ABSTRACT
The 21st century has seen renewed interest in two seemingly disparate subjects: hauntology and the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Hauntology, particularly in the iteration defined by scholars like the late Mark Fisher, has evolved from its origins in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, in which Derrida uses the term to frame his argument about the past’s continued presence and to suggest a manner of approaching history that acknowledges its own hauntedness. Since then, the term “hauntology” has grown to encompass a variety of subjects of academic and (sub)cultural interest: trauma, memory, nostalgia for “forgotten futures,” and an acutely contemporary form of melancholia. This chapter explores two theses: first, that Lovecraft, particularly in his later cosmic writings, provides us with a rhetorical framework for expressing the concerns raised within contemporary hauntological discourses; and second, that Lovecraft’s continued presence in our culture is itself a hauntological event. Lovecraft anticipates hauntology in his literary expressions of dread, ennui, and the feeling of loss brought by the foreclosing of the future (through the literal or figurative end of the world), and his continued haunting of our culture reveals the scope of millennial anxieties about the possibility of the future itself.
