My grandfather is the ghost and,

"The Ghost is Shakespeare. He is the one who comes as a revenant, belatedly instated, regarded as originally authoritative, rather than retrospectively and retroactively canonized, and deriving increased authority from this very instatement of authority backward, over time. The ghost, le re-venant, the survivor, appears only as a means of figure or fiction, but its appearance is not nothing, nor is it a mere semblance." This "presence without present of a present which, coming back, only haunts" haunts Freud, haunts Nietzsche, haunts Lacan, haunts postmodern England and postmodern America. The Ghost's command, his word, is "Remember me!" and we have done so, to the letter, avant La Lettre, moving our remembrance further and further back until it becomes an originary remembrance, a remembrance of remembrance itself. "Remember me!" cries the Ghost, and Shakespeare is for us the superego of literature, that which calls us back to ourselves, to an imposed, undecidable, but self-chosen attribution of paternity. "Remember me!" The canon has been fixed against self-slaughter.

"A little more than kin and less than kind." Hamlet's bitter phrase inflects not only the problem of a ghostly genre, the unwriting and rewriting of revenge tragedy, but also the continuous attempt to render Shakespeare both kind and kin, of our time, our contemporary, always already postmodern, decentered. "Yet his modernity too, like Nietzsche's, is a forgetting or a suppression of anteriority." This is de Man on Baudelaire. But it could be said of Hamlet - and of Shakespeare. This Baudelairization is not Bowdlerization, but transference, con-texting. We know that Shakespeare played the part of the Ghost in Hamlet. What could not be foreseen, except through anamorphic reading, was that he would become that Ghost. "Remember me!" the Ghost cries. "Do not forget." And, indeed, we do not yet seem quite able to give up that ghost." (Garber, 1987, p.176)

The question is how to remember one whom you have never known, who only exists in memory.

And, yet, still his shadow entreats me, 'Remember me!'

"In the vertiginous moment of coitus, all men are Shakespeare." (Darren Borges)