[Reader-list] The Future Belongs to Ghosts

Inder Salim indersalim at gmail.com
Wed Sep 1 10:37:48 IST 2010


http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090323201248AAI2qXE

What does Derrida mean when he says "The future belongs to ghosts"?
Here's an excerpt of him talking about what it means, but its a little
over my head. Can someone tell me what he's saying in plain English
and what his main point is? You don't have to read this thing if you
already know. I just put it there for reference.


"In the film, in which you play yourself, you say to Pascale Ogier,
your partner: "To be haunted by a ghost is to remember what one has
never lived in the present... Modern technology, contrary to
appearances, increases tenfold the power of ghosts." Might you
elaborate on this statement: "the future belongs to ghosts?"

Derrida replies with the following:

...Phantom preserves the same reference to phainesthai, to appearing
for vision, to the brightness of day, to phenomenality. And what
happens with spectrality, with phantomality... is that something
becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not
visible in flesh and blood. It is a night-vision [translation
modified]. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility
brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates a night
light. At this moment, in this room, night is falling over us. Even if
it weren't falling, we are already in night, as soon as we are
captured by optical instruments which don't even need the light of
day. We are already specters of the "televised." In the nocturnal
space in which this image of us, this picture we are in the process of
having "taken," is described, it is already night. Furthermore,
because we know that, once it has been taken, captured, this image
will be reproducible in our absence, because we know this already, we
are already haunted by this future, which brings our death. Our
disappearance is already here. We are already transfixed by a
disappearance or disapparition which promises and conceals in advance
another magic "apparition," a ghostly "re-apparition," which is in
truth properly miraculous, something to see, as admirable as it is
incredible, credible or believable, only by the the grace of an act of
faith [translation modified]. Faith which is summoned by technics
itself, by our relation of essential incompetence to technical
operation. (For even if we know how something works, our knowledge is
incommensurable with the immediate perception that attunes us to
technical efficacy, to the fact that "it works:" we see that "it
works," but even if we know this, we don't see how "it works;" seeing
and knowing are incommensurable here.)"


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