Jacques Derrida: Specters of Marx, Chap. 1
Terri Senft's reading of "Injunctions of Marx," the first chapter of Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx
(Note: Derrida's book was hotly debated when it came out. Needless to say, mine is one of many possible readings. Please feel free to use this, attributed, and check out what other people have written on this book.)
"Maintaining now the specters of Marx." Thus begins Derrida's opening sentence of his long-awaited book on the future of Marxism . What and odd beginning, what awkward construction, even for a translation. "Maintaining now, the specters of Marx. " What is Derrida saying? Is it a statement--he, Derrida, is maintaining the specters of Marx? Is it an injunction--You should maintain the specters of Marx? Is it an observation--We are already maintaining the specters of Marx, whether we know it or not?
I wait breathlessly for Derrida, postructuralism's discontented Crown Prince, to answer the question, "whither Marxism?" Always one for suspense, however, Derrida must set the stage by printing on the first page of his book a scene from Shakespeare's Hamlet-- the scene where Hamlet and the ghost of his father swear together that they will set "right" the current political climate, which, at the time the play begins, is "out of joint." I get the set-up quickly enough: Shakespeare's Hamlet, delaying both the play and his decision to kill Claudius participates in the famous "play within a play" . Derrida, in this book at least, plays deconstruction's own Hamlet, and sees himself as charged to take on the challenge of the materialists who have complained that deconstruction fails to address the "real world". To this end, Derrida writes a book whose question is "whither Marxism?" Presumably, he does this in order to set right an ivory tower academic climate which is currently "out of joint" But first, Derrida, like Hamlet, keeps us busy with a series of sub-plots, essays within essays, all the while promising to answer the question "whither Marxism" by way of a discussion of Shakespeare's influence on Marx., an analysis of Paul Valery's work on the "political economy of spirit", an interrogation of Maurice Blanchot's essay on "Marx's Three Voices", and a critique of Heidegger's discussion of "the gift". Nevertheless, no matter where he travels in this book of essays within essays, Derrida will always circle back to the same problem: that of the thinker who is haunted by specters.
Derrida, like Shakespeare's Hamlet, and also like Marx who began The Communist Manifesto , starts off his book by "seeing ghosts." But where Hamlet's ghost is merely his father, the King, and Marx's ghost is the "specter" that he called Communism, Derrida claims that to think of Marxism today is to see multiple specters. Why, Derrida asks, is this the case? He answers his own question in two ways: first , Marx, who was interested in displacing the subjectivity of the bourgeois individual agent with a new kind of subjectivity, often spoke of the crowd, the horde, the masses, the community without a leader, rather than the individual agent. The many, rather than the one. In addition, Marx himself , properly speaking, is no longer a living subject. Thus Marx become a "less than one"--a dead man who haunts current thought , analogous to the ghost of Hamlet's father, known to the living world like most ghosts--through the force of their injunctions. In the case of Marx, the injunction is clear enough: Make Change, Now.
Thus Marx, both more and less than the "one" of bourgeois subjectivity, takes the form of a series of specters for Derrida. When he speaks of the "specters" of Marx, Derrida always stresses the plural, the three-fold, the trinity: First, there is Marx as The Father : The father of communism; the structuralism Law of The Father whose figure haunts poststructuralism; the oedipal father who hands down the Law to Derrida, just as Hamlet's father does to Hamlet. Then there is Marx the Scholar, the Marx who wrote The Communist Manifesto and warned that "there is a specter haunting Europe--it is the specter of Communism." The scholar, according to Derrida, is the one who is designated to speak to and for the specter, as Horatio was commanded to do in Hamlet. Finally, there is Marx the Son, the ordinary man writing the Manifesto, the man who feels he has to act (as does Derrida, to some extent) because he perceives time as out of joint, and is being commanded to set it right.
