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Mira Radanovic
A Heuristic Scene of Reading and The Self-Effacing Trace in Specters of Marx:
Derrida as a Prosopopoeia for Deconstruction
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless––a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed––
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illuminate our tempestuous day.
––Percy Bysshe Shelley, “England in 1819”
Jacques Derrida dedicates Specters of Marx to Chris Hani and states that “one should
never speak of the assassination a man as a figure, not even an exemplary figure in the logic of
an emblem....A man’s life, as unique as his death, will always be more than a paradigm and
something other than a symbol.” As much as his lectures are a meditation on the futures of
Marxism and, more fundamentally, the concept of the future, we must always be aware that they
can also be read cautiously as being separately and often discreetly a bequest or a provision for
the futures of deconstruction and/or the legacy of Derrida himself. Therefore, while one of
Derrida’s ostensible central concerns is the aporia of Marxism(s) and Marx, he is equally uneasy
in his attempts to maintain the parallel aporia of deconstruction and his own name, and thus his
own presence, to resist his name becoming a metonymy for deconstruction. Although in order to
define this future or futures without the risk of offering a dangerously over-determined future,
Derrida necessarily wrests the concept of the present from a locatable axis, instead positioning
the innate non-contemporaneity of the present with itself. In his exordium, Derrida defines that
“learning to live...can happen only between life and death”(xviii), an interstice contingent in that
it “can only maintain itself with some ghost”(xviii), and that we are responsible for these others,
those “who are not there, or...those who are no longer or who are not yet present and
living”(xix). He concludes with an overt denouncement of the Heideggarian notion of life instead
positing an orientation that is “not toward death but toward a living-on...a trace”(xx). In these two
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preludes to the text that Derrida describes as a text on “ghosts, inheritance, and generations”(xix),
he establishes that the guiding principle is to force one to think, but to think in a mode of
irresolvable discord which he also acknowledges somewhat paradoxically must upset “any
effectivity”(xx). The question becomes one of parsing through what trace Derrida attempts to
leave and why he chooses Marxism as a conduit to conduct this legacy. And while Derrida warns
of the dangers of the emblematic, it is impossible not to question to what extent Spectres of Marx
works to anxiously allegorise deconstruction and, further, to what extent Derrida integrates or
dissociates himself within the text, if there is a within, both explicitly and implicitly, both
intentionally and otherwise with this concept he wishes to be impossible to circumscribe. In other
words, how does Derrida haunt his own text? However, such an examination does not necessarily
yield that Derrida seeks to define deconstruction in any tangible terms, but it may instead be that
what remains, what is left to us, is not so much a proviso, but a provocation.
Simon Critchley considers that it is “perhaps...something of a banality to speak of
Derrida’s withdrawal from the political,...of his complex reticence on Marx and Marxism, of his
alleged complicity in the supposedly unquestionable political guilt of Heidegger and Paul de
Man”(189), and goes on to reject this idea instead to discuss the ways in which Derrida fails in
his commitment to the political. Far from banality, it is important to engage with what Derrida
himself defines as the nature of his ‘reticence’ with respect to Marxism. In an interview that
focuses on Marx and Marxist discourse, Derrida recounts his early years at the “strange
institution”(Negotiations 149) Ecole Normale and his complex relationships to Althusser, Lacan,
and Foucault, and recreates the vexed relationship he has to the Marxist critiques of his colleges,
especially the “dominant discourse”(165) of Althusser. Concerned over the certain negations of a
questioning of the question within this line of thought, Derrida describes that he was cautious not
“to formulate questions in a style that appeared...phenomenological, transcendental, or
ontological”(152) which was to risk being viewed as “suspicious, backward, idealistic, even
reactionary”(153), but was frustrated that “in spite of the denials,...the declared rejection of
Husserl and Heidegger, there was an incorporation”(153). Derrida goes on to describe how
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Althusser’s unacknowledged echoing of Heidegger’s attribution of a metaphysical humanism to
Marx left him “reticent”(159), which he then amends to conserving a “reservation”(166) in that
“sometimes one prefers to remain alone, not to be read or understood, rather than to be
assimilated too fast or misunderstood”(166). Viewed through this reflection of the very start of
