ABSTRACT
Ghosts are making something of a come-back these days. Long at home in fictional domains, they are reappearing in theoretical texts as non-fictional participants in the daily reality of social exchange. These are not the same ghosts who stalked a pre-enlightened world. They neither replicate any of the five types familiar to medieval Catholicism nor the three that sustained the Reformation until European Enlightenment banished them from consciousness. 1 Nor are they simply projections of psychic realities that undermine the unity of Spirit. Today's ghosts are sociologized, rather than theologized or psychoanalyzed, and they are deeply politicized. Specters of Marx, the enslaved, apparitional lesbians — they haunt this world in its other-ing dimensions. They mourn the loss of justice, the power of power to render others invisible, and thus they manifest the social processes that have made them what they are: repressed, marginalized, liminal, carrying out the death drive within culture.