Implicit in Shakespeare's Hamlet is a condemnation of those players who cannot see what is currently wrong in the present time. Implicit in Derrida's book on Marx is a critique of those who fancy themselves "beyond" communism's historical moment. In the spirit of poststructuralism, however, Derrida is less interested in the question "why do people believe they are beyond communism?" than the question, "from whence comes this notion?" To answer his own inquiry, Derrida draws a genealogical line between Shakespeare, Marx, and Paul Valery, arguing that Valery brilliantly understands the modern Hamlet is an "intellectual Hamlet", one who is listening not to the voice of one ghost King, but many ghosts of disembodied enlightenment intellectual traditions:
If he seizes a skull, it is an illustrious skull-"Whose was it?"--This one was Leonardo...And this other skull is that of Leibniz who dreamed of universal peace. And this one Kant qui genuit Hegel, qui genuit, Marx, qui genuit...Hamlet does not know what to do with all these skulls. But if he abandons them...will he cease to be himself?"
(Valery, "la politique de l'esprit" )
Derrida, who as a modern man must also play the intellectual Hamlet, the one who in this book silently fills in the blank space of Valery's ellipses ("Marx qui genuit...) with the name "Derrida", both agrees and disagrees with Valery. Where Derrida differs from Valery, is in his definition of the difference between the relatively harmless nature of a "ghost" and the terror of a "specter." The specter, according to Derrida, is a type of threatening "word made flesh", and as such, it is always three-fold: the specter (as opposed to say, the spirit) involves mourning, language, and work.
This bears analysis. A specter, according to Derrida, must be mourned, and for mourning to occur, "the body must be dead." Things may have been rotten in the state of Denmark even prior to the death of Hamlets father, but the appearance of the specter of the deceased King, and the injunction he brings to set things right, begins the play we call Hamlet. This is a particularly Hegelian reading of history, in which the King must be dead in order to create the narrative of the kingdom. Thus the certainty of the death of both Marx and the death of certain types of communism may now usher in the "birth" of the specters of Marx.
Next, the specter, which both can and cannot speak, demands a medium through which to make its claims known, and this medium must speak the language of the King, the father, the academy. The specter will address itself to he who has the language of power. This is the place of the scholar, according to Derrida. Horatio is enlisted to speak to Hamlet's father's ghost. Marx was enlisted to speak for the specter of Communism. Derrida is enlisted to speak for Marx, and so it goes.
Finally, and probably most importantly from a Marxist perspective, the specter for Derrida involves a notion of work, but a particularly mental type of work. This is the spiritual (or even, religious) work involved in recognizing that the future is NOW--or as Hamlet would have it, that time is out of joint. The work involved in this realization leads one naturally to the desire to "set time right", and invokes the connection between time, work, and justice.
Today, for Derrida, time is out of joint, it is unhinged, it is pregnant and waiting to birth...something. Today is the time when justice should be done, when intellectual work should recognize that the past lives within the present. And ironically, today is when Marxism lives, in spite of the television news, because the very stripping of the trappings of communism worldwide have cleared the way for us to now hear the original injunctions of Marx:
When the dogma machine and the "Marxist" ideological apparatuses (states, parties, cells, unions and other places) are in the process of disappearing, we no longer have any excuse, only alibis, for turning away from this responsibility. There will be no future without this. Not without Marx, no future without Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx: in any case of a certain Marx, of his genius, of at least one of his spirits...
The work of the academy, then, is to do justice to the specters of Marx., and, Derrida implies, deconstruction is uniquely qualified to mete out this justice. Why is this? Derrida's first argument is historical--he argues that deconstruction began in a time that birthed itself through death: the claim of the death of philosophy. He claims that the current intellectual cry "we are experiencing the death of Marxism" happened not with the fall of the Berlin wall in the 1990s, but ironically in the 1950's when a totalitarian vision of "communism" was at its height. As he puts it "Many young people today probably no longer sufficiently realize it: the eschatological themes of the "end of history" of the "end of Marxism" of the "end of philosophy" of the "last man" and so forth were, in the 50's, that is forty years ago, our daily bread... Therefore, the question, 'whither Marxism?' resonates around us like a deja vu of sorts..."
The historical paradox of making ones living off declaring the "death of history" , all the while watching totalitarian regimes roll tanks into Europe under the sign of "communism" is one that Derrida argues is crucial to understanding the time and place in which deconstruction first developed and later flourished. This is also why Derrida repeatedly claims that media culture of the 1990s is "deliberately late to the end of history." The end of history, for deconstruction at least, happened some time ago.
How can one be late to the end of history? He asks, and suggests that perhaps what we are really talking when we say "the end of history" or the "end of Marxism" is really in fact, the end of a certain CONCEPT of history, the modernist concept that would render history disembodied, mechanized, and free of agency--that is, a spirit, rather than a specter. These are the people, Derrida writes, who now puff out their chests and speak of capitalism, liberalism and the virtues of parliamentary democracy, terms which Derrida argues are firmly located in an imaginary conception of an ideal disembodied PAST, rather than a practicing present.
The issue for Derrida is how to make a present, living embodied practice from the injunctions of the specters of Marx. For a blueprint of sorts, Derrida turns to Blanchot 's essay, "Marx's Three Voices". In this essay, Blanchot points out that there are at least three commands coming from Marx: to DO (and this echoes Hamlet's dilemma in his "to be or not to be" speech); to DECIDE (for every form of knowledge requires choices; we will believe this story, reject that story), and finally (and paradoxically) to MAINTAIN--to hold together those terms in Marx 's thought that are most disparate-- for instance, the injunction to act in the now, even though "time is out of joint"; the commandment to keep the specter of communism in sight, just as it fades from view (or has not yet arrived); the hope that perhaps it is possible to put ones belief in a system of justice that would lie outside of law, or perhaps even history itself. "Maintaining the specters of Marx." This is the first sentence of Derrida's essay, and the contradictions of the phrase "maintain the specters" is made manifest by the very terms of "subjectivity" articulated by The Manifesto, and later espoused as the subjectivity of the New International:
The alliance of rejoining without conjoined mate, without organization, without party, without nation, without State, without property (the "communism" that we will later nickname the new International.
The New International requires subjectivity without those trappings we have historically believed create subjectivity. It promises an identity free of nation, state, race, organization and property. The economy described in this passage is not one of exchange, nor is it value free, but it is rather, that of the gift. We make a gift of ourselves, we turn ourselves over. As Marcel Mauss and others have pointed out, where a market economy may delude itself in believing itself "value-free", a gift society (or an inheritance society, if you like) is always dealing in issues of community, obligation, justice, and, of course, specters. In this way, Derrida moves his analysis from "the future of communism" to "the communism of the future." Derrida sees the project of deconstruction an injunctive and participating in a gift economy of sorts. Deconstruction suggests that it is precisely when times are most unjust that justice may be done; and Derrida makes the claim that "without the opening of the possibility of evil, there remains perhaps, beyond good and evil, only the necessity of the worst. "
But just when it seems as if Derrida is suggesting that Marx wants a sort of redemptive Christian economy based on gift-giving, however, he interrupts his own text to compare deconstruction's ideas of gift-giving to those of Heidegger. Where Heidegger's notions are clearly located in a yearning for a disembodied being or spirit, Derrida points out that for deconstruction, an economy of the gift would always be linked to the figure of the specter, the dead relative whose inheritance is, properly speaking, yours, but actually, the inheritance winds up being 'of the community' (this is the economy in which you would "feel the ghost peering over your shoulder" .) Far from being redemptive, then, the specter is really, according to Derrida, a threat. It can never stop being a threat.
Academics who mutate the gift economy described by Marx into the academic exchange value "Marxism", miss the point. Marx has given us the injunctions; they inform the very map upon which we currently interpret the terms "work", "worth", "community" and "subjectivity." It is the academy's current lack of an injunction with which Derrida particularly takes issue. Maintaining now the specters of Marx. Here are the injunctions, and there are more to come: to make change now, to see our lot as Hamlet's rather than Christ's, understand a gift economy as Nietzsche might have it, rather than as Heidegger would like it. Maintaining now the specters of Marx. How? A specter can only be dealt with by way of conjuring, which is both a naming of the specter, and a sort of political alliance with it, after all. The difference between the future of communism and the communism of the future for Derrida lies in this process of forming an alliance with a threat, and echoes his earlier writings on the pharmacon--the poison that is also the cure. To ask whither Marxism, Derrida writes, is neither to forge a political plan, nor is it to make a place in the canon for the literature of "Marxism" . To ask whither Marxism is rather, to follow a specter, because "after the end of history, the specter comes, by coming back."
