What do you think?
Rate this book
Specters of Marx
Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values. In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, 'Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, 'Specters of Marx', delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.
258 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
238 people are currently reading
8852 people want to read
About the author
Jacques Derrida
650 books1,792 followersJacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 155 reviews
April 6, 2025
The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the horned gate.
- Sweeney Among the Nightingales
You know, socialism (unlike Marxism) is not a parasitical invader to free market society: it is a symbiotic friend to its host, imparting warm human value to a money-mad world.
Just as the Franciscans impart fallible human life into the infallible Church! And this, I believe, is Derrida's point here.
This one was a DNF. But NOT a disappointed or angry DNF.
An appreciative but elegiacally regretful DNF, like Orpheus ultimately, in the labyrinthine entrails of Hades, bidding sad farewell to his ever-beloved Eurydice.
Yes, I left Eurydice, and Jacques Derrida, struggling with their grief as they commenced to wrestle once more with their demons, and so started the interminable wending of my way back to the glad light of day.
And to read Derrida is always so monumentally and fiendishly difficult - even MORE difficult, perhaps, than parsing Virgil’s dense Latin in my sophomore college year, as he sang of Eurydice’s troubled and helpless paramour, lost in love!
I rarely make the effort any more. You can’t teach an old dog to relearn even his OLD tricks.
And now I’m leaving Derrida behind for the same reasons.
But for all my gripes about Derrida’s sententious and prolix density, when he waxes lyrical he is wonderful - and affectively non pareil!
For his anxious and turbulent emotions are constantly breaking the boundaries of concealment Open. And to do that, in his late writings, he relies heavily on story and metaphor.
At the opening of this hugely contentious work, to give an example, he salutes an aged and balefully obsolete Paul Valery’s sunset words on the climacteric collapse of all real value in the West, after WWI - and the effect is simply marvellous.
I have to agree with Jonfaith in his review: the opening is remarkably convicting, but after that... c’mon! You’ve got to come up for air and at least grapple with mainstream journalistic opinion, some of the time.
You can’t live in isolation.
Having said that, though, Jacques, I must here offer my fond farewells to you and to any hope of progressing significantly through this remarkable book of yours, though its purple passages may and do, thankfully, abound.
Because when you write with a melancholy and lyrical passion, you are without peer...
You write here of our Mourning.
How right you are! For we have, in these happy days (in Beckett’s oblique sense) succeeded only in throwing out the adorable baby of high and shiningly altruistic Socialist idéals with the filthy Stalinist bath water.
T.S. Eliot is right, too, in the poetry I quoted at the beginning of this review.
For now Sweeney squats in the doorway and guards the (24-hour) Free Market Throne Room from us square pegs...
Some of us are getting richer and more vacantly comfortable in our bustling modern Agora, but - you know what? - we’re not getting any happier.
For the Fall of Totalitarianism’s plenitude has bequeathed us but one dubious legacy: one very, very expensive “Receipt for Deceipt.”
What are we spending buckets of money on these days? Big Bright Green Pleasure Machines that, quite frankly, bore us to tears and get busted in no time? Is Derrida right? Is this the end of the road?
Well, you know, it IS possible to take a subjectively stated, strongly ethical POV - we are, after all, trying to COMMUNICATE with each other - without conceding defeat to Nothingness right from the outset.
Sure, our opinions may mean nothing to many of our economic superiors, and that’s unavoidable.
But the only way, Monsieur Derrida, that you could have made a clear point in this book is by putting your heart into achieving clarity. AND more solidity. For with the faithful there’s ALWAYS hope.
And do you know, Jacques, reading this book today in this fear-crazed, heavily metalled political climate of ours - the weary dawn of the second millenium’s third decade - I can only turn to wave goodbye as T.S. Eliot languorously did in “The Boston Evening Transcript,” to his ethical doppelgänger, la Rochefoucauld, and say (in my own skewed words):
“God’s in His Heaven, and all’s Wrong with the World!”
And the courage of our convictions will clarify our point.
If there are ears to hear.
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the horned gate.
- Sweeney Among the Nightingales
You know, socialism (unlike Marxism) is not a parasitical invader to free market society: it is a symbiotic friend to its host, imparting warm human value to a money-mad world.
Just as the Franciscans impart fallible human life into the infallible Church! And this, I believe, is Derrida's point here.
This one was a DNF. But NOT a disappointed or angry DNF.
An appreciative but elegiacally regretful DNF, like Orpheus ultimately, in the labyrinthine entrails of Hades, bidding sad farewell to his ever-beloved Eurydice.
Yes, I left Eurydice, and Jacques Derrida, struggling with their grief as they commenced to wrestle once more with their demons, and so started the interminable wending of my way back to the glad light of day.
And to read Derrida is always so monumentally and fiendishly difficult - even MORE difficult, perhaps, than parsing Virgil’s dense Latin in my sophomore college year, as he sang of Eurydice’s troubled and helpless paramour, lost in love!
I rarely make the effort any more. You can’t teach an old dog to relearn even his OLD tricks.
And now I’m leaving Derrida behind for the same reasons.
But for all my gripes about Derrida’s sententious and prolix density, when he waxes lyrical he is wonderful - and affectively non pareil!
For his anxious and turbulent emotions are constantly breaking the boundaries of concealment Open. And to do that, in his late writings, he relies heavily on story and metaphor.
At the opening of this hugely contentious work, to give an example, he salutes an aged and balefully obsolete Paul Valery’s sunset words on the climacteric collapse of all real value in the West, after WWI - and the effect is simply marvellous.
