On What Lingers: Hauntology and Memory

(Featuring: Jacques Derrida! William Shakespeare! Søren Kierkegaard! Henri Bergson! Gilles Deleuze! Friedrich Nietzsche! Marcel Proust! Sophie Calle! My Partner! Claude Debussy! A Ghost of My Past!)

The Prefix That Won’t Let Go

Some moments don’t end—they echo. They return—not as memories neatly archived, but as heavy sensations, sounds, shadows. They arrive mid-sentence, mid-step, mid-sip. This is the nature of re—the return, the repetition, the residue. A prefix that refuses closure. We live in spirals, not lines. And so, we find ourselves reliving moments not because we haven't moved on, but because they have moved in.

The English prefix re- traces its roots to the Latin re-, meaning “back,” “again,” or “against.” It signals a return, a repetition, a reversal. A circling motion that doesn’t quite allow you to move forward without first doubling back.

Its lineage is tangled with the Latin word res, meaning “thing.” In its ablative form, re, it implies movement in relation to a “thing”—a turning back to it, an action performed again or in resistance. Res communis: a thing held in common. A shared possession, or perhaps, a shared memory.

Remembrance, recollection, recurrence, repetition—these are the shapes memory takes when it loops and knots and embroiders existence with some tangled thread of being. When it draws us back not just intellectually, but viscerally. The prefix re- marks the place where language and longing collide.

Because there is remembering, yes—remembering is when memory arrives soft and easy, still light in a heavy body—but to be haunted is something else. It is to live inside the in-between: the liminal, the looping, the listening. Re- is no longer just a prefix, not merely an etymological quirk, but a structure for feeling. A choreography of return. A map of what still remains. Of what refuses to be forgotten.

A Ghost Story, David Lowery, 2017

The Philosophy of Re-

The philosophical lineage of re—as repetition, remembrance, return—runs deeper than grammar. It pulses at the core of existential and metaphysical inquiry. For Søren Kierkegaard, repetition was not a failure of progress but its possibility. In his 1843 work Repetition, Kierkegaard distinguishes repetition from recollection: recollection is the act of retrieving the past, but repetition is its transformation. It is the forward-facing version of return, a test of faith in the future. To repeat something is not to duplicate it—it is to risk encountering it anew.

“Repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions; for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.”

- Søren Kierkegaard

Henri Bergson, in Matter and Memory, makes a similar move, drawing a line between mechanical repetition and what he calls pure memory. For Bergson, memory is not a static archive but a living, breathing duration. The past is not gone—it coexists with the present, layered and thick. Every moment contains echoes of what has come before, just as every recollection subtly reshapes what is remembered. This is not nostalgia—it is temporal permeability.

Friedrich Nietzsche radicalized repetition through the concept of eternal recurrence: the idea that everything recurs infinitely, and that the test of your life is whether you could embrace its exact repetition, forever. In this frame, repetition becomes a moral and existential crucible.

Can you love what has already happened—not just remember it, but affirm it?

Do you love your life enough to live it again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again?

Can you say yes to the return?

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?”

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Gilles Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, upends the idea that repetition means sameness. True repetition, he argues, always produces difference. It is never the same thing twice. Memory, in this sense, is not a retrieval of the original but the performance of variation. Repetition reveals rather than replicates. It shows how time shifts the meaning of the same event, how we are never the same self each time we remember.

And then there is Proust. The involuntary memory triggered by the taste of a madeleine in In Search of Lost Time is perhaps the most sensorial account of how the past erupts into the present. Memory, for Proust, is not summoned—it arrives. It pulses through the body before the mind can name it. It is not linear, not logical. It is a haunting of a different kind: sweet, sudden, and overwhelmingly tangible.

“The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object... which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it before we ourselves must die.”

- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Together, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Nietzche, Deleuze, and Proust suggest that repetition and memory are not passive—they are dynamic, formative, even sacred. Especially sacred. They shape who we are and how we carry what we’ve lived. They refuse closure. They demand attention. They insist that the past is not behind us—it is woven into the now, echoing in our gestures, our longings, our language.

A Lesson in Hauntology

Jacques Derrida, in his 1993 book Specters of Marx (a deconstructive meditation on the lingering presence of Marxist thought after the supposed "end of history"), gives us a word for this persistent, elusive feeling: hauntology. A philosophy of what lingers. Of ghosts that refuse to stay in the past. Hauntology recognizes that time does not always behave—it loops, stutters, echoes. And what returns is not only memory, but the unresolved, the undone, the not-yet or never-quite. It is the philosophy of presence through absence, of futures that never happened, of doors that still rattle in their frames long after the house has been abandoned.

“A ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come back.”

- Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

Derrida’s hauntology is not merely a poetic gesture—it is a radical rethinking of ontology itself.

Traditional ontology concerns itself with the nature of being, with what is. Hauntology, by contrast, is concerned with what is not here, with what has departed but refuses disappearance. In this framework, presence is never fully present, and absence never wholly absent. It is a mode of existence constituted by deferral, by delay, by the 'trace'—a concept central to Derrida’s earlier work on différance, the idea that meaning is always postponed, that signs carry within them the shadow of what they are not.

Derrida turns to Hamlet for language, for form. “The time is out of joint,” Hamlet says, standing face to face with the ghost of his murdered father. It is a line that captures the whole strange architecture of grief and memory: disordered time, an interrupted now. The ghost is both past and future, both a trace and a demand. It is a call to action that paralyzes even as it insists. And Hamlet himself becomes the emblem of what it means to live haunted—aware, burdened, torn. Trying to move forward while tethered to something unresolved behind him.

“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”

- Hamlet

Alan Cumming as Hamlet in a production by English Touring Theatre at Donmar Warehouse, directed by Stephen Unwin, in 1993.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet becomes the perfect figure for this hauntological condition. Hamlet is not merely haunted by his father’s ghost—he is haunted by time itself, by a history he cannot revise and a future he cannot clearly see. The ghost’s demand is not simple revenge; it is an ontological disturbance. Hamlet becomes a man undone by the return—by the recursive echo of loss, of betrayal, of obligation. As Derrida notes, the ghost inaugurates a temporality that is disjointed and spectral, one that disrupts any sense of linear time and stable identity.

In this sense, the “time out of joint” is not just a statement of disorder—it is a thesis about modern subjectivity. We are all, in some way, Hamlet: caught in the cross-current between past and future, haunted by things unfinished, undone, or foreclosed. The ghost in Hamlet is not a metaphor for memory—it is the rupture of time into the present. A reminder that our lives are not clean sequences, but haunted recursions.

For Derrida, this is not just Hamlet’s burden—it’s ours. The modern subject, he argues, lives always under the influence of spectral returns. We are haunted by ideologies we thought were dead, by identities we thought we had shed, by versions of ourselves we left behind but who keep showing up. We live with the remnants of other timelines, other possibilities, other selves.

Hauntology, then, is not just a theory—it’s a condition. And it offers us a new way to understand the re- in our lives. To remember. To return. To revisit. To reenact. Not as acts of stagnation or failure, but as gestures of deep presence. Because in the re- lies the truth that time does not heal in straight lines. It spirals. It whirls. It swirls. It repeats.

Like Hamlet, we may find ourselves in the presence of ghosts. And like Hamlet, we may not always know what to do with them. But if we listen carefully, if we stop resisting the cyclical pull of memory and echo, we may begin to understand that the task is not to exorcise the past—but to live beside it.

The Derridean specter is not there to be banished—it is there to be reckoned with, to be listened to. And what it speaks in its elliptical way is something we already half-know: that the past is not past, and the future is already here, groaning at the threshold of the now. The prefix re- becomes not only an etymological curiosity, but a structure for feeling. A choreography of return. A map of what still matters. Of what refuses to be forgotten.

A Memory vs. A Haunting

Which is why there is a difference between remembering and being haunted. Remembering is an act you choose: a reaching back, a pulling forward, a quiet placing of a moment in your palm to hold and examine, turn over, make sense of, appreciate. It is often accompanied by a kind of attunement—a feeling of coherence, of alignment, where the memory doesn’t need defending or revising. It simply is. You can visit it without getting lost inside it. There’s a steadiness to true remembrance, even when the memory itself is bittersweet. It belongs to you and somehow, in that moment, you belong to it too.

Haunting is different. Haunting is not an act of will—it happens to you. It is the return of a memory that still pulses with tension, ambiguity, or pain. A memory that doesn’t land neatly. One that may carry multiple, conflicting versions of truth—yours, theirs, the silence between.

Haunting often arrives when something remains unresolved, unspoken, or misaligned. It is a past moment that echoes louder than it should, asking for attention even when you don’t want to give it.

You don’t hold a haunting. A haunting holds you.

To remember is to know the memory belongs to you, even as it changes form. But to be haunted is to be chosen by the memory. It arrives uninvited, It carries the charge of the unresolved and settles beside you like some strange impression on a bed. Haunting is memory that resists softening. One is a door you open. The other is a door that creaks open on its own.

Which is why, to be haunted, more often than not, is to remember in solitude.

(An aside: Even Horatio—Hamlet’s most loyal companion—is less a confidant than a quiet witness to a man unraveling. I often wonder what the story might be if Hamlet had truly shared his yoke. As for Ophelia, his feelings for her are knotted with grief, suspicion, and the performance of madness. He once says, “I did love you once,” only to later deny it: “I loved you not.” And perhaps it’s worth noting that after his famous cry—“The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”—he doesn’t retreat alone. He turns and says, “Nay, come, let’s go together.”)

The be haunted, to carry a moment that lives differently in your memory than it does—or did—in someone else's. Like an argument, sharp and spiraling, where each person walks away with a different story. Or a death that split one path into two—one who goes on living, one who does not. It's the ending of something where you never quite get the closure of hearing their side or their story.

Sometimes it’s abandonment, a father vanishing without explanation, where you're left to fill in the silence like some sad, pathetic mad lib. Or a breakup where the memories don't match—yours tinged with longing, theirs perhaps already rewritten. It can be something as quiet and formative as a childhood moment when you held a secret so tightly it reshaped your entire insides.

To be haunted is not just to remember—it’s to be the only one still remembering. It’s to be the only one left with a version of the truth that no one else can validate or refute. It is the echo of what wasn’t said, the distortion of what was, the loneliness of holding a memory that no longer—or never did—belong to more than just you.