Haunted by the Other: Levinas, Derrida and the Persecutory Phantom

Abstract

In this article, I explore what I call the persecutory trope – which underscores the alterity of the phantom and its relentless haunting and spectral oppression of the protagonists – in recent American ghost films, connecting it to the ethical thought of the continental philosophers, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Films like The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002), The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2004), It Follows (Robert Mitchell, 2014), and Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012) depict terrifying spectral antagonists whose relentless persecution of the protagonists often defies comprehension and narrative closure. I suggest that these films comprise a specific supernatural subgenre due to the particular way in which their specters haunt the victims. The relentlessness of the spectral assailant, and the foreclosure of actions by which the specter is either expelled from or reintegrated into symbolic understanding of its victim, can be construed in terms of the ethical relationship between the other and the self in the work of Levinas and Derrida. Their focus on the moral agent's responsibility to an other, an obligation that the agent does not undertake voluntarily, entails the spectralization of ethical responsibility insofar as it does not rest on solid, evidential grounds. This article shows how the spectralization of the ethical resonates in recent American ghost films through the disruptive effects of the specter's haunting and responsive mourning enacted by protagonists.

At first glance, pairing the phantom to the ethical figure of the other may appear somewhat incongruous. After all, The Ring's terrifying spectral antagonist, Samara (Daveigh Chase), penetrating from the screen and petrifying the viewer with her Medusa-like gaze, hardly seems the ideal recipient for our moral obligations. Similarly, what responsibility could I possibly owe Kayako Saeki (Takako Fuji), the twisted maternal phantom of The Grudge, or the rest of her spectral family, who are intent on persecuting and killing all who enter the cursed house? The relentless spectral persecutions of victims in these films seem unconvincing examples of moral obligation. And yet those characteristics that seem most resistant to expressing moral responsibility – the implacable, unyielding character of their haunting and inability to be satiated in their persecution of the living – map quite nicely onto the description of the other and the call to responsibility Levinas sets out.

Typical presentations of Levinas's ethics often locate the core of his views in his reaction to the wars and genocides of the twentieth century (particularly the Holocaust, in which several of his family members perished). Levinas finds standard ethical theories, grounded in the assumption of a free (almost freewheeling), autonomous moral agent and the voluntary deduction of its obligations to others, mute in the face of these catastrophic horrors, since such theoretical views fail to uphold the singularity of the other person. Hence, Levinas's idea of ethics can be said to proceed from the basic recognition of the other person's alterity as such, irreducible to race, sex, religion or any other category that could be employed to reify humans. Levinas adds to this relatively uncontroversial point the more contentious implication of a fundamental asymmetry in the relation between the self and the other, which upends the self's mastery and agency. It is this realization that upsets the typical assumptions about the moral agent's freedom and equality, since the self and the other do not encounter one another as equals. Rather, the other and its concerns take precedence above those of the self, with the latter placed in a position of passivity, called to an unbounded responsibility for and responsivity to each and every other person. The origin of ethics does not lie, then, in the self's freedom but comes from the demand of the other; Levinas states that, "The responsibility for the other can not have begun in my commitment, in my decision" (1981, p. 10). Yet it is important not to underestimate the violence and tumult the subject often experiences in the encounter with otherness, which shatters one's self-understanding and reorients the agent's experiences as such.

The incomprehensibility of the other's alterity eerily mirrors the ontological insubstantiality of the specter, in its frustration of technological attempts to record it or, when caught on film, its inexplicable manipulation of technological devices, which it turns back on their users. There is also a spectralization of responsibility, as attempts to provide a clear explanation or verification of the self's obligation to the other fail outright. A typical moral approach tries to track down obligation either to an initial encounter or at least to a hypothetical moment from which a contractual understanding of how to act could be derived. But Levinas's interpretation of responsibility does not begin from the rational principles of free, equal rational agents but, rather, from a demand arising from a time before my time, before the self's capacity to represent it. There is an irrecuperable character to the proximity of the other, not only in that it reaches me before I am aware of it, but it proves resistant to my attempts to rationalize or explain away its urgency. Hence, Levinas declaims attempts by the self to blunt the other's alterity and demand into a more accommodating framework constitutive of the subject's approach to the world.

