| Chapter 1: | The Aesthetics of Spectrality |
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movement at a speed that cannot be calculated—and that is not because it is merely too fast—and thereby leaves a wake that allows for something people call “reading” or “understanding,” which is always belated.
Rodolphe Gasché has undertaken a rigorous analysis of “mere form” that––because it is inseparable from the indeterminate judgments that underlie all determinate cognition––provides the Stimmung, a tone and mood, for the play of the faculties at work in Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
The phantasms of nature and art either evoke a response of dismissal—it is “only” something unimportant passing in the night, a shadow over the sun—or they evoke an architectonic of idealism that will establish, within the solidity of the construction of a foundation, the substance of epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. Shielding one’s face from the sun, or from the shadow that crosses the sun, with a raised hand—as if the Medusa were staring at one in every instant—one turns away from the dissolving force of the “mere” and hopes for something more substantial. “What if, though, everything inevitably appears “merely” as an apparition? Apparition thus names the structural instability between appearing and (‘mere’) appearance” (Saghafi 3). This “structural instability,” for which there are many names, will erode all idealisms without being a synonym for nihilism—on the contrary.
This turning away—errance (straying), detour, writing—is the very movement of indirectness that allows the phantasm of art and the arts of the phantasm to come into appearance. There is no directness or univocity, no main line of logic that carries one along from A to B, from 1 to 2, from signifier to signified along the direct express of a temporal