You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
If he loves justice at least, the “scholar” of the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back their speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. (Derrida, Specters 176)
Faced with the haunting prospect of learning to live in the tortuous temporality between the no longer and the not yet, of learning to live with the ethical and political injunction of doing justice to the ghost, I find myself strangely drawn to the spectre of incorporation inhabiting this text. What does it mean to give the dead back their speech, to give it body in oneself, to embody the other in oneself? What does this necromantic magic of incorporation entail?
I suspect that the scholar of the future has been attributed a distinctly actorly disposition towards communing with the dead, performing an ambassadorial role in making present their past thoughts and actions, in represent-