Summary: Hauntologies of Modernity. Geneses
p. 527-529
Texte intégral
1In 1980 in his Adorno Award speech Jürgen Habermas interpreted modernity to be ”the unfinished project”. According to the author of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity the Enlightenment has entered the postcritical phase when it needs to struggle with the exhaustion of its own culturally active capability. Habermas pointed at the fact that the ideas of modernisation – aesthetical, technical and political – constitute the elemental component of the experience of the contemporary times. They remain radically historical in the way that, as they develop, they enable us to notice their dialectic opposition in the shape of reactive forces that endanger the project as such. This ambivalent character of modernity is apparently traced best in the ambiguous model of the aesthetic experience.
2It seems that the descriptive and diagnostic character of what Habermans is saying is appropriate to the aesthetic situation of late modernity when both individuals and communities have to struggle with the tenebrous dialectics of the Enlightenment i.e with the catastrophic belief that the dreams of emancipation are over. However – and contrary to Habermas – it is possible to think modernity not as the modernising and prospective narrative that – by its nature – cannot be finished but as a process that cannot be either begun or reach its own end. This in turn is how modernity can be perceived as the spectre which haunts individuals and commnunities in various incomplete, precarious, radically and temporalily incoherent and asynchronic ontological forms. In his book the author is trying to ask questions that are essentially transcendental i.e. questions that concern the conditions of the possibility of the spectre as the paradoxical, ”incomplete fullfilment” of modernism. Trying to work out such an epistemological field in which the dialectic inversion of modernist gestures would be made possible, I want to present the issue of hauntology in the disenchanted world. The key issues that are brought up in this book are the language and rhetorics of the beginning and the source of modernity. The genetic structures are as important in this book as the spectral forms of the indefinite future: the forms that are yet to come. The author, whose starting point is Jacques Derrida’s intuition that the world of modernity is contained not as much in the progressive narrative but rather in the discontinued and faltering story of the recurrent phantoms that are impossible to be conceptually grasped, aims at working out a general theory of spectral modernity.
3From such a perspective the principle of the self seems different. Where does the spectral self come from? We might say that the question of the origin of the self is reformulated by various modernistic discourses and yields the principle of the radical dialectics where, on the one hand, an individuality is exposed to active negativity, and, on the other, stops this very same negativity inside its own self, incarnates it and repositions the meanings generated by the negativity. From such a perspective the origin is always dialectical. It fits in the semantic hiatus in the developing, updating language, its semiotic ambivalence and existential discontinuity of the speaking self. However, the origin is always spectral either. Not only is the swerve of the self towards its own genealogy the case of self-reflection, but it also plays the ontological role: it suspends an individual being between life and death or rather between the concepts of existence and absence, thus establishing the principle of the continuous movement between the light of the spirit and the matter. Modernity, which is being discussed here, appears to be spectral because it is both sensual and conceptual and because it fits in both the order of visibility and invisibility. The same happens to the self that is circulating between the poles of the essential immanence and the possible transcendence.
4Whereas in the classical Hegelian narrative of modernity and the self the world reached its fullfilment in the identities’ reconciliation in the difference, the spirit that becomes the concept, in the modernity that the author defines to be radical, the subjectivity and the world are destined to exist within the limits set by the epistemological crisis that excludes any form of the pure spirit. The crisis in epistemology is the basis of the crisis in ontology. Spectral reality negates both the principle of death and the possibility of complete life; not only does it nullify but incessantly stops an individual being in a strange state which is no longer life but which cannot be named death either. Therefore the phantom existence is in its own way the end of the spirit and the beginning of the end of modernity. But, reversing the famous statement of Habermas, it can also be said that modernity seen from the spectral perspective is not merely an unfinished project but the world of individual spirits, quasi material peculiarities whose histories have been bleared. Thus, modernity as the spectre cannot be over, but not because of the fact that its characteristic discourse disperses the horizon of the unattainable and normatively defined possibilities but because it takes up the form that fractures every language, neutralizes the perspective value of the modernistic narrative conveying in this way the (at least) potential critical content.
5A few words about the composition of the book. The key issue in the first part is the problem of three paradigms of spectral modernity and the genetic conditions that are linked with these paradigms: critical theory, psychoanalysis and deconstruction which is not given the separate chapter but in many parts of the book is its influence significantly noticeable. In the second part the author presents a sort of a bickering between theoretical discourse and artistic practices in which the issue of the origin of the modernistic spectrality is mapped out and remains idiomatically open on the epistemological level.
6The book is the first one from the planned series of the hauntological histories. The parts to follow are going to deal with mediation, the acoustic aspect of the spectre as the alternative project of the self and, last but not least, the spectre of the political and ideological issue.
7Translated by Paweł Rogala

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