Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past

by Merlin Coverley

Ghosts and specters, the eerie and the occult. Why is contemporary culture so preoccupied by the supernatural, so captivated by the revenants of an earlier age, so haunted? The concept of Hauntology has evolved since first emerging in the 1990s, and has now entered the cultural mainstream as a shorthand for our new-found obsession with the recent past. But where does this term come from and what exactly does it mean?

This book seeks to answer these questions by examining the history of our fascination with the uncanny from the golden age of the Victorian ghost story to the present day. From Dickens to Derrida, MR James to Mark Fisher; from the rise of Spiritualism to the folk horror revival, Hauntology traces our continuing engagement with these esoteric ideas. Moving between the literary and the theoretical, the visual and the political, Hauntology explores our nostalgia for the cultural artifacts of a past from which we seem unable to break free.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, History, Horror, Theory, Occult, Cultural

321 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 21, 2020

Reviews

[Montzalee Wittmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hauntology: Ghost of the Furures Past
By Merlin Coverley
Well, this book did what it told us it would do in its blurb. Discuss why and when people got fascinated with ghosts and how society views it. It's still relevant today with the ghost shows and books. ( I'm guilty!) Do I believe? No, not really, but I would like to. I think that really is the point. Well, and scamming people.
The book was too good in getting in too much detail for me. I must say I got a bit bored in a few places but overall it was informative and did its job!

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hauntology may seem like a slippery concept but Coverley's book cuts through the fog and should be very helpful to those of us struggling with the concept. To my understanding, Hauntology (almost rhymes with ontology) is not the study of what IS but of those things that affect actuality that are not themselves actual, things that "haunt" experience. Ghosts and the belief in ghosts are obvious examples, but others include history and our sense of it, especially as it informs and changes the nature of places over time, nostalgia (originally classified as a disease!), and expectations of the future (futurism, science fiction). Even more interesting, and a core concept, is the notion that we are haunted by past anticipations of futures that never occurred (such as a world of socialist states) but that still shape the actions and rhetoric of our politicians and the work of our artists. Coverley treats hauntology as an English phenomenon, so most of his examples are from English culture, literature (including some excellent analyses of Arthur Machen's work), and art. American hauntology surely exists and probably differs from English in some key features, but I can see plenty of overlap too. I enjoyed the book thoroughly, especially the first two parts and I look forward to following the signposts it lays down.

[Gayle (OutsmartYourShelf) · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author examines the continuing fascination with the supernatural in modern culture and our societal inability to let go of certain aspects of the past so that they haunt the present. They cover the theories of Jacques Derrida, and the argument that the cycle of interest in the occult and ghosts seems to correspond to certain events in society which may prompt this renewal of interest.

This started well. I was intrigued by the introduction and the first part which dealt with the Victorian fondness for the strange including the first ghost hunting society and the rise of mediumship and seances, and how these leaked through into the surrounding culture. I thought that the examples used in this section were interesting and worked well and I felt I understood what the author was trying to say. After that, things became a little muddled for me. The next sections had fewer examples and more discussion of the different theories and proponents of Hauntology which became a little dry to read at times. Overall it turned out to be a rather different book to the one I was expecting, but that may very well have been a misunderstanding on my part. Others who are interested in this subject may enjoy reading this, but in the end, it was not for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and publishers, Oldcastle Books, for the opportunity to read an ARC.

[Maud Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

[tl;dr: many thoughts, blabber, great book]
Man. This book would've loved to see the post 2020 era, just a few years behind- before new practices of engaging with land flourished in lockdown, Weird Walk folk-horror revival, climate change anxieties, 'postmodern gothic' in the form of liminal space... the difference between 2020 and 2025 is, a lot. This book already seems dated! But, a good read, and the concepts introduced shall haunt me indefinitely.

A book that attempts to map a spectral fog of a concept, and does it the best it can. It’s all over the place, but it has a right to be. It summarise ‘hauntology’, tracing the concept as it's grown. If you don't think Marx, freak folk, ghosts, and Freud do not align as one- wrong.

Hauntology renews a sense of the interrelation of all things, and how they can all affect us. It can be everywhere and nowhere, as a music genre, political aesthetic, academic tool for future-making. It evokes this *abyss*, of all things in life that ever happen and will happen, this abyss staring back at you, and lingering so to make you feel stared at forever. So stressful and yet so soothing. Shadowy, dark ecologies if you will, a shimmering secret medium behind all existing things; ecologies.
Under a hauntological lens, new geographies and ecological dynamics that explain our work and can assist us in making sense of, and navigating, this uncertain world. Everything is haunted, and is either repeated or destroyed, layered over, folding, reused, reacknowledged.

This book starts by mapping out the beginnings of the concept of 'haunting', interestingly tracing through the socio-cultural influences of what makes people afraid, and haunted. From the horror novellas of the Victorian times caused by Darwinism and the smallest psychological intricate events, like seeing ones reflection more often, the urban wyrd, and the loss of the countryside way of life.
Hauntology unblurs quit a bit, like what makes us anxious? Scared? Where are we heading as a society? Why do I feel so hopeless, why is this world becoming hostile too? It makes sense of where we stand in the malaise of the global postmodern.

It does this by showing what ‘horrifies’ us, it tracing an anatomy of culture influence, a societal, psychological whole. This poses cosmic questions at each turn. Horror media dwells amongst futures and pasts, collective fears and hopes, bending space-time-thought. All horror is in fact psychological horror... A history of anxieties. Nothing is inextricably something, and a very dynamic something too.

The book swirls through occultism-oriented, strange theories of time arising from the 1930s to the 60s in a world further expanding, fragmenting, ‘tech-knowligising’ itself and its pasts, to where we are now. A point forms, that as time feels to be accelerating and too much information surrounds us, we passively find comfort in what already has been structured and defined. Which triggers the notion that we, right now, are haunted by futures passed. No God, just ghosts of places, eras, concepts.

The rhythm of the book was strange - I enjoy the conceptual hauntings throughout the book, such as of the word 'haunt' itself, the way of the rural British landscape, and the year 1848- somehow! But, for most of it was rambles about old Victorian literature and certain psychology/literary figureheads with occultist, surreal concepts of space-time which could echo true to today, but the last 30 pages regarding Mark Fisher and the 70s truthfully encapsulated 'hauntology' succinctly- that should have just been the whole book! Fisher, although with excellent points, is trapped in nostalgia itself, making the 70s the ‘one’ important decade to fall back to. The 70s follow the failure of the hippie movement. These allusions assume an opaque sense of culture, thought, and future- this view is highly reductionist and highly risked fabulation/ aestheticisation more than the many realities of the time. Things did not even start in the 70s, I believe it goes further back and can be argued to go further back and back (Sort of becomes a ' Start of the Anthropocene'type argument). But, Fisher’s unpublished ‘acid communism’ -a hauntological dissection of the 70s in this way, poses stimulating ideas and I LOVE HIM! But as the book mentions from discussing Acid Communism, the 70s and decade-ologising of everything is perhaps a new ‘folk horror’ and a new postmodern haunting, a cultural crisis smacking the new lost generation of the 2020s youth, far and wide out of any future vision of active change.

Also, another part being too short was hauntology and its links to capitalist realism, for we acknowledge the passivity that no other future is possible, so we are only ever just haunted by past futures. This leads onto the idea that whoever controls space, also controls and defines the future and past. Now, space and time are individual and exterior to us as a functional resource-where machines track space via co-ordinates and digitally, time is constantly tracked, folklore dissolves, we all meld into one pragmatic grey submissive blob of What(?). Ahhh, more please!

What I do know is that the hauntological lens effectively witnesses how art, music, culture signifies worldly becomings of future and past, and these futures and pasts linger through different spaces and times, they haunt. But what is substantial about identifying hauntings? How can we redefine living and re-establish visions of a future, make action? What substance is added, other than a haunting which paralyzes (i.e nowadays)? The present, a ‘vast conforming suburb of the soul’ is so deeply relevant to Trump, Mangione, liminal space, rise of alt-right, a lack of revolutionising.. a worldwide fatigue is in place. Millions of nostalgias and hauntings must be paralysing for us. How has capitalism realism manifested in our bodies and agencies? When will we break? When will we create a future again? Who is in control now, how do we fix this? Time and space is distorted right now, stalled, even, in a more anxious world of knowing more, being haunted more, locking us into a present somehow. The mechanisms of capitalist realism are starting to show. All hauntology seems to take place within the capitalist cosmos, beginning at the start of the industrial revolution, so more word on capitalism, hauntology, and how futures remain lost, would be interesting (2025 revision of the book NOW!).

The book is indeed UK-centric, discussing the urban 'wyrd' and the eerie proclivities of the British Countryside itself, but- what about hauntologies of outside of Suffolk and London, to Scotland, Cornwall, Welsh borders, other countries? I think about American hauntology blended with colonialism- folklore, like bigfoot, 'indian burial grounds' in movies, what socio-cultural, colonist dynamics could one extract from a hauntological lens on all of that?

Regarding folk horror and what this the book said at the end, quoting McFarlane, about folk horror returning and the admiration of folklore saving us of 'uncertain' futures and our 'ungrounded' postmodern lives, it bloody well figured out why a lot of us Gen Z and millenial Brits are drawn to folklore at the moment, and maybe why I had that 70s acid folk phase in 2019. But the past being repackaged as heritage, to nostalgia, where is the urban folklore? Modern gothic? Why must we be stuck in perpetual-yet-fading kaleidoscopic past-making (decadeology, comprehending the 2000s, 2010s- dates become odd poetry, numbered code lacking sign and action)?

Also has anyone suggested hauntological dissonance? How in this age of data we have more storage, access to information, and memory than ever, and yet we forget more and repeat ourselves more than ever at quicker rates? The lack of collective futures, loops of downfalls and self sabotage, pendulums of right to left wing, perhap spiralling to a worse technocratic dystopias, Nostalgia is an illness. How do we choose what haunts, and allow ourselves to be receptive? Precarious 21st century topics, but I am dying to know. If time is a loop, forming this flat circle, then that circle is currently a wrestling ring between technology, and whatever cultural multiplicities take hold amongst swatches of societal and physical landscape changes. Why are we more in control of the past more than ever, yet the future is more taken from our hands?
Anyway, many thoughts, great book.

[Arya · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Fisher regards the roots of our current impasse as being much deeper than their cultural manifestation might suggest, pointing towards a more widespread societal malaise. In short, the imaginative deficit that hauntology brings into focus is not simply cultural in origin but political. The most sustained expression of this belief is found in Capitalist Realism (2009) in which Fisher’s primary thesis is neatly encapsulated in the title of his opening chapter: ‘It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’.’
- p. 260

brb need to go read and re-read all of Fisher’s work

[J. d'Merricksson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book wasn't what I expected from reading the description. I was expecting a look at actual ghost stories and tales of haunting, and how the spectral influences the corporeal. Instead, I found myself introduced to a fascinating philosophy that I was wholly unfamiliar with. This notion of how the past 'haunts' the present resonated with me. Concepts such nostalgia, retromania, cyclical history and more gave me much to ponder, leading to it taking much longer to finish reading than it might otherwise have.

This seemed eerily prescient given current goings on both world-wide, and within my birth country. The past is certainly haunting us right now as history has cycled around, bringing situations we should have been prepared for/ could have avoided. A global pandemic and the rise of the Tangerine Tyrant are events repeating themselves, echoing into the present, yet no-one seemed prepared at all. I wonder- will we ever learn from the dead past or will it always haunt us?

[Plum-crazy]

I started this last Halloween & have only managed to reach page 76. I've read an odd page here & there but haven't picked it up in weeks. It's a book that need my full attention & I just can't give it...

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Hauntology' is a decent enough guide to what might be termed an academic intellectual fashion but one which flipped over into a relatively brief burst of musical and cultural creativity as the twentieth became the twenty-first century.

It derives from the absence/presence thought of Jacques Derrida and his investigation of 'temporality' where ghosts (or shades or shadows if you want to change the metaphor) of the past and the future infect the present which becomes the past as it unfolds.

It has a close association with the most decadent late stage of depressed Marxism with much talk of the ghosts apparently (apparitions) being inherent to late liberal capitalism. There is no doubt that some sense of the impending millennium played a role in its popularity.

Coverley tells a fairly conventional if often insightful story of 'cultural hauntings' in a largely British context. He relies a great deal on the work of Simon Reynolds (primarily derived from musical culture) and the late Mark Fisher.

Coverley's account of M R James and his ghost stories happened, by synchronicity, to be read while I was working through the latter's complete works in this genre. I cannot fault Coverley's analysis. He also introduced me to the work of Vernon Lee and I hope to pursue that further.

