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This issue of AVANT is dedicated to hauntology, an approach originally defined by Jacques Derrida as a "logic of haunting" that is "larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being," and that "harbor[s] within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves" (Derrida, 1994, p. 10). At a most general level, hauntology is a study of spectrality and spectres-that is, entities and processes that exceed any definite categorization; accordingly, it inevitably questions the established notions of being, thereby transforming the status of the objects and subjects of knowledge, and contesting the possibility of objectivity. The very idea of spectres-positioned as they are between worlds and times-disrupts the conventional means of measuring time and space, as well as all kinds of dichotomous conceptualizations, including "the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being" (Derrida, 1994, p. 11). Significantly for the articles collected in this issue, the figure of the spectre questions the divisions between texts, and the separation between the individual and the social/communal, thus palpably demonstrating the impossibility of examining any concept or text independently of others. Ac cordingly, instead of looking for certainties, the scholar of spectres looks for sites of crossings, borrowings, and contaminations, re-discovering traces of other times, places, and beings in the seemingly solid here and now, and producing somewhat melancholic accounts of a culture that is both already haunted and potentially haunting.The publication of Derrida's Spectres de Marx in 1993-itself an interdisciplinary study embracing philosophy and its various sub-disciplines, ontology and ethics in particular, political science, history, literary theory and criticism, and psychoanalysis-brought about a number of other interdisciplinary publications, uses and appropriations, reaching beyond the scope of the original book and crossing into the fields already partly occupied by the

Abstract. This article presents the major aspects of hauntology, highlighting the impact of spectrality studies on contemporary redefinitions of knowledge and cognition. Referring predominantly to Jacques Derrida's Spectres de Marx (1993), we discuss the ways in which the spectral turn has led to a "cognitive crisis" of sorts by radically questioning the existing procedures of knowing and re-configuring the prevalent conceptualization of time and history. Approaching the spectre as a conceptual site of difference and otherness, we comment on the ethical dimensions of spectrality studies and the questions of (in)visibility, representation of as well as responsibility for the Other, the marginalised or the silenced. We also stress the contribution of the psychoanalytic concepts explaining psychological reactions to loss-the metapsychic phantom and the intrapsychic crypt-to the development of trauma and memory studies. In all of these concerns, we are primarily interested in outlining the transformative potential of the figure of the spectre and its influence on methods of study in contemporary scholarship.

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The recent exhibition of Patricia Piccinini’s art called That’s Us (Toruń, CSW) largely represents the Australian artist’s visions and fascinations known from earlier exhibitions. Questioning and erasing the borders between species, the affective realities of Piccinini’s art are bound to the concepts of care, empathy and fragility, which refigure what is human and non-human and the relations between them by expanding the notion of mothering and fostering to include interspecies relations. Beginning with a discussion of the uncanny, abjection and monstrosity, this article aims to examine the complicated implications of interpreting Piccinini’s art within the conceptual framework of ecofeminism, as well as in the context of disability aesthetics. In her explorations of different and alternative corporealities, Piccinini, among many other things, asks questions about ideologies of normativity and able-bodiedness, suggesting the possibility of going beyond them.