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

academetron, roaming indiscriminately across disciplinary and technical boundaries, penetrating the flesh through the eye, ear, and hand. Just when one thinks one has entered into the adulthood of science and its planetary soteriology, the old childhood tales of things that go bump in the night have reappeared. All of these titles of the phantoms are related, via a kind of transepochal tonality rather than a direct influence—although that too is quite often evident—to Derrida’s 1993 (French 93; English 94) Specters of Marx, a text that produces a “hauntology” that succeeds “ontology” with its correlatives of a logocentric clarity of consciousness and a stable object of knowledge as the discourse of Being. This correlation is what underlies the possibility of a rigorous phenomenology and what gives way in the face of a rigorous phantomenology. As Peggy Kamuf, the translator of Specters, argues, this work encourages scholars to

The wights are no longer on the foggy moors or on the battlements of old stone castles but are instead in the office next door, in the microchips of printers, and in the applications of mobile phones and touchpads. There are the infinite sounds of downloaded music and the thumb-driven frenzy of text messaging.

The air is full of the noise of silent signals, but the mainline progress of the before-and-after of “teleological time” does not vanish, for the research and the teaching of the university continues to depend on this being bound to the track of time that leads from beginning to end. Each day of work is a project in motion; one grant application follows another in a programmatic sequence. What Derrida explicates, however, is the