Derrida
My response to Derrida's Specters of Marx. Probably the most engaging writing I did of the semester.
After reading Specters of Marx, I think the book is - well, “out of joint.” It is a rare work that can employ so much cleverness to say so little. Derrida goes from an extended poetic elucidation of the meaning of ghosts and responsibility, to a critique of Francis Fukuyama, to an application of “hauntology” to the 1990s world. Yet, when I looked for Marxist doctrines or even clear positions, rarely did I find anything. As thoroughly impressed as I was by the sorts of poetic connections he could make, his method seemed designed to avoid saying anything concrete. Derrida is no “orthodox” Marxist, as any Marxist knows. He does not accept any doctrine held by Marx that I could see; likewise, he abandons much of the Marxist tradition. He does not even seem to retain dialectic materialism, the method by which Lukács defined orthodox Marxism.
So what is the Marxist content in Derrida? Short answer: the spirit of Marxism. What is the spirit of Marxism? We must plod through half the book before he properly says, and even then we are disappointed. The Marxist spirit is, first and foremost, a questioning stance. Not only that, but a “certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation” that one can be liberated from dogmatics and from messianism itself (111). As definitions go, even this is rather vague. What of class consciousness, history, dialectal materialism? Derrida throws them all out the window. The sudden, unforeseeable collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and Russia necessitated the development of new concepts, concepts that “exceed[ed] both the traditional givens of the Marxist discourse and those of the liberal discourse opposed to it” (88). But Derrida refuses to say exactly what the new discourse must be, beyond the vague hints he throws out. To be “properly revolutionary” is only when an “unleashed overflowing” occurs “at the moment when all the joints give way between form and content” (144). Derrida makes - or tries to make - a virtue of this endless delay of meaning. His project is explicit. He is not here to “propose a scholarly, philosophical discourse” (63), he says, but to articulate “a responsibility,” to submit for discussion several hypotheses on the nature of this responsibility “(64).
Derrida’s political project is quite clear, and to get a handle on what he’s attempting to do, I found it useful to orientate myself by considering what he considered wrong with the world today. Ten “plagues” mark the “new world dis-order.”
(1) There is unemployment.
(2) The massive exclusion of the homeless in democratic life.
(3) The ruthless economic war between various world powers.
(4) The inability to master the contradictions of the free market, such as interventionist bidding wars (which takes the “free” away from market).
(5) & (6) There is the aggravation of foreign debt - financial debt rather than moral debt - and the rise of the arms industry.
(7) There is the spread of nuclear weapons.
(8), (9), (10) There are inter-ethnic wars based on the model of the nation-state, capitalist phantom-states of the mafia and drug cartels, and the problems in international law and its institutions.
Twenty years later we might frame some of these problems differently but, all in all, I have little problem granting the significance of the global issues Derrida witnesses. Nonetheless, I do have trouble seeing how unveiling these issues is a specific virtue of Derrida’s unusual method, and how they cannot adequately be handled through the more intuitive discourses of human rights and equality, the foundations of liberal democracy. Can Derrida, having emptied much of Marxism of its traditional content, really just mean by “Marxism” a resistance to complacency with the status quo? If so, then many people can be considered Marxists, including Derrida’s main target, Francis Fukuyama. Without denying the significance of any of his “ten plagues,” what exactly is Derrida after? His “revolution” is no revolution at all, not in the way old Marxists understood the term. He claims that deconstructionism is a radicalization of the spirit of Marx, that spirit of critique, but his points are nearly all destructive/deconstructive rather than positive.
Some clear claims shine through his verbiage. He does not think Marxism should dissociate itself from teleology, as the Frankfurt School accomplished with its turn to cultural critique. (Although Derrida seems to offer a teleology without a telos, a claim which I, alas, cannot distinguish from nonsense.) He is also against all anti-Marxist interpretations of Marx which offer their own emancipatory eschatologies on the basis of metaphysical or onto-theological content that is itself deconstructible (115). He also believes that that we should never ignore Marx’s injunction to act, to change the world (38). This point exemplifies Derrida’s peculiarity. Under Derrida, what does the act entail? Not revolution or class consciousness - that’s the body of Marx, the substance, and nowadays it’s the spirit that’s important, the insubstantial, the hauntological. Let Casper say “boo” to capitalism and liberal democracy, but do not let him throw up a barricade, lest he sully his hands with corporeality!
