ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt, Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog diagnosed dislocation and rupture as characteristics or even symptoms of the modern experience of time. Both Arendt and Koselleck argued that the past no longer illuminates the present in the same way as it did in previous centuries. Instead, it is the future that illuminates and guides the modern understanding of time. Hartog, in contrast, argues that neither the past nor the future illuminate the present; we exist in an extended or endless present. Particularly with globalisation, mass-mediated images and vicarious experience, ghosts may blur fixed temporal boundaries of past, present and future. For some, the ‘time is out of joint,’ while others may sense glitches or that they are ‘stuck in time’ and ‘stranded in the present.’ In response to this impasse, I suggest that Jacques Derrida’s hauntology provides a way in which to acknowledge the spectral and episodic presence of the past within the present. In particular, his attention to the loops and disjointed sense of time responds to the lacunae in Arendt, Koselleck and Hartog’s philosophy of history. Moreover, ghosts demonstrate that temporal boundaries may be far more porous than the past as ‘no longer’ and the future as ‘not yet.’
