My interpretation of Aristotle concludes by forcing the apparition of a "ghost" into his ideal conception of audience; I say forcing because Aristotle would likely be uncomfortable with the supernatural, after all one of Socrates' most critical comments in the Gorgias is that rhetoric "seems to be something supernatural in scope" (456a).. Nonetheless, we can discern the presence of a philosophically-friendly spirit in his epistemology, a spirit which testifies to his unease with merely human rhetoric. Aristotle dismisses delivery to (corpo)real audiences as an unfortunate necessity and in doing so trivializes rhetoric's ability to theorize the interrelationships of delivery and ethics. He idealizes a non-corporeal single auditor- True Justice- as our ideal audience because her judgments are stable, predictable (so long as we use the right hermeneutics), and universal or final (predicting what will follow: we might say that True judgments are "out of time").
Aristotle's non-corporeal judge, his ghost, is a quite friendly one—I would like to contrast this strictly positive conception of a spectral judge with Derrida's conceptions on spectrality (as developed in Archive Fever and Specters of Marx). Derrida's specters are not entirely hostile—they threaten only the stability and security of our epistemological and hermeneutic systems (of course, Aristotle wouldn't modify this with an "only"). In return for this threat, Derrida's conceptions provide rhetoric with a theoretical foundation (shaky at best, inherently risky) for incorporating considerations of the complexities of localized and unassured ethics in rhetoric. His conceptions on specters and archives provide this foundation precisely by challenging the pure, philosophic conception of foundations at the heart of Platonic / Aristotelian philosophy (and their corresponding treatments of rhetoric).
As his works often do, Derrida's (1998) Archive Fever advances from a seemingly simple hypothesis: "order is no longer assured" (p. 5). Deconstruction destabilizes order, or "the institution of limits declared to be insurmountable" (p. 4), and thus challenges many of the essential foundations of archival research and maintenance (Derrida stresses that both the verb (to archive) and the noun (the archive) are equally destabilized by deconstruction). Especially problematic for the archivist deconstructions challenge to the specific guidelines and categorizations essential to regulation of the field: for instance, distinctions between public and private or biography and autobiography (p. 4-5). These challenges stem from deconstruction's challenge to hermeneutic and epistemological foundations, to the systems that control "putting into order" (p. 4-5). The archives ontological categories are not all that are at stake—the very act of categorizing itself is called into question. The implications can be extended beyond archives: deconstruction's impact potentially stretches to any field concerned with "ordering" (how much of rhetoric, especially invention and arrangement, is concerned with classification and order, what Derrida refers to as "consignation"?)