I have to agree with Jonfaith in his review: the opening is remarkably convicting, but after that... c’mon! You’ve got to come up for air and at least grapple with mainstream journalistic opinion, some of the time.
You can’t live in isolation.
Having said that, though, Jacques, I must here offer my fond farewells to you and to any hope of progressing significantly through this remarkable book of yours, though its purple passages may and do, thankfully, abound.
Because when you write with a melancholy and lyrical passion, you are without peer...
You write here of our Mourning.
How right you are! For we have, in these happy days (in Beckett’s oblique sense) succeeded only in throwing out the adorable baby of high and shiningly altruistic Socialist idéals with the filthy Stalinist bath water.
T.S. Eliot is right, too, in the poetry I quoted at the beginning of this review.
For now Sweeney squats in the doorway and guards the (24-hour) Free Market Throne Room from us square pegs...
Some of us are getting richer and more vacantly comfortable in our bustling modern Agora, but - you know what? - we’re not getting any happier.
For the Fall of Totalitarianism’s plenitude has bequeathed us but one dubious legacy: one very, very expensive “Receipt for Deceipt.”
What are we spending buckets of money on these days? Big Bright Green Pleasure Machines that, quite frankly, bore us to tears and get busted in no time? Is Derrida right? Is this the end of the road?
Well, you know, it IS possible to take a subjectively stated, strongly ethical POV - we are, after all, trying to COMMUNICATE with each other - without conceding defeat to Nothingness right from the outset.
Sure, our opinions may mean nothing to many of our economic superiors, and that’s unavoidable.
But the only way, Monsieur Derrida, that you could have made a clear point in this book is by putting your heart into achieving clarity. AND more solidity. For with the faithful there’s ALWAYS hope.
And do you know, Jacques, reading this book today in this fear-crazed, heavily metalled political climate of ours - the weary dawn of the second millenium’s third decade - I can only turn to wave goodbye as T.S. Eliot languorously did in “The Boston Evening Transcript,” to his ethical doppelgänger, la Rochefoucauld, and say (in my own skewed words):
“God’s in His Heaven, and all’s Wrong with the World!”
And the courage of our convictions will clarify our point.
If there are ears to hear.
July 4, 2015
Certain Soviet philosophers told me in Moscow a few years ago: the best translation of perestroika was still "deconstruction."
Specters of Marx sustains five star prose and luminous ideas. Unfortunately i became lost along the way. maybe my effort slipped. The opening program is truly delightful, Hamlet and The Manifesto amble about, offering a gleaming tribute to Marx always a heady feat, and one Derrida performs with panache.
The subsequent sections are a somewhat more mixed bag. Derrida scoffs at the idea that only after the Soviet collapse is it proper to recognize Marx's greatness. Derrida links Marx's use of ghosts and spirits to a reading of Hamlet. Instead Derrida places Marx in that metaphysical caravan between presence and Otherness where each theorist struggles to be outside and after, but is bound to such all the same.
Francis Fukuyama's The End of History And The Last man is then challenged by Derrida and delightfully ripped to shreds. Neo-liberal military humanism often is found hollow upon inspection. Derrida then broaches the relationship between Marx and fellow New Hegealian Max Stirner. What follows was beyond me.
Derrida is ever playful when discussing the ghostly baggage of Marx, addressing the idea of a "hauntology" to depict the uncanny alienation present in our being. there are also grim and yet hopeful dimensions as well. There is a frequent use of Marcellus imploring to Horatio: "Thou are a Scholar, speak to it, Horatio." This strikes me personally as call to the stage of our present vanguard: Badiou, Žižek and Negri/Hardt amongst others.
Specters of Marx sustains five star prose and luminous ideas. Unfortunately i became lost along the way. maybe my effort slipped. The opening program is truly delightful, Hamlet and The Manifesto amble about, offering a gleaming tribute to Marx always a heady feat, and one Derrida performs with panache.
The subsequent sections are a somewhat more mixed bag. Derrida scoffs at the idea that only after the Soviet collapse is it proper to recognize Marx's greatness. Derrida links Marx's use of ghosts and spirits to a reading of Hamlet. Instead Derrida places Marx in that metaphysical caravan between presence and Otherness where each theorist struggles to be outside and after, but is bound to such all the same.
Francis Fukuyama's The End of History And The Last man is then challenged by Derrida and delightfully ripped to shreds. Neo-liberal military humanism often is found hollow upon inspection. Derrida then broaches the relationship between Marx and fellow New Hegealian Max Stirner. What follows was beyond me.
Derrida is ever playful when discussing the ghostly baggage of Marx, addressing the idea of a "hauntology" to depict the uncanny alienation present in our being. there are also grim and yet hopeful dimensions as well. There is a frequent use of Marcellus imploring to Horatio: "Thou are a Scholar, speak to it, Horatio." This strikes me personally as call to the stage of our present vanguard: Badiou, Žižek and Negri/Hardt amongst others.
December 28, 2014
A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism – so begins the Communist Manifesto, and Derrida takes that line as the basis of his deconstruction of Marxism. One of the spectres used here to help make sense of Marx is Hamlet’s ghost. And a lot of time is spent discussing Hamlet, much more than I would have expected.
Now, I’ve been hearing a lot about this book lately, and so decided it was important to read. Earlier in the year I read ‘Haunting the Knowledge Economy’ – a terribly interesting book, but not one I found time to review at the time and now it seems too late. Still, it made me curious about this book. Like this book, it is framed around a series of ghosts – from Dickens this time and his Christmas Carol. The idea of certain ideas haunting us, coming back in various guises and always returning – that they can’t really be ghosts, in a sense, without a kind of repetition, is an interesting and structuring idea here. But I think Derrida really did not mean for ‘hauntology’ to become a standard means of criticism, but rather one that was particularly apt for Marx. I could be wrong, of course, as it does seem to be used much more widely in post-modernist circles, but I’m not convinced it out to be.
