Thursday, July 22, 2010

"I ain't afraid of no ghosts": My reading of Derrida's _Specters of Marx_



Why is Derrida’s then-highly-anticipated official comment on something called “Marxism” and his statement about the future of politics in the age of global capitalism haunted by the specter of the fictional character Hamlet? That Marx himself was an avid admirer of Shakespeare is no secret and that Derrida’s quasi-philosophical explorations often draw from various works of literary fiction is something we have come to expect. I think, though, that not only does a cross-reading Shakespeare’s text allow Derrida an entry point for introducing/expanding a number of concepts that will be fleshed out in his meditation of Marx, but—more than this—I think the simultaneous discussion of the themes of non-temporal time, “hauntology,” undeciability, and justice in the differing texts allows Derrida to make an implicit connection between literature and “the political”; between “deconstruction” and politics. While I would argue that already in the “early” Derrida (I think here of _Of Grammatology_) language and literature are always inherently political, the stakes become much higher when Derrida is confronted with answering the specific questions of his relationship to the Marxian tradition and the political import of his methods of reading as it relates to the world-wide political turmoil of our age. Let’s see how Derrida approaches these questions.

The text of _Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International_ grew out of Derrida’s lectures a 1993 conference “Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective” held at University of California, Riverside. Scholars and critics across national and disciplinary boundaries gathered to approach the question—essentially—“What do we do with Marx now?” That is, in the aftermath of the crumbling of the Berlin wall in 1989, the economic incorporation of Europe a few years later, the ongoing economic growth of Eastern markets, and Francis Fukuyama’s prediction the eventual global triumph of political and economic liberalism and the “end of history” (_The End of History and the Last Man_,1992), scholars who did ,and did not, claim to be followers of Marx found themselves pressed with answering how relevant Marx’s theories remained in this economic/political landscape so different from Marx’s. The question is rephrased in Derrida’s opening address at the conference, “what have we inherited from Marx?” The term “inheritance” is a loaded one for Derrida, along with words and phrases like “the gift,” “the proper name,” “friendship,” and “hospitality,” themes that Derrida continues to revisit and complicate in this period of his writings. For my purposes here, I will not expand at length on Derrida’s conception of what it means to inherit (other than to note, for Derrida it will mean the call to a certain “responsibility”)—but rather I’d like to touch on a few relevant themes that run through the lectures, before gesturing towards some of the most vehement responses of critics to this text.




“The time is out of joint,” declares the melancholy prince in I.v of _Hamlet_, after swearing his commitment to “remember” at the foot of his father’s ghost. Derrida uses the motif of a disjointed temporality to introduce both the relationship of us “heirs” of Marx as well the necessary condition for justice—one will notice that these two themes, the possibilities of “Marx” and justice today, are never separate in Derrida’s reading. Hamlet laments, and curses, the fact that his father’s ghost has called him to put time back into joint by avenging his death. This is because “revenge” would call for Hamlet to inherit, in one way or another, the crimes of the past, and to bring that cycle of crime and punishment into the future. The weight of the call for Hamlet’s revenge, while pondered in the present diegetic world of the play, rests firmly in the relationship between the past event and the murder to be committed in the future; the decision that Hamlet wrestles with throughout is the gap between these two temporal sites. He is called to fix the history that came before, and this, claims Derrdia, is the position of the heirs of Marx. But readers of revenge tragedy will recognize the strange temporality of the act of vengeance—something I think Derrida would liken to a “general” rather than “restricted” economy—which per force is not entirely compensatory. Rather than putting “time back in joint,” the act of revenge in such dramas can never really compensate for the crime; the dead are not made present again, and a whole new cycle of crimes and punishments is engendered. It is, in fact, two articulations of absence, that of what has passed and that of what is to come. Hamlet curses because in this case justice is born of vengeance, and Derrida interrogates such a notion calling for instead an “incalculable” justice that exceeds the law of retribution, an understanding of justice that goes beyond “faults” of the past. As developed elsewhere (Cf. _Politics of Friendship_, _The Gift of Death_) we see Derrida’s notion of a type of “gift without restitution”: “ Beyond right, and still more beyond jurididicism, beyond morality, and still more beyond moralism” (27). One of Derrida’ s major threads here is that we need to re-evaluate our conception of justice as an articulation of presence, because as we have seen, justice is intimately tied to the past and the future: “Otherwise justice risks being reduced once again to juridical-moral rules, norms or representations, within an inevitably totalizing horizon” (28).

In order to understand this very strange temporality, we will need to (at least attempt) to understand what Derrida calls “hauntology” or “spectral logic.” “Hauntology” emphasizes what is NOT present, like the ghost of King Hamlet and Marx for us today. A ghost is never (really,that is corporally) present and it never dies, and therefore it is BEYOND essence as we are accustomed to imagine it. It is both singular in its appearance and multiple in its repeating (through the visitation) since it is the trace of something once present. These are not unfamiliar ideas once we have made acquaintance with Derrida’s lifelong interrogation of a “metaphysics of presence.” This attention to what is not present allows for an interaction with the completely other or total alterity. In short, Derrida wants to replace “ontology” (Being as presence) with “hauntology,” an experience that is open to what is not present, rather what was and what perhaps WILL be. In a characteristic rhetorical flourish, Derrida writes, “ No diffĂ©rance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without the here-and-now” (30). This one sentence would take pages to unpack, but I take it to mean that both the deconstructive way of reading and this particular formulation of justice (that we will hear more about below) calls for an opening to the altogether other that is not merely a moment of delay, but an instant promise of singularity, and what makes this promise truly of the “here-and-now” is that is not made based on adherence to reified a priori laws.



And this brings us to a third major thread woven throughout the text: the relationship between undecidability and justice. What draws Hamlet, our inheritance from Marx, and the practice of deconstructive reading together is the question of NOT knowing, through which the possible is related to the impossible through the injunction of “perhaps.” This is the type of phrase, emphasizing “undecidability,” that I think really puts pressure on the possibility for change—if we are not reading careful enough. Derrida writes, “Needless to spell it out here, therefore, still lest to insist on it too heavily: it [both “deconstruction” and Derrida’s proposed notion of justice] is not a taste for the void or for destruction…On the contrary, it is a matter therefore of an ethical and political imperative, an appeal as unconditional as the appeal from which it is not separated” ( 30).

One way to approach this ambiguity in Derrida’s logic is to think about this moment of undeciabliity similar to other “failures” of reason/knowledge that point to something beyond that we see in other philosophical paradigms. I am thinking here, foremost, about the Platonic dialectic, which per force begins with what is “unknown” (better, “not yet known” or not yet made intelligible by Socrates)and proceeds through the process of attaining new knowledge. Speaking of dialectics, there is Hegel, in which the moment of mis-recognition in the coming to be of self-consciousness yields true recognition of oneself and one’s relation to external reality in the _Phenomenology_. The experience of the Kantian sublime is yet another experience in which reason fails, but only to point beyond its own limits to bring the subject a greater encounter of subjectivity. Finally, I think of Freud, for whom it is not understanding of the conscious, rational mind that leads to the uncovering of man’s motivations, but rather that which resists one’s reasonable faculties, the unconscious. My point here is simply that the concept that the failure of certainty or knowledge can lead to something greater, or the idea that through a relationship to what one can’t know one can move beyond to new knowledge, does not start with Derrida.



The text has many very intelligent things to say, that for the sake of brevity, I won’t address here. For instance, Derrida’s close reading of and response to Fukuyama(Chapter 2, which we should note also, this becomes an implicit critique of Kojeve) is well-worth the read and his attentive explication of Marx’s _Capital_ in Chapter 5 (especially on Marx’s “dancing tables” ) is truly a pleasure. Rather, I’d like to take a glance at what become the two related and most controversial elements of these lectures, and some of the criticisms leveled against them, before attempting to see if we still can find any merit in what Derrida is proposing here. These two ideas, which go hand-in-hand, are Derrida’s call for a “mesianism without a messiah” and his proposal of the “New International.”
What exactly is a “messianism without a messiah”? It sure sounds like maintaining a state of constant waiting for something that won’t come, because it doesn’t exist. Essentially, a state of interminable stasis. But, before we judge, let’s listen to Derrida speak:

Now, if there is a spirit of Marxism which I will never be ready to renounce, it is not only the critical idea or the questioning stance…It is even more a certain emancatory an messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise that one can try to liberate from any dogmatics and even from any metaphysico-religious determination, from any messianism…To break with the “party form” or with some form of the State or International does not mean to give up every form of practical or effective organization. It is exactly the contrary that matters to us here…The critique belongs to the movement of an experience open to the absolute future of what is coming, that is to say , a necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other and for the event. (89-90)

I take this to mean that “messianism without a messiah” amounts to a constant, vigilant, and radical critique of a way of thinking that is never static because it is always in the process of its own questioning, and never merely a replication of established dogma. A page or so later Derrida calls deconstruction a “radicalization” of a “certain spirit of Marxism” (92), because he is attempting here to radicalize, or free from reified concepts a system of thought that now appears without a future. That is, if we are haunted by the “ghost” of Marx, we are not only inheriting the “crimes of the past” (the failures of Marxist regimes, the mis-reads of Marx throughout the ages), like young Hamlet, BUT we also have a RESPONSIBILTY to the future—a future we cannot make a concrete prediction for when/if it will come, in the same way Hamlet and Horatio cannot be sure the Ghost will return the following night. This too, I think, of what we are to do with our concepts of “democracy” and the “State.” We need to re-configure our conceptions of time and space in order to allow for a “democracy-to-come” and the potential for true justice : “This messianic hesitation does not paralyze any decision, any affirmation, any responsibility. On the contrary, it grants them their elementary condition. It is their very experience” (169). This is facing indeterminacy--and the responsibility--to keep thinking and keep striving for something beyond. Recall that Hamlet’s preservation of indeterminacy is what creates the actual space of the drama.

As anyone can surely imagine, these “political” ideas did not sit well with many, especially many Marxists, who viewed Derrida as proposing something closer to nihilism or his own quasi-transcendentalism, rather than a “radicalization of Marxism.” As a result, Michael Sprinkler pulled together various responses that had appeared in the aftermath of the “Whither Marxism” conference and collected them in one text, under the heading _Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’_. In Terry Eagleton’s essay, “Marxism Without Marx,” he essentially asks, “where was Derrida when we needed him” and claims that whether it is through Derrida himself, or any of his “followers”, deconstruction is nothing like Marxism. He claims that Derrida exhibits a “postmodern” desire to never take a stand, rather than a true and effective strategy that could ever apply to reality or history. In, “Reconciling Derrida,” Aijaz Ahmed dubs the politics of deconstruction an “anti-politics” and takes issue with the fact that Derrida’s text is not an analysis, but “performance” (90). Ahmed also claims that Derrida ignores the issue of “class” in his conception of the New International. I think, perhaps, looking briefly at how Derrida responds to these accusations in his essay (the final of the collection) will help shed some light on what we ultimately make of the import of these ideas. [Note that the most of the other essays in this collection are worth a read because of the rich conversation they continue, and Jameson’s contribution—for my money—is very intelligent and does the most “justice” (now such a loaded term!) to Derrida’s text]

Derrida admits, “ In _Specters of Marx_, the presentation of the hypothesis does not present itself, in the proper sense”, but , like Marx’s _Manifesto_ it calls for interpretation and responsibility: “ Without presenting itself in the present, it nevertheless takes a position…that is, the ‘responsibility’ thus assumed- as a transformation” (219). And this responsibility is to commit oneself to PERFORM. This is why we can say that, yes, Ahmed is correct, _Specters_ is a performative text. But his is NOT a negative thing for Derrida; quite the opposite, as this welding together of form and content is the space for change opened up by thinking. This allows then for the “paradoxical transposition” of the famous 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, so that this performative interpretation is “an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets” (219). Performativity questions the notion of Being as presence. Against charges that Derrida proposes something anti-political or ventures to ignore issues of class struggle, he responds that after “putting the question into question” (meaning questioning ontology as a measure of self-presence) that “what should come after this deconstruction of Marxist ‘ontology’, in my view, is exactly the opposite of a depoliticization…rather the point, as I see it, of radically re-examining the premises” of any theory of “Marxist” principles, democracy, and the State (221). Derrida does not recommend that one never “takes a stand” on issues of class inequality, but rather that we be ever attentive to what words like “class” and “inequality” mean, and how these meanings shift in every context: “ All this depends, at every instant, on what is urgent in, first and foremost, singular situations and their structural implications. For such assessment, there is, by definition, no pre-existing criterion or absolute calculability” (239). If one wants to champion Marx’s cry for constant attention to “material reality” versus some form of abstract idealism, then what else is Derrida’s suggestion for such an vigilant attention to the real world? This is why messianicity cannot be construed as some abstract, metaphysical Utopia, but “ it refers, in every here and now, to the coming of an eminately real, concrete event” ( 248).

Let’s recall Marx on “estranged labor” in _Capital_. The problem, he says, is that each individual laborer gets grouped into some collective idea of “labor power,” and in the process the particular struggles and material life of each and every man becomes congealed into a giant mass of some ABSTRACT idea of “labor.” How do we change this? By throwing into question the concept of “labor” as such. By re-examining each singular instance as something unique that has ties to a larger overall structure, the structure from which we have accepted our concepts, and our abstract concept of “labor”. This is exactly what Derrida is attempting to do. The idea is not to ignore, eliminate, or sweep under the rug issues of class, but to resist substituting REAL issues under the concept “class.” When “labor” became an abstract concept used to define a certain group of people, something got left out. This too is what has happened to our concepts of “class,” “the State,” and—of course—“Marx.”

Why are we still haunted by Marx? Why do we need to reassess his ideas now? We will recall that the reason so many Marxisms (plural), so many differing opinions on how to read Marx in political, philosophical, and economic terms, exists is because Marx’s prediction for a future stateless, classless society did not have a codified, step-by-step plan. This is why we need to consider a “New” International. When we remained tied to reified ways of thinking that do not adapt to new contexts, temporal shifts, changes in landscapes of all kinds, that is when we are static in a state where true decisions cannot be made. We are like the protagonists of revenge tragedies, stuck in an endless cycle of retribution for a problem that is never solved. Derrida, too, refuses to give us a concrete plan. But we have only to look at texts like _Ghostly Demarcations_ to find evidence that we are talking about these ideas, evaluating and re-evaluating them. And in these conversations about that which we disagree or don’t yet understand, exists the possibility to change the way we think. And by extension, the way we live.

“Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.”