A Freak Hauntology

Jacques Derrida provides us with a strange and beautiful understanding of what it might be like to be haunted by ghosts. A temporality filled with ghosts is a time out of joint.[1] Haunted time does not simply follow a clear trajectory from the past, present, to the future, in a clear and linear progression but provides us with ruptures, fractures, and stumbling stones. Repressed events, injustices, and lost opportunities might come back to haunt us at moments out of our control. Derrida suggests that “being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.”[2] To be haunted, to be caught in what Derrida terms hauntology, provides an opening, a possibility to create a more just and equitable world.[3]<br>I suggest that ghosts of a multitude of freak performers haunt circus. Following Derrida, I call this haunting freak hauntology. The fact that circus has still to learn to live with ghosts makes it prone to sideline its violent past by searching for correlatives that display the (subversive) potential of the freak body in a contemporary context. Linking freak with notions such as queer and grotesque in circus scholarship testify powerfully to such freak hauntology. Undoubtedly, aspects of the notion of queer and grotesque reverberate with characteristics of freak performances of the past, yet the term freak stays irreducible. The irreducibility of the freak constitutes the very navel of freak hauntology. The power is to reinsure a responsibility to the past in the present towards a more just future, precisely by being susceptible to the history of violence and exploitation while addressing its potential for subversiveness and defiance without neglecting one over the other.<br>[1] Derrida, Jacques: <i>Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. </i>Routledge Classics 2006, p. 21.<br>[2] Ibid.: p. xviii<br>[3] Ibid.: p. 10