Philosophy, Art, and the Specters of Jacques Derrida By Gray Koc ...

undo the instrumental power of reason at the level of its immediate and long-term effects—that is clear for everyone to see—but it does raise a series of questions about the essence of reason and its relationship to the formation of the university.

As the twenty-first-century university begins to shape itself, its multiple pasts return as an experience of being haunted by old cultural formations, but the presence of ghosts also opens up the future as an imaginative projection and its concomitant question of ethics: how shall people respond? As some scholars within the university—from out of the genealogies of post-Nietzschean philosophy, psychoanalysis, trauma and affect studies, posthumanism, new empiricisms, and deconstruction—attempt to “think the uncanny” along the lines of phantomenology, what experience will emerge for the academetron, that learning machine in which all scholars participate and that produces, through the operations of reason, so much useful and quantifiable knowledge? What is one to do with the pixilated data torrent?

If there is anything to this being haunted within the university—and it may simply be the sleight of hand of a wild host of charlatans—it will show itself not only in the density of a philosophical discourse dispersed throughout a variety of departments, themselves undergoing sea-changes, but also in the everyday habits of teaching, learning, reading, and writing. Indeed, one of the effects of haunting will be to destabilize the traditional modern site of teaching, the classroom, and its place in the so-called system of the university. Where do educators, for example, teach? How do they describe that space and its histories? How far does teaching travel and at what speeds? As for objects of study and departmental organizations, there has also been a rash of deaths on university grounds—of philosophy, of art, of the subject, of the author, of history—and the bodies are beginning to decompose and putrefy.

Sprouting from all of the dead bodies lying around campus (though this word, too, no longer means what it did) as if it is the institutional version of Hamlet, a new cultural formation is emerging, in fits and starts, within the digitized machinery of the academetron. These phantoms are not from an outside of the machine that invades the interior space of