Ontology: The science or study of being; that department of metaphysics which relates to the being or essence of things, or to being in the abstract.

"To be, or not to be - that is the question" (Shakespeare, p.239)

The sublimation of the possibility of neither being nor non-being undermines the certainties of any ontology which is based upon a denial of alterity and is derived from the submerging of difference, of possibilities. What Derrida terms the 'hauntology' is the presence of the spectral as trace of possible meanings and it involves acknowledging the 'other' that haunts the 'self' - the possibility of that 'h' as a hovering presence over the certainties of ontology. Hauntology undermines by the awareness that all discussions of ontology, of the nature of being of anything, is imbricated in a hauntology of attendant traces, differences, disseminations. The political implication of this is that such hauntologies allow for the introduction of the other, of other voices, other identities and other epistemological positions.

Which brings us, of course, to ghosts. The apparition is itself a mark of an absent present.