Renaud Remond-Teissier, The ghostly philosophical Books

Philosophical ghost Books designate works that have existed, which no longer exist, but which haunt the history of philosophy through quotations within other books. They invite us to question the issues of philosophical reading and the traps of memory. What specific impacts do missing works generate within the history of thought? The work examines the effects of theoretical metamorphoses produced by these forms of haunting (to be distinguished from simple intertextuality): how to read the books that are missing? Because the quotation covers a diversity of intentions, the quoting book alters, sometimes attempting to exploit it, the fragment of the missing book. This in return exerts haunting effects through which, by “parasitizing” the host book, it guarantees its anachronistic survival. These semantic metamorphoses are inseparable from the permanence of the past in the present.

This work invites an original writing of the history of philosophy, which would take into account the effects of survivals and latencies complicating any linear trajectory. Beyond conscious dialogues between works and authors, philosophy deals with effects of unconscious haunting, opening onto an underground unconscious memory of thought.