his career, speaking about Marx becomes for Derrida a highly politically sensitive matter of the
reception of deconstruction; he goes on to explain how in order to avoid offering another version
of one of the many current anaesthetic handlings of Marx’s writings, he would rather provide a
“blank” that is “an active calling into account of the Marxian legacy”(185) through an implicit
provoking of a questioning of his ideas on Marx by not speaking directly about Marx. He
immediately then juxtaposes the way in which there is a “traditional Marxist discourse [that] is
accepted....Whereas deconstructive questions and practices...encounter a greater and increasingly
bitter resistance from the institution and thus from dominant intellectual normativity”(185), but
however notes a similar strain of a “tranquilizing legitimation of deconstruction”(186) within
academia. Again, in this interview, Derrida expresses the problematic interconnection between
Marxism and deconstruction and the concern he has for the futures of both projects. A key
moment occurs when Derrida is asked, “In what sense are the procedures that you yourself adopt
when you read a text allowed to escape that critique of etymolgism that Marx levels at Stirner, et
al.?”(189) Derrida first responds with, “I cannot...escape that criticism altogether”, and then
explains that his “‘critique’ of Marx”(190) concerns how “the impossibility for a presence to
gather itself in a self-identity or in a substantiality, compels one to inscribe the reality effect in a
general textuality”(189-90) and that “deconstruction in the sense of a relatively coherent set of
discursive rules at a given moment in Western discourse is only a symptom”(192). Instead,
Derrida defines that deconstruction is “an explanation with, an experience of the
impossible”(192) and he does not think that “deconstruction can be formalized”(193). In this
candid and lucid account of the intricacies of his engagement with Marxist discourses and the
writings of Marx, Derrida continuously refers back to his project of deconstruction as though
speaking of Marxism and Marx is to somehow risk the systematising of deconstruction and to
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endanger his own legacy. Far from being cause to cite Derrida’s political failings, his
‘reservation’ in explicitly commenting on Marxism and Marx is the exact opposite of a
disengagement or failing but signals that, for Derrida, the wait to speak in a more transparent
manner, and what he finally says about Marxism is central and perhaps one of the most important
topics to address for the futures of the deconstructive project. In addition, Derrida points out, a
‘reticence’ or ‘reservation’ does not mean that he has not silently addressed Marxism, even if that
address takes the form of a provocation of a questioning through an inferring ellipsis. Moreover,
the question posed to Derrida of how he escapes Marx’s critique of Stirner bears a pivotal
significance to how Specters of Marx can be read simultaneously as a consideration of the legacy
of Marx, Marxism, his own, and as a metanarrative of deconstruction.
In a meditation entitled, “Mnemosyne”, which predates Specters of Marx by almost a
decade and begins as a consideration of memory, narrative, and mourning, upon the death of Paul
de Man, and progresses to an interwoven defence of deconstruction, Derrida reminds us of de
Man’s idea of memory: “‘the power of memory’ is not...that of ‘resuscitation’: it remains
enigmatic enough to be preoccupied...by a thinking of ‘the future’”(3). Here, Derrida also stresses
that the “impossible mourning, which, leaving the other his alterity”(6) is the only ‘true’
mourning. Before launching into what becomes a consideration of the narrative, or the
impossibility of offering a narrative of deconstruction in America, Derrida frames his discussion
with Paul de Man’s definition of allegory as the “possibility that permits language to say the
other and to speak of itself while speaking of something else; the possibility of always saying
something other than what it gives to be read, including the scene of reading itself”(11) and that it
also “precludes any totalizing summary”(11). The idea of the scene of reading as signalling
allegory, of transference, and translation, is another key to approaching a consideration of the
register that Derrida employs in Specters of Marx, beginning as he does with a conceptual and
meditative poetic invocation. However, in “Mnemosyne”, Derrida changes course and mode in
what becomes a highly provoking proliferation of ideas especially in relation to his comments on
America. Forever circumspect to making a definitive statement that is vulnerable to reductive
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critics, Derrida, with irony, claims “America is deconstruction”(18) after he offers a kind of
gestalt definition of deconstruction that, of course, resists definition in that it is “both more than a
language and no more of a language”(15) that its structure is one of “transference”(17),
significantly characterising it as kind of metaphoric process that produces irreducible remainders.