Levinas's later works, especially Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, deepen the way the other's appeal undoes the identity of the self. Employing more hyperbolically charged language ("accusation", "expiation", "hostage", "obsession", "persecution", "trauma") and tropes, Levinas underscores the horror involved in the persistence of the other's appeal and the self's inability to escape it.⁹ The proximity of the other to me in its vulnerability cannot simply be shaken off or ignored. Describing the self's awareness of its responsibility as a Nessus tunic – the cloth dipped in poisonous blood that torments and dooms the mythological hero Hercules to a horrific death – Levinas captures, in an unsettlingly visceral manner, the pricking of conscience regarding our obligations to others and its consequent corrosive effect on our self-image (1981, p. 109).¹⁰ Responsibility torments the self; it is inflicted upon the self like the proverbial itch that cannot be satisfied. I cannot escape from responsibility to the other and I cannot escape from myself as a self, just like I cannot escape from my body. This unease settles under the skin, gnawing away at the self, in what Levinas dubs an "obsession" (1981, p. 110). This obsessiveness undoes the moral complacency of the self, undermining its understanding of itself as an autonomous moral agent and its previously unquestioned priority under the sun. Levinas depicts this process of dissolution through his idea of substitution, through which the self finds its place by responding and bearing witness to the other's demand. The Other substitutes itself in place of the self, hollowing out the self's complacency and presumption to make way for its responsibility to the other. The self, in discovering the other where it itself is, may assume a moral identity through the response to the other's proximity – but the intonations of horror and terror experienced under the assault of this appeal must not stripped from this process of self-discovery. Insofar as the other is "implanted" in me, I find myself, per Levinas's hyperbolic turn of phrase, "hostage" to the other (Waldenfels, 2011, p. 156). The manner in which my responsibility to the other unfolds in me assumes the characteristics of a persecution, hounding and harrowing the self at every moment and disrupting its peace of mind.

Yet beyond passing allusions to literary tales of horror which illustrate the anonymity and terror of Levinas's idea of the "il y a" (a depiction of existence shorn of the meaning of intelligibility or subjectivity [1981, p. 162–65; 2001a, p. 51–60]), he, as far as I am aware, never substantively linked this view of the ethical relationship to horror themes.¹¹ Derrida, on the other hand, is much more open to productive couplings of deconstruction (a way of prying open the meaning of a text beyond the typical binary logic governing it) with regard to cinema, and in one interview, linked cinema explicitly to spectrality (De Baecque, Jousse, & Kamuf, 2015, p. 26). Not only did he underscore the importance of cinema in presenting the unrepresentable, as in Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), but he also appeared in several films himself, including Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983), and wrote about cinema in various texts, including Tourner les Mots (2000). Through his project of "hauntology" (Derrida's neologism for an ontology examining the spectral underbelly of existence [1994, p. 10; p. 51]), he explores connections between the figure of the specter and the question of ethics and justice. Derrida's investigations into the ambiguous status of the specter have been regarded as foundational to spectrality studies, a fast-growing field of inquiry into the role of the spectral in areas ranging from history, classics, literary studies, cultural studies, and film.¹²

Derrida emphasizes the sense of asymmetry and ontological ambiguity introduced by the figure of the specter, highlighting its character of undecidability in his seminal work Specters of Marx, which explores spectrality with regard to post-Soviet reinvigoration of a moribund Marxism. Describing his investigations into the specter as a "hauntology", an ontology of that which does not exist, Derrida focuses on a relational ethics not only for the present and immediate but for the absent, for what is not present (such as those yet to be born, who are no longer, or who may never be). In this regard, the specter not only hovers in ontological indeterminacy (the gap between existence and non-existence) but also in temporal indeterminacy, harkening as both "revenant" (invoking what was) and "arrivant" (announcing what will come) (Derrida, 1993, pp. 34–35). The latter is particularly important for Derrida, as the temporal asynchrony or untimeliness of the "arrivant" displaces the meeting place, the threshold from which it emerges, coming from who knows where, an undiscovered country.¹³ Exceeding anticipation and evading any fixed time or place, the specter's very appearance is thus marked with an urgency and insistence.

In Specters of Marx, Derrida explores the paradoxical phenomenality of the phantom in the Shakespearean drama Hamlet, namely, the armored specter of the Danish prince's father. Hamlet questions the guard's report of the spectral king, asking about its garb and visage, particularly whether its visor is raised or not. In discussing this example, Derrida notes that the specter's visibility is of a body not present in flesh and blood, a visibility offering an intuition that withholds its tangibility (2004, p. 38). It is unclear whether the armor is part of the spectral apparition or a kind of technical "prosthesis", foreign to the spectral body it dresses (Derrida, 2004, p. 8). Yet it is from out of this helmet, with its visor raised, that the apparition sees us; Derrida names this spectral regard the "visor effect" – the ghost looks at and watches us (2004, p. 40).

