Hauntology and spectrality¶

Summary: A cross-chapter analytical thread in cinema-of-marbles. Hauntology — Derrida's coinage, taken up by Mark Fisher — names the way the cinematic image and the archive both produce and depend on a constitutive absence. In Mademli's reading, spectrality is what film does to its objects and what the archive does with the dead — and crisis is the moment when the spectrality of representation becomes politically active.

Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, primarily section 2.1.0 ("Spectral Strata," lines 1052–1150) and section 3.2.3 ("Spectral Legacies," lines 2953–3275), with reprises in 3.2.4 (vlihi as eerie).

Last updated: 2026-05-24.

In the cinema museum¶

Section 2.1.0 introduces "spectral strata" as the analytical key for reading the thessaloniki-cinema-museum. The museum's building — a former Customs Office on a former Ottoman port — already holds stratified historical traces. Inside, the cinematic image is read through Bliss Cua Lim's claim that "the spectral estranges our predisposed ways of experiencing space, time, and history and hauntingly insinuates that more worlds than one exist in the world we think we know."

The museum thus operates as a "double" mediation: the building's architectural history and the moving image's phantasmal reanimation produce a spectral co-presence that the visitor walks through.

In the refugee documentary¶

Section 3.2.3 on spectres-are-haunting-europe uses Derrida's Specters of Marx directly (the film borrows its title from the opening of the Communist Manifesto) and overlays it on Agamben's homo sacer. The refugees at Idomeni are "spectralized" — "reduced to a haunting trace rather than an evident reality" — through the very digital media that hyper-document them.

The film's switch to 16mm in the final 13 minutes is read as a reversal of this hauntological reduction: the analog camera restores faciality and is recognized by the filmed subjects as effortful intimate technology.

Vlihi as eerie¶

vlihi is read through Fisher's distinction between the weird (presence of what doesn't belong) and the eerie (failure of presence or absence). The film's single-performance, 35mm-with-live-orchestra structure is treated as an eerie cinema — one that haunts the archive by refusing reproducibility, leaving only the spectator's memory as record.

Archive fever, briefly¶

Derrida's archive fever ("the archive always works, and a priori, against itself") is taken as a shared infrastructure of the dissertation — the death-drive built into the preservation drive. Amnesia Diaries is read as another instance: its title names the loss that its archival form is supposed to defer.

Hypervisibility / invisibility¶

In spectres-are-haunting-europe, hauntology pairs with what Sophie Arrivé calls "hypervisible invisibility" and Nicole Fleetwood calls "carceral visuality": the refugees are at once over-imaged by international media and unseen as faces. This is part of why the chapter treats the right to opacity (Glissant) as a political demand: opacity preserves the subject's spectral self-relation against forced transparency.

double-structure — spectrality lives in the held-open binary, not in its resolution.
marmarization — the inverse of spectrality (fixing what should remain mobile, ghostly).
crisis — temporally, crisis is a moment when past, present, and future are spectrally simultaneous.