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

The spectral, like a shadow that awaits one, is constitutive without belonging to its object. The university does not quite know what to do with this thinking of the other, for this is not, and can of course never become, a form of quantifiable, logical, or verifiable “knowledge.” It cannot be translated into technology transfer or commercialization, and it is therefore always exposed to being cut, but a genealogy can nonetheless be followed.

The emergence of the technical and material forms of “modern spectrality,” which does not in any sense exhaust the meaning of hauntology, becomes more clearly visible throughout the nineteenth century with its experience of literature, the death of the Spirit of the Absolute, railroads, telegraphy, combustion engines, the development of both the social and the natural sciences, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. Then, in addition to those genres, it emerges from the implications for human beings of the technologies of reproduction such as photography, film, digitization, cloning, genetic engineering, and the development of artificial intelligence. Why might this unsettling emergence of the spectral within the university, that bastion of rationality, be occurring now? More than the predictable apocalypticism at the turn of the millennium—though this plays an important role, especially as suicide bombings and natural disasters are transmitted across the global media screen in constant feedback loops—this emergence of the ghost-in-theory is also symptomatic of both the general experience of early twenty-first-century life and of a fundamental shift in the ways in which the university understands itself within a networked society.

Transnational modernization continues to change the face of the university and of its host societies. There is the continuing incursion of industrial and electronic modernization on its boundary areas: less “developed” cultures, new regions of the earth such as beneath the ice