The "visor effect" is asymmetrical in nature; the ghost haunts me, locking me in its gaze and I am unable to do likewise – the specter is elusive and unknowable in this sense. As Derrida states, "the non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge" (1994, p. 6). The spectral gaze displaces the self insofar as we are looked at before and beyond any possibility of a reciprocal exchange. The ghost sees me without answering or responding to me; rather, I am selected and chosen to respond. In this regard, to be haunted is to be called upon. Derrida pairs the dissymmetry effected in the gaze with the heteronomic figure of the law, identifying the dead person addressing itself to the self as the wholly other (2002, p. 132). He writes,

Derrida's inquiry into the specter requires closer examination, especially with regard to how his views into ethical alterity and justice differ from those of Levinas. Derrida has long acknowledged his debt to Levinas in his articulation of the ethical relation – the precedence of heteronomy to autonomy, justice, and hospitality – devoting several noted pieces and essays to his thoughts, conveying his appreciation in patient, generous, and insightful criticisms of Levinas's work. Yet for Levinas, it is clear that the other (Autrui) of the ethical relationship is primarily the human other (1969, pp. 78–79; 1996, p. 8). Derrida's examination of Levinas's use of the term "other" not only pinpoints how Levinas is discussing the human other but also notes a disconcerting complicity between the human and divine other in Levinas's thought.¹⁴ In this regard, Derrida underscores what might be considered the anthropomorphic and theological configurations of the other in Levinas's work. Whereas Levinas generally intends the human other in his discussion of Autrui (relation to the other), pairing it with the wake of a monotheistic God, it is precisely this knot of assumptions that Derrida targets and seeks to unravel (among other issues) in his inquiries into the figure of the specter and the animal. For Derrida, there is never a relation to the other as such (for the other never appears as such); rather, one can only have a relationship to the other as other (with the distant, the secret, the invisible). Derrida's formulation of alterity, "tout autre" refers to all that is other and not solely to God or to Levinas's Autrui (Saghafi, 2010, p. 59).¹⁵ In this regard, Derrida – in contrast to Levinas, who configures ethical alterity in a humanistic fashion – considers that to be in relation with the other is to be in relation with that which comes from beyond being, whose identity is always yet to be determined.

Derrida's excavation of this humanistic kernel in Levinas's thought affects the deployment of his "hauntology" with phantom persecution films. While Derrida links the specter to a who, it is precisely this space that is stripped of humanist pretenses – expanding the view of the phantom beyond hostile human antagonists or wronged victims opens the possibility for an alterity/alterities that need not be marked primarily by the human.¹⁶ As the source of the spectral assignation is unmoored of humanistic and monotheistic privileges, so, too, is this response or inheritance to spectral assignation, the proper rejoinder to phantom interpellation, explored in its complexity. Derrida not only spectralizes the sources of the ethical assignation, scrutinizing the humanistic/monotheistic privilege in Levinas's thought but he also acknowledges the fragility of the inheritor's response to the phantom's interpellation. While this recognition does not necessarily entail persecution for the subject or the impossibility of doing justice to the specter's demand, Derrida does not rule out the failure to right wrongs or to mount a fitting response. After all, as the specter belongs to the order of the non-knowledge, uncertainty cannot be separated from it.

In this regard, Derrida focuses on the problematic relationship between the ethical and justice in more depth than Levinas, who most notably explores the link between the two in Chapter Five of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. While Levinas explores the ethical injunction from which justice and the focus on the third party arise, Derrida excavates the paradoxes implicit in relating ethics to justice in The Gift of Death, noting, "I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others" (1995, p. 68). Fulfilling responsibility to the other, it seems, entails failing in one's responsibilities to all the others (Derrida, 1995, p. 70). This logic of the double bind also illustrates the challenge to the inheritor – for how can one genuinely respond to the spectral call, while keeping faith with the specter as specter (rather than exorcising it, localizing it, depriving it of its spectral character by which it disrupts the present and makes itself known to me)? Derrida emphasizes this dilemma, especially with regard to the possibility and the impossibility of the task of inheriting (2002, p. 132).

Despite differences in plot and characterization in many of the phantom persecution films discussed here, they all exhibit to some degree the most important constituents of the ethical relationship proposed by Levinas and Derrida; the alterity of the other and the foreclosure of agency and understanding by the self. In addition to these elements of spectral alterity and the frustration of the protagonists’ attempts to dispel the phantom, these films often display features of techno-haunting which dovetail with Derrida's comments on the "visor effect" and prosthetics.

A crucial element in the phantom persecution genre is the unknowable alterity of the specter. The phantom often bursts upon the scene as an anomaly that cannot be assimilated or domesticated into the protagonist's conceptual schema. This characteristic of opacity coincides with the analytic philosopher Noel Carroll's (1990) depiction of the monster in horror fiction. Carroll underscores the categorial interstitiality of the monster; the overlapping of cultural or conceptual categories normally kept separate in our comprehension of the world. While his use of categorial switching alludes to determinate, fixed content (i.e., the spirit as living and dead, present and absent, visible and invisible), in contrast to Levinas's emphasis on the other's absolute alterity, the effect of this indecipherable entity, the unsettling of one's cognitive mastery of the world, is similar. Yet the liminality of the spectral phenomena and the frustration of the protagonists’ attempts to comprehend them through rational means are characteristics displayed by most ghost films – what distinguishes the phantom persecution film lies in the relation of the spectral assailant to the victim via the manner of haunting.

The manner in which the haunting unfolds is the key characteristic of the phantom persecution genre. Unlike restitution ghost films – where the shock of spectral alterity is domesticated and reintegrated into the subject's conceptual and symbolic understanding of reality – the phantom persecutor, even when its origin is excavated, remains starkly foreign and hostile to the protagonist. Any knowledge obtained about the phantom's prior life does not offer reprieve; the specter does not cease its pursuit. Nor do phantom persecution films, in general, offer substantially complex narrative reasons as to why a particular character suffers from the spectral assignation. Sheer coincidence – whether entering the wrong house, watching the wrong video, or being unfortunate enough to be on a cursed friend's contact list, as in One Missed Call (Eric Valette, 2008) – is grounds enough to become a target.

An interesting feature of many of these films is the mobility of the specter, where the haunting is not confined to a specific locale like a house or an abandoned lot.¹⁷ Rather, the ghost haunts the living – the protagonist or inheritor – doggedly pursuing them sometimes even overseas, as in The Grudge 2 (Takashi Shimizu, 2006). Here, a manner of mourning which immobilizes the dead one to a specific place is interrupted. Derrida discusses how "inhumation" by stabilizing the dead in one location, often through the intervention of state, church, or other public institution (burial in the public square of the graveyard), serves as an insurance policy to prevent the dead from returning home to oneself; ultimately to prevent the form of return in a "revenant" (2011, p. 166). Phantom persecution films destroy this safeguard, as no place is safe from spectral assignation. As Derrida explains,

By turning briefly to Levinas's description of the other's proximity to the self, we can see why the configuration of this relationship constitutes the core of the persecutory trope of ghost films. For Levinas, ethical responsibility is posed on a razor's edge, on which the self's individuality, while shaken and unsettled by the other's demand, is not suppressed or assimilated into the other. Yet this delicate equipoise, in which neither self nor other are reduced to each other's conceptual scheme, still skews asymmetrically to the other and its predominance over the self. While being haunted by the other is not possession as such, ethical responsibility remains a form of contact that disrupts the self.¹⁸ In phantom persecution films, the apparition likewise resists integration into the self's symbolic understanding of the world. Unlike some ghost films, which play on the ambiguity of the haunting – leaving it to the viewer to decide whether the apparition in question is a hallucination or an unresolved psychological issue – the persecutory trope in general is quite clear on the stark reality and alterity of the phantom.¹⁹ Furthermore, the traditional avenues of identification with the specter, or recourses to action, are often definitively closed to the protagonist; attempts to deal with the phantom that extend beyond acknowledging the haunting and spectral demand usually end in failure.²⁰

In contrast to films of the restitution trope, resolution is often lacking in the persecutory phantom films, as the protagonists’ attempts to implement rational, and often technologically sophisticated, plans fail to banish the spectral threat. Efforts to harness, predict, and rein in these specters inevitably come to naught, such as the elaborate experiment in Rings (F. Javier Gutierrez, 2017), where students watch the cursed footage, bypassing the curse by passing it on to others. Elsewhere, It Follows features cursed teenagers’ desperate plan to destroy their implacable spectral stalker in an indoor pool. However, the film ends on an ambiguous note, with the doomed couple out on an evening stroll, still possibly stalked by their phantom follower. Even burying the bones of Samara, the spectral nemesis of The Ring, in order to put to an end to the phantom's killing spree falls flat; instead, it is in enabling the specter to continue the call, to disseminate its voice that Rachel (Naomi Watts) and her son Aiden (David Dorfman) are able to evade death. Often it is not simply that a reasonable plan has been thwarted at some crucial stage but, rather, that the scheme is wrongheaded from the start, illustrating the abyss between the safe, rational world of the protagonists and the opaque, unfathomable spectral dimension. The inscrutability of the spectral force defies all rationalization and calculated ploys. While the sense of helplessness engendered by spectral onslaught is a common trope in ghost films, phantom persecution films go further in banishing almost all hope of reprieve.

The tropes of surveillance and observation characterize the spectral assignation and election of the victim. Derrida's "visor effect" is thus a crucial tool in underscoring the importance of the spectral gaze in phantom persecution films. While ghost films regularly feature unearthly observation and surveillance, the voyeuristic trope is crucial for phantom persecution films. The spectral gaze contributes to the disruption of the self's cognitive mastery; no longer lord of all it surveys, the protagonist feels put upon, uncertain, and unsettled by the phantom's demands and expectations. The unsettling effect of the "visor gaze" is reinforced by the invisible specters who wreak confusion upon the living in Insidious; the unwavering gaze of the voyeuristic specter (and camera) in It Follows; and the atmosphere of oppressive surveillance in the dilapidated house of The Grudge. That the spectral gaze also goes hand in hand with the specter's viral proliferation through telecommunication and other technological devices – whether The Ring's videotape, Pulse's computers, or One Missed Call's mobile phone where one's future self can be heard screaming in terror – underscores Derrida's linkage of spectral phenomenality with technical prosthetics. Hence, many of these films explore the technologies of communication as the form through which the ghost makes contact, with the medium itself being spectralized in a way that blurs the distinction between the phantom and the technology. Not even social networking sites are safe from spectral intrusion, as illustrated by the box office success of Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014), where a ghost torments a clique of teenagers across Skype, Facebook, and Instagram.

Some of the most disturbing effects of this gaze in fact unfold when the technological veil of security and safety is itself pierced and coopted. For instance, when characters are watching paranormal events caught on camera, the specter often refuses to be a passive object seen by others, instead reversing the visual orientation (raising the visor, as Derrida might say) to see through the video or camera footage and interact with the viewer. One noteworthy example occurs in The Grudge, when the phantom Kayako sees Detective Nakagawa (Ryo Ishibashi) watching security footage of it and looks out to him. Other instances abound, including the central premise of the Ring films, where Samara contacts her potential victims via the telephone after they watch the eerie footage; the inquisitive journalist in The Grudge 2 who meets a fate similar to Nakagawa; and Bughuul (Nick King), the malevolent entity who, in Sinister, gazes through the computer at a momentarily distracted Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke). Such reversals bear a dramatic impact – reminding the audience that the specter's spectator is inevitably a participant – and underscore Levinas's point that one cannot excuse oneself and hold a position of impartiality before the other's plea. The detachment of the voyeur is no defense. Persecutory phantom films undermine the protagonists’ confidence and security in technology (often employed as a form of security), which becomes coopted and incorporated into the spectral gaze.

The phantoms’ inexorable pursuits of the haunted often bar most avenues of escape for the protagonist save one; that of replicating the spectral demand. The typical manner in which the haunted victim is stripped of all ties and connections to their quotidian life and the status quo as the haunting intensifies can be understood in Levinasian terms as the "hemorrhaging" or emptying out of the self, experienced by the encounter with the other (1981, p. 92). It is not in retreating into the established, complacent markers of identity (which Levinas describes as the "Same", the way that one makes oneself at home) or in reactivating the specter's ties to the living (cashing in on the symbolic debts) but, rather, in clinging to the consciousness of one's haunting "to exposing one's very exposedness" that Levinas identifies as the self's (almost) impossible assumption of its hyperbolic responsibility (1981, p. 92).

In this regard, the specter's gaze interweaves with its victim's passivity as expressed in two of the most chilling of the American J-Horror remakes – The Ring and The Grudge – in both of which the respective spectral antagonists kill their victims by literally staring them in the face. The victims, unable to tear themselves away from this spectral gaze, are reduced to a state of numbing shock, a fundamentally passive posture; all thoughts of agency and frenzied activity vanish. This moment of the victims’ hyperbolic passivity corresponds nicely with the passivity of the self before the demand of the other. As Levinas underscores, while one's responsibility can be shirked, the self cannot shed the awareness of this responsibility – even if only in the form of bad conscience or the uneasiness of its moral complacency.²¹ The phantom persecutor reveals the subterranean dimension of the ethical relationship, then, in its relentless persecution, and often destruction, of the protagonist. This is possibly one of the reasons why Jay (Maika Monroe), the protagonist of It Follows, does not unequivocally obtain closure or banish the apparition in her Oedipal confrontation with it at the abandoned pool, where it assumes the guise of her deceased father. And, perhaps, this is also why, in The Grudge 2, Aubrey (Amber Tamblyn), the sister of The Grudge's deceased protagonist, Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), feels compelled to return to the dilapidated haunted house where Kayako dwells, as if recognizing the impossibility of reprieve, having exhausted every other avenue in trying to exorcise her spectral antagonist. Aubrey meets her end there, becoming an unwitting witness to the events that led to the death of Kayako. In light of the failure of the characters’ rational plans to exorcise and dispel the specter, the final gesture in many of these films is to bear witness to the phantom and, often, to pass on the manner of bearing witness to others; as with The Ring, where Rachel survives by making copies of the cursed videotape.

At first glance, The Ring operates as a perfect example of the restitution trope in ghost films: it is a noirish mystery in which Rachel, a journalist, tracks down clues while investigating a mysterious videotape whose viewers die seven days after viewing it. The specter turns out to be Samara, a waifish uncanny child, neglected by her father and killed by her mother, whose situation bears disturbing similarities to Rachel's negligence of her own son, Aidan, whom she has inadvertently doomed by leaving the videotape lying around for him to watch. Moreover, as a film which expresses a concern with screens and reflections – with many shots through dry or rain-drenched windows and reflections in mirrors or panes of glass – The Ring calls the viewer's attention to the cinema screen and implies various doublings: of Rachel and Samara's mother (distracted, harried mothers), Noah and Samara's father (absent fathers), and Aidan and Samara (neglected, psychic children). With the aid of Noah (Martin Henderson), Aidan's negligent father, Rachel unravels the various clues to many of the tape's images, eventually tracking down and burying Samara's body, after which her life is spared, the curse is lifted, and there are even hints of reconciliation between herself and Noah. However, the end of the film bears an unsettling surprise: here her son warns her that Samara never rests, and Noah is killed.

As the film's end makes startlingly clear, the tropes of distracted mothers and absent fathers, screens and reflections are red herrings; through its display of the themes of spectral alterity, foreclosure of agency, and the call to witness, The Ring falls squarely in line with the persecutory trope. Hence, the most prevalent images of the film are of the static screen and the ambiguous ring image, which seems to stand in for objects as diverse as the sun-rimmed lid of Samara's well, the oval mirror, a circle on a piece of paper, or even the dread eye of Samara herself (Stone, 2003). Static and the fogging up of panes of glass herald Samara's arrival – she communicates no clear message, instead acting as an interruption to and disruption of the regularly scheduled programming. Nor do resemblances or reflections capture her spectral alterity. Furthermore, the film violates the reassuring boundaries that separate us from its events, whether the cursed video's fly, which Rachel pulls out from the screen, or the little black discs that flicker periodically on the margins of the screen visible to the audience. (Stone, 2003)

The Ring also upends the typical assumptions audiences bring to ghost films, as we find the rules established at the beginning of the film being violated throughout. For instance, if Rachel has already copied the tape early on in the film, why does Samara haunt her until the end? Why is Aidan drawing pictures of Samara, and being haunted by her, before he has even watched the video? Why, for that matter, has Samara's father seemingly been taunted by her whisperings since her death decades previously? Finally, why does Aidan's viewing of the film (with a spinning chair) differ from Rachel's? It is as if the video itself is also a red herring.²² There seem to be no clear rules that the protagonists can discover and employ to solve their predicament.

Despite Rachel's tracing of the provenance of many of the tape's images (whether the sunlit tree near Samara's murder scene, or the mirror used by Samara's mother), lingering doubt remains regarding the videotape (the numbers of the control track, that displays the tape's origin, are ‘screwed up’ and the events of Samara's birth/adoption are unclear). The knowledge Rachel gleans from her inquiries, her sympathy upon learning of Samara's grisly fate, and even the discovery and presumed interment of her bones are ultimately of no avail; such actions fail to exorcise Samara. Instead, what saves Rachel and her son is copying the videotape and passing on the message – the only recourse left to the self, after all of its prior courses of action have been exhausted, is to bear witness to the spectral demand and pass it along. Even Aiden's haunting question – "What about the person we show it to? What happens to them?" – evokes a concern similar to those expressed by critics of Levinas: that the priority of the ethical relationship seems to exclude concern about relation to other others. Interpreting The Ring in terms of a resolution trope leads to frustrating incongruities that divert attention from what I consider to be the fundamental element of the film: the spectral haunting in all its terrifying alterity. No matter the action or secret uncovered, the spectral assignation cannot be explained away, exorcised, or dispelled – it can only be witnessed. In this regard, spectral haunting resembles not only the persecutory aspect of the self's relationship to the other but intimates a redemptive dimension of inheritance to the spectral assignation; that of bearing witness to and disseminating the specter's demand.

To conclude, the thrust of Levinas and Derrida's refiguration of ethics lies in uncovering a dimension of terror and disruption in moral responsibility. Rather than construing the specter as the moral recipient, it is the spectralization of ethical obligation, in its haunting, excessive demand that best aligns with the spectral antagonists of ghost films. The complacent, autonomous moral agent is upended by the call of the other. Thus, the passivity of the self before the spectral gaze, often called to witness (and not solve or resolve) the death of the person that becomes the phantom, reinforces Levinas and Derrida's assertions that the call to responsibility cuts across the agent's moral complacency and good conscience. Instead of exculpating or explaining away our responsibility, ethics enjoin us to listen, to give witness to the call that summons us to accountability – endowing us with a bad conscience, a sense that one's obligations can never be fully accounted for or put to rest. Yet there are several vicissitudes to the spectral: not only a persecutory dimension but also a redemptive/messianic/affirmative one. It is not the case that the spectral haunting results only in persecution, as the possibility of a redemptive rejoinder to the spectral call remains (however this possibility does not, like restitutive horror films, merely assimilate the persecutory element into a synthesis where the exorcism is completed, and the work of mourning accomplished).