(Note: Derrida's book was hotly debated when it came out. Needless to say, mine is one of many possible readings. Please feel free to use this, attributed, and check out what other people have written on this book.)
"Maintaining now the specters of Marx." Thus begins Derrida's opening sentence of his long-awaited book on the future of Marxism . What and odd beginning, what awkward construction, even for a translation. "Maintaining now, the specters of Marx. " What is Derrida saying? Is it a statement--he, Derrida, is maintaining the specters of Marx? Is it an injunction--You should maintain the specters of Marx? Is it an observation--We are already maintaining the specters of Marx, whether we know it or not?
I wait breathlessly for Derrida, postructuralism's discontented Crown Prince, to answer the question, "whither Marxism?" Always one for suspense, however, Derrida must set the stage by printing on the first page of his book a scene from Shakespeare's Hamlet-- the scene where Hamlet and the ghost of his father swear together that they will set "right" the current political climate, which, at the time the play begins, is "out of joint." I get the set-up quickly enough: Shakespeare's Hamlet, delaying both the play and his decision to kill Claudius participates in the famous "play within a play" . Derrida, in this book at least, plays deconstruction's own Hamlet, and sees himself as charged to take on the challenge of the materialists who have complained that deconstruction fails to address the "real world". To this end, Derrida writes a book whose question is "whither Marxism?" Presumably, he does this in order to set right an ivory tower academic climate which is currently "out of joint" But first, Derrida, like Hamlet, keeps us busy with a series of sub-plots, essays within essays, all the while promising to answer the question "whither Marxism" by way of a discussion of Shakespeare's influence on Marx., an analysis of Paul Valery's work on the "political economy of spirit", an interrogation of Maurice Blanchot's essay on "Marx's Three Voices", and a critique of Heidegger's discussion of "the gift". Nevertheless, no matter where he travels in this book of essays within essays, Derrida will always circle back to the same problem: that of the thinker who is haunted by specters.
Derrida, like Shakespeare's Hamlet, and also like Marx who began The Communist Manifesto , starts off his book by "seeing ghosts." But where Hamlet's ghost is merely his father, the King, and Marx's ghost is the "specter" that he called Communism, Derrida claims that to think of Marxism today is to see multiple specters. Why, Derrida asks, is this the case? He answers his own question in two ways: first , Marx, who was interested in displacing the subjectivity of the bourgeois individual agent with a new kind of subjectivity, often spoke of the crowd, the horde, the masses, the community without a leader, rather than the individual agent. The many, rather than the one. In addition, Marx himself , properly speaking, is no longer a living subject. Thus Marx become a "less than one"--a dead man who haunts current thought , analogous to the ghost of Hamlet's father, known to the living world like most ghosts--through the force of their injunctions. In the case of Marx, the injunction is clear enough: Make Change, Now.
Thus Marx, both more and less than the "one" of bourgeois subjectivity, takes the form of a series of specters for Derrida. When he speaks of the "specters" of Marx, Derrida always stresses the plural, the three-fold, the trinity: First, there is Marx as The Father : The father of communism; the structuralism Law of The Father whose figure haunts poststructuralism; the oedipal father who hands down the Law to Derrida, just as Hamlet's father does to Hamlet. Then there is Marx the Scholar, the Marx who wrote The Communist Manifesto and warned that "there is a specter haunting Europe--it is the specter of Communism." The scholar, according to Derrida, is the one who is designated to speak to and for the specter, as Horatio was commanded to do in Hamlet. Finally, there is Marx the Son, the ordinary man writing the Manifesto, the man who feels he has to act (as does Derrida, to some extent) because he perceives time as out of joint, and is being commanded to set it right.
Implicit in Shakespeare's Hamlet is a condemnation of those players who cannot see what is currently wrong in the present time. Implicit in Derrida's book on Marx is a critique of those who fancy themselves "beyond" communism's historical moment. In the spirit of poststructuralism, however, Derrida is less interested in the question "why do people believe they are beyond communism?" than the question, "from whence comes this notion?" To answer his own inquiry, Derrida draws a genealogical line between Shakespeare, Marx, and Paul Valery, arguing that Valery brilliantly understands the modern Hamlet is an "intellectual Hamlet", one who is listening not to the voice of one ghost King, but many ghosts of disembodied enlightenment intellectual traditions:
If he seizes a skull, it is an illustrious skull-"Whose was it?"--This one was Leonardo...And this other skull is that of Leibniz who dreamed of universal peace. And this one Kant qui genuit Hegel, qui genuit, Marx, qui genuit...Hamlet does not know what to do with all these skulls. But if he abandons them...will he cease to be himself?"
(Valery, "la politique de l'esprit" )
Derrida, who as a modern man must also play the intellectual Hamlet, the one who in this book silently fills in the blank space of Valery's ellipses ("Marx qui genuit...) with the name "Derrida", both agrees and disagrees with Valery. Where Derrida differs from Valery, is in his definition of the difference between the relatively harmless nature of a "ghost" and the terror of a "specter." The specter, according to Derrida, is a type of threatening "word made flesh", and as such, it is always three-fold: the specter (as opposed to say, the spirit) involves mourning, language, and work.
This bears analysis. A specter, according to Derrida, must be mourned, and for mourning to occur, "the body must be dead." Things may have been rotten in the state of Denmark even prior to the death of Hamlets father, but the appearance of the specter of the deceased King, and the injunction he brings to set things right, begins the play we call Hamlet. This is a particularly Hegelian reading of history, in which the King must be dead in order to create the narrative of the kingdom. Thus the certainty of the death of both Marx and the death of certain types of communism may now usher in the "birth" of the specters of Marx.
Next, the specter, which both can and cannot speak, demands a medium through which to make its claims known, and this medium must speak the language of the King, the father, the academy. The specter will address itself to he who has the language of power. This is the place of the scholar, according to Derrida. Horatio is enlisted to speak to Hamlet's father's ghost. Marx was enlisted to speak for the specter of Communism. Derrida is enlisted to speak for Marx, and so it goes.
Finally, and probably most importantly from a Marxist perspective, the specter for Derrida involves a notion of work, but a particularly mental type of work. This is the spiritual (or even, religious) work involved in recognizing that the future is NOW--or as Hamlet would have it, that time is out of joint. The work involved in this realization leads one naturally to the desire to "set time right", and invokes the connection between time, work, and justice.
Today, for Derrida, time is out of joint, it is unhinged, it is pregnant and waiting to birth...something. Today is the time when justice should be done, when intellectual work should recognize that the past lives within the present. And ironically, today is when Marxism lives, in spite of the television news, because the very stripping of the trappings of communism worldwide have cleared the way for us to now hear the original injunctions of Marx:
When the dogma machine and the "Marxist" ideological apparatuses (states, parties, cells, unions and other places) are in the process of disappearing, we no longer have any excuse, only alibis, for turning away from this responsibility. There will be no future without this. Not without Marx, no future without Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx: in any case of a certain Marx, of his genius, of at least one of his spirits...
The work of the academy, then, is to do justice to the specters of Marx., and, Derrida implies, deconstruction is uniquely qualified to mete out this justice. Why is this? Derrida's first argument is historical--he argues that deconstruction began in a time that birthed itself through death: the claim of the death of philosophy. He claims that the current intellectual cry "we are experiencing the death of Marxism" happened not with the fall of the Berlin wall in the 1990s, but ironically in the 1950's when a totalitarian vision of "communism" was at its height. As he puts it "Many young people today probably no longer sufficiently realize it: the eschatological themes of the "end of history" of the "end of Marxism" of the "end of philosophy" of the "last man" and so forth were, in the 50's, that is forty years ago, our daily bread... Therefore, the question, 'whither Marxism?' resonates around us like a deja vu of sorts..."
The historical paradox of making ones living off declaring the "death of history" , all the while watching totalitarian regimes roll tanks into Europe under the sign of "communism" is one that Derrida argues is crucial to understanding the time and place in which deconstruction first developed and later flourished. This is also why Derrida repeatedly claims that media culture of the 1990s is "deliberately late to the end of history." The end of history, for deconstruction at least, happened some time ago.
How can one be late to the end of history? He asks, and suggests that perhaps what we are really talking when we say "the end of history" or the "end of Marxism" is really in fact, the end of a certain CONCEPT of history, the modernist concept that would render history disembodied, mechanized, and free of agency--that is, a spirit, rather than a specter. These are the people, Derrida writes, who now puff out their chests and speak of capitalism, liberalism and the virtues of parliamentary democracy, terms which Derrida argues are firmly located in an imaginary conception of an ideal disembodied PAST, rather than a practicing present.
The issue for Derrida is how to make a present, living embodied practice from the injunctions of the specters of Marx. For a blueprint of sorts, Derrida turns to Blanchot 's essay, "Marx's Three Voices". In this essay, Blanchot points out that there are at least three commands coming from Marx: to DO (and this echoes Hamlet's dilemma in his "to be or not to be" speech); to DECIDE (for every form of knowledge requires choices; we will believe this story, reject that story), and finally (and paradoxically) to MAINTAIN--to hold together those terms in Marx 's thought that are most disparate-- for instance, the injunction to act in the now, even though "time is out of joint"; the commandment to keep the specter of communism in sight, just as it fades from view (or has not yet arrived); the hope that perhaps it is possible to put ones belief in a system of justice that would lie outside of law, or perhaps even history itself. "Maintaining the specters of Marx." This is the first sentence of Derrida's essay, and the contradictions of the phrase "maintain the specters" is made manifest by the very terms of "subjectivity" articulated by The Manifesto, and later espoused as the subjectivity of the New International:
The alliance of rejoining without conjoined mate, without organization, without party, without nation, without State, without property (the "communism" that we will later nickname the new International.
The New International requires subjectivity without those trappings we have historically believed create subjectivity. It promises an identity free of nation, state, race, organization and property. The economy described in this passage is not one of exchange, nor is it value free, but it is rather, that of the gift. We make a gift of ourselves, we turn ourselves over. As Marcel Mauss and others have pointed out, where a market economy may delude itself in believing itself "value-free", a gift society (or an inheritance society, if you like) is always dealing in issues of community, obligation, justice, and, of course, specters. In this way, Derrida moves his analysis from "the future of communism" to "the communism of the future." Derrida sees the project of deconstruction an injunctive and participating in a gift economy of sorts. Deconstruction suggests that it is precisely when times are most unjust that justice may be done; and Derrida makes the claim that "without the opening of the possibility of evil, there remains perhaps, beyond good and evil, only the necessity of the worst. "
But just when it seems as if Derrida is suggesting that Marx wants a sort of redemptive Christian economy based on gift-giving, however, he interrupts his own text to compare deconstruction's ideas of gift-giving to those of Heidegger. Where Heidegger's notions are clearly located in a yearning for a disembodied being or spirit, Derrida points out that for deconstruction, an economy of the gift would always be linked to the figure of the specter, the dead relative whose inheritance is, properly speaking, yours, but actually, the inheritance winds up being 'of the community' (this is the economy in which you would "feel the ghost peering over your shoulder" .) Far from being redemptive, then, the specter is really, according to Derrida, a threat. It can never stop being a threat.
Academics who mutate the gift economy described by Marx into the academic exchange value "Marxism", miss the point. Marx has given us the injunctions; they inform the very map upon which we currently interpret the terms "work", "worth", "community" and "subjectivity." It is the academy's current lack of an injunction with which Derrida particularly takes issue. Maintaining now the specters of Marx. Here are the injunctions, and there are more to come: to make change now, to see our lot as Hamlet's rather than Christ's, understand a gift economy as Nietzsche might have it, rather than as Heidegger would like it. Maintaining now the specters of Marx. How? A specter can only be dealt with by way of conjuring, which is both a naming of the specter, and a sort of political alliance with it, after all. The difference between the future of communism and the communism of the future for Derrida lies in this process of forming an alliance with a threat, and echoes his earlier writings on the pharmacon--the poison that is also the cure. To ask whither Marxism, Derrida writes, is neither to forge a political plan, nor is it to make a place in the canon for the literature of "Marxism" . To ask whither Marxism is rather, to follow a specter, because "after the end of history, the specter comes, by coming back."