Philosophy, Art, and the Specters of Jacques Derrida By Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

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

Chapter 1:

The Aesthetics of Spectrality

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Judgment, though this is, of course, a pivotal text to which I will return. Rather, it is because his thought, as Gilles Deleuze demonstrates, is like a “bolt of lightning” (Deleuze 4) that changes the very terrain of philosophy. Deleuze is right when he credits Kant with the “founding” of phenomenology, for there is

phenomenology from the moment that the phenomenon is no longer defined as an appearance but as apparition. The difference is enormous because when I say the word “apparition” I am no longer saying appearance at all, I am no longer at all opposing it to essence. The apparition is what appears insofar as it appears. Full stop. (Deleuze 4)

The “appearance,” for philosophy from Plato to Kant, was always in some ways “defective,” a deprivation in one way or another of an “essence” of stabilized truth.

Phenomenology claims to be a rigorous science of the apparition as such, which is to say asks itself the question: what can we say about the fact of appearing?…The appearance is something that refers to essence in relation of disjunction, in a disjunctive relation, which is to say either it is appearance or it is essence. The apparition is something very different; it’s something that refers to the conditions of what appears. The conceptual landscape has literally changed completely…the problem has become phenomenological. (Deleuze, Kant 5)

Although he works all of this out in much more detail than I can follow here, Deleuze is indicating something essential in the trajectory of thought and in the multiplicities of the exposures of cultural formations. This Kantian opening will also entail a completely new subjectivity, a transcendental subjectivity “which is evidently neither you nor me,” (Kant 5) but which is constitutive of the conditions for the appearance of all apparitions. “It is already beautiful as a system of ideas. I hope you can feel its extent; it’s a tremendous machine” (Kant 5).

The Geist, then, is on the move, but not in the spiraling pattern of an Aufhebung, not along the path of absolute self-consciousness, of the