What Casper may say, though, is of higher importance. Derrida’s long teasing out of the meanings in Marx’s specters, entwining it with the analysis of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the debts and responsibility of the past present and the present future: all these mask the fact that Derrida has changed the locus of the Marxist act from the action to the per formative utterance. The significant act is the speech act. “Conjuration” plays a key role in hauntology, for it is vitally connected to the performative. All at once and the same time, “conjuration” is a conspiracy of those who promise solemnly (50), a magical incantation to evoke (50), the magical exorcism (“I abjure thee, foul shade!”) expelling unwanted revenants and ghosts (58).
Derrida means to criticize the enemies of Marx who seeks to conjure away the spirit of the old German, but Derrida himself re-conjures that spirit into being. Derrida is the master of the occult act, a magician, a word which has the same root as grammarian, from gramarie (Old English) and gramaire (Old French). By knowing the words, words without finalizable content, by knowing the grammar of conjuration, Derrida can invoke new shades meant to haunt us. But what he invokes is only the pale shade(s) of something that once belonged to a body robust. To link the act to the performative is the act of someone determined to live on the margins. Magicians are never kings. They cannot rule. Fecklessly do they shout from the unstable and marginal spaces, feeling superior all the while. At the dominant discourses do they snipe, mouthing their incantations, but they do not -- cannot! - substitute that discourse with one of their own. How may the magicians invoke the spirit of critique, when it would be themselves they are critiquing? Derrida might sneer at what he denounces, but he cannot live without it. He privileges conjuration because it avowedly takes of responsibility, “commit[s] oneself in a per formative fashion” (63-4), but what a weak thing this “commitment” is when we compare it to what a more vulgar Marxism meant by a committed intellectual.
Derrida’s ten plagues are quite real. Yet his basic method seems parasitic upon the “dominant discourse” and “incontestable self-evidence” of capitalist liberal democracy. I do not see the purpose of it, unless there is value in obscurantism and irrationalism. Derrida’s own self-confident assertions trumpeting the value of his method and deriding human rights and equality fail to ring true. Let him speak (perform) in his own words:
For it must be cried out, at a time when some [e.g. Francis Fukuyama] have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity. . . No degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth. (106) (Italics mine.)
The rhetoric, of course, is quite powerful. Nonetheless, such a passage as this is the rhetoric of the huckster. Can a philosopher of such cleverness really speak of “absolute figures” with a straight face, given how drastically the current human populations so many previous generations combined? Even if the sum of evil per individual is less now than in ambiguity, for example, in absolute terms the sum of evil would obviously still be more. It seems incredible to me that someone like Derrida could be guilty of such blatantly faulty statistical thinking. The terms Derrida uses to critique liberal democracy are also significant. Violence, for example. Yet it was Hobbes, the founder of the modern natural rights teaching, the philosopher for the bourgeois, who made the elimination of violence a central issue to his philosophy. Why not the ghost of Hobbes, instead of the ghost of Marx? Similarly for the other terms Derrida privileges. Many of them were not valued in ambiguity or the medieval world; their valuation is the product of the trans-valuation of all values that modernity has undertaken (and which Nietzsche wanted to trans-value himself). The “spirit of Marx,” which works quite well against the inequalities created by capitalism, is nonetheless based on a series of values at the core of the liberal tradition. When Derrida claims, for example, that Fukuyama is haunted by Marx, why not simply go further back in history - and suggest that Marx is haunted by liberalism?
Derrida’s immense self-confidence and cleverness mask his tone of complaint when he speaks of Fukuyama in particular. All in all, I believe Derrida says many true things of Fukuyama’s book - Fukuyama is no weighty philosopher. He speaks merely as a political scientist informed by political philosophy. His “end of” philosophy and theory of the Last Man was, as Derrida rightly pointed out, sounded by Marxists since the 1950s. With this in mind, we might forgive Derrida’s exasperation. Fukuyama lucked into the kairos of the moment, the euphoria of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. His book was undoubtedly timely. Here, though, we might see the subversion of Derrida’s method. Of timeliness he makes a vice, and of untimeliness he makes a virtue. Specters of Marx is an untimely book, speaking at a moment of great triumph for capitalist liberal democracy; “the time is out of joint” for a book like Derrida’s, which somehow makes it in joint. The timeliness of the untimely!
Fukuyama’s own success, claims Derrida, lies in how well he waffles between empirical history (“liberal democracy has won, just look!”) and ignoring that empirical history (“there’s lots of bad tidings in the current world”) to hold up an ideal version of liberal democracy. Mere empirical history doesn’t refute the ideal orientation of a “greater part” of humanity to liberal democracy (71). Yet I do not know if Derrida’s brand of teleology without a telos is any less waffle-esque. And I really don’t know if, in the end, Derrida really says anything of value. He says that the problematic of Marxism live on, but not the dogmatics of Marxist “orthodoxy.” It does not seem to me that Marx has a monopoly on those problematic, however. The liberal tradition is not wholly compatible with capitalism, of course, the mutual tension between those two paired discourses has, at least in the United States, accomplished many “Marxist” goals in the twentieth century. The radicalization of Marxism by Derrida seems quite unnecessary.
Derrida, it seems, is haunted by the appearance, the manifestation, the triumph in the west of John Locke and Adam Smith. Fukuyama dares what Derrida dares not: an explanation of this triumph. His almost exultant optimism is mistaken in the same way that the optimism of the Enlightenment was mistaken by the critics of the Enlightenment: the “messianic eschatology” was never meant to instantiate paradise on earth or the City of God. Fukuyama does not simply white wash the real and ongoing problems of the world, which is the Derridean accusation. Rather, Fukuyama’s vision of the fall of communism is akin to Xenophon’s memorable exclamation, when he and the Ten Thousand finally escape Persia after the death of their employer. “The sea, the sea!” he cries. It was a moment of exquisite triumph and joy for Xenophon and his fellow Hellenes, but it was a joy that could not forget that only half the Hellenica was written, that, though they had escaped Persia, they had not yet reached Greece.
After reading Specters of Marx, I think the book is - well, “out of joint.” It is a rare work that can employ so much cleverness to say so little. Derrida goes from an extended poetic elucidation of the meaning of ghosts and responsibility, to a critique of Francis Fukuyama, to an application of “hauntology” to the 1990s world. Yet, when I looked for Marxist doctrines or even clear positions, rarely did I find anything. As thoroughly impressed as I was by the sorts of poetic connections he could make, his method seemed designed to avoid saying anything concrete. Derrida is no “orthodox” Marxist, as any Marxist knows. He does not accept any doctrine held by Marx that I could see; likewise, he abandons much of the Marxist tradition. He does not even seem to retain dialectic materialism, the method by which Lukács defined orthodox Marxism.
So what is the Marxist content in Derrida? Short answer: the spirit of Marxism. What is the spirit of Marxism? We must plod through half the book before he properly says, and even then we are disappointed. The Marxist spirit is, first and foremost, a questioning stance. Not only that, but a “certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation” that one can be liberated from dogmatics and from messianism itself (111). As definitions go, even this is rather vague. What of class consciousness, history, dialectal materialism? Derrida throws them all out the window. The sudden, unforeseeable collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and Russia necessitated the development of new concepts, concepts that “exceed[ed] both the traditional givens of the Marxist discourse and those of the liberal discourse opposed to it” (88). But Derrida refuses to say exactly what the new discourse must be, beyond the vague hints he throws out. To be “properly revolutionary” is only when an “unleashed overflowing” occurs “at the moment when all the joints give way between form and content” (144). Derrida makes - or tries to make - a virtue of this endless delay of meaning. His project is explicit. He is not here to “propose a scholarly, philosophical discourse” (63), he says, but to articulate “a responsibility,” to submit for discussion several hypotheses on the nature of this responsibility “(64).
Derrida’s political project is quite clear, and to get a handle on what he’s attempting to do, I found it useful to orientate myself by considering what he considered wrong with the world today. Ten “plagues” mark the “new world dis-order.”
(1) There is unemployment.
(2) The massive exclusion of the homeless in democratic life.
(3) The ruthless economic war between various world powers.
(4) The inability to master the contradictions of the free market, such as interventionist bidding wars (which takes the “free” away from market).
(5) & (6) There is the aggravation of foreign debt - financial debt rather than moral debt - and the rise of the arms industry.
(7) There is the spread of nuclear weapons.
(8), (9), (10) There are inter-ethnic wars based on the model of the nation-state, capitalist phantom-states of the mafia and drug cartels, and the problems in international law and its institutions.
Twenty years later we might frame some of these problems differently but, all in all, I have little problem granting the significance of the global issues Derrida witnesses. Nonetheless, I do have trouble seeing how unveiling these issues is a specific virtue of Derrida’s unusual method, and how they cannot adequately be handled through the more intuitive discourses of human rights and equality, the foundations of liberal democracy. Can Derrida, having emptied much of Marxism of its traditional content, really just mean by “Marxism” a resistance to complacency with the status quo? If so, then many people can be considered Marxists, including Derrida’s main target, Francis Fukuyama. Without denying the significance of any of his “ten plagues,” what exactly is Derrida after? His “revolution” is no revolution at all, not in the way old Marxists understood the term. He claims that deconstructionism is a radicalization of the spirit of Marx, that spirit of critique, but his points are nearly all destructive/deconstructive rather than positive.
Some clear claims shine through his verbiage. He does not think Marxism should dissociate itself from teleology, as the Frankfurt School accomplished with its turn to cultural critique. (Although Derrida seems to offer a teleology without a telos, a claim which I, alas, cannot distinguish from nonsense.) He is also against all anti-Marxist interpretations of Marx which offer their own emancipatory eschatologies on the basis of metaphysical or onto-theological content that is itself deconstructible (115). He also believes that that we should never ignore Marx’s injunction to act, to change the world (38). This point exemplifies Derrida’s peculiarity. Under Derrida, what does the act entail? Not revolution or class consciousness - that’s the body of Marx, the substance, and nowadays it’s the spirit that’s important, the insubstantial, the hauntological. Let Casper say “boo” to capitalism and liberal democracy, but do not let him throw up a barricade, lest he sully his hands with corporeality!
What Casper may say, though, is of higher importance. Derrida’s long teasing out of the meanings in Marx’s specters, entwining it with the analysis of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the debts and responsibility of the past present and the present future: all these mask the fact that Derrida has changed the locus of the Marxist act from the action to the per formative utterance. The significant act is the speech act. “Conjuration” plays a key role in hauntology, for it is vitally connected to the performative. All at once and the same time, “conjuration” is a conspiracy of those who promise solemnly (50), a magical incantation to evoke (50), the magical exorcism (“I abjure thee, foul shade!”) expelling unwanted revenants and ghosts (58).
Derrida means to criticize the enemies of Marx who seeks to conjure away the spirit of the old German, but Derrida himself re-conjures that spirit into being. Derrida is the master of the occult act, a magician, a word which has the same root as grammarian, from gramarie (Old English) and gramaire (Old French). By knowing the words, words without finalizable content, by knowing the grammar of conjuration, Derrida can invoke new shades meant to haunt us. But what he invokes is only the pale shade(s) of something that once belonged to a body robust. To link the act to the performative is the act of someone determined to live on the margins. Magicians are never kings. They cannot rule. Fecklessly do they shout from the unstable and marginal spaces, feeling superior all the while. At the dominant discourses do they snipe, mouthing their incantations, but they do not -- cannot! - substitute that discourse with one of their own. How may the magicians invoke the spirit of critique, when it would be themselves they are critiquing? Derrida might sneer at what he denounces, but he cannot live without it. He privileges conjuration because it avowedly takes of responsibility, “commit[s] oneself in a per formative fashion” (63-4), but what a weak thing this “commitment” is when we compare it to what a more vulgar Marxism meant by a committed intellectual.
Derrida’s ten plagues are quite real. Yet his basic method seems parasitic upon the “dominant discourse” and “incontestable self-evidence” of capitalist liberal democracy. I do not see the purpose of it, unless there is value in obscurantism and irrationalism. Derrida’s own self-confident assertions trumpeting the value of his method and deriding human rights and equality fail to ring true. Let him speak (perform) in his own words:
For it must be cried out, at a time when some [e.g. Francis Fukuyama] have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity. . . No degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth. (106) (Italics mine.)
The rhetoric, of course, is quite powerful. Nonetheless, such a passage as this is the rhetoric of the huckster. Can a philosopher of such cleverness really speak of “absolute figures” with a straight face, given how drastically the current human populations so many previous generations combined? Even if the sum of evil per individual is less now than in ambiguity, for example, in absolute terms the sum of evil would obviously still be more. It seems incredible to me that someone like Derrida could be guilty of such blatantly faulty statistical thinking. The terms Derrida uses to critique liberal democracy are also significant. Violence, for example. Yet it was Hobbes, the founder of the modern natural rights teaching, the philosopher for the bourgeois, who made the elimination of violence a central issue to his philosophy. Why not the ghost of Hobbes, instead of the ghost of Marx? Similarly for the other terms Derrida privileges. Many of them were not valued in ambiguity or the medieval world; their valuation is the product of the trans-valuation of all values that modernity has undertaken (and which Nietzsche wanted to trans-value himself). The “spirit of Marx,” which works quite well against the inequalities created by capitalism, is nonetheless based on a series of values at the core of the liberal tradition. When Derrida claims, for example, that Fukuyama is haunted by Marx, why not simply go further back in history - and suggest that Marx is haunted by liberalism?
Derrida’s immense self-confidence and cleverness mask his tone of complaint when he speaks of Fukuyama in particular. All in all, I believe Derrida says many true things of Fukuyama’s book - Fukuyama is no weighty philosopher. He speaks merely as a political scientist informed by political philosophy. His “end of” philosophy and theory of the Last Man was, as Derrida rightly pointed out, sounded by Marxists since the 1950s. With this in mind, we might forgive Derrida’s exasperation. Fukuyama lucked into the kairos of the moment, the euphoria of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. His book was undoubtedly timely. Here, though, we might see the subversion of Derrida’s method. Of timeliness he makes a vice, and of untimeliness he makes a virtue. Specters of Marx is an untimely book, speaking at a moment of great triumph for capitalist liberal democracy; “the time is out of joint” for a book like Derrida’s, which somehow makes it in joint. The timeliness of the untimely!
Fukuyama’s own success, claims Derrida, lies in how well he waffles between empirical history (“liberal democracy has won, just look!”) and ignoring that empirical history (“there’s lots of bad tidings in the current world”) to hold up an ideal version of liberal democracy. Mere empirical history doesn’t refute the ideal orientation of a “greater part” of humanity to liberal democracy (71). Yet I do not know if Derrida’s brand of teleology without a telos is any less waffle-esque. And I really don’t know if, in the end, Derrida really says anything of value. He says that the problematic of Marxism live on, but not the dogmatics of Marxist “orthodoxy.” It does not seem to me that Marx has a monopoly on those problematic, however. The liberal tradition is not wholly compatible with capitalism, of course, the mutual tension between those two paired discourses has, at least in the United States, accomplished many “Marxist” goals in the twentieth century. The radicalization of Marxism by Derrida seems quite unnecessary.
Derrida, it seems, is haunted by the appearance, the manifestation, the triumph in the west of John Locke and Adam Smith. Fukuyama dares what Derrida dares not: an explanation of this triumph. His almost exultant optimism is mistaken in the same way that the optimism of the Enlightenment was mistaken by the critics of the Enlightenment: the “messianic eschatology” was never meant to instantiate paradise on earth or the City of God. Fukuyama does not simply white wash the real and ongoing problems of the world, which is the Derridean accusation. Rather, Fukuyama’s vision of the fall of communism is akin to Xenophon’s memorable exclamation, when he and the Ten Thousand finally escape Persia after the death of their employer. “The sea, the sea!” he cries. It was a moment of exquisite triumph and joy for Xenophon and his fellow Hellenes, but it was a joy that could not forget that only half the Hellenica was written, that, though they had escaped Persia, they had not yet reached Greece.