It affects and bereaves it in advance, like the ghost it will become, but this is precisely where haunting begins. And its time, and the untimeliness of its present, of its being ‘out of joint.’ To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology.
Jaques Derrida (1994) Spectres of Marx, the state of the debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge