Sadeq Rahimi, MSc, PhD

This book explores the relationship between subjective experience and the cultural, political, and historical paradigms in which the individual is embedded. Providing a deep analysis of three compelling case studies of schizophrenia in Turkey, it addresses the ways in which private experience is shaped by collective structures, offering insights into issues surrounding religion, national and ethnic identity and tensions, modernity and tradition, madness, gender, and individuality. The book offers those studying political theory a way for conceptualizing the subjective within the political, it offers mental health clinicians and researchers a model for including political and historical realities in their psychological assessments and treatments, and it provides anthropologists with a model for theorizing culture in which psychological experience and political facts become understandable and explainable in terms of, rather than despite each other.

Standing in a homonymous yet deeply contradictory reference to Ontology, the term Hauntology (Fr. Hantologie) was proposed by   Derrida as a theoretical language capable of capturing the human experience of being –not the abstract philosophical idea of being, but the lived experience of being.  The spectral ghost –this peculiar form of “being” that is simultaneously present and absent, dead and alive, yet belongs neither to concrete reality nor to pure imagination –stands at the center of an analytic theory that understands subjective experience as an assortment of disjunctions threaded together by vectors of permanent deferral that simultaneously flow to and from an imaginary point of reference that is both the origin and the destination of human desire.

At the interface of hauntology and psychoanalysis, hauntological justice addresses the subjectivity of injustice, and the haunted nature of justice. The sense of injustice, that which becomes the impetus for seeking justice, always has an external, measurable face, but it also always has a more elusive internal, experiential face shaped by desire, fantasy, and the so-called “lost object.” Emancipatory discourse simultaneously informs and is a manifestation of this experiential injustice and its nostalgic and messianic projections of justice. The core wisdom of “hauntological justice” is the understanding that justice is on the one hand always haunted by voices that had to be silenced for "it" to mean justice, and on the other hand never complete, never attainable. This disillusioning realization preempts utopian ideals and leaves only one path open -towards justice: perpetually towards.

The linguistic interpretation of hauntology has direct implications for theorizing the qualities of temporality, virtuality and spectrality of subjective experience.  This opens to a fruitful discussion of the role of futuricity in a hauntology of subjective experience. The space of individuality, of the nodal  subject as we have understood it, does not resonate with the ghost.  But the virtual, the networked multiplicity of the place of speech, comes quite close to actualizing the position of the ghost, if not its desire. The future of human subjectivity and the notion of artificial subjectivity are among the emerging theoretical directions inherent in the topic of hauntology.