Derrida and messianic subjectivity: a hauntology of revealability

In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida argues that the category of hauntology should replace the canonical understanding of ontology. By invoking the trope of the ghost, hauntology helps to demonstrate how there still lingers in the absence of a thing, a spectral element that is more real than its corporeal counterpart. Thus, the ontological category of time is replaced by deconstruction with an anticipatory temporality abstracted from the transcultural messianisms of planet Earth, which is called messianicity. By framing this analysis through the epochal deployment of what Derrida coins as globalatinisation, I will argue that the concept of messianicity can be applied to a specific mode of subjective production, subjectivation, to help demonstrate the failings of not only the event of revelation (Offenbarung), but also, by pushing towards its paroxysm in an hauntological spirit, the so-called originarity of revealability (Offenbarkeit) – its still entanglement in the politics of light. Going beyond Derrida here, what this amounts to is a certain ‘hauntology of revealability’ whereby the arrivant, the First, is accepted under the umbrella of the messianic pledge of faith just to have itself doubled by a darker power that has never had to haunt itself into its eschatological or teleological throne.