Reflections on Spectral Life

A specter is both visible and invisible, both phenomenal and nonphenomenal: a trace that marks the present with its absence in advance. The spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic. It is in the element of haunting that deconstruction finds the place most hospitable to it, at the heart of the living present, in the quickest heartbeat of the philosophical. Like the work of mourning, in a sense, which produces spectrality, and like all work produces spectrality.

—Jacques Derrida, "Spectrographies"

"At the heart of the living present," the specter appears. "Visible and invisible, phenomenal and nonphenomenal," the specter signals a temporality of absence in advance. It haunts the present in advance. "The specter," says Jacques Derrida, "is not simply this visible invisible that I can see, it is someone who watches or concerns me without any possible reciprocity, and who therefore makes the law when I am blind, blind by situation."¹ Before the spectral gaze, I am blind, blinded perhaps by the law of spectral visuality. It watches me, the specter, without any possible reciprocity, someone watches me, without the possibility of reciprocity: Although I can see the specter, I do not see it as it sees me. It, the specter and the law of spectrality, is also someone, at once a "who" and a "what." A figure, being, subject, or trace of subject and a law that reveals itself to me in the form of a blind visibility, a visible invisible that I can see, and that blinds me in this act of seeing. I see the visible invisibility of the specter, who sees me without reciprocity, rendering me blind before it, before myself, before the law of spectrality. Without reciprocity, the specter opens a field of visuality with no reflection.

Among the many legacies of Jacques Derrida, the many lines of thought that remain to be thought and rethought, thought through, and extended in thought, are the reflections that Derrida left on the subject of life, spectrality, and autobiography. Separately and together, the points of life, spectrality, and autobiography form a constellation of points, a virtual universe that opens in and across his oeuvre. Each point forms in this universe a portal through which, but also in which, a world of thought opens up, a world of thought, but also a thought of the world. "What I call the gaze here, the gaze of the other, is not simply another machine for the perception of images. It is another world, another source of phenomenality, another zero degree of appearing."² The other, the look of the other that appears before me, a zero degree of appearance, forms another world, arrives from another world of phenomenality. The look of the other is world forming; it signals the appearance of the other, the world of the other, the subject of another world. It brings life, a specter of life "at the heart of the living present."³ The subject of life names not only a topic, a topos, and site of vitality, it also signals the arrival of the one who bears life, the one for whom life animates the possibility of being. In its numerous forms and iterations, the subject of life in Derrida's thought trembles on the line between life and death, being and otherness, the singularity of this being and the singularities of others, but also along the thresholds of "who" and "what." Whose life and what life. The space that opens between these two subjects of life shimmers in Derrida's universe, a pulse of light that travels through it like a lifeline.

The force of spectral visuality that drives much of Derrida's thought, the vital economies of visuality and visibility, avisuality and invisibility, specularity and spectrality, are marked not as opposing dimensions of vision, as the conflict of visuality with its negations, obfuscations, interferences, but rather as variations on the aporetic possibility of seeing formed around a subject of visuality not always visible. ("An aporia," Derrida says, "is not simply a momentary paralysis in the face of the impasse. It is a testing out of the undecidable.")⁴ Never a...