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

alongside “transcendental ideality” (72). This reading would like to be “simultaneous,” but the gathering together of the empirical and the transcendental requires the spacing of writing, the inscription of time on a flat surface. There is always deferral, never instantaneity.

“Hauntology,” as Derrida has renamed ontology, gathers threads from different genres and domains that operate after the collapse of the hope of a totalizing systematicity—whether that is named science, politics, philosophy, or poetry—while recognizing that regional systematicities, islands of order, are always at work. Spectrality emerges as a haunting residue, as the debris of philosophy as either metaphysics or as “merely” linguistic analysis, as the flotsam and jetsam of areas of cultural activity separated out from one another as part of the modernist project, or as the ephemera of writing. It is a mood, a tenor, a sign without a determined referent, because one of its effects is to dissolve traditional referentiality (which, as if by magic, continues to operate with great and very concrete effects). It indicates multiplicities of voices and bodies and a dissembling of voices and bodies, of structure in general; it responds to the contemporary demand to ask another question, to attempt to think otherwise.

People are all confronted by this shimmering of the veils of language, a trembling of object- and subject-constancy, and a system of movement detectors and surveillance that comes from all directions at once, from satellites and from invisible sensors. The network constantly surveys itself. The perceptual-aesthetic field of being human, itself on the edge of a shift into unpredictable ratios, has dramatically changed, and humankind is attempting to articulate the dissolution of the object, the subject, the subject-object relation, the space of knowledge, the body, media, and the work of art. Individuals are also called to compose a reconstitution of each of these in a new network made of a fabric that is, in part, a veil, a shroud, a prayer flag. The phenomenon is becoming, in this magic grotto, the apparition of phenomenality. It is the (dis)appearing of appearance.

It is impossible to accurately date such a “becoming”—what scale would one use?—but Kant’s work in the eighteenth century is a marker of the transfiguration. This is not primarily because of the Critique of