Hauntology is a concept within the philosophy of history first introduced by Jacques Derrida in his 1993 work Spectres of Marx and further developed within various critical disciplines in the early 21st century.
It is closely related to Derrida’s deconstruction of Western philosophy’s metaphysics of presence, which argues fundamentally that being is not equivalent to presence. Claiming that there is no temporal point of pure origin but only the time of the always already, deconstruction identifies “haunting [as] the state proper to being as such.”
“Hauntology,” then, describes the resulting state of temporal, historical, and ontological disjunction in which “the priority of being and presence [is replaced by] the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive.”