Journal Article

Looking forwards to the 1950s: Utilising the concept of hauntology to investigate Australian theatre history

Julian Meyrick

2022

Overview

Instead of thinking of past, present and future as separate kinds of time, we can see them as reflexive categories of understanding linked together in mysterious ways. [...]we can talk, as Jacques Derrida does, of a 'non-present present, [a] being-there of an absent or departed one [that] no longer belongs to knowledge':2 of the present haunting the past. The concept of memory is used by a wide variety of different disciplines. [...]we find: collective memory,6 cultural memory,7 social memory8 and national memory,9 as well as psychoanalytic and neuroscientific definitions of the term. [...]it destabilises subject positions, reminding us not only that the state of affairs we call 'the now' is radically contingent, but that we could, in the past, have chosen a different future than the one we currently know as the present. [...]it gives the user a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances.11 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (2006) (Specters)12 is the published version of a plenary address given by Derrida in 1993, at a conference to discuss the future of Marxism in a world of collapsing communist regimes and the capitalist triumphalism of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992).13 In it, Derrida uses hauntology in a sensitising way to capture an epochal shift with vast ideological consequences but elusive empirical features, as it was still occurring, and destined to impact for decades to come.

• Publisher: Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies,La Trobe University at Bundorra
• Subject: Artists / Collective memory / Cultural heritage / Culture in art / Derrida, Jacques / Drama / Historiography / Influence / Marxism / Memory / Political aspects / Theater / Theater history