What is also interesting is how Derrida uses the idea of ghosts to explain Marx’s notion of commodities – not commodities as use values, but rather commodities as exchange values, where exchange can only make sense on the basis of a ghostly third that stands in place of this ‘value’ – what we call money, that most ghostly and insubstantial of things.
No matter how often Marx has been killed, cast into the dustbin of history, proven wrong by his own predictions, his ghost seems to return yet again to haunt us. As does our debt to him. This book is not about praising Marx, or even of burying him. This is really about exploring the debt we owe and how best to live with the various ghosts of Marx that continue to haunt us.
Now, I’ve been hearing a lot about this book lately, and so decided it was important to read. Earlier in the year I read ‘Haunting the Knowledge Economy’ – a terribly interesting book, but not one I found time to review at the time and now it seems too late. Still, it made me curious about this book. Like this book, it is framed around a series of ghosts – from Dickens this time and his Christmas Carol. The idea of certain ideas haunting us, coming back in various guises and always returning – that they can’t really be ghosts, in a sense, without a kind of repetition, is an interesting and structuring idea here. But I think Derrida really did not mean for ‘hauntology’ to become a standard means of criticism, but rather one that was particularly apt for Marx. I could be wrong, of course, as it does seem to be used much more widely in post-modernist circles, but I’m not convinced it out to be.
What is also interesting is how Derrida uses the idea of ghosts to explain Marx’s notion of commodities – not commodities as use values, but rather commodities as exchange values, where exchange can only make sense on the basis of a ghostly third that stands in place of this ‘value’ – what we call money, that most ghostly and insubstantial of things.
No matter how often Marx has been killed, cast into the dustbin of history, proven wrong by his own predictions, his ghost seems to return yet again to haunt us. As does our debt to him. This book is not about praising Marx, or even of burying him. This is really about exploring the debt we owe and how best to live with the various ghosts of Marx that continue to haunt us.
August 2, 2020
This book - this book - remains an inspiration. It also conveys how much we have lost from academic life in the last thirty years.
Specters of Marx was based in two lectures delivered by Derrida on April 22 and April 23, 1993, at the University of California, Riverside.
We need to pause at this point. How long has it been since you attended a public lecture that didn't just convey empirical results or some interesting finds from fieldwork, but delivered a shattering tear in epistemology?
Do we have space for these types of lectures anymore? Do we have the literacy? The answer to both these questions is probably in the negative.
This book is a different Derrida. There were always many Derridas, just like there were - and are - many versions of Karl Marx. And that is the point of this book. The ghosts of Marx speak to us today. We need to speak with them if we are going to survive.
Derrida was having personal conversations with Althusser at the time of writing these lectures. The impact of those conversations are seen in this book. Base and superstructure, economic determinism and the political economy are parked - just out of sight. Instead, intricate conversations about dead and living people, dead and living ideas, are offered. Althusser's fingerprints leave a trace on these pages.
This is a rich book. A powerful book. I am working on four different projects at the moment, and this book will be cited in all of them. That is its power and depth.
But this books serves as a potent reminder for those who mention Derrida or deconstruction and have never read him or his theories. Deconstruction is not analysis. Deconstruction is not interpretation. Also, Derrida was - and is - much more than deconstruction. Marx was - and is - much more than the Communist Manifesto. Read this book and grasp the diversity and complexity of ideas. And also what we have lost from academic life.
But as this book shows, from a loss - from a death - we have specters that are waiting to speak with us. Our task is to do the reading, thinking and writing to translate the past into the present - with meaning.
Specters of Marx was based in two lectures delivered by Derrida on April 22 and April 23, 1993, at the University of California, Riverside.
We need to pause at this point. How long has it been since you attended a public lecture that didn't just convey empirical results or some interesting finds from fieldwork, but delivered a shattering tear in epistemology?
Do we have space for these types of lectures anymore? Do we have the literacy? The answer to both these questions is probably in the negative.
This book is a different Derrida. There were always many Derridas, just like there were - and are - many versions of Karl Marx. And that is the point of this book. The ghosts of Marx speak to us today. We need to speak with them if we are going to survive.
Derrida was having personal conversations with Althusser at the time of writing these lectures. The impact of those conversations are seen in this book. Base and superstructure, economic determinism and the political economy are parked - just out of sight. Instead, intricate conversations about dead and living people, dead and living ideas, are offered. Althusser's fingerprints leave a trace on these pages.
This is a rich book. A powerful book. I am working on four different projects at the moment, and this book will be cited in all of them. That is its power and depth.
But this books serves as a potent reminder for those who mention Derrida or deconstruction and have never read him or his theories. Deconstruction is not analysis. Deconstruction is not interpretation. Also, Derrida was - and is - much more than deconstruction. Marx was - and is - much more than the Communist Manifesto. Read this book and grasp the diversity and complexity of ideas. And also what we have lost from academic life.
But as this book shows, from a loss - from a death - we have specters that are waiting to speak with us. Our task is to do the reading, thinking and writing to translate the past into the present - with meaning.
