The nexus of this paper is the question of "life" as maintained by a number of intersecting paths running through works of Jacques Derrida, from essays on Paul Celan back to the earliest book-length essay on Edmund Husserl, the Introduction to the Origin of Geometry. This essay is about the words "vif" (quick) and "hanter" (haunt), in Derrida's writing. Its purpose is to demonstrate why "haunting" is present, as it were, from the early phenomenologically oriented work, and why that is related to what is "vif": quick, lively.