Hauntology could be said to be a close cousin of Psychogeography (Coverley has written on this). This came out of the 1950s as a cultural leftist phenomenon much like hauntology with its own French master intellectual source (Guy Debord). It also influenced culture notably urban and cultural studies.

Hauntology may be familiar to London radical intellectuals less for its persistent and gloomy critique of a capitalism the Left had given up trying to fight by the turn of the century than for its role in reviving interest in weird literature, in music and promoting 'Verso-type' popular intellectualism.

This got me thinking about the sociology of both post-modern movements, why such movements emerge and with what effect. In both cases, you appear to have a depressed and increasingly deracinated intellectual class, politically impotent, theoretical and inactive, hanging on to something.

Nor are these the only examples. Although the class base was different (more public school than grammar or comprehensive), you will find a similar class of radicalised intellectuals with steadyish but vulnerable sources of income caught up in a similar aesthetic revolt against reality.

This latter was the post-romantic and symbolist movement of the end of the 19th century - neo-pagan nostalgia in Britain and nostalgia for Christian esotericism in France, an intellectual class that was functionally rather idle making work for itself enough to be artistically or culturally creative.

We should not over-simplify this phenomenon but impotence in the face of the world, nostalgia (whether expressed as invented pasts or ghosts of the past) and pessimism combined with the urge, if not always to create art, to encourage artistic creation. It seems to be a rhyming event in history.

You might also apply hauntology to the hauntologists themselves and say that all these moments in cultural history are themselves haunted moments where the ghosts are shadows of material reality, replaying their own pasts and trying to attract attention through impotent howlings.

All such movements eventually reach a natural terminus either because the haunted age and exhaust the possibilities of their discontent unable to appeal to the generation below or because external events throw intellectuals back into action or into materialism.

The neo-paganism and symbolism of a previous era exhausted itself quite quickly, derived as it was from particular types of education relevant to respective countries (classical in Britain and catholic in France). They faced the action logic of nationalism in the first world war.

If hauntology could ride on the coat tails of psychogeography and create a form of long duration occulture (at least in London), it too is perhaps crashing now against the fact that the memory generation of 1970s Britain has said all it can say and the knowledge that pessimism is not enough.

The political aspects of hauntology are interesting here. An academic community looked at capitalism from the safety of secure moderate academic incomes and wept. Screeds of urban condemnation of Thatcher and the effects of the market resulted in Grandpa Corbyn and the Starmer regime!

Yet this was also the era of nihilism, Nick Land, accelerationism and a great deal of desperate intellectual hysteria and so interesting that, while no one who matters in terms of raw power on the Left listens to intellectuals, hyper-capitalist accelerationism proved influential amongst the techbros.

Being an intellectual on a posh state benefit was not linked to influence or power. Quite the contrary, never has the intellectual or even expert been so culturally devalued as it has become under late liberal capitalism. 'Ressentiment' expressed itself as 'criticism'.

Of course, capitalism has proved even more inconvenient to the intellectual as it showed its flawed nature. The 2008 crash may have demonstrated that the critics were right but no one cared about the critics being right. The system poddled along with sticking plasters in place.

Now, the real implosion is taking place but not as predicted. Brexit and Trump are just symbols for the revolt of the people who not only do not give a toss what intellectuals think but actively despise them as both impotent and irrelevant.

The intellectual is under siege. The money is running out to give them the security they think they deserve. They also failed as a class to act to improve the security of their lessers, the people out there who are now seeing their living standards crumble under a regime of war hawks and incompetents.

Post-modern politics has nothing to say to the population. The hauntological or the psycho-geographical or the old neo-pagan or symbolist critiques of bourgeois capitalism look redundant as people out there desperately attempt to retain rather than deny bourgeois comforts.

No one wants pessimism and analyses without practical solutions any more. People are moving back in the direction of action, pre-empting the action of war (which may yet come) with the action of overthrowing one wing of capitalism that takes heed of their plight (populism) against the other.

But, having said all that. it is the cultural detritus of such intellectual movements that still moves and inspires people. When the theories are returned to the scholars, the art and the music remains as progress of sorts. People are moved by the emotion hidden in the analytical verbiage.