July 24, 2011
OK, I accept that having Derrida on a list is close to showing off – only because he has a reputation as such a 'difficult' writer, and here Derrida, the BIG name of deconstructionism turns his eye on Marx, the BIG name of 20th century politics to argue that we can't understand the current world without Marx, and we can't fix it without Marx. I'm not sure what happened in the 1990s but a whole bunch of philosophers came out of the woodwork to proclaim a form of Marxism: Derrida's is among the most exciting, the most challenging, and in the long run I suspect among the most important. It's an extremely demanding book, read it slowly and soak it up. If you don't understand his references, put the book down and find out what he's on about. It took two times through before I felt like I was getting it. It was worth it.
December 2, 2015
writing lots and saying little
Read
June 21, 2020Feels a bit disingenuous to write a review proper of a book one dropped halfway half a year ago but I wanted to put into words a thought that's been bothering me for quite a while now and here seemed the best place. For a long time I felt defeated over having not properly finished this landmark work of a theorization of justice, but the more I consider it I find this to actually be a major issue. More and more I questioned why Derrida would choose to make his book on Marx to be about "justice"? Upon consideration I find it symptomatic of how Marx now appears in leftist academia - as a symbol, or ghost, of justice. As a heurmenetican of suspicion, but bereft of his actual theory.
But Marx wasn't a theoretician of justice; be it gender, racial, or economic. Marx's lifework was a systematic critique of capital. He produced a material theory that (while we today should do away with the notion of a singular Marxism) is able to be analysed, reapplied, corrected and reconsidered in a manner that I consider fit to be called 'scientific'.
And precisely because we can think of Marx's body of work as formulating a science we can overcome him, he can become legacy and properly buried should a better theory of capitalism appear. But currently he's precisely just a ghost, an mere hollow thing without substance. An object of remembrance, but taboo to actually disturb.
But Marx wasn't a theoretician of justice; be it gender, racial, or economic. Marx's lifework was a systematic critique of capital. He produced a material theory that (while we today should do away with the notion of a singular Marxism) is able to be analysed, reapplied, corrected and reconsidered in a manner that I consider fit to be called 'scientific'.
And precisely because we can think of Marx's body of work as formulating a science we can overcome him, he can become legacy and properly buried should a better theory of capitalism appear. But currently he's precisely just a ghost, an mere hollow thing without substance. An object of remembrance, but taboo to actually disturb.
March 18, 2015
we see here, after tearing into fukuyama, by way of kojeve, by way of Shakespeare, that there is a sense of justice that is indeconstructible. that's damned interesting.
May 8, 2012
I don't know if I would call this a profound book about Marx, but that's not to say that there is no profundity to be found here. Ultimately, this work may be more revealing about its own author, but Derrida is himself a worthy subject.
Based on a plenary address Derrida gave at a UC Riverside conference entitled “Whither Marxism?” in 1993, Derrida performs close-readings of passages from three of Marx's texts; “The German Ideology,” “Capital, Volume 1,” and the Manifesto. He relates Marx's writings to those of Shakespeare, particularly in their shared enthusiasm for super-natural imagery. Both writers' pages are filled with mentions of ghosts and specters. One can quickly imagine why ghosts would intrigue Derrida- neither fully alive nor dead, they problematize our bifurcation of life and death. This work, like almost all of Derrida's oeuvre, is ultimately most concerned with how to acknowledge the Other in its full otherness, the ultimate “other” being the ghost, being the dead that haunt us.
In his preface, Derrida asks what it is to “learn to live.” One cannot, surely, learn it simply on one's own, but to learn to live from the dictations of an absolutely present other sounds like slavery. To learn, then, is to interpret, to take from the other's example and make such practice one's own. The other, then, can only be freeing (and free) if it remains not entirely present. And one can only learn to live as a semi-presence because learning to live is learning to die. To learn to live (die) we must learn to live with ghosts, with the past that we will become in the future. To be free, to be just to ourselves (in the future), we must be just to those who have died, arrived at our future, in the past.
Derrida says that in discussing Marx, Marxism, and the Communist movement, we must think of ourselves as sifting through an inheritance. We are discovering what Marx has left for us. An inheritance becomes “one” only by acknowledging itself as a collection of disparate elements. Derrida celebrates Marx for his understanding of his future, his acknowledgment that his thought would not survive time without transformation. Almost a kind of historical perspectivalist, Marx knew his thought would have to transform and disperse with different economic-historical changes. He knew, as Derrida puts it, that his death would disperse his identity, making him both less and more than one, a swirl of ghosts, haunting different historical and social situations. The task of discovering our inheritance from Marx then, is to transform Marx's legacy through interpretation.
Jumping into his lecture, Derrida notes the specters that inaugurate both the Manifesto and “Hamlet”. The specter is, of course, neither fully present nor absent. It is a presence of absence. Yet, it is an absent “one”. It is not simply death, but the Dead One: a King, or Communism. This is an identity we must take entirely on the word of the ghost. We cannot identity the specter. It proclaims its identity to us (“I am your father's spirit!”).
Through its self-identification, the specter makes the work of morning impossible. Morning both presents the memory of the fallen for reverence, but it is also the act of putting the dead in their place. (“Here, the fallen lie buried! Here they are!”) Morning both recalls and dismisses the dead and death. The specter, through its self-identification, de-territorializes death and life. The dead no longer lie buried. The specter's very self-presentation makes it impossible to locate it in death or life, here or there. The specter thus throws time out of joint, as Shakespeare says. And if the ghost beckons us towards a mission, either avenging a fallen father or mobilizing towards a revolution, can it not be said that we are spurred forward towards the future by the dead, by the past?