Separating into categories deconstruction’s multidimensional aspects of the political, ethical,
religious, academic, and technological, Derrida comments on how in the case of the latter
although “it is anything but a set of technical and systematic procedures, certain impatient
Marxists nevertheless accuse deconstruction of deriving its “power” from the “technicality of its
procedure”(16). While all aspects factor in Specters of Marx, often simultaneously, here Derrida
separates them out, as his critics do, and chooses to address the reductionist accusations of
Marxists in relation to their attack of deconstruction as simply a set of mechanisations. Such a
charge of systemisation represents one of the most dogmatic and damaging charges levied at
deconstruction which undermines the heart of Derrida’s positioning of deconstruction as a
forever questioning of determinability, programability, and familiarisation. For Derrida, a
definition that attempts to thematize deconstruction is motivated by a wish to “weaken it, date it,
to slow it down...to wear deconstruction out,...turn the page”(17), metaphorically connoting the
literal attempts of critics to conceptualise deconstruction as a machine. The need to provide a
constant defence for deconstruction as being more than a mere lingering programmable
methodological abhorrent aberration of an Enlightenment legacy is never far below the surface in
any of Derrida’s writings, although in “Mnemosyne”, perhaps due to the often successful
denouncements of the thought of Paul de Man, Derrida directly confronts the forces, Marxist
discourse as one of many, which wish to contain and discredit deconstruction.
Despite Derrida’s indignant reply to those who accuse deconstruction as a system, he
defines that the project has within it, “an auto-interpretive figure which will always be difficult to
subsume under a meta-discourse or general narrative”(13) and that the ability to deconstruct is
enabled “according to a law...it accumulates within itself those very forces that try to repress
it...without being able to totalize them, like...surplus values”(13). Here, while he resists offering
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definition, Derrida does characterise that the ‘force’ of deconstruction is dependent on a strange
incorporative yet self-referential working that is always dependent on those irreducible
remainders of other discourses. And while denying deconstruction a narrative, and thus a
beginning, middle, and end, Derrida significantly accredits the shape of deconstruction as being
heavily influenced by Paul de Man. Of course, anyone familiar with de Man’s preface to
Allegories of Reading will recall his careful qualification of his use of the term ‘deconstruction’
in that he “came across ‘deconstruction’ for the first time in the writings of Jacques Derrida,
which means that it is associated with a power of inventive rigor to which I lay no claim”(x) and
then refuses to counter the charges that using the term invokes such as those of who have
variously wished to have deconstruction “dismissed as a harmless academic game or denounced
as a terrorist weapon”(x). While de Man appears to include this disclaimer in order protect the
term from the negative associations it may gather because of his own infamous reputation,
Derrida oppositely and openly counters and repudiates those who charged de Man with
“‘nihilism’”(21) and instead posits de Man’s thought as being based in “‘affirmation’”(21). All
through Derrida’s insistence in retrieving and reorienting de Man’s legacy from those who wish
to have done with it there is a keen sense of not only the self-referential, but the implicit
acknowledgement of such, but Derrida becomes most candid in his defence of deconstruction in
speaking of and through de Man. Nonetheless, Derrida qualifies what is at work in his address by
referring to de Man’s definition of autobiography in that it is “neither a genre nor a mode, but ‘a
figure of reading...that occurs in all texts’ since a ‘specular structure’ is always ‘interiorized’
there” that “reveals a tropological dislocation that precludes any anamnesic totalization of
self”(23). Characteristically acknowledging a self-referentiality, but one that resists a
delimitation, Derrida then further elaborates on what we can anticipate which is the use of
prosopopoeia. Asking us to re-read de Man for ourselves, Derrida defines the nature of such a
figure:
They become...by doing what they tell of and by telling what they do, Paul de Man’s
epitaph, the prosopopoeia that he addresses to us from an incineration all the more
sublime for having no tomb––emblazoned spirit....Here is the figure, the visage, the
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face and the de-facement, the effacement of the visible figure in prosopopoeia: the
sovereign, secret, discrete, and ideal signature––and the most giving, the one which
knows how to efface itself. (26)
Through reviewing de Man’s definition of prosopopoeia, a “‘fictional voice,’...‘the fiction of the
voice-from-beyond-the-grave’ Paul de Man will later say, takes the form of an address”(26),
Derrida’s own strategy of reading and writing becomes more legible. Signalling the ideas of the
spectral, the spirit, and significantly, ‘the sovereign’, Derrida addresses how speaking of and
through the voice of another is always tied to a self-effacing referent that in itself is never stable.
In addition, Derrida tells us this voice, “looks at us, describes and prescribes to us, dictates to us
in advance...although I believe that this voice already haunts any said real or present voice”(26).
