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

binaries: the zero, the one. Temporality becomes folded back over itself in a new manner, now electrifying and volatile. This is a stored and repeatable motion, as if the evanescence of the presence of the present could be shuttered into a black box by the turning of a crank, stored on a surface, and then projected back out onto the pearlescent screen of the world. What is being screened, and what, thereby, is being kept from view? One is in the screening room, darkened except for the radiation flowing back to one from the thin screen hung in front of one. One is the screening room, a room full of screens, projectors and projections, immemorial histories, plush chairs, other bodies, the scent of food, and an illuminated darkness. This is the scene, highlighted by the approaching train, that appears in the famous no. 653 of the Lumière catalogue: L’Arrivée d’un train en Gare de la Ciotat.

As one addresses one’s exposure to spectrality, one will have to encounter this entire constellation of figures as a kind of doodle, or an arabesque, in which philosophy turns itself inside out, cross-hatches everything, and opens upon an infinite hallway of doors where its others come and go intractably, without being trackable by any global positioning system. And though I will by no means limit the hallways, mirrors, trapdoors, stairways, attics, basements, gardens, lures, woods, streets, and secret passageways to those that have been delineated and deconstructed by Jacques Derrida, the tangled line of his telephonic voice from the other side, always full of static that resounds with his insistence on hauntology, will serve as a kind of figural leitmotif that will give a series of clues for reading. This, needless to say, is not a map of an already established territory. Such reconnoitering and tracking will require that I move along the boundaries of philosophy and often step beyond the magic circle to see what is on the other side of the looking glass.

For Derrida, as Martin Hägglund observes, has always already moved beyond the static world of the given. Time and space, for example, are not