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

Always hybridized, the traditional concepts of nature as an accessible “outside” of the human and “culture” as the expression of the “spirit” of the human are becoming ever more tightly intertwined as forms of bringing-forth. People are growing animals for organ transplants; manufacturing skin; reconstructing the genomes of all living things, as well as of the dead (such as frozen mice and Neanderthals); implanting RFIDs and cochlear devices; teleporting photons; and reconstructing their identities both surgically and in the chat rooms with their avatars. In the midst of this redistributing machine of globalizing culture, the future of which is radically unpredictable, aesthetics takes on a spectral tone, blurred at the edges of all identities. It is wave-particle, ratio-imago: step, leap, swirl.

Heidegger warns that as the world becomes “objectless”—when everything is treated merely as resource for the standing reserve to be used as stored energy—humankind faces a “precipitous fall” or a “banishment” and the danger that “it could be denied to man to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth” (QCT 28). What happens to “thing,” “object,” “text,” “person” when each becomes digitized, in which the digit as a number comes to re-place the digit as a finger? And, in the institutional space of the university, what happens within the space of learning to the episteme that has governed the university since at least 1810, with the inauguration of the University of Berlin, when it becomes haunted by the dismembered body of knowledge instantiated by the disruptive technologies of the so-called smart classroom or “online” learning? What characterizes knowledge production, transmission, and reception when it can no longer be imagined as positivistic? What happens when there is no longer a unity to the ethos of a single community of scholarship or to idea of the university itself ?

These, then, are some of the ways that the spectral, though it can never be directly seen, shows itself to one by beckoning, with a mere wave of a diaphanous hand, in one’s direction. Derrida, in one of the many versions of such a statement, writes: