Derrida on Ghosts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nmu3uwqzbI

We have words in our language for a reason. A dangerous thing that happens to overly rationalistic minds is that we want to get rid of all words in our language that don't seem to make sense. For me, this happened once with 'god'. But the better thing to do is to think about words - their origins as well as what changes may have happened over time to these words. Derrida shows this perfectly in this clip when he is asked if he believes in ghosts. To take this question at face-value is simplistic, and I am sure that, a year or so ago, my frame of thinking was such that I would have said 'No, of course not. It's a superstition that grew out of....' and I would go into the cultural reasons why ghosts came about and why modern science has shown that such supernatural phenomena that people usually attribute to ghosts is actually explicable naturalistically.

Yeah yeah yeah, all 'true' enough. But it shuts down thinking rather than opening it up. The better way to answer is the way Derrida does - to say that perhaps this idea of ghosts has been fundamental to people for so long in history not because people before were superstitious and now we are enlightened, but because the very idea of a ghost is that which haunts, and no culture, no matter how advanced, can escape being haunted, can escape distance and intangibility, and moreover, as Derrida points out, modern technology may actually be a new vehicle for the ghost, rather than a way to eliminate its presence.

Fascinating. Thinking should always be creative, or else it only serves to give us a false sense of comfort, a smug knowledgeability that is really just throwing a blanket over the peculiarities and wonders of our world.