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Introduction
The concept of haunting has become common parlance in the humanities and social sciences, and with it, much-needed questionings - even undoings - of modern empirical dualisms of absence and presence, visibility and invisibility, life and death (Derrida, 1994; Gordon, [1997]2008; Gunn, 2006; Rosenberg, 2010; Roseneil, 2009; Saltmarsh, 2009). Because of the specter's ability to account for the presence of what is seemingly not there - what Derrida (1994) terms the 'disjointed or disadjusted now' (p. 1) - the concept of haunting has perhaps not surprisingly been taken up in studies of trauma, memory and mourning (Gordon, 2008; Rosenberg, 2010); racial and colonial displacement and identity (Bhaba, 1996; Gordon [1997]2008; Gunew, 2004); as well as postmodern social theory more broadly (Derrida, 1994, Gordon [1997]2008; Zizek, 1999; Gunn, 2006). What I find curious, and take up in this article, is the near-virtual absence of the concept of haunting within critical studies on health, illness and the body.1
This omission strikes me as odd because the experiences of illness can so easily be seen as a form of haunting. In illness we are self and not-self; we are host to an invisible, often alien invader; and the unseen workings of illness commonly leave their marked presence on the lived body. Beyond these arguably needed descriptive factors, illness and haunting also share a long epistemological pairing. In premodern, as well as in some eastern and alternative medical conceptualizations, illness is often understood as the infiltration of negative deities, spirits and energies. It was not until the rise of empirical medicine that illnesses come to be seen as an entity removed from the 'dimensions of the hidden' (Foucault, 1973, p. 90). As Rhodes (1985) explains, the overarching trajectory of the history of medicine is 'a move from supernatural to natural explanations of phenomena' (quoted in Nettleton, 2006, p. 3). Emerging in the early nineteenth century and entrenched in the paradigm of positivism, the clinical model marked the epistemological underpinnings of contemporary western biomedicine.2 In contrast to the classificatory model of the premodern era, which functioned largely as a descriptive interpretation of symptoms, the clinical model reframed illness as a visible and locatable pathology within the increasingly charted (and chartered) spaces of the physical body (Foucault,...