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

This is the fabric of philosophy as phenomenology that Derrida begins to niggle at along the edges. This curiosity, this terror, this making and unmaking of the body, perception, and meaning is the site—the crater, the tear, the wall, the blink, the interval, the dead zone, the burial mound—of spectral aesthetics. It is all, though, a mere scrap of text, burned, waiting for its blackened scratches to be read, for one more line of writing to appear.

The Haunting of the House of Reason

—Jacques Derrida

The university is the house of learning, the home of rationality and its various modes of research that are enacted by every worker within its walls, not just in the philosophy that traces one history of the ratio (the various forms of the ordering of the world). Its purposes are to support the work of learning for the sake of knowledge and the good life; to support the state, as a form of both politics and capital, through a number of research initiatives; and to train students and faculty to generate the economic health of a region, a country, and the world. In some places there is still the wisp of a theory of social critique that, at least in the cultural sciences, might be a part of the university’s vocation. Behind all of these formulations, however, stands the value of generating knowledge that will lead to further the progress of humankind through the advancement of the rationalization of the linkages between the university, the community, economics, and the political world at large. The university, in other words, is the site where humankind’s reflective capacities meet transnational capital and the production of knowledge for the sake of