The Hauntology of Language and Identity1

This article, written by John E. Joseph’s, begins with a reference to Yasir Suleiman by highlighting how language and identity – a connection featured in a considerable part of Suleiman’s academic work – are embedded in one another as they occupy what Joseph terms ‘the same memory’. Joseph then employs the term hauntology (Fr.: hantologie), coined by Derrida in his Specters of Marx, to explicate linguistic identity. Joseph’s argument is further developed in his reference to a paper by Wernberg-Møller (1999) which was published following series of conferences on language and society in the Middle East and North Africa organised by Suleiman at Edinburgh in the late 1990s. Through Wernberg-Møller’s paper in which a conversation by a Moroccan family that had been living in Edinburgh for around twenty years is analysed, Joseph demonstrates the value of the hauntological perspective in understanding text and in identifying its hidden meanings. Emphasising the strong emotive component of identity, Joseph urges us to challenge our ‘rational comfort zone’ through the lens of hauntology’s analytical strategies.