What is a haunting? It is an internal misalignment, or a rupture within, so that not only can we say, “That man [he/subject] is haunted,” but also, “That house [it/object] is haunted.” It seems to come from within spirit, as spirit is understood—that is to say, as man understands himself as spirit—but it also seems to exist inside contexts or structures within which an aesthetic qualification of the spiritual as haunted occurs—houses, cornfields, forests. A haunting signifies a symbolic instability, or a snag in the order within which man has understood himself as spirit. There’s motion in the haunted. “A spirit, an apparition, is a reproduction,” writes Søren Kierkegaard in part I of his book Either/Or. “This is the secret implicit in the coming again” (113, Hong & Hong). There’s a breakdown of meaning in spirit’s ‘unfinished business’, in that which is left over by that which is complete—or, to say the same thing, in the haunting, the unfinished becomes the distinctive character of the finished.
This very symbolic instability is also the reason for the double-meaning of the word ‘haunted’. To the extent that it takes part in a haunting, the haunted belongs primarily to the realm of consciousness. But the haunted also belongs to that site of the haunting within which consciousness locates itself, and which consciousness therefore synthesizes as an aesthetic quality in a subjective moment. A haunting requires spirit’s being there; but it also requires that spirit be within a sort of dwelling. There is no way to think a haunting as apart from its dwelling place.
In the the Book of John, John the Baptist writes about the Word of God as a sort of dwelling of spirit. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning” (New International Version, John 1:1-2). God is manifest in the world—or can be said to dwell within it—in the Word, or through the Word’s having been spoken. The Word has been with God since the beginning, and therefore through the Word has God spoken all of existence: “Through [the Word] all things were made; without [the Word] nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:4). Where there is spirit, spirit experiences it as representation. Yet spirit and spokenness have been linked since before the creation of time, and therefore before a distinction was ever made between them. There is no difference between the spirit that speaks and the spirit that is spoken.
The collapsed relationship between spirit and spokenness, between God and the Word, is again reflected in the Gospel by the relationship between Christ and John the Baptist. Christ, whose arrival John the Baptist anticipates, has symbolically “surpassed” John by His having come before him; and John, who “make[s] the path straight for the Lord”, is rendered symbolically unstable by Christ’s having already come (John 1:23). In other words, the Christ whom John the Baptist formulates himself in terms of is the very Christ which erodes John the Baptist’s understanding of himself.
These fleeting, spectral reflections and doubles represent the elusive character of representation itself. Where there is the Word, it is always there in the context of God, who is spoken in and by it; where John is the Baptist, John is always the Baptist in the context of Christ, in terms of whom John is the Baptist; and where language is understood, it is always understood in the context of consciousness, which understands it as that through which it understands itself.
In understanding itself as a reproduction, then, spirit marks itself as different wherever it understands itself. This is what gives spirit its narrative structure, or the existential framework within which it understands itself. Where spirit understands itself, it has always already done so in a relation; it has always already reflected; and it has always already recognized its placement within its own unfinishedness. This applies not only to spirit’s recognition of its abstract form as a concept, or to its concrete form as that ghost which it encounters, but also to that same spirit which it runs into, that same spirit by and which it constitutes itself. When we say that “That man is haunted by something,” we are really indicating the tension between the unified whole which he understands himself to be and the unfinished symbolic relation which he has discovered within himself.
It’s in this very irreducibility that the haunted dwells, the same experience of which cannot be had twice, because spirit has already represented it to itself as within itself. It’s what makes the question of the haunting a haunted one; as spirit dwells within the world, the unfinished dwells within us—just as we dwell within the house which is storied to have a dark, unfinished past. Spirit exists that it may finally be freed of its spokenness, that what is experienced may be negated, but never forgotten: every soul shall be set free, all business shall be finished, each sin shall be forgiven.