ABSTRACT
This chapter uses theoretical insights from Jacques Derrida to analytically engage with and take seriously the doubts that attend witchcraft. I criticize the idea that witchcraft is a form of belief and suggest that the “belief in the beliefs of the other” is a species of Western logocentrism that serves to domesticate witchcraft. This epistemological domestication of witchcraft fails to see how witchcraft, like philosophy itself, is a hauntological questioning, which arises from the aporia of the impossible existence of death. Studying witchcraft as aporia requires a shift of analysis from the register of ontology to that of hauntology. Based on an analysis of the death of my mother in Buli on the island of Halmahera in eastern Indonesia, I demonstrate that witchcraft is a “not-being-at-home” in the world, an experience of différance in which death happens before itself. Deploying Derrida’s notion of the pharmakon, I also show how the most effective cure for witchcraft, impossibly, is witchcraft itself. Throughout, I use Derrida’s concepts but insist on placing them “under erasure” (sous rature). The chapter, finally, criticizes the sociological interpretation of witchcraft as a “scapegoat mechanism” or a form of trained incapacity.
