ABSTRACT
The words in the title, guest and ghost, share a common stage in their etymologies. Guest presents the Old English giest (gist, gyst), gæst forms. Ghost derives from the Old English gást (also gǽst). There is, indeed, something ghostly about the guest. The guest is frequently the stranger that comes from the outside. This exteriority is a constant source of fear and disquietude. In his Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida claims that the absence of identity, the empirical invisibility of the Other, accounts for its “spectral aura”: “It is thus necessary, beyond all perception, to receive the other while running the risk, a risk that is always troubling, strangely troubling, like the stranger (unheimlich), of a hospitality offered to the guest as ghost or Geist or Gast. There would be no hospitality without the chance of spectrality” (1999a, 111-12). In a slightly different context, Jean and John Comaroff (1999) explain that the dread evoked by the migrant as Other is akin to the experience of confronting a zombie, the spectral gure par excellence that seems to have made a comeback in the era of globalization and neoliberalism.
