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

of the work of reason, the work of culture, and the work of art, all of which are exposed to the elements of rain, sun, and wind. The logic of the phantom, phantomenology, is one phrase for this site, which is nowhere, anywhere, and everywhere. The where and the when, in fact, depend essentially for their manifestation upon such spectrality. In the pages to come, then, I will weave together three threads in order to format an image of the contemporary as it encounters that which disrupts all attempts at a chronology, disrupts people’s attempts to situate themselves in a habitual seam of past-present-future, the out-of-date and the contemporary, that provides an inevitable form of protection from the radicality of exposure. These three threads consist of (1) a critique of the philosophy of appearances, with phenomenology and its vexed relationship to idealism as the primary representative of this enterprise; (2) an analysis of cultural formations—literature, cinema, painting, the university, new media—that highlights the enigmatic necessity for learning to read a spectrality that, because the two cannot be separated, is both hauntological and historical; and (3) a questioning of the role of art—as semblance, reflection, and remains—that occurs within and alongside the space of philosophy and all of the “posts-” in which one finds oneself.

One last thought comes to mind, but I suppose it will have to wait, for a train is heading directly here from the ruins of La Ciotat, from out of the draped box cameras and the conceptual screens of the nineteenth century. It is not a new train, and one will have encountered it already, even if one has never seen the fifty-second clip in which the train steams toward one from around the corner of the histories of philosophy, cinema, and culture and the delimitations of the absolute exposure. There must always be a mask, a screen, a black drape, a protective shadow. And there will, therefore, always be ghosts. In what language do they speak? What is the form of their apparitional appearance? To what shall one, by their arrival, be exposed?