Although hauntology is moving now into its own ghostly state, you will gain more than you lose by being aware of it as a cultural phenomenon. This book is an excellent starting point for discovering its curious slant on reality without having to wade through Derrida to get there.

[Brenda Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very, very academic.
This comes over as more of an academic dissertation than anything else. Not a piece of reading for the faint-hearted. Not that it isn't interesting - it is - but as other readers also seem to feel, not quite what I was expecting. I keep going back over bits, then forwards again - a bit like hauntology itself, actually - and saying 'Oh, do get on with it' while actually feeling I haven't learned a great deal. There are more notes and cross-references than actual text, mainly to books and other sources that are probably not available to the general reader, which is frustrating. I first came across this book in a review in the Fortean Times, which is rather more my style than the book. (I'm interested in the paranormal, with a serious approach, but not quite this serious.)I'll probably keep going back to it, but not with a great deal of enthusiasm.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hauntology: I too dislike it.

Hauntology is the latest in Coverley's series of interesting and mercifully brief books about intellectual flavors of the month.

"Hauntology" began as a bit of rhetorical shorthand by the late obscurantist Jaques Derrida. Eventually a more mundane and useful role was found for the term as Marxism was eclipsed in 90s academia.

The examples Coverley provides of works by his hauntologists strike the reader as (at best) eccentric themes from creative writing class assignments.

Excerpts from a zine called "Savage Messiah" by someone named "Laura Grace (formerly Oldfield) Ford" seem to be the acme of this kind of amateur gibberish, subsequently canonized with a Verso edition. Coverly suggests "Savage Messiah" valorizes atomized dead-end riots as examples of popular protests against "Thatcherism."

Mark Fisher of "acid communism" fame is given pride of place in the book's final chapter. I suspect Fisher called himself a Marxist by misunderstanding: his brand of petty bourgeois social democracy cross-fertilized with fashionable academic jargon is not fundamentally different from the priorities of old New Left Review/Tony Benn Labour reformist Bernsteinism.

Fisher's vaunted and "courageous" 1970s political nostalgia is untouched by the weight of the victory in Vietnam against US imperialism, the Portuguese revolution, or the Irish civil rights movement. His 1979 is oblivious to victories in Grenada, Nicaragua, and Iran, and the intensifying antiapartheid struggle. Crucially: no mention of class, class dictatorship, or class struggle. In the end, Fisher is one more purveyor of pink whateverism.

Coverley's sections on Vernon Lee, Machen, Susan Cooper, and Alan Garner will be useful to new readers looking for guidance. So are the lists of recommended websites, films, and books.

[Ana Moth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book explores some really fascinating concepts. I didn't realise until I read the 'also by this author ' section that I have read one of Coverley's books before (Occult London) but this one resonated with me much more.

Years ago I glibly told someone that we have a linear understanding of time, and that was the end of it. Since then I have had cause to rethink this several times, and the temporal theories in this book made me think again as well.

I also recognised a lot of the discussions around mourning for a lost future and a past that never was (perhaps the essence of hauntology). As someone is is prone to nostalgia reading analysis of these phenomena wasn't just familiar, it was comforting.

And of course the discussions of pop culture gave me many new things to seek out and many more books to read.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an outstanding cover of this non-fiction book. Inside you'll find many theories and arguments why we are so preoccupied with haunting things. Ghosts as a part of the future, folk horror revival, nostalgia (Dickens, The Haunted Man), mythic time, deep time (Arthur Machen), Freud and the Uncanny, archive fever (MR James), experiments with time, myths of the near future (JG Ballard), ghosts of futures past, the return of nostalgia/retromania. Intriguing scientific book that gives much insight why we are so obsessed with horror. Quite academic, but absolutely worth your time. Really recommended!

[George Bate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whilst I find many of the things that Cloverley writes about in this book extremely interesting in themselves, the definition of Hauntology used here (and I suppose applied elsewhere) has become so vague as to lose most of its meaning. In attempting to draw the subjects back to the theme, much of the text becomes somewhat tautological and any depth of analysis is lost. I think the concept is at its most interesting in more difficult texts (such as Fisher's) where its relationship to the lost futures of Marxism is maintained.

