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

posed this question in the key of comedic invention; Sebald asks it in a far more tragic key, where, in his writings, there is image, there is text, and there are the relationships that have been, and must continue to be, constructed by a reading that is, in the extreme, provisional. How, if at all, can one learn to read spectrally?

Art, then, remains, accompanied by a form of thinking that I am calling “phantomenology,” in which light, appearance, the phantom, and the logos are all intertwined with one another. Against all odds, and at least so far, these forms of exposure endure. Nonetheless, the manner in which art remains is merely as a leftover, a scrap. It is the residue of something whose name one cannot quite name. That, however, might be enough, just enough. As the whirligig of technocapitalism produces, and is produced by, the objectlessness and subjectlessness that are becoming more deeply imbricated in the vortices of the falls and eddies of globalizing powers, ghosts appear in front of one, behind one, off to the sides, and above, below, and within one.

Ontology is inseparable from the coming-to-appearance of a phenomena as an apparition, as a phantom. Meaningful perception, of course, continues unabated—the world continues to give itself as articulable experience—and

I will have occasion to question this “lived body” and a certain “intentionality of consciousness,” but nonetheless, provisionally and for the most part, this thing called living involves a perceptive apparatus that always entails a mobility of sensibility and meaning. This is a