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

savoir absolu (sa). There is a great murmuring as the shades shuffle about, blindly rearranging themselves, blindly groping with their hands along strange surfaces, along each other’s insubstantial bodies. Occasionally, writing appears: “lines which went up and down, over the words inscribed on the whiteness of the page, recorded in blindness. I am only passing through, the writer had said, and these were the signs he had left in passing” (Saramago 294). Art, as the surface of material, social, and intellectual exposures, remains; the remains of art remain. There is charcoal, smoke, the whiteness of the page, the texture of canvas, the earth tones of the earth, and the metallic sheen of manufactured surfaces. There are installations. There is being, but it is spectral being. There is a strangely fascinating aesthetics at work in the world, an adventure of thought and of making that keeps one’s attention in something like the way one is fascinated with a corpse, with walking, or with the summer wind skittering through the gray-green leaves of the trees by the river. Where is one? What remains here? What opens onto an exposure toward the future?

People are in a labyrinth with no exit—there is not a second life into which to flee—but there are vectors of force that have positioned them at this place at this time in the labyrinth. I will trace only a small, but nonetheless intensely intertwined and enormously compacted, knot of these vectors. I will, for example, examine the emergence of phantomenology from within phenomenology—and this is occurring within a number of different sites within “philosophy”—first as a step across the threshold of the theater of the split and multiplying double that enables meaning to occur and then within the discourse of philosophy itself, though the “itself ” is a mere phantasm. This “mere,” however, is itself extremely enigmatic. It is usually employed as a gesture of dismissal, like the phrase “just art.” One shrugs one’s shoulders indifferently, as if one thinks one knows how to respond to these small words. How, though, do “mere” and “just” dismiss that which—the phantasm or art—is already insubstantial in its very way of being? Why insist on the mereness of the already mere, the justness of the already transitory? The “mere” of mereness or the “just” of justness are signs of how language operates via an incessant