The Ghosts of Ulysses

Abstract

Abstract In the film Ghost Dance, directed by Ken MacMullen, Jacques Derrida is interviewed by an ethereal young woman who asks him if he believes in ghosts. “That’s a hard question,” he smiles, “because, you see, I am a ghost.”1 Eerily, this reply turned out to be prophetic, not for Derrida (who is no deader than the rest of us), but for the questioner herself, who died before the movie was released and her image was set loose to haunt the screen. Yet in the film itself, the living man is just as insubstantial as his dead inquisitor, for both have been dispatched into the afterlife, translated into bodiless projections. Through the photographic image we survive the grave but also die before our death, disenfleshed before our hearts have ceased to beat. To be or not to be is no longer the question. What could be blinder than refusing to believe in ghosts? Our ghost-free civilization is based upon the myth that presence is superior to absence, and that absence is a lack of presence rather than an independent power.