Ghost Dance: Derrida, Stiegler, and Film as Phantomachia

Against Bernard Stiegler’s ontological claim, following Roland Barthes, that in photography the photographic referent “was there,” present at one time in the past, Jacques Derrida proposes in Ken McMullen’s film Ghost Dance that the photographic referent is self-divided and “never had the form of presence,” making film “a phantomachia.”