The Hauntology of Everyday Life / Psychology and Our Planet (PDF)

"In this elegantly haunting volume Rahimi presents the complicated and dense texture of memory by anchoring it in specific phantoms of the everyday-a half pack of cigarettes and a ten-Franc coin, given as objects and claimed as mana, in words given as things and claimed as ghosts, in the crypt of everyday language that constantly transfers presence to and through absence, in the virtual subjectivities of the present and the haunting presence of the pantemporal (war, colonialism, hunger, genocide, slavery)."
-Neni Panourgia, PhD, Associate Professor, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University

This volume develops a comprehensive framework for applying the theory of hauntology to everyday life from ethnographic and clinical points of view. The central argument of the book is that all human experience is fundamentally haunted, and that a shift from ontological theory of subjective experience to a hauntological one is necessary and has urgent implications. Building on the notion of hauntology outlined by Derrida, the discussions are developed within the frameworks of psychoanalytic theory, specifically Jacques Lacan's object relational theory of ego development and his structural reading of Freud's theory of the psychic apparatus and its dynamics; along with the Hegelian ontology of the negative and its later modifications by 20th century philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida; and the semiotics of difference introduced by Saussure and worked by Jakobson and others. This book argues and demonstrates the immediate relevance of hauntological analysis in everyday life by providing a microanalysis of the roles played by power, meaning and desire; and by using vignettes and data from ethnographic research and clinical settings, as well as references to literature, movies and other cultural products.

Sadeq Rahimi, MSc, PhD, is a Research Associate in the Department of Global Health and SocialMedicine at Harvard Medical School, and an Adjunct Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. Dr. Rahimi is a psychoanalytically trained clinician and holds a private practice in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.