The mirror-image of mourning, perhaps a sub-genre of it, is conjuration. The living summons the spirit so as to make it absolutely present so that it can be expelled. This expulsion, however, only results in the ghost's dissipation into a multitude of spirits. (S)He who performs the conjuration, then, becomes all the more haunted.
Derrida goes back to the question of addressing the ghost in its otherness. Here, Derrida's indebtedness to Walter Benjamin is most apparent. To create any kind of justice, Derrida posits, is to attempt to set-right, a concept which is reliant on nostalgia for the past. To make right is to make as once was, as the fallen ideal. Yet, the making right is an event planned for to take place in the future: the messianic. The positing of a future is grounded in nostalgia. Derrida claims, dramatically and persuasively, that the primary purpose of deconstruction is to break down philosophical totalities that block certain types of questioning with answers that thus make it impossible for thought to truly, openly question, and truly wait for the messiah without naming it. To try to recall the past without demanding the future in the present.
Derrida's Marx becomes a (pun-intended) haunting character. He is a man terrified of ghosts. He tries to conjure them so as to do away with these specters and is thus constantly haunted by them, completely possessed by his private battle with these wraiths. Marx is controlled by the dead as all men are, but he is more aware of his war against death. In the first sentence of the Manifesto he summons the specter of communism which is the spirit of both the past (primitive communism) and, for Marx, the future so he can locate it in the present (in Europe). Marx's writings are, for Derrida, the greatest articulation of spectral anxiety of what will come in the future from the past. Marx's work is itself one of gathering an inheritance, an inheritance of history, of the march towards the future, towards death, the ghost world.
In this sense, Derrida will claim Marx as his mirror reflection. Both men are obsessed with ghosts and the messianic which will tear down the veil between life and death. Marx, for Derrida, made the mistake of naming the messianic, as Communism, instead of awaiting the word of the ghost that haunted him. For the messianic promise must remain, for Derrida, promissory, abstract. The promise is always, at most, half-present. It remains spectral and haunting. Even if never fully fulfilled the promise transforms the procedure of thought and life with the possibility of coming into being. The promise, like all specters, puts time out of joint, and we should celebrate it for this.
The communism formulated by Marx, and the Soviet experience it inspired, was motivated by messianic energy, but it tried to deliver the messiah into the realm of being, rather than promise.
From there, all of the points made in the book are fairly trite. Derrida, of course, makes the obvious point that the neo-conservative proclamation of the death of Marxism, he uses Fukuyama as his example, is an attempt to conjure Marx so as to abolish him, and that this is futile. The dispersal of Marx's spirit(s) only creates more Marxism(s). We are as haunted by Marx after the death of the Soviet Union as we ever were.
The book's weakest point is when Derrida tries to offer his own variation on Marxism, the “New International,” a transformation of international law not tied to the notion of the nation-state. Derrida claims it to be inspired by a spirit of Marxism- that of self-critique and re-invention. Unfortunately, what Derrida calls for is basically for rich western people to be, you know, nice and generous to those poor people in the third world. It's all very Bono-esque.
Perhaps Marx was afraid of ghosts, of the indeterminate. Certainly, he was a man who attempted to force certainty onto history. But I think that Derrida was frightened of presence, the very concept he, at times persuasively, argued was an artificial construction. Derrida attempted to conjure away presence. We should remember that he lived and thought in a terrifying age- that of the Cold War, in which there was a palpable sense that the present was the moment of annihilation. Humanity lived a presence of ideological bifurcation that threatened to destroy it, to make the present intolerable, and to destroy the past and the future. Derrida feared his present, and he tried to dissipate it into the past and the future. In this sense, I think he was the premier philosopher of Cold War consciousness.
In the last interview he gave in his life, in 2004, Derrida returned to the concept of “learning to live.” Near death from cancer, he said he was “learning to live finally.” He saw that the generation to come would have to struggle against not a bifurcated power structure, but the single leviathan of berserk western imperialism. In the era of the (ongoing) War on Terror, Arab Spring, and Occupy, I think Derrida would have been on our side.
Based on a plenary address Derrida gave at a UC Riverside conference entitled “Whither Marxism?” in 1993, Derrida performs close-readings of passages from three of Marx's texts; “The German Ideology,” “Capital, Volume 1,” and the Manifesto. He relates Marx's writings to those of Shakespeare, particularly in their shared enthusiasm for super-natural imagery. Both writers' pages are filled with mentions of ghosts and specters. One can quickly imagine why ghosts would intrigue Derrida- neither fully alive nor dead, they problematize our bifurcation of life and death. This work, like almost all of Derrida's oeuvre, is ultimately most concerned with how to acknowledge the Other in its full otherness, the ultimate “other” being the ghost, being the dead that haunt us.
In his preface, Derrida asks what it is to “learn to live.” One cannot, surely, learn it simply on one's own, but to learn to live from the dictations of an absolutely present other sounds like slavery. To learn, then, is to interpret, to take from the other's example and make such practice one's own. The other, then, can only be freeing (and free) if it remains not entirely present. And one can only learn to live as a semi-presence because learning to live is learning to die. To learn to live (die) we must learn to live with ghosts, with the past that we will become in the future. To be free, to be just to ourselves (in the future), we must be just to those who have died, arrived at our future, in the past.
Derrida says that in discussing Marx, Marxism, and the Communist movement, we must think of ourselves as sifting through an inheritance. We are discovering what Marx has left for us. An inheritance becomes “one” only by acknowledging itself as a collection of disparate elements. Derrida celebrates Marx for his understanding of his future, his acknowledgment that his thought would not survive time without transformation. Almost a kind of historical perspectivalist, Marx knew his thought would have to transform and disperse with different economic-historical changes. He knew, as Derrida puts it, that his death would disperse his identity, making him both less and more than one, a swirl of ghosts, haunting different historical and social situations. The task of discovering our inheritance from Marx then, is to transform Marx's legacy through interpretation.
