Feeling Haunted by Loss:Reflections on the Phenomenology of Possibility

Descriptions of feeling haunted in an emotional way are widespread. It is doubtful that the relevant experiences are reducible to any combination of established emotion categories, such as regret, remorse, or guilt. Nevertheless, what it is to feel haunted has been neglected by philosophers of emotion and by emotion theorists more generally. In this paper, I focus more specifically on what it is to feel haunted by loss. Here, I suggest, talk of haunting spans a range of experiences. However, the majority of these share a common phenomenological structure. Being haunted by loss involves continuing to experience certain possibilities as foreclosed, in a way that is inextricable from how we experience our current situation and orient ourselves towards the future. This unsettles and undermines us.