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

improving the plight of the world. All of this requires a teleological concept of time in which one thing leads to another and might, one day, come to fulfillment.

But what if the house of reason is haunted in its very essence? What if in its very institutionality it is exposed to murmurings, scratchings, whistlings, and contaminations of the rational that are incessantly undermining its own foundations? What if there is another time at work that dissolves the possibility of a final telos, a guiding purposiveness? The university, for a variety of historical reasons, is a house both multiplied and divided—perhaps more divided than one had imagined. The medieval university of theological learning grounded in the transcendental signified of God morphed into the Enlightenment university focused on the divestiture of superstition and the embedding of the principle of reason as critique and scientific rationality into the curriculum. This, in turn, gave rise to the research universities of Berlin, Johns Hopkins, and their many successors. The current historical moment is one of globalization, telecommunications, e-podiums, and distance education. It is the moment of photographs of the edge of the universe, trace-maps of clouds of newly discovered subatomic particles, and the reading of the genomes of different species. It is the moment of deconstruction, new media, simulacra, and rhizomic affiliations that create new vectors of thought.

The emerging telematic culture of the posthuman—which transforms the meanings of “body,” “place,” “knowledge,” “machine,” “animal,” and the “human”—is the moment of the discourse of the phantom, spectrality, haunting, and the uncanny. The university, as Nicholas Royle has phrased it, is, “increasingly, a ghostly institution, haunted not only by questions concerning the nature of teaching, but also by a sense of its relationship to itself and to its own past” (54). This is an exceedingly strange phenomenon, for it marks a disturbance in the very essence of reflective rationality: a point, cut, or flow that reason cannot encompass, that both gives impetus to reason and exceeds all of reason’s attempts to reason. It is the encounter of reason and its other, but within the foundations of the house of reason. This presence of phantoms does not