Jumping into his lecture, Derrida notes the specters that inaugurate both the Manifesto and “Hamlet”. The specter is, of course, neither fully present nor absent. It is a presence of absence. Yet, it is an absent “one”. It is not simply death, but the Dead One: a King, or Communism. This is an identity we must take entirely on the word of the ghost. We cannot identity the specter. It proclaims its identity to us (“I am your father's spirit!”).
Through its self-identification, the specter makes the work of morning impossible. Morning both presents the memory of the fallen for reverence, but it is also the act of putting the dead in their place. (“Here, the fallen lie buried! Here they are!”) Morning both recalls and dismisses the dead and death. The specter, through its self-identification, de-territorializes death and life. The dead no longer lie buried. The specter's very self-presentation makes it impossible to locate it in death or life, here or there. The specter thus throws time out of joint, as Shakespeare says. And if the ghost beckons us towards a mission, either avenging a fallen father or mobilizing towards a revolution, can it not be said that we are spurred forward towards the future by the dead, by the past?
The mirror-image of mourning, perhaps a sub-genre of it, is conjuration. The living summons the spirit so as to make it absolutely present so that it can be expelled. This expulsion, however, only results in the ghost's dissipation into a multitude of spirits. (S)He who performs the conjuration, then, becomes all the more haunted.
Derrida goes back to the question of addressing the ghost in its otherness. Here, Derrida's indebtedness to Walter Benjamin is most apparent. To create any kind of justice, Derrida posits, is to attempt to set-right, a concept which is reliant on nostalgia for the past. To make right is to make as once was, as the fallen ideal. Yet, the making right is an event planned for to take place in the future: the messianic. The positing of a future is grounded in nostalgia. Derrida claims, dramatically and persuasively, that the primary purpose of deconstruction is to break down philosophical totalities that block certain types of questioning with answers that thus make it impossible for thought to truly, openly question, and truly wait for the messiah without naming it. To try to recall the past without demanding the future in the present.
Derrida's Marx becomes a (pun-intended) haunting character. He is a man terrified of ghosts. He tries to conjure them so as to do away with these specters and is thus constantly haunted by them, completely possessed by his private battle with these wraiths. Marx is controlled by the dead as all men are, but he is more aware of his war against death. In the first sentence of the Manifesto he summons the specter of communism which is the spirit of both the past (primitive communism) and, for Marx, the future so he can locate it in the present (in Europe). Marx's writings are, for Derrida, the greatest articulation of spectral anxiety of what will come in the future from the past. Marx's work is itself one of gathering an inheritance, an inheritance of history, of the march towards the future, towards death, the ghost world.
In this sense, Derrida will claim Marx as his mirror reflection. Both men are obsessed with ghosts and the messianic which will tear down the veil between life and death. Marx, for Derrida, made the mistake of naming the messianic, as Communism, instead of awaiting the word of the ghost that haunted him. For the messianic promise must remain, for Derrida, promissory, abstract. The promise is always, at most, half-present. It remains spectral and haunting. Even if never fully fulfilled the promise transforms the procedure of thought and life with the possibility of coming into being. The promise, like all specters, puts time out of joint, and we should celebrate it for this.
The communism formulated by Marx, and the Soviet experience it inspired, was motivated by messianic energy, but it tried to deliver the messiah into the realm of being, rather than promise.
From there, all of the points made in the book are fairly trite. Derrida, of course, makes the obvious point that the neo-conservative proclamation of the death of Marxism, he uses Fukuyama as his example, is an attempt to conjure Marx so as to abolish him, and that this is futile. The dispersal of Marx's spirit(s) only creates more Marxism(s). We are as haunted by Marx after the death of the Soviet Union as we ever were.
The book's weakest point is when Derrida tries to offer his own variation on Marxism, the “New International,” a transformation of international law not tied to the notion of the nation-state. Derrida claims it to be inspired by a spirit of Marxism- that of self-critique and re-invention. Unfortunately, what Derrida calls for is basically for rich western people to be, you know, nice and generous to those poor people in the third world. It's all very Bono-esque.
Perhaps Marx was afraid of ghosts, of the indeterminate. Certainly, he was a man who attempted to force certainty onto history. But I think that Derrida was frightened of presence, the very concept he, at times persuasively, argued was an artificial construction. Derrida attempted to conjure away presence. We should remember that he lived and thought in a terrifying age- that of the Cold War, in which there was a palpable sense that the present was the moment of annihilation. Humanity lived a presence of ideological bifurcation that threatened to destroy it, to make the present intolerable, and to destroy the past and the future. Derrida feared his present, and he tried to dissipate it into the past and the future. In this sense, I think he was the premier philosopher of Cold War consciousness.
In the last interview he gave in his life, in 2004, Derrida returned to the concept of “learning to live.” Near death from cancer, he said he was “learning to live finally.” He saw that the generation to come would have to struggle against not a bifurcated power structure, but the single leviathan of berserk western imperialism. In the era of the (ongoing) War on Terror, Arab Spring, and Occupy, I think Derrida would have been on our side.
August 17, 2010
I mostly concur with this review.
