The technical relation

In a televised interview (printed in Echographies of Television, 113-7), Bernard Stiegler asks Jacques Derrida a brilliant question about some lines Derrida said in the above film:

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.)