The concept of hauntology (hantologie) was introduced by Derrida in his now well-known book Specters of Marx (1993). Derrida conceived hauntology as a way to explain the return of the past, of lost futures, the ghostly traces that refuse to vanish, and the impossibility of a pure, self-contained “now.” This view undermines the metaphysics of presence by asserting that every moment is haunted by absence, by liminality, by what no longer is or what never came to be.

Hauntology emerged as a logical extension of Derrida's decades-long critique of what he views as the “metaphysics of presence”—the Western philosophical tradition's privileging of immediacy, self-identity, and unmediated access to meaning. Derrida formulated his ideas that presence is always compromised by absence and that meaning is perpetually deferred through the play of differences in his early works.(1) Hauntology extended this critique by focusing specifically on temporal disjunction—the way the present is inhabited by non-present elements (past and future) that constantly disrupt any claim to pure contemporaneity.(2)

Hauntology also challenged Husserlian phenomenology, which sought to ground philosophy in the immediate presence of consciousness to itself. For Derrida, consciousness cannot fully present: it is constantly haunted by its incompleteness, by what it is not. This logic suggests that “being” is never pure or self-contained but haunted by its absence, not from outside, but as a condition of its very form. The ghost (spectre) becomes Derrida's figure for this ontological impurity—neither present nor absent, neither alive nor dead, occupying a liminal (metaxycal) space that challenges binary oppositions.

Remarkably, decades before this formulation, in 1929, Russian science fiction writer Alexander Beliaev described hauntological conditions in his story “The End of Light”. The premise of the story is built around the unexpected change in the speed of light in the universe: it suddenly decreases from 300,000 kilometers per second to a mere 1 meter every 6 minutes and 58 seconds. This leads a global crisis of perception: humans no longer see the present moment but only the reflected images of what occurred minutes earlier. As a result, all visual experience becomes delayed; the world becomes a realm of ghosts, doubles, and temporal disjunctions. This fictional catastrophe becomes the entry point into a deeply philosophical meditation on time, perception, and the authenticity of experience.

Once people realize what is going on, panic erupts. Accidents multiply, trust in perception collapses, and individuals become haunted by delayed images of themselves and others. The world begins to operate like an unstable projection system, a cinematic reel looping scenes of a world already gone.

The plot centers on Maramball, a French journalist in Berlin, who in the beginning of the story, discovers that the world had dramatically changed. He starts to experience strange anomalies: he hears the sound of striking a match before seeing the flame, sees a delayed image of his own hand lighting a lamp, and soon, shockingly, sees a double of himself mimicking his earlier actions. Maramball observes that the world reveals itself only after a lag, like a photo gradually appearing on a photographic paper in a chemical bath.

This metaphor points to a new metaphysical framework of reality — the metaphysics of uncertainty. No longer immediate experience, the world now appears as a slowly developed photographic image : imperfectly, vibrating, always too late. Time-lag becomes ontological delay, and the subject is caught in a reverberation of spectrality. The metaphor replaces Enlightenment vision—clear, radiant, horizon-directed —with a hauntological structure of deferred revelation. Knowledge becomes uncertain, provisional, retrospective. In this world, there is no pure perception—only residue, imprint, and the unreliability of light.

From here, Beliaev pushes further into the territory of the bizarre. Maramball, like others, begins to see his double. He becomes a witness to himself, not in real time, but as a delayed ghost. Identity fractures under the pressure of temporal distortion: “He saw himself sitting at the table. The double reached out to the lamp and lit it. A bluish light flared beneath the black lampshade, even though the shade was made of green glass. Then Maramball’s ghost rose from the table and silently walked across the room, repeating all the movements of the first Maramball, performed several minutes earlier.”(3)

This image perfectly captures the theme of ghostly doubling and delayed presence central to hauntology. It recalls Derrida’s figure of the specter: neither present nor absent, neither alive nor dead. The self becomes a ghost of itself, dissociated from synchronic unity. It is no longer a sovereign presence; it begins to operate as an archive of its former gestures.