Is this not part of what in Specters of Marx becomes the specter, that which sees us and precedes
us while at the same time we anticipate its reappearance, and from which we can only hear a
voice of unstable origin? Further on, Derrida connects the trope of prosopopoeia to mourning, in
that there is “no choice but to let the other speak, since it cannot make the other speak without the
other having already spoken....This trace results in speech always saying something other than
what it says”(37-8). For Derrida, the trace is “interiorized in mourning as that which can no
longer be interiorized”(38). While this lecture upon the death of Paul de Man predates Spectres of
Marx by a decade, Derrida distinctly outlines not only his privileging of a de Manian strategy of
reading and writing as allegory, and provisionally signals the concepts of mourning, spectrality,
spirit, and inheritance that he fully develops in Spectres but also points to, however momentarily,
Marxist criticisms that attack the heart of the concept of deconstruction. Therefore, it is inevitable
that Derrida must eventually reappropriate Marxist discourse, and in doing so, under the guise of
asserting the survival of certain Marxist discourses, opens a space in which to critique Marxist
thought through exposing the hypocritical critiques of its founder, and additionally, to perhaps
reorient one of the Marxist discourses to be hospitable to a deconstructionist thought.
One of the many references that de Man makes to Derrida and deconstruction in
Allegories of Reading occurs during the chapter “On Genesis and Genealogy” that begins with
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the topic of Romanticism and a deconstructive resistance of Hegel’s terminally oriented concept
of history termed the “genetic”(80), or even Nietzsche’s “organic”(81) model which relates to the
central concern, or leitmotif, of the nature of historicism introduced at the start in Specters of
Marx. Paul de Man defines:
The critical ‘deconstruction’...creates radical discontinuities and disrupts the linearity
of the temporal process to such extent that no sequence of actual events or no
particular subject could ever acquire, by itself, full historical meaning. They all
become part of the process that they neither contain nor reflect, but of which they are
a moment....No father, no son can be God, but the history of the struggle between
fathers and sons remains in essence divine. As a diachrony animated by a teleological
intent, such a movement remains genetic.(81)
Here, de Man defines the imperative to create a temporal disjointedness in deconstruction, but
still situates this so-called process or movement as being still historically genetic. Differently, in
Specters of Marx, Derrida definitively attempts to modify this conceptualisation of time through
providing a focalization of historicity by beginning with a questioning of the nature of time,
inheritance and generations by way of spectrality. Derrida begins by foregrounding the act of his
own reading, the acknowledgement of the haunting of a specter while going on to define the
nature of the relations of the past and future with the figure of the “revenant” immediately
evoking the concept of the messianic. Through interrogating the concept through a reading of
Marx intertwined with Shakespeare, Derrida literally heightens what he wants to emphasise as
the intertextuality of reading, writing, and speaking. Introducing “the visor effect: we do not see
who looks at us”(7), he significantly reminds us that “We will probably not speak of this visor
effect any more, at least not by that name, but it will be presupposed by everything we advance
on the subject of the specter in general”(7) signalling that we must read his subtext by being ever
wary of these formative concepts. More importantly, Derrida tells us that this asymmetry of sight
forces us to “fall back on its voice....An essentially blind submission to his secret, to the secret of
his origin....Another can always lie, he can disguise himself as a ghost”(7). Derrida’s focus on
costume furthers his caution of falsity, false prophets, the danger of “the power to see without
being seen”(8) and by offering a reading in a manner that creates a strange conceptual
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defamiliarization of Hamlet, we are positioned to read and listen always with a vigilance of the
origin of voice, or more fundamentally the claim to an origin, or future, of any voice. Derrida’s
previous comments about the nature of deconstruction to allow for other discourses becomes the
definition for his “Staging for the end of history. Let us call it a hauntology”(10) that is “not
merely larger and more powerful than an ontology....It would harbour within itself...eschatology
and teleology themselves. It would comprehend them, but incomprehensibly.”(10) Can we see
Derrida’s hauntology as a metonymy for deconstruction? How does such a deconstructive
hauntology harbour but not completely interiorize?
