‘In a ghostly pool of blood / a crumpled phantom hugged the mud’: Spectropoetic Presentations of Bloody Sunday and the Crisis of Northern Ireland

Abstract

Hauntology, Derrida terms his philosophical investigation of ‘responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghost of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist or other kinds of exterminations, victims of oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any form of totalitarianism’ (Derrida, 1994, p. xix). Such a responsibility entails a quest for unfound justice irreducible to laws and legal documents, requires ‘respect for justice concerning those who are not there’ (ibid., p. xix), and continuously unsettles an unknown future: ‘This question arrives, if it arrives, it questions with regard to what will come in the future-to-come’ (ibid., p. xix). Such justice, according to Derrida, assumes the qualities of the spectre; it defies the finality of life and death, but is dependent upon both dimensions. Justice based upon the life of the living present enters the problems of relativity, whereas any metaphysical underpinning of justice transports the concept beyond its empirical and ontological actuality. Justice is not immediate consensus — if that were ever a possibility — nor arbitrary legal decision, nor does it possess an ontological solidity of Kantian proportions.¹ Justice is ‘neither substance, nor essence, nor existence, is never present as such’ (ibid., p. xviii).