Much discussion of the spectral has emerged, inevitably perhaps as an after-effect of Derrida's most visible consideration of the spectral in Specters of Marx. The "spectral' turn has in large part divided itself into three areas: (1) a reinvention of the Gothic, and with that supernatural, uncanny, and "weird' fiction, in which, neutralized and normalized, "spectrality' is taken largely as a metaphor for a range of assumed relations between tropes, types, and genre overlaps; (2) the "virtualizing' effect of digital technologies, the Internet, email, texting, etc. This has largely been consigned to a theorized cultural studies, with a more or less politicized agenda to do with globalization, simulacra, and increasingly a world perceived as virtual rather than material; (3) by far the least explored, and the most interesting post-Derridean thinking on the spectral, hauntology and so on, has to do with memory, the trace, perception, in short, a kind of haunted (quasi-) phenomenology, which is now in more or less "translated' versions of critical thought in the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Alain Badiou. In this, it is necessary to consider how the subject is both constituted and responds to the trace, experience becomes perception, becoming in turn that which returns as the trace of its earlier traces in memory, in order to present itself hauntingly as what Edmund Husserl describes as "re-presentation': that image indelibly written onto the self, which finds its effect in the interface between who we are and how we are made to feel by that which returns and which can, in any given moment, reiterate itself.While particular aspects of trauma work and memory work more generally address such effects, they do so through the idea of constants, through repeatable effects. Where such studies find their limit is in the consideration of the neutral, in the non-traumatic. What is also not touched on is the manner of aesthetic response, the way in which, in reading a work of literature, the subject is in part constituted through the arrival of the other, the spectral guest, to which the reading subject acts as host. From this, one has the sense of a radical reorientation of Being, which the acceptance of the spectral makes possible. What does it mean to live with ghosts? What are the ramifications for taking "feeling' and the phenomenal response seriously, when one admits to a world made not of objects but of phenomena? Why do we need the spectral? There is both a poetics and an ethics of spectrality, a poethics.To understand, to apprehend this, is not something new. It is already figured in the work of Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, and other writers before them. There is in the work of reading an intimate relation between self and other, reading subject and textual subject, narrator and narrated. One must, in the act of reading, be open to the other and receive the ghost. To receive the ghost, is this not always to experience a visitation in the strictest sense? And does such a possibility not make of the event a "truth'? For admitting the ghost, allowing its arrival unconditionally and giving way to it, giving a place for the passage of haunting to take place on its own terms; this would be the only possible ground by which the authenticity of the ghost could be assured, by which the veracity, the truth of the spectral voice, could be received.But, here, before the possibility of any arrival, we have to pause on the threshold, as if the ghost were our host, and we the guests, as if we found ourselves displaced, our roles reversed; as if we were haunting the precincts, hovering at the door; if the ghost, in its visitation—and this would extend as a general logic of spectrality—were to make the truth available, what would that truth be? The starting point of the chapter is a distinction made by Jacques Derrida between two modes of hospitality. On the one hand, there is the "hospitality of invitation'. In this mode, one remains, Derrida observes, "the master of the house: "Come, come to me, feel at home," and so on, "but you should respect my house, my language, my rules, the rules of my nation" and so on. "You are welcome, but under some conditions."' On the other hand, visitation of any kind implies that "absolute hospitality must be extended, because the visitation, what is, properly speaking, a visitation, has to come and be received unconditionally. It must, says Derrida, "fall on me, or visit me … it falls upon; it comes; it is an intrusion, an eruption—and that is the condition of the event … For something to happen [for an event and the truth that it "makes" to take place], it must remain unpredictable, that is … I should not see him or it coming in front of me, but it must fall on me.' Here is the motion at least, the trait, and re-trait, the arrival and revenance that informs the "coming to pass' of the spectral; here is, if not the ineluctable logic of the ghost, then the unveiling of the poetics of the ghost: in its unexpected visitation, which can always come, and which always has the possibility, even in the most impossible of scenarios, to come, once more. Visitation is everything with ghosts, and this suggests crucially important ways of rethinking our relationship to literature and what it means to be human.Of course, there is another dimension to this, having to do with the work of memory, which is in a sense to speak of the ghost of that other that is my own experience. As Husserl argues—and in order to address the matter of theory as it moves on, if it moves on, we must return to phenomenology, to what might be called conveniently first principles—there is always "re-presentation' in memory work. That is to say, when an event or experience returns to me, it returns as a trace, always already doubled. For, to follow the logic of the causal sequence as mapped by Husserl, experience or event, at which the subject is present, which involves the subject's "inner self' and the world in intimate relation, becomes trace in that irreversible passage from pre-reflective to phenomenological apperception. Thereafter, perception, as memory of the trace of the experience, can only return as an after effect, in the manner of re-presentation, of mental image, the trace of a trace. As a result, the visitation of the other, the spectral, is not separate from me, it is of, and in me in a particular way, and yet, as other, not me. Being is therefore informed by, and cannot reflect on itself without being informed by that which is both of the self and not the self. Being is constituted by this alterity, which, the author argues, suggests that the self is informed by loss; to put this another way, loss is a constituent of Being in a fundamental way, and not merely as the experience of an affect.