Derrida concept of hauntology is an object of masculine hetero-normative Whiteness that is produced in entitlement, as ghosting of Whiteness.

Derrida presents hauntology as part of his general theory of capital in which objects, labor and all things related through capitalism are transformed into use-value conditions in what he calls phantasmagoric or hallucinatory processes. He conceives of hallucinations as process of transformation beginning at an origin that is itself fictive or ideal, thus already purified by a certain fantastics (Derrida, 1994, 160). He names this transformation ‘limit-concept’ and suggests that it is in advance contaminated, that it is pre-occupied, inhabited, haunted by its other, namely what will be born… [which is its] commodity form, and its ghost dance (ibid.). Derrida centers a Marxist analysis in which the constructed commodity-form is distinct from yet haunted by its soon-to-be born ‘use-value’ under capitalism. Haunting, he suggests, originates in the world in which the object is about to be born “like the ghost it will become” (ibid., 161). Thus, to haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology (ibid.). 32It was at this juncture, of hauntology as originating in the world in which the object is about to be born “like the ghost it will become” that I generate shape-shifting tools. It was clear to me that the haunted object is masculine hetero-normative Whiteness, produced in a phantasmagoric delusion of grandeur and entitlement, beginning at an origin that is itself fictive or ideal, thus already purified by a certain [I insert: violent] fantastics (ibid., 160). That limit-concept was more than a capitalist process of othering, it is (in the present tense) a colonial (post) modernizing endeavor, in advance contaminated… pre-occupied, inhabited, haunted by its other, chattel slavery and colonial genocide emergent yet silent in White disciplines of history, sociology, criminology, political science, biology, and so many more, in commodity form, and its ghost dance (ibid.). The ghosting of Whiteness in dominant scholarship produces work that is tragically incomplete; thus, it is destined to remain unfinished (Mathiesen, 1974). In Black Feminist Hauntology unfinished business is the result of oppression. As we know, ghosts remain because justice has not been achieved. The unfinished nature of abolitionism and resistance will continue to produce inaccurate renditions of the social world until anti-Blackness is exorcized. Short of an exorcism, this type of thought will continue to dwarf complex and liberating understandings of oppression and privilege, remaining trapped within its own lessons, reproducing its own cycles of violence, on small and grand scales simultaneously. 33As I finished Derrida’s book I found myself unwilling to engage too deeply in what would be an obvious critique of his work; it is a highly romanticized and at times uncritical representation of Karl Marx and an exaggerated affirmation of Marxism’s wide reaching ideological prowess. Derrida’s writing about ghosts was distracting and at the same time inspiring – as my mind wandered through some of his denser passages I found myself chuckling to Foucault’s French accent declaring: as far as I am concerned, Marx does not exist! (1980, 76, exclamation point added). Above Foucault’s ghost flashed images of Joy James’s (1996) Black insurrection of Foucault’s (1980) White subjugated knowledges. I kept waiting for Derrida to address the abundant critiques of Marx and Marxism, but to no real avail. My English-speaking mind wandered to a German accented Marx who had adopted from his Christian neighbors the habit of calling ideas and people he did not like ‘dirty-Jewish” whether they were Jewish or not, and when he really hated someone… Marx would call him a ‘dirty Jew of Negro blood’ (Randall, College, 1964, 9-10). And thus, Black Feminist Hauntology was born for me through these readings of Whiteness between the lines of dominant scholarship, radical and otherwise. 34The ghosted and ghosting essences of White scholarship, when assessed through Black Feminist Hauntology remerge trapped within a fragile, ponzi-scheme form of paranoid existence, always in anticipation of the ‘discovery’ of its morally bankrupt reality. With each generation of White scholars reproducing scholarship easily located within White supremacist power and abuse emerges the ensuing legacies of colonial violence and the attempted (but not fully successful) extermination of all that is not White, or not yet White. So, yes: the sociological ghost I call upon is a Black feminist. She is the voices and the intellectual contributions of Black women who have known and seen that which has not been articulated or documented in White-ologies. She (and her descendants) is a Black woman who lived hundreds of years ago on plantations, beneath the boots and belts of White men and their wives, and she (and her descendants) is the Black woman who lived thousands of years ago in societies and worlds predating racial colonialism and chattel slavery. She is the transcendent shape-shifter I locate below and she has produced metamorphic and structural shape-shifting, tools for the exorcism I invoke here.