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

This “betweenness” does not somehow stand between any two stabilities, but forms only an intertwined fold, a platform for performance, or a juncture—as in a switching station for trains or phones—that is the condition for appearance.

World, Dasein and thing exist as this folded betweening: “Intimacy obtains only where the intimate—world and thing—divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing, in their inter, division prevails: a difference” (L 202). This absolutely enigmatic conjunction of the whiling—where, in more traditional language, the one mixes with the many in order-to-speak—is the dynamic place of art. And because, furthermore, this “joining of the rift” (L 204) is marked by pain, art is the site at which pain becomes a threshold. But art gives form, even if only the hint of an outline of a silhouette, to this pain and is therefore the threshold where the “limpid brightness shines” (L 205). Without at least the “mereness” of form, there is no brightness.

Whether as sensible experience in general—whatever that means—or as sensible experience articulated as art, aesthetics is spectralizing. It fascinates and frightens people. This does not distinguish it from other human experiences; instead, these spatially contoured moments of material ideality illuminatively represent people’s form of passing. If phenomenology, through its suspensions and reductions, attempts to establish the “principle of principles,” then phantomenology will attempt to trace the rhythms and shapes of the threshold when one steps to one edge or another of this possibility. It will not let one rest; it will summon one, restless, into the night. There can never be a “principle of principles.” This is the first principle.

Technology, with its logics that produce the uncanny in the very midst of the rage for the order of rationality, is another of the vectors I will keep an eye on from within. In the glow of a cell-phone screen full of its text-messaging and the silver screens that reflect the ways in which people