Butoh retroactively constructs its origins even as it denies access to them. Seen as Derridean hauntology, butoh serves to excavate a butoh subtext from within European and Japanese modernism, a vexed promise of futurity that did not (could not) eventuate. History's spectral presence inhabits and traumatizes nervous bodies.

Published for Paris's 1985 Butô Festival, Jean Baudrillard's essay is important to the history of butoh. Responding to dancemakers Carlotta Ikeda and Ko Murobushi, Baudrillard employs three main descriptors: revulsion, convulsion, and repulsion. The dancer shifts from animal to mineral, while the body captures or draws into itself the surrounding space, before violently ejecting it.