hauntology

thumb|upright=1.2|Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act I, Scene IV by Henry Fuseli (1789)

Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology, also spectral studies, spectralities, or the spectral turn) is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as if to haunt the present. The term is a neologism first introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx. It has since been invoked in fields such as visual arts, philosophy, electronic music, anthropology, criminology, politics, fiction, and literary criticism.