ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the idea of repetition and repeating. The idea of repetition has, in different historical situations, helped to maintain a certain idea of the relationship between the past and the present. From the very beginnings of recorded human history individuals and social groupings have recognized their actions and personalities as being somehow repetitious of past actions and personalities. The chapter suggests the obsessive search for ghosts which as part of the Marxist project of social emancipation and the ways in which both Marx and Engels sought to distinguish between the immaterial of the spirit and the material of the earthly world. Marx very clearly asserts that the historical process is made by human beings themselves. Marx very clearly had a conception of human nature whilst retaining the notion that the naturally produced beings existed as historically malleable phenomena: inhabitants, products and producers of both the natural and the human world.