[Mia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t expect much from this book, but it offered a very interesting historical and literary analysis of the English fascination with ghosts and how we as humans “haunt” ourselves. The audiobook was not the way to consume this book; I would like to revisit this in a physical copy so I can more thoroughly examine the sources and footnotes. Also, I think it’s extremely comical how the presenter of the audiobook puts on voices when the author is quoting from his sources. That made the listening experience very entertaining, though I can’t say I absorbed much of the content.

[Roger O · Rating 5 out of 5]

For nerds like me who love folk horror, especially the eerie vibes of British folk horror, this book is a clear and engaging exploration of hauntology. Coverley does a great job breaking down how nostalgia, location, and cultural history help create the unsettling feeling we find in these stories. Most of the book focuses on literature, but he also touches on films, TV shows, and even some music. It’s a fascinating look at why certain places and ideas stick with us, and how hauntology became such a powerful way to explore them.

[Ian Mapp · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting academic study that looks at the uncanny and the eerie. I particularly liked the examination of being haunted by things that have not happened yet.

Not the easiest of reads, with a fair degree of repetition and really just reexamining other peoples work. Yet, it has a very strong bibliography section and my TBR pile has increased significantly. Mainy about modern pop culture books.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I picked this up. Something to do with the paranormal perhaps. Unfortunately this fell down in the opening pages, an analysis of Dickens - A Christmas Carol, really wasn't it though.
I didn't make it much further, as it would result in being tantamount to pulling nails (not the metal variety).

#netgalley, #hauntology

[Jed Mayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

The chief contribution of this study is to open the history of hauntology up to the nineteenth century, and consequently the first chapter is the most intriguing. Chapter two fills in the space between the late-19C and the 1970s, and chapter three focuses on the chief theorizers of the hauntological (Derrida, Fisher, Reynolds, etc.) and is consequently more of a summary than a fresh perspective.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and complete.

Well written and cogent overview of a difficult to define phenomena. Many interesting aspects and examples are brought together that trace the history and concept of hauntology. This is an essential book to begin to understand the ideas in this fascinating view of our culture.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun and accessible book that I seem to have started then put down before rediscovering. Spans a wide body of work, paying tribute to Nigel Kneale and Mark Fisher via Marx, Baudrillard and Jameson.

The overall thesis is that the recent past is haunting the present, whether via cultural nostalgia or neoliberal policies that alienate normal people.

[joanne ellis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book and showing concepts of the haunted…… it delves deep into the phenomenon and looks at the history of spirits.

This book is not for the faint hearted but I thoroughly enjoyed it and my hats off to the author! It will certainly be a book that I will re-read.

[cypher · Rating 3 out of 5]

i somehow both felt like it had some interesting things and was not really engaging enough...especially for a subject which is supposed to be very captivating.
it was a bit of a halloween month disappointment...

[Kian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great introduction to an incredibly interesting topic - how our present is haunted by pasts that never were, and futures that are yet to be. I see everything differently now, more conscious of the ghosts which influence the world around us.

[Samantha Johnston · Rating 5 out of 5]

love love love!

[Karin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very dry and academic writing. Interesting concepts! I could have done with a long form article on this though. Dense, and went into discussions of other media far more than I care for.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some highlights when talking about folk horror, Mark Fisher, etc. But ultimately too academic for me

[George Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, on par with Mark Fisher's work. Hauntology as far as I can see is not yet really a science but it should be. It certainly fits with Jungian theory as James Hollis shows.

[Dominik]

(przeczytany trzeci, ostatni rozdział)

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This text attempts to examine the staples of the Victorian fascination with the supernatural, the idea of folk horror and how people can interpret the culture and surroundings related to them. To do this the author uses the term, hauntology. I'm probably grossly simplifying the following, but it means the study of the past with relation to the supernatural, specifically to be haunted by ideas which are thought to be outdated and futures that didn't happen and the fear of futures that might happen. The book finds new ways to look at the Victorian fascination with ghosts and examines the cultural effects of the 1970s. It also raises the point of how the term huntology has become important now within our current political and social culture and the way that previously inaccessible Media texts have now all become easily within reach of anybody with an interest in them. There is one quibble I have with the design of the text which I read on Kindle. That is, it can be easy to miss when the text moves into a quotation because of the way it's formatted. However this does not detract from the perspective that the text has or how it causes the reader to expand on what the term hauntology means and how it makes them perceive things. It’s certainly a good starting point for how it can be applied.