Interweaving references to the fundamental limitations of the “scholar” in their inability
in “apostrophizing the ghost, which is to say also for speaking the language of kings and of the
dead”(12), Derrida begins to speak of Marx as the prophesied scholar who “would know how to
address himself to spirits”(12). Derrida increasingly references the act of his own re-reading of
texts, and then makes what is a pivotal statement after telling us about how Marx and Engels
concede to “their own possible ‘again’ and their intrinsically irreducible historicity”(13):
What other thinker has ever issued a similar warning in such an explicit fashion? Who
has ever called for the transformation to come of his own theses? Not only in view of
some progressive enrichment of knowledge, which would change nothing in the order
of a system, but so as to take into account there...the effects of rupture and
restructuration? And so as to incorporate in advance, beyond any possible
programming, the unpredictability of new knowledge, new techniques, and new
political givens? (13)
Why does Derrida so obviously use this intensification of rhetorical questions? Is this not simply
telling us that Marx was a deconstructionist, a man after Derrida’s own heart, and that instead of
being some sort of disinterment of Marxism(s), that his lecture is a definitive alignment of
Marxism with deconstruction but one that fundamentally reorients a Marxist critique so as to
grant impunity to deconstruction once and for all from charges of systematization? And the
greater question here arises from the statement which ends this thought which is that since “the
dogma machine and the ‘Marxist’ ideological apparatuses...are in the process of disappearing, we
no longer have any excuses, only alibis, for turning away from this responsibility”(13) of reading
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beyond a familiarizing “scholarly ‘reading’”(13). What is the difference between having an
excuse or an alibi? Why does he gesture at such a blatant acquittal of his own past reservations?
What is this responsibility but that of a radical deconstructive reading, or perhaps taking up
deconstruction and carrying on a transformation that is increasingly radical and dissonant? As
Derrida tells us, accrediting Maurice Blanchot, that if “the readability of a legacy were given...if
it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to
inherit from it. We would be affected by it as by a cause––natural or genetic....The injunction
itself...can only be one by dividing itself....by speaking at the same time...in several voices.”(16)
How many voices does Derrida use, and does he maintain an inheritance for deconstruction that
is as varied in its voices so as to allow for this division and self-difference? When Derrida delves
into an interpretation of Heidegger’s concept of the gift and Un-Fuge, an “irreducible excess of a
disjointure or an anachrony”(27) and its precondition to justice, when he says that this disjuncture
is an antecedent to deconstruction as “the thinking of the gift and of undeconstructible justice, the
undeconstructible condition of any deconstruction”(28), should not a deconstruction be
deconstructible? What is an undeconstructible deconstruction? Is the undeconstructible an
irreducibility, or an impermeability? In an interview from 2001, Derrida claims, when speaking
of Specters of Marx that “All responsibility is revolutionary, since it seeks to do the impossible,
to interrupt the order of things on the basis of nonprogrammable events”(The Spirit of the
Revolution 83). Not only does Derrida defend deconstruction from the Marxist charges of
systemisation, he reorients that at the centre of deconstruction is this responsibility to maintain an
uncertainty, and unprogrammability and that necessity is what motivates Derrida to use these
multifarious voices of Marx’s progenitors to interject an undefined bequest of a deconstructive
inheritance, but one that takes the shape of a scene of reading. Perhaps Derrida acknowledges the
problems of his own project in there is always a disjointedness, a “beyond the self.
Sometimes...whoever gives the example is not equal to the example he gives”(34) that the
predecessor should not be treated as an exemplum, that the inheritance can be transferred and
transmuted “through him if not from him”(34). And if Derrida is at once speaking of Marxism
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and deconstruction simultaneously, his indignation to characterise Marx as simply another
canonical philosopher whose work is read “systematically, by respecting the norms of
hermeneutical, philological, philosophical exegesis”(32) and read “on the condition that a silence
is maintained about Marx’s injunction [the interpretation] into a transformation that ‘changes the
world’”(32) is also an admonishment to those who read Derrida’s reading as a systematization of
critical tools rather than the disquieting call or imploring conjuring to take heed of a world that is
not in view of a theoretically or religiously predicted end, but is at the precipice of a unknown
beginning. At this moment, Derrida draws attention to his intentions claiming, while renouncing
a “self-presence”(32) that he speaks of “something other”(32), that we must “avoid the
neutralising anaesthesia of a new theoreticism, and to prevent a philosophico-philological return
to Marx from prevailing...but not to avoid its taking place, because it remains just as
necessary”(32), which is to say that he wishes to warn, but not so as to be too transparent, that the
worst possible of these ‘new theoreticisms’ to come would be a deconstructive Marxism that
would become the abhorrent totalizaing, canonical academic discourse that would become the
very demonstration of Marxist denouncements of deconstruction, the potential nature of his
project that he most fears.
