - État Présent, Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms
Davis, Colin - État Présent, Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms
3, 373 379
doi:10.1093/fs/kni143
ETAT PRESENT
HAUNTOLOGY, SPECTRES AND PHANTOMS
COLIN DAVIS
1
References are to Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris, Galilee, 1993).
2
Introduction, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Spectres de Marx, ed. by
Michael Sprinker (LondonNew York, Verso, 1999), p. 2. For political responses to Derridas
Spectres de Marx, see the essays in this collection; see also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ghostwriting,
Diacritics, 25 (1995), 65 84, and Ernesto Laclau, The Time is Out of Joint, Diacritics, 25 (1995), 86 96.
3
Marxs Purloined Letter, in Ghostly Demarcations, pp. 26 67 (p. 39).
# The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French
Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org
374 COLIN DAVIS
4
References are to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, LEcorce et le noyau (Paris, Flammarion, 1987;
rst published 1978). See also Abraham and Torok, Cryptonymie: le verbier de lhomme aux loups (Paris,
Flammarion, 1976).
5
Fors: les mots angles de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok, in Abraham and Torok, Cryptonymie: le
verbier de lhomme aux loups, pp. 7 73.
6
For a review of work in this area, see Claude Nachin, Les Fantomes de lame: a` propos des heritages
psychiques (Paris, LHarmattan, 1993), pp. 175 202. See also Nachin, Le Deuil damour (Paris, Editions
universitaires, 1989); Didier Dumas, LAnge et le fantome: introduction a` la clinique de limpense genealogique
(Paris, Minuit, 1985); Serge Tisseron, Secrets de famille: mode demploi (Paris, Editions Ramsay, 1996);
Serge Tisseron et al., Le Psychisme a` lepreuve des generations: clinique du fantome (Paris, Dunod, 1995,
2000).
ETAT PRESENT: HAUNTOLOGY, SPECTRES AND PHANTOMS 375
7
and popular culture. A notable success in this domain was scored by the
psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron in his book Tintin chez le psychanalyste
(1985). Analysing a sequence of Tintin albums in which Captain Haddock
is haunted by the ghost of an ancestor, Tisseron speculated about a
possible connection between the ghosts illegitimate origins and a drama
of legitimacy in the family history of Tintins creator Herge. Subsequent
biographical research undertaken after Herges death showed that Herges
7
For criticism drawing on the work of Abraham and Torok, see, for example, Esther Rashkin, Family
Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton University Press, 1992); Nicholas Rand, Invention
poetique et psychanalyse du secret dans Le Fantome dHamlet de Nicolas Abraham, in Le Psychisme
a` lepreuve des generations, pp. 79 96; Nicholas Rand, Le Cryptage et la vie des uvres: etude du secret dans les
textes de Flaubert, Stendhal, Benjamin, Stefan George, Edgar Poe, Francis Ponge, Heidegger et Freud (Paris,
Aubier, 1989); Serge Tisseron, Tintin chez le psychanalyste: essai sur la creation graphique et la mise en sce`ne
de ses enjeux dans luvre dHerge (Paris, Aubier Montaigne, 1985), and Tintin et le secret dHerge
(Paris, Hors Collection Presses de la Cite, 1993); Colin Davis, Charlotte Delbos Ghosts, FS, LIX
(2005), 9 15.
8
See in particular Maria Torok and Nicholas Rand, Questions a` Freud: du devenir de la psychanalyse (Paris,
Les Belles Lettres, 1995).
376 COLIN DAVIS
11
Papier machine (Paris, Galile e, 2001), p. 398; emphasis in original.
378 COLIN DAVIS