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

point again to the closeness of the mere, the little cleft in meaning where the mysteriousness of people’s most idle chatting becomes the secret gift of language.

But for humankind, this gift of language is inseparably entwined with the history of modernity, a history of violent modernisms that disrupt and uproot. This violence is an appearing of something, an event or an epoch, that calls people to attentive action, to a thought that can do almost nothing to fundamentally change the blast wind of the trauma but that must nevertheless address the apparitions. “Our official cultures of memory,” Gene Ray notes,

Hiroshima awaits in all the modes of temporality. The object—a human body, for example—has been destroyed by the violent system of the Gestell (the set-up) of modernity. How does the Gestell cast a shadow? But, for the moment, let me simply assert that art, and philosophy in some of its forms, speaks from, toward, and back at this rupture.

One consequence of this shift that has occurred through the willowy evanescence of language, the instantiation of mechanical and digital technologies of reproduction, and the trauma that touches and tears every perception, is a troubling sense that history itself as the primary means of bringing the past into the present is becoming a wraith. What art can possibly remain, asks W. G. Sebald in his novel-memoirs, when one can no longer, or can just barely, read the pathways of the narrative one used to think of as history? How can history be produced, as a narrative-image, if everything is in an advanced state of decay, if entropy and forgetfulness rule the powers of memory? Jorge Luis Borges has