However, even films where justice is served, or hospitality is given to the ghost – such as Jay's mourning of her dead father in It Follows, or Karen's survival of her confrontation with Kayoko in The Grudge – do not entail that the haunting has come to an end. Karen perishes at the beginning of The Grudge, and the cursed couple are stalked by a figure in the distance at the end of It Follows. The persistence of the threat signifies the impossibility of fully redeeming our symbolic debts and obligations to the other, and of anticipating the demands of future generations to come (those yet to become specters, or who may never become so). While the spectral assignation need not culminate solely in persecution, hospitality does not entail silencing the specter or laying it to rest. Here, the redemptive element can be connected to Derrida's idea of surviving ("survivance") – a life enhanced when the self is turned over to the other, to the specter (2011, p. 131).²³

Following Derrida, then, we must learn to live with ghosts, respecting both their injunction to remember and preserve what has come before, and their refusal to be contained or assimilated under our cognitive mastery and present-day concerns (1994 p. xix). Going even further, phantom persecution films remind us that we inevitably die with ghosts; that is, we must come to terms with not coming to terms with the other, in the sense that the other will always remain outside of our attempts to control it. The ghost stands as an equivocal reminder, an omen, marking our inability to wholly escape the past, as well as our inability to control the future. The viral nature of this phantom persecution, proliferating just as rapidly as an Internet meme, illustrates the dissemination and openness constitutive of ethical alterity. The relation to the specter does not foreclose, then, the opportunity for justice but, rather, disrupts the synchrony of living presents, serving as the relation of fidelity or promise to what is not simply present, in order to provide an opening for a balancing of accounts, for redress. However, the promise itself is not solid: there is no guarantee or inevitable balancing of the ledgers. Nor is the mourning – the work of settling accounts, cashing in one's symbolic debts – ever completed. Insofar as the specter belongs to the order of non-knowledge, the incommensurable, there is no ontological surety or (in terms of phantom persecution films) final exorcism or banishment. In what might otherwise be viewed as a cheap gimmick or jump scare, the spectral presence at the conclusion of many of these films intimates how we inheritors may not always get the last word, or even the opportunity to respond.²⁴

1 Ruffles’ Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife (2004) goes further than most scholarly literature in tabulating and organizing the spectral in its thematic classification of ghostly apparitions, including ghost lovers, ghosts of those who cannot rest, and ghosts who dispense sage advice, amongst other archetypes.

2 This term is problematic, as David Kalat notes, since J-Horror fails to differentiate between gory, shock-driven Japanese films and more traditional Japanese ghost stories (2007, p. 9). Moreover, the genre is not exclusively Japanese; often including films from Korea and Hong Kong, as well as American remakes. Several of the latter have been directed by Japanese directors, including The Ring 2 (Hideo Nakata, 2005), The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2004), and its sequel, The Grudge 2 (Takashi Shimizu, 2006).

3 In terms of box office, The Ring grossed over $249 million worldwide on an estimated $48 million production budget, making it one of the most commercially successful horror remakes (The Ring (2002). [n.d.]. In Internet Movie Database. Retrieved from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298130/). It remains the most critically acclaimed of the J-Horror remakes.

4 The cross-cultural appeal of New Asian Horror, McRoy remarks, may stem in part from its paradoxical reliance upon atmosphere and restraint over explicit gore, excessive violence, and sexual perversity (2008, p. 1). Of note as well is the genre's elision of basic ontological categories and cultural cross-fertilization (McRoy, 2008, p. 6). Specific films such as Ju-On: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2002) explore the hybridity of an older Japan and a more modern setting as well as the interweaving of traditional Japanese with Western motifs.

5 I am not trying to create an exhaustive list of necessary traits for the phantom persecution film; as genres are often fluid and imprecise, I am merely pointing out a cluster of similarities and resemblances among ghost films of a persecutory trope. As Lewdon states, "any definition of genre is at best incomplete. There will always be exceptions, overlaps and grey areas" (1993, p. 261).

6 The horror/thriller films Stir of Echoes (David Koepp, 1999) and The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) are paradigmatic examples, where ghosts of murdered victims bring to light the horrid, disavowed deed or signify the need to communicate their legacy.

7 In this vein, the conclusion of The Sixth Sense involves Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osmond), the boy who ‘sees dead people’, becoming something of a ‘ghost whisperer’ or psychoanalyst, who dispels restless spirits’ anxiety.

8 Redding describes the ghosts in this trope as "solicitous, desirous, who have not finished living, who want our aid in their unfinished business" (2011, p. 121).

9 Here is a brief listing of some of the passages in which Levinas uses these terms: "accusation" (1996, p. 140; 1981, pp. 110, 121); "expiation" (1981, pp. 14–5, 111–12, 118, 125); "hostage" (1996, pp. 140, 143–44; 1981 pp. 15, 112, 117–18, 124, 127); "obsession" (1981, pp. 83–89, 91, 101, 110, 113–14, 121); "persecution" (1981, pp. 101, 111–13, 121); "trauma" (1996, pp. 142, 146; 1981, pp. 12, 15, 50, 123–24).

10 Levinas avers, "The neighbor excludes himself from the thought that seeks him, and this exclusion has a positive side to it: my exposure to him, antecedent to his appearing, my delay behind him, his undergoing, undo the core of what is identity in me" (1981, p. 89).

