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

With a kind of odd festivity, a mixture of anticipation and anxiety, those late nineteenth-century men and women wait while they walk randomly about in the dirt with their heavy coats and hats, their solid shoes, their baskets and valises, the occasional umbrella tucked alongside the top edge. A mustachioed conductor runs, with a little skip as he leans very slightly backwards, slowly alongside the train to make sure he is at the front when it comes to a stop. As the train slows, the passengers mill closer. The doors swing open with the moving shapes of the scene reflected, in a very blurred manner, on their polished surfaces. Some passengers board while others climb down the metal steps onto the sand. An occasional glance, a bit curious or a bit irritated—they do not yet know how to be frightened of the small hand-turned machine—is thrown in the viewer’s direction, as if they are trying to see ahead into the future and perhaps catch a glance of the viewer looking back at them. They can, perhaps, feel the viewer watching them from far away on that ordinary day so full of the sun. Where are they going? It is almost as if Paris, Frankfurt, or Istanbul is just around the corner, just out of sight. No one knows where they ended their journey that day, where they slept when night fell. It is as if they simply are recorded on film, in that moment, and then they vanished.

And yet, here they are again. They keep returning, taking the same positions and going through the same motions, time and time again. What is it that they are rehearsing; what are they practicing for, going so assiduously through their motions over and over again? The conductor shifts his balance ever so slightly and tries to keep up with the train. How is it that these apparitions come to one repeating their appearing? Where is it that one is being projected? A rectangular screen, quite finite and framed, opens up to the lines of the infinite. The screen, like the canvas of painting and the page of writing, appears to open up a flat surface to the mysteries of depth. All of these are twisted topologies. The cinématographe turns—all those years ago, embedded within a network of an already historically complex set of technologies—and another writing begins to emerge at a speed that exceeds the perceptual apparatus.

The frames per second whirr faster and faster until they break through the digital barrier and one enters the numeroscape of the great