Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida summery paper

Continental Political Theory
Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida summery paper
Terese Howard
10/13/09

Jacques Derrida begins his treatment of Marx in Specters of Marx with a discussion of the statement “I would like to learn to live finally” (Derrida, xvi). Throughout this work, finality and ends serve as a focal point. Yet this end, or absence of end, is always haunted by ghosts. Following it, going before it, seeing it without being seen. In this brief summery I will address those two themes with in the book: finality (ends, eschatology) and ghosts.

The question of learning to live finally brings up a handful of observations which deconstruct its finality. Is how to live is something one learns or is that “by definition,…not something one learns” (xvii). If we can learn to live “it can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone” (xvii). Leaning to live finally is not final in itself. It is never even finally done in death for learning and life is no longer in dialogue with finality. The phrase “time is out of joint” (which is translated ten different ways) also serves to deconstruct the finality of ends. This phrase, first used by Hamlet, sees time off its path and finds the end of time in that jumble. This disjointedless of time “strikes a blow at the teleological order of history” (96). The 1950’s had a wave of “eschatological themes of the “end of history,” of the “end of Marxism,” of the “end philosophy,” of the “end of man” and so forth” (16). Derrida looks at these ends not as finalities or dialectics but continual haunting and disjointing of the past, present and future. In this way Derrida reads out of Marx the dialectical end that many (probably including Marx himself) understood there to be. For Derrida it does not matter whether it is there or not but only that whatever end is there is never done in Marx own work, life, or death.

Yet even after death Marx himself and the specters of Marx are not completely absent – they still haunt us as ghosts. These ghosts are present to us as a trace, neither dead nor alive, coming and going, and coming only to go again. Marx and his specters are not the only ghosts haunting us. Marx speaks of ghosts in the first word of the Manifesto “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism” (2). The ghosts are responsible for disjointing time. They mess with any past, present, future trajectory as the ghost is present from the past, future in the present. The ghost, “turned toward the future, going toward it, it proceeds from the future” (xix). Communism is not a future goal to be realized, it comes from the future and haunts our present and our past. Furthermore, these ghosts, communism and Marx and the specters of both, see without being seen. We do not see communism, we do not always know when it is haunting us, yet it sees us nonetheless. The blurring of the real and unreal which Marx himself sets forth in introduction ghosts, sets him apart from all scholars because “there has never been a scholar capable of speaking of anything…and especially of ghosts” (12). Marxism introduces the ghost of a scholar, and Marxism and communism are both haunted by ghosts and haunt as ghosts. In this reading Derrida deconstructs Marx’s temporality and trajectory with the very trace, the ghost, Marx speaks of in the Manifesto.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx Routledge: New York, 1993.