Volume 10, Issue 2, Spring 2006
An Entrusted Responsibility: Reading and Remembering Jacques Derrida
Kas Saghafi
Pages 263-286
The Ghost of Jacques Derrida
This essay examines the phrase—“here, now, yes, believe me, I believe in ghosts”—a phrase uttered by Derrida in a fi lmed interview. It takes up Derrida’s avowal
of belief in ghosts, not simply to explain the signifi cance of “ghosts,” simulacra, doubles, hence images, in Derrida’s work and to show their relation to death and mourning, or to merely draw an analogy between the structure of doubles or simulacra and what we may call “synthetic” images, but also to attend to the alliance between the image, the ghostly, and belief.