Hauntology has its roots in Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. The ghosts dealt with in this text pertain to, at the very least, those ghosts of Marx that haunt us (as in chapter 3, “Wears and Tears”), and those that haunted Marx (those he confronted, was obsessed with, and afraid of, as in chapter 4, “In the Name of the Revolution, the Double Barricade”).

In dealing with these different levels of ghosts and hauntings Derrida treats two fundamental questions: 1) whither Marxism?, that is, where is it going? and is it dying?, and 2) how is time out of joint and what kind of response does this call for? These questions come together in an affirmation of a certain type of “learning to live” as seen in the
exordium (xii-xx). Derrida urges the reader to learn to live together-with, together with ghosts, and together with others rather than repress history. In recognizing a debt–a debt to Marx and his specters–Derrida signals a “politics of memory” and the necessity to reckon with, and work with our past, our ghosts, and our inheritance.

So the questions become: What are the ghosts that haunt us, that we conjure up, that we should conjure up, or those that have been cast out? And, how can we enact the “politics of memory” that Derrida invites and thus be able to better learn to live with a politics of that which points to our inheritance (xix exordium) and a sort of space that allows a
negotiation with the past, a struggle with the ghost that is never present, not alive, unable to be killed or repressed because it always returns?

This is a politics of memory that does not just call for nostalgic memory, but rather with engaging-with and responding to memory.To learn how to live would be to add something to what you already do (live), which is to say you must learn from something other than life—i.e., death (and the other).

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