Introducing his concept of the new international, Derrida parallels how “communism was
essentially distinguished from other labor movements by its international character”(39) and then
draws attention to the seeming conceptual arbitrariness of time questioning if there “is [a]
difference from one century to the next”(39), if there is a difference of the specter that is said to
come or to return since every revenant is a return to a present when there is “the doubtful
contemporaneity of the present to itself”(39). Conspicuously, Derrida tells us that had
“Marx...written his Manifesto in my language,...he would have played on the word
conjuration”(40), in that it means both the conspiracy to exorcize and to bring forth. In the
beginning pages, Derrida tells us to “Think as well of Macbeth”(11) in terms of the revenant of
Banquo, but could we not also remember here the conjuring scene of the heirs of Banquo, the line
of eight kings, the last of which holds a mirror that shows many more, a strange simulacrum that
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relates to the production of “‘magic’ (Magie) that transmutes paper into gold”(45), the
production of heirs, or even the character of Macbeth who must kill the heirs of others to inherit
but is fated to be without true heirs, and whose name is to become synonymous with murder.
While Derrida allows Hamlet and Timon to dominate our thoughts, Marx almost turns into a
Macbeth in his wish to chase away spirits not only of the past, but of the future, while at the same
time relying on them and at the same time becoming in danger of being without a true heir, or a
true mourner. Derrida asks “how to distinguish between the analysis that denounces magic and
the counter-magic that it still risks being?”(47). For if Derrida speaks of himself when speaking
of Marx, (when he says “that of Marx of whomever”(48)) and counters what others say of Marx
in order to also defend himself, Derrida also speaks of Marx in order to tell us what he wishes not
to do and what he wishes us not to inherit from Marx and also from himself.
It is on this note of the responsibility in the inheritance of Marxism and also quietly that
of deconstruction, that Derrida reminds us that the “task”(54) of inheritance, the work of
mourning, that our responsibility is to “filter, select, differentiate, restructure the questions”(54).
Thus Derrida then begins his critique of Francis Fukuyama whom he casts as some kind of manic
melancholic whose The End of History and the Last Man provides us with a “new gospel, the
noisiest, the most mediatized..., the most ‘successful’ one on the subject of the death of Marxism
as the end of history”(56), which is to say an unsuccessful heir. After introducing this character,
Derrida presents his core concern which is to consider the idea of the messianic, the “war of
messianic eschatologies in...the ‘appropriation of Jerusalem’”(58) and the need to transform
Marxism to think of these new conditions, but that “we will not claim that this messianic
eschatology common both to the religions it criticizes and to the Marxist critique must be simply
deconstructed”(59). Derrida explicitly qualifies his concept of the messianic:
Well, what remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as
undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction is perhaps, a certain
experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a
structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without
messianism, an idea of justice––which we distinguish from law or right and even
from human rights––and an idea of democracy––which we distinguish from its
current concept and from its determined predicates today....But this is perhaps what
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must now be thought and thought otherwise in order to ask oneself where Marxism is
going...where Marxism is leading. (59)
In an extraordinarily clear yet complex series of displacements which serve to demonstrate his
mandate to engage in transference, to inherit through a process of selection, he replaces
deconstruction with Marxism in what is a fascinating metonymy without being a metonymy, a
explicit naming of a definition of deconstruction but one that goes beyond definition, Derrida
address the problem of the messianic. After this moment in which he makes what is arguably one
of the key points of his lecture, Derrida then abruptly returns “to the neo-evangelistic rhetoric of
Fukuyama”(58) in a way that reads as some sort of ironic return, as though while Derrida was
providing us with this thoughtful, complex negotiation which transcends a deconstructive
commentary, Fukuyama, this “come-lately reader of Kojéve”(56), was left muttering in the
background. Here, Derrida creates this voice of Fukuyama not to merge or to become
indistinguishable with his own, but he becomes a figure of ridicule, a dangerous sophist (Derrida
cannot decide whether his tone is one of “sophisticated naïveté or...crude sophism”(62)) to whom
we must nevertheless return because to denounce him would be validate his importance in the
topos of mourning. Derrida casts Fukuyama as a ‘pragmatic’ thinker who “oscillates confusedly
between two irreconcilable discourses”(63), those of the “empirical...observable event...and/or in
the...simple sign of an as yet inaccessible regulating ideal that cannot be measured against any
historical event”(62). Not only is Fukuyama an unsuccessful heir of what he has read, Derrida
tells us it “as if he had never come across any worrisome question about such a Man, or read
either a certain Marx or the Stirner whom the latter goes after in The German Ideology regarding
the properly ghostly abstraction of such a concept of man”(67) and goes on “not to mention”
Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, and most of all, Hegel. While Derrida works through the
fundamentally disjunctive concepts of Fukuyama, he points to how this kind of discourse over
the “triumph of liberal capitalism”(68) which is “bereaved by what the specter of Marx represents
still today...but also virtually bereaved for itself”(68) hides from the “spirit of the Marxist
critique”(68). Here Derrida makes another key qualification that this critique is not those
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recognizable forms, ontological, philosophical, or otherwise, and also that it is a “deconstruction,
there where the latter is no longer simply a critique and where the questions it poses to any
critique and even to any question have never been in a position either to identify with or
especially to oppose symmetrically something like Marxism”(68). So while at times Derrida uses
deconstruction and Marxism as strange metonymies, he maintains for us that Marxism is wholly
‘other’ to deconstruction, that even if he may use Marxism to speak of deconstruction, the very
otherness of Marxism to deconstruction is what allows for this kind of speaking through. Derrida
concludes by defining this outright and names all of the topics such as “thinking of the trace, of
iterability, of prosthetic synthesis....the possibility for the reference to the other, and thus of
radical alterity”(75) and so forth which are what make deconstruction not equivalent to but
“faithful to a certain spirit of Marxism, to be at least one of its spirits”(75), finally claiming his
inheritance to Marx outright in that the fundamental dimensions of deconstruction are one branch
of the Marxist legacy.
If there are to be parallels between Marxism and deconstruction found embedded
throughout Specters of Marx, perhaps the most conspicuous, and what should be a central
question, is the doubling of the “ten-word telegram”(81) with Derrida’s recounting of Marx
counting off ten of Stirner’s ghosts. Is Fukuyama some sort of feeble Stirner, or rather does
Derrida speak through Stirner? Derrida draws attention to the number by posing the question,
quite mockingly, to us when telling us of Marx: “Why ten?”(142). In a footnote to this
questioning of Marx, Derrida explains that he wishes to “reaffirm the heritage of Marx while
according it or bending it to a thinking of the spectral that takes into account...an irreducible
virtuality”(190). Derrida believes that “tele-communications...spectralizes.”(51) It is important to
consider the nature of this virtuality, a topic about which he would go on to greatly develop in his
final years, and that Derrida chooses this outmoded (and behind the times or passé) medium, a
telegram, instead of calling them ghosts, in order to relay his reminders of the violent realities
that persist in disturbing Fukuyama’s hallucinatory utopian new world order rhetoric, but another
statement here takes precedence in demanding a consideration. Derrida tells us that in his critique
15
of Stirner, by “pursuing this double who is in a rush to get things over with...Marx always runs
the risk of going after in this way his own ghost”(142). Of this doubleness, we are told in
Gespenst No. 8, that man is “the most ‘unheimlich’ of all ghosts”(144) and that here is where
“the logic of this fear of oneself that is guiding our remarks”(145). Derrida is always reminding
us that he is speaking of a spirit of Marxism, but that there are multiple Marxisms. If Derrida is
defining a spirit of Marxism that is compatible with deconstruction, there is certainly a guiding
principle, a distinguishing characteristic, at the centre of this repositioning of Marxism. Early on,
Derrida addresses the question of which Marxism he is privileging and slightly circumvents this
question by instead responding to those who would say he is late in his rally to Marxism, and that
“one would have to have misunderstood quite badly”(88) and that, with perhaps a little levity, he
has a belief “in the political virtue of the contretemps”(88). Derrida takes time to answer at first
asserting (which reminds us of the charges of certain Marxists of deconstruction) that his
Marxist deconstruction is not “a methodical or theoretical procedure”(89). A bit further on
Derrida tells us that this Marxist spirit is not merely a “questioning stance”(89) but it “is even
more a certain emancipatory and 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”(89). Here Derrida gives the distinction of the Althusserian
metaphysical messianism versus the unprogrammable deconstructive messianic which is the
“undeconstructibility of a certain idea of justice”(90). Derrida, through reminding us of Marx’s
critique of Striner which reveal them both being fundamentally religiously influenced in their
thinking even when they wish to denounce religion, finally defines what he could not define for
so long and what was such a risk to deconstruction to clearly articulate. Derrida later on states
that it is the religious, “along with the messianic and the eschatological, be it in the necessarily
undetermined, empty, abstract, and dry form that we are privileging here, that ‘spirit’ of
emancipatory Marxism whose injunction we are reaffirming here, however secret and
contradictory it appears”(167). For Derrida, it is too much of a risk to have explicitly articulated
the fundamental impetus to define a basis of a messianic without it being confused with this so-
16
called determining messianism, and thus to risk accusations from Marxists of deconstruction as
being a system of implements, affirming their claims of totalization. While Derrida tells us that
“Marx thinks it is enough to turn the apostrophe back against Saint Max”(172), his own critique
of Fukuyama brings into account the multiple discourses that haunt not only Fukuyama’s claims,
but his own. Also, by reviewing the rhetorically hyperbolic determinable messianism of
Fukuyama, Derrida is able to more clearly defend deconstruction as founded in a much different
unprogrammable messianic, which in turn lest that be too dangerous a claim, is not even founded
in deconstruction, but the legacy of a spirit of Marxism. In this double reading, or “double
interpretation”(81), Derrida is careful to displace his central assertion, that of the messianic
foundation of a potential reading of Marx in his reading of Marx reading Stirner. Derrida goes as
far as to characterise Marx’s texts as “Pre-deconstructive”(170) in that they are “a relatively
stabilized knowledge that calls for questions more radical than the critique itself and than the
ontology that ground the critique....not even...questions but seismic events.”(170). Previously,
Derrida tells us that Marx’s “deconstructive critiques that [he] will address to the Stirnerian
‘historical constructions’ or ‘montages’ risk coming back at him like a boomerang”(141), and this
leads to the quite possibly indeterminable question if Derrida prevents such a risk for a future
deconstruction?
Conceivably, the answer to this question lies in the very nature of the heuristic reading
that Derrida encourages of us through his own demonstrations, the way in which Derrida is
always reminding us to read and re-read, to parse through our inheritances for ourselves. In the
final pages, Derrida brings us back to the beginning of his text that starts with his defamiliarizing
reading of Hamlet, by reminding us of how Freud conceded that he should have started with “es
spukt”(173), how we often do not begin where we should. Whereas Derrida does begin with this
‘es spukt’ that should have been the origin for Freud, beginning with the most fearful, the most
strange which is arguably the basis of a deconstruction, Derrida could be also referring to how
perhaps he should have begun his work with Marxism, or perhaps even something else. In an
extraordinarily elusive paragraph, he repeates the word this and strings together his thoughts on
17
the topic of this which seems to represent for Derrida his idea of the uncanny, the source of fear,
some place within us of the other, the stranger within, he tells us, “this that puts to rout our
meaning-to-say, making us speak regularly from the place where we want to say nothing, where
we know clearly what we do not want to say but do not know what we would like to say”(172).
Derrida struggles with the very difficulty of defining the undefinable and the necessity to displace
one’s own voice, and the danger of allowing an other to speak through us, the impossibility of
any renouncement of an inheritance, and that a critique of another inevitably becomes a selfcritique: “It was a Hegelian neo-evangelism that Marx denounced with great verve and
vehemence in the Stirnerian theory of ghosts”(100). Derrida tells us that the spirit of Marxism
that is interested in “its self-critique”(88) that “is heir to a spirit of the Enlightenment which must
not be renounced”(88), which Derrida in turn will not renounce. In the final pages, Derrida, in a
familiar turn which concludes many of his meditations on other thinkers, reminds us that “Marx
has not yet been received. The subtitle of this address could thus have been: ‘Marx––das
Unheimliche. Marx remains an immigrant”(174) and that we must not “assimilate him so as to
stop frightening oneself”(174) and that, to any predecessor, it is our responsibility to learn to “let
them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in
oneself”(176). In teaching us to live with Marx, in his demonstration of a ‘true’ work of
mourning, Derrida also offers us a way of approaching his own thought that allows for his voice
to continue to speak. Thus, in order to think and speak through Derrida, we must always maintain
his alterity to deconstruction, to our own future deconstructive registers of thought, in order to
inherit his radical call to justice and imperative to question, to revolutionise, to resist allowing a
stasis of Derrida’s voice or the implementation of his concepts as a definitive systemisation, to
develop for ourselves an unprogrammable spirit of deconstruction.
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Works Cited
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the Technological: On Derrida’s Specters of Marx.” Ethics––Politics––Subjectivity:
Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought. London: Verson, 1999:
143-82.
de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and
Proust. London: Yale University Press, 1979.
Derrida, Jacques. “Mnemosyne.” Mémoires for Paul de Man. Trans. Cecile Lindsay. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986: 3-43.
–––––. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New
International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Introd. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg.
London: Routledge, 1994.
–––––. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001. Ed. Trans. Intro. Elizabeth
Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Derrida, Jacques and Elisabeth Roudinesco. “The Spirit of the Revolution.” For What
Tomorrow...A Dialogue. Trans. Jeff Fort. 2001. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2004: 77-105.