ABSTRACT
Rhetorical and communication studies have long studied hauntology. For example, Gunn’s analysis of 9/11’s “mourning speech” clearly revealed that traces of human life linger in the imaginations of others, becoming new types of memories–indeed hauntings. Instead, hauntology aims to connect ontology to its dialectic correspondent: If ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence, and reality, then hauntology replaces being, existence, and reality with “the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive”. Hauntology emerges as an appropriate critical lens because truth is relative. One person may experience the wind as a cold phenomenon, for example, while another will qualify it as warm. Truth is relative because anything can become truth. Rumors, as Ovid warned and to demonstrate, have the capability of becoming truth when certain unpredictable conditions assemble.
