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This essay is basically a prose ode in honour of the ‘ghosts’ of Jacques Derrida, the late French philosopher, and particularly honouring his work The Specters of Marx. Gunn, a rhetorician, cultural theorist and critic, writes that he has been ‘chasing Derrida's ghost through a series of books in order to demonstrate the influence and utility of Derrida's idiom of haunting’ (p. 97). His essay is an expression of appreciation, and hospitality toward the spectres of Derrida, to those indebted to him and those to whom he was indebted.
Gunn contextualizes his review by tracing the movement from humanism to postmodernism. First he provides a critical comparison of postmodernism and humanism, while acknowledging the challenge of defining postmodernism. He settles on its most common themes: ‘the de-centering of the autonomous, self-transparent subject’, and ‘a commitment to displacing the masculine rational agent’ (p. 78). Gunn demonstrates that postmodernism is better described as post-humanism and that, while Derrida's idiom of haunting assumes that the humanist subject is dead, it also demonstrates that this death can uniquely re-enliven humane values like tolerance, goodwill, and responsibility (p. 81).