This Ego, this living individual would itself be inhabited and invaded by its own specter. It would be constituted by specters of which it becomes the host and which it assembles in the haunted community of a single body. Ego=ghost. Therefore “I am” would mean “I am haunted”: I am haunted by myself who am (haunted by myself who am haunted by myself who am . . . and so forth). Wherever there is Ego, es spukt, “it spooks.” . . . Its translation always fails, unfortunately, to render the link between the impersonality or the quasi-anonymity of an operation [spuken] without act, without real subject or object, and the production of a figure, that of the revenant [der Spuk]: not simply “it spooks,” as we just ventured to translate, but “it returns,” “it ghosts,” “it specters.”) The essential mode of self-presence of the cogito would be the haunting obsession of this “es spukt.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx
