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

Time, spacing itself, inscribes itself on the “material supports and technologies” that are “available” for such a writing and that must then, with remainders that cannot be traced, be read. Imagine, for the sake of discussion, that within the Zeitgeist forming around 1895 that phenomenology, modern painting and literature, cinema, X-rays, special relativity, and psychoanalysis are all beginning to gather themselves and to take shape in a screening room where the train keeps arriving, as if it is running on its own, from around the bend that is beyond the screen of La Ciotat.

Perception, Philosophy, Art

—Gilles Deleuze

How is it that aesthetics—as perception, as a dedication to art, as a philosophical discourse—has become spectral? How has it become ragged around the edges, shadowed from within? No one can say with any assurance exactly when this darkening began or how exactly it is related to that most uncanny guest of nihilism and the attendant glare of the cutting edge of the technologics that brings one to the edge of both the beginning and the end. And yet, one knows this dissolution, this spectrality of experience that leaves its remains in the wake of the debris of modernity as it projects these remains forward into the future, looking for a name. Spectrality, in other words, must be thought both within experience and as the condition for experience itself in a manner analogous to Immanuel Kant’s twofold reading of “empirical reality”