11 While commentators have focussed on some of the more unsettling effects of the "il y a" and ethical responsibility upon the stability of the subject (cf. Marder [2008] and Sealey [2013], especially in their respective focuses on impersonal existence), none has engaged in significant detail with ghost films. Further, Levinas's well-noted resistance to aesthetic depictions of ethical alterity and responsibility, especially prevalent in his early caustic essay on art, "Reality and Shadow" (1998), cannot be ignored either. A case could be made, however, that Levinas allows some space in his later works for a certain rehabilitated notion of the artistic depiction of the other. He approvingly states that the signification of my responsibility for the Other can come not merely from a human face, the Other looking at me, but also from the nape of the person standing in line in front of one, even a bare arm sculpted by Rodin (2001b, p. 208). Nor does such an admission stand alone; Levinas discusses, in a variety of passages, the way that the human face speaks through literature and poetry in writers such as Blanchot, Celan, and Proust. He elucidated this point in an interview, commenting, "I think that across all literature the human face speaks- or stammers, or gives itself a countenance, or struggles with its caricature" (1985, p. 117).

12 Derrida's inquiry into spectrality holds broader importance for his overall corpus; Nass notes how spectrality relates to "the intrinsic possibility of doubling and iteration that makes any phenomenal appearance possible. Spectrality would be one of those nonsynonymous substitutes for what was once called iterability or differance" (2008, p. 190).

13 Derrida stresses that the "arrivant affects the very experience of the threshold whose possibility he thus brings to light before one even knows whether there has been an invitation, a call, a nomination or a promise" (1993, p. 33).

14 Derrida notes, "in taking into account absolute singularity, that is, the absolute alterity obtaining in relations between one human and another, Levinas is no longer able to distinguish the infinite alterity of God and that of every human" (1995, p. 84).

15 As Saghafi writes, "Since every other – whether human, animal, X, ‘living’ or ‘nonliving’ – is absolutely other, respect for the revenant, the ghost that returns, as much for the arrivant, who or what comes, because we are never simply hospitable toward an identifiable ‘subject’" (2010, p. 60).

16 In this regard, it would be interesting to consider the possibility of a non-human animal haunting, looking perhaps at farm factory documentaries such as Food, Inc. (Robert Kenner, 2009) and Farm to Fridge (Lee Iovino, 2011).

17 It is interesting to note that the persecutory phantoms of Insidious, Sinister, The Ring, and The Grudge 2 have become refugees, not tied down to one specific locale like the haunted house, but ‘on the go’, haunting the person and not the place. It is as if the phantom trope, sensitive to the contemporary political challenge of the resettlement of refugees fleeing political or economic persecution, evokes fear of (and perhaps hostility towards) such a population and the growing difficulty of ignoring those in such need, or of postponing the redress of such injustices.

18 Hence, phantom persecution films are not possession/exorcism films per se, where the self's identity is almost wholly subsumed by the ghostly or demonic antagonist (although hybrids of both, as found in the Insidious film series, do occur).

19 Pulse, concludes on an apocalyptic note, concerning a spectral invasion from the afterlife. Moreover, specific authority figures (including police, journalists, and professors) such as those in The Ring, The Ring 2, Rings (F. Javier Gutierrez, 2017), The Grudge, and The Grudge 2 often come to believe in these spectral alterities – to no avail, of course.

20 This is a crucial feature in the relationship of haunting: the protagonists’ attempts to understand and forge some symbolic reconciliation with the phantom, whether by retrieving its bones, uncovering its origin, or avenging its murder. Plots carried out in The Ring, The Grudge 2, and Rings, respectively, all fail. These plans falter because they seek to exorcise the ghost and end the haunting, rather than to serve as a witness to the haunting.

21 The distinction between the inscrutable spectral alterity and its haunted, passive victims sometimes blurs as the phantom strikes from within, not only their own homes but sometimes their own bodies. Here, the Levinasian theme of substitution undergoes a perverse transformation, as in The Grudge 2, where the wraith snatches its victims from within their bedsheets and through their own apparel. The possessions of various characters in Sinister, Insidious, and their respective sequels underscore further this theme of perverse substitution, most notably in Rings’ ending, where the film transitions into the possession plot as the spectral antagonist takes over the main character, Julie (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz), who is ‘substituted’, ceding her identity to Samara.

22 In an early scene in the film, Rachel lies to a clerk performing a magic trick, pretending that the card she pulled (the nine of spades) is the seven of spades (representative of the loss of a loved one). This hints at the upending of the typical assumptions of the restitution ghost film, especially Rachel's misplaced certainty that her agency can dispel the haunting.

23 Saghafi writes regarding this point, "Survival, then rather than referring to my survival, has become what happens when I am turned over to the other" (2015, p. 23).

24 Insidious and its respective sequels notoriously include jump scares in their concluding scenes.