Ghost Writing

Abstract

This short chapter sets the stage for a reading of Don DeLillo’s novel The Body Artist by relating DeLillo’s artist to the mime discussed by Jacques Derrida in “The Double Session” from Dissemination. Coughlan details the way in which Derrida presents the mime as a phantom that presents nothing and represents nothing, appearing as the double of no one, as a copy without model, as an allusion without source, or as a graft without root. Coughlan argues that Derrida here conceives of mimesis as a ghost writing which, as a writing both by and of the ghost, means nothing present represents nothing.