In this bold and highly original work David Ratmoko offers an analysis of haunting in the
history of European literature law and politics in the wake of Derrida's notion of
'spectrality'. Interested in figures of redemption from guilt he traces the rise of canonical
literature through the history of an encryption or transcoding that has produced such fantastic
compromises as Exodus Greek tragedy Dante's Comedia and Shakespeare's Hamlet as well as the
conversion into capitalism. Addressing the issue of ghosts through our modern crisis of
legitimacy as raised by Benjamin Schmitt and Kafka Ratmoko explores Freud's idea of
traumatic fantasy in its capacity of driving the progress of spirituality or spectrality in the
Judeo-Christian world.
