A Spectral Materialism to Safeguard Modernity

Abstract

Ghosts, spirits and spectres typically belong to the domain of pre-modern superstition, having no place in modern thought. According to Foucault, the classical period is inaugurated by Descartes’ fateful decision to bar madness from discourse. In a different but related gesture of exclusion, Kant warned against reason’s conceit to confront metaphysical questions (e.g. free will and determinism, the divisibility of matter). For Kant, the attempt to delve into these noumenal matters leads to the impasse of the antinomies of reason. Thought would henceforth have to limit itself to the sober domain of science defined as the study of phenomena, how things appear rather than how they are in-themselves. In this chapter, I argue that these two measures of exclusion, intended to protect and guarantee the advent of the modern, paradoxically lead to the failure of modernity’s full realization. The inaugural exclusion by which modernity attempts to establish itself leads to a return of the repressed compromising modernity’s advance. Such resurgences of the pre-modern within our contemporary late modernity are attested to by the rise of New Age spirituality, the proliferation of new religiosities, the obscurantism of modern American psychiatry and the mystical faith in the “invisible hand of the market”. By contrast to the Cartesian marginalization of madness and the Kantian banishment of the noumenal, Hegel, Marx and Freud dare to grant attention to these tabooed objects relegated to pre-modernity. Hegel revives interest in the noumenal, claiming that the aim of his Science of Logic is nothing less than “the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind” while Marx centres his critique of classical political economy on an analysis of the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” of commodities and Freud returns to the dream – formerly the passion of fortune tellers and soothsayers – as the “royal road to the unconscious”. I argue that it is only by returning to these forsaken objects (God, the mysticism of the commodity and the dream) as well as other “spectral” entities that modernity can forge for itself an unshakable materialism immune to resurgences of pre-modern superstition.