The story also reveals the political consequences of temporal collapse. Without access to a stable present, legal and political structures unravel: curfews are imposed but cannot be enforced, crimes occur without visible perpetrators, and justice becomes impossible. In Derridean terms, the metaphysics of presence that underpins modern governance collapses into spectrality. Justice cannot see, and therefore cannot be rendered.

Yet Beliaev does not leave us in pure dystopia. One of the story’s most interesting turns is how people adjust to the new temporality. They rely on sound, memory, and approximation. “Cooks in restaurants somehow managed to prepare dishes and serve customers “by ear, taste, and smell”; street traffic resumed, although it moved with extraordinary slowness; and the post, telegraph, and telephone began operating again—albeit at the same slowed-down pace.”

This new mode of existence—imperfect and mediated—nonetheless continues. The world, once disrupted by delay, stabilizes into phantomness and people accept living in this state of shimmering temporality.

Even the title points to the new phantasmagoric condition. The Russian Светопреставление is a neologism blending svet (“light”) and konets sveta (“doomsday” or “the end of the world”), implying both a literal disturbance of light and a metaphor for cosmic upheaval. It plays on multiple registers — “the end of the world,” a “light show,” and a “the death of light.” The word itself evokes theatricality, unreality, and catastrophe all at once. Beliaev’s pun becomes a philosophical revelation: apocalypse arrives not as destruction, but as delay; the implosion is is epistemological, not material. Like Derrida, Beliaev deconstructs the metaphysics of light—truth as brightness, immediacy, and presence—and replaces it with a poetics of displacement, deferral, and uncertainty. The world acquires a holographic quality.

Beliaev’s tale is not merely science fiction; it is speculative metaphysics. By imagining a world in which light is no longer immediate, he conjures a world governed by specters, echoes, and lag. His tale prefigures the hauntological critique of modernity and offers a great metaphor for the spectral temporality of our own moment. It endures because it captures something deeply true about time, about perception, and about a weird feeling of being oneself.

What makes Beliaev's story particularly compelling is its exploration of subjectivity under hauntological conditions. The story's central idea—the slowing of light that creates a perceptual delay—becomes a powerful metaphor for the modern experience of selfhood as fundamentally divided, deferred, and ungraspable. When Maramball witnesses his own double performing actions he had completed minutes before, he experiences a radical splitting of identity that disrupts the illusion of a unified, self-present subject. This encounter with oneself-as-other is dramatic: “He saw himself sitting at the table. The double reached out to the lamp and lit it... Then Maramball's ghost rose from the table and silently walked across the room, repeating all the movements of the first Maramball, performed several minutes earlier.” (3)

This eerie scene captures something profound about human experience that exceeds mere scientific speculation: the alienating feeling of being oneself and simultaneously not being oneself, of watching oneself act as if from outside. Maramball becomes both performer and spectator, actor and audience, self and other.

As Sartre once observed, consciousness perpetually escapes itself, unable to coincide with itself in pure presence. This existential split with oneself is not a failure of subjectivity, rather it is it’s very condition. Beliaev's story demonstrates this philosophical insight through its science fictional conceit: when Maramball observes his double, he experiences physically what is normally a metaphysical, often referred as out-of-body, condition—the impossibility of being fully present to oneself.(5)

The slowing of light in Beliaev's story materializes this abstract philosophical condition. Maramball literally sees himself in the immediate past as he was, not as he is, emphasizing how selfhood is constructed retrospectively, never immediately accessible in the moment of experience.

This relationship to one's identity challenges the Cartesian foundation of modern subjectivity—the “I think, therefore I am” that grounds existence in the immanence of consciousness and being or immediate self-presence of consciousness. Instead, Beliaev suggests a hauntological formulation: “I am seen, therefore I was.” Identity is no longer a result of direct self-knowledge; it emerges through the strange experience of seeing oneself as another would, with a temporal delay that makes self-coincidence impossible.

The anxiety that pervades Beliaev's narrative stems from this destabilized subjectivity. When Maramball confronts his double, he experiences the disturbingly unfamiliar within the familiar. His own image, detached from his current consciousness and actions, becomes a source of existential dread. This unsettling sentiment emerges precisely because the double reveals something true about subjectivity that normally remains concealed: its fundamental dividedness, its phantom nature.

What Beliaev captures so vividly is not just the philosophical paradox of self-consciousness but its affective dimension—the vertigo of watching oneself from outside, the disorientation of temporal disjunction, the fear of finding oneself not-quite-oneself. The character experiences what Merleau-Ponty would call “the flesh”—the chiasmic intertwining of subject and object, seer and seen. Maramball becomes flesh in this profound sense: both perceiving subject and perceived object, caught in the reversibility of perception.

Beliaev recognized how technology doesn't simply represent existing reality, it fundamentally reformulates it. The slowing of light in his story functions as a kind of media technology that transforms the conditions of perception and, consequently, of subjectivity. This ghostlike condition of selfhood is not merely philosophical abstraction but lived experience—the weird feeling of not quite being oneself, of watching oneself act as if from a distance, of being split between multiple temporal frames and mediated presences. It manifests in moments of déjà vu, in the shock of hearing one's recorded voice, in the alienation of seeing oneself in photographs, in the dissociative experiences common to digital life.

What Beliaev's describes is the "new" normal condition of modern subjectivity: to be haunted by oneself, to never quite know who one really is.

Maramball’s sense of himself bears striking resemblance to what clinical psychology might classify as dissociative experiences—or even elements of schizophrenia—particularly depersonalization (the sensation of being detached from oneself) and derealization (the experience of one’s surroundings as unreal or estranged). As Ronald David Laing argued in The Divided Self (1960), schizophrenia is an intensification of the dividedness already latent within modern consciousness. The so-called psychotic, according to Laing, may be simply engaged a desperate effort not to collapse, but to preserve coherence under existential threat. Madness, in this view, is an attempt to survive in a world that no longer validates one’s being.

Beliaev’s vision makes this condition tangible. Through the disjointed temporality of his fictional world, we glimpse a subjectivity that always arrives late to itself. The eerie sensation of watching one’s own gestures from elsewhere—of being both actor and observer—becomes the exaggerated logic of modern life. Hauntology’s most unsettling intuition lies here: that the ghost is not the other, but the delayed self, endlessly replaying scenes already past.

This divided self was made increasingly visible and vivid by technological mediation and temporal disjunction. The experience of not quite being oneself is simply an intensified version of ordinary experience. And it raises a deeper question: has it always been this way yet dissimulated behind the rules and norms? Or is this condition a relatively modern phenomenon, following the dismantling of an integrated vision of the world by the Enlightenment?

Once, we claimed to inhabit a cosmos suffused with meaning, in which self and world formed a continuous whole—visible, for instance, in the unified vanishing points of Renaissance painting. Now, that vanishing point appears to be us.

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1. Particularly Of Grammatology (1967) and Différance (1968). Derrida, Jacques - Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, p. 156.

2. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Routledge, 1994, p. 11.

3. Beliaev, Alexander – Collected Works, Molodaia Gvardia, 1963/64, Vol. 8, p. 13

4. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956, p.79, 98

5. The deferred sense of identity in Beliaev's narrative speaks not only to Sartre, but to what Heidegger called the “not-yet” and “having-been” structures of human existence (Dasein). For Heidegger, human temporality is never confined to a pure “now” but always extends both forward into possibilities and backward into facticity. We exist in what he terms “ecstatic temporality”—standing outside ourselves, stretched between past and future.

6. Laing, R. D – The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, Penguin Books, 1969, pp. 37-38