A Quivering Ontology:
Ali Smith,
Hauntology,
and Deconstructive
Aesthetics
This article explores how the fiction of Ali Smith defies Western philosophy’s metaphysical logic of binary partition, proposing instead a revitalized mode of aesthetic engagement grounded in a new logic of generative liminality. Smith dramatizes the pitfalls of institutional literary theory’s dedication to “paranoid hermeneutics” (Kosofsky Sedgwick) and its presence bias. She then consciously begins to “unlearn” these approaches, adopting a lyrically deconstructive mode of engaging with the arts—one that embraces the inexplicable and celebrates the vibrant atmosphere of post-death experience. The ghost—the deconstructive figure par excellence and icon of the “spectral turn” in literary studies—defies binary opposition and linear temporality, and thus becomes central to Smith’s project of generative liminality. By placing Smith in dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s concepts of différance, trace, and hauntology, this article argues that—like the ghost—the self, time, and literary text possess a “quivering” ontology: each oscillates permanently between states, neither wholly present nor entirely absent, formed by a continual process of “making up,” and thus freed from the finality of semantic fixity (Lovlie).