If, as one of the reviewers below notes, Specters of Marx concerns methodology (or deconstruction as a whole) rather than Marx per se (or, less importantly, Fukuyama [as easy a target here as he was for Zizek:]), then we have to wonder what it does at all? While Derrida explains, several times, that he wants to hold out the Messianic hope of what he might have called a 'Marxism worthy of the name' (or indeed a Marxism beyond the name of Marx], and that he does not mean to dismiss the importance of political action, I can't help but feel that he's talking about Marx not because of his political content but simply because Marx is there for the taking, like anyone else.
Why even talk about Marx (etc) if Derrida speaks repeatedly of "a certain Marx"? Derrida takes Marx to task for wanting to get at the ghostless real, but Marx's hope for a pure presence is the hope of just about any thinker. If Marx falls down, then so does [name your thinker:]: one text is as good another, because all of them speak the same truth of deconstruction.
We get, via Marx, via Hamlet, via Blanchot, via Stirner, via, at times, the gormless Fukuyama, much of the same, if we've been reading much Derrida: he explains, again and again, the gift and the host and responsible decision and justice and the to-come and a nonteleological eschatology (what I've elsewhere called "an Apocalypse without an Eschaton"), all of which allow something new to perhaps enter the world.
It thus might as well have been called "Specters of [Your Name Here:]."
It's not useless of course. The line bewteen disembodied spirit (think "spirit of the age") and specter (which has a spectral body, a bodiless body) should be remembered and worked over, not least of all because it conjures the best bit, "hauntology" (pronounced in French like "ontologie"). The review above rightly notes the superiority of this concept to "trace" or "difference" because it gives a clear (kind of) presence to what is (only purportedly) absent from the (supposedly) present-at-hand signifier. The trace also has a (spectral) body.
For my purposes, I'm interested in the links between Derrida on the "Gift" and the Christian notion of "grace," opposed to the Law, which is necessarily, I believe, predicated on an anti-Jewish logic of supersession. It would be especially productive to think this with Derrida's (justifiable) sneering at Fukuyama for bringing the neoliberal "good news."
If, as one of the reviewers below notes, Specters of Marx concerns methodology (or deconstruction as a whole) rather than Marx per se (or, less importantly, Fukuyama [as easy a target here as he was for Zizek:]), then we have to wonder what it does at all? While Derrida explains, several times, that he wants to hold out the Messianic hope of what he might have called a 'Marxism worthy of the name' (or indeed a Marxism beyond the name of Marx], and that he does not mean to dismiss the importance of political action, I can't help but feel that he's talking about Marx not because of his political content but simply because Marx is there for the taking, like anyone else.
Why even talk about Marx (etc) if Derrida speaks repeatedly of "a certain Marx"? Derrida takes Marx to task for wanting to get at the ghostless real, but Marx's hope for a pure presence is the hope of just about any thinker. If Marx falls down, then so does [name your thinker:]: one text is as good another, because all of them speak the same truth of deconstruction.
We get, via Marx, via Hamlet, via Blanchot, via Stirner, via, at times, the gormless Fukuyama, much of the same, if we've been reading much Derrida: he explains, again and again, the gift and the host and responsible decision and justice and the to-come and a nonteleological eschatology (what I've elsewhere called "an Apocalypse without an Eschaton"), all of which allow something new to perhaps enter the world.
It thus might as well have been called "Specters of [Your Name Here:]."
It's not useless of course. The line bewteen disembodied spirit (think "spirit of the age") and specter (which has a spectral body, a bodiless body) should be remembered and worked over, not least of all because it conjures the best bit, "hauntology" (pronounced in French like "ontologie"). The review above rightly notes the superiority of this concept to "trace" or "difference" because it gives a clear (kind of) presence to what is (only purportedly) absent from the (supposedly) present-at-hand signifier. The trace also has a (spectral) body.
For my purposes, I'm interested in the links between Derrida on the "Gift" and the Christian notion of "grace," opposed to the Law, which is necessarily, I believe, predicated on an anti-Jewish logic of supersession. It would be especially productive to think this with Derrida's (justifiable) sneering at Fukuyama for bringing the neoliberal "good news."
Read
March 21, 2020Yeah this needs several rereads.
Read
February 22, 2025Świetne, nic nie zrozumiałam.
October 4, 2017
I like to think of this book as a sandwich. The bread: extremely thick slices of abstruse and solipsistic pontification inspired, vaguely, by the word 'specter', with random words from Greek, French, Latin, and German sprinkled throughout like seeds. The filling: some fairly lucid thoughts on the state of capitalism at the time and why Fukuyama was wrong about it being "the end of history". The filling is great, but you first have to wade through many pages in which Derrida explores every possible meaning of the quote "the time is out of joint" from Hamlet. And I mean every possible meaning. I came very close to giving up on several occasions.
My absolute favourite part of the book is when, on page 49 (49!!!!!!) Derrida says: "Pardon me for beginning with such an abstract formulation."
(I assume he is referring to the preceding 48 pages, in which he dissects the figure of the 'specter' beyond all rhyme and reason. By the time I got there, I was nearly at the end of my rope but figured that meant he would be getting to the concrete stuff soon--by which I mean, actually talking about Marx or Marxism and not just ghosts. So I kept reading. Unfortunately, it took many more pages until I got there, but by then I had sunk enough time into the book that I just had to finish it.)
The main things that kept jumping out at me when I read this book are: 1) Derrida is obviously brilliant and can speak/write beautifully when he wants to; and 2) when Derrida writes/speaks, he does it for himself. His intended audience is, presumably, Derrida. This is the most writerly book I have ever read. You have to basically try to emulate Derrida's brain in order to understand what he's trying to say on any given page. Which is not easy. But worth attempting? Maybe?
I might try to re-read this one day when I'm older and wiser and feeling masochistic, who knows.
My absolute favourite part of the book is when, on page 49 (49!!!!!!) Derrida says: "Pardon me for beginning with such an abstract formulation."
(I assume he is referring to the preceding 48 pages, in which he dissects the figure of the 'specter' beyond all rhyme and reason. By the time I got there, I was nearly at the end of my rope but figured that meant he would be getting to the concrete stuff soon--by which I mean, actually talking about Marx or Marxism and not just ghosts. So I kept reading. Unfortunately, it took many more pages until I got there, but by then I had sunk enough time into the book that I just had to finish it.)
The main things that kept jumping out at me when I read this book are: 1) Derrida is obviously brilliant and can speak/write beautifully when he wants to; and 2) when Derrida writes/speaks, he does it for himself. His intended audience is, presumably, Derrida. This is the most writerly book I have ever read. You have to basically try to emulate Derrida's brain in order to understand what he's trying to say on any given page. Which is not easy. But worth attempting? Maybe?
I might try to re-read this one day when I'm older and wiser and feeling masochistic, who knows.
October 25, 2017
After the fall of the Soviet Union, a conference was held in UC Berkeley to discuss the current state and future of Marxism around the world. One of these lecturers was Jacques Derrida, and his speeches are collected here in Specters of Marxism. What Derrida was hoping to achieve with his lectures is unclear, and even more unclear to me is what this book is supposed to be about.
Specters of Marx derives its name from the first sentence off the Communist Manifesto: “A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of communism.” I do wonder what the organizers were hoping to get out of Derrida. I know that he is a philosopher, and I know I’m supposed to give them some slack (as I do to Bertrand Russell), but Specters of Marx is a rambling incoherent confusing mess. At no point does Derrida seem to actually discuss the future of communism and Marxism in any way, but he does go down a rabbit hole of philosophical interpretations of what Hamlet has to do with Marx, and what the difference is between the specter and the spirit. And Derrida’s writing is so intricate and unnecessarily confusing. Here’s a taste: “This woody and headstrong denseness is metamorphosed into a supernatural thing, a sensuous non-sensuous thing, sensuous but non-sensuous, sensuously supersensible.” Imagine a whole book written like that. Am I supposed to be impressed by how “deep” Derrida can be?
Of course, Derrida is a philosopher so at no points do actual statistics or facts come into play here. One would think this would be of value at a conference like this. Specters of Marx is simply a waste of time.
Specters of Marx derives its name from the first sentence off the Communist Manifesto: “A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of communism.” I do wonder what the organizers were hoping to get out of Derrida. I know that he is a philosopher, and I know I’m supposed to give them some slack (as I do to Bertrand Russell), but Specters of Marx is a rambling incoherent confusing mess. At no point does Derrida seem to actually discuss the future of communism and Marxism in any way, but he does go down a rabbit hole of philosophical interpretations of what Hamlet has to do with Marx, and what the difference is between the specter and the spirit. And Derrida’s writing is so intricate and unnecessarily confusing. Here’s a taste: “This woody and headstrong denseness is metamorphosed into a supernatural thing, a sensuous non-sensuous thing, sensuous but non-sensuous, sensuously supersensible.” Imagine a whole book written like that. Am I supposed to be impressed by how “deep” Derrida can be?
Of course, Derrida is a philosopher so at no points do actual statistics or facts come into play here. One would think this would be of value at a conference like this. Specters of Marx is simply a waste of time.
Read
October 17, 2024chiqui qué angustia
October 24, 2016
أطياف ماركس
جاك دريدا
لست ماركسياً ، عبارة دريدا ليس لكون الماركسية تهمة دنيئة أو قذرة ، بل لان دريدا اللامنتمي للايدلوجيا غير متحمس للأطر الحزبية والسياسية ، هذا الانفكاك الدريدي والمتمرضع في الخارج لتكون الرؤية بمستوى الحدث ، انه استحضار للشبح للمثول أمام التاريخ ، مع انه مستحضر عبر المخلوقات اللامرئية الى مساحة المشاهدة وحضور المعاينة ، استحضار للنقد والتفكيك والموائمة مع الأفكار التي سبقته وعاصرته وتجاوزته ، حيث لازالت افتراضاتها تحاور الوضع السياسي في صيغة تكوين الدولة أهي دولة شيوعية أم ليبرالية ديموقراطية على غرار ما طرحه فوكوياما في كتابه نهاية التاريخ وهي النهاية التي افترضها للمجتمعات " نهاية سعيدة " لتكون ديموقراطية ليبرالية في إلغاء نهاية الشيوعية كفكرة كانت كالطيف في الحياة ، كما تحاور الوضع الاقتصادي في حرية السوق وعلاقتها بالرأسمالية المتوحشة ، فهناك من يؤمن بعودة طيف ماركس نفسه مخلص على صورة المسيح الموعود ، فكرة الدين المخلِّص تتطابق مع زفرة البؤساء من جشع رأس المال .
أطياف ماركس كتاب مغلق ، تحتاج ان تفتحه من خلال امتلاك مفاتيح التفكيك التي اختلقها دريدا ليس كلفظ له معنى لغوي بل كأداة احترافية من صنع محترف ليس لها تعريف محدّد .
جاك دريدا
لست ماركسياً ، عبارة دريدا ليس لكون الماركسية تهمة دنيئة أو قذرة ، بل لان دريدا اللامنتمي للايدلوجيا غير متحمس للأطر الحزبية والسياسية ، هذا الانفكاك الدريدي والمتمرضع في الخارج لتكون الرؤية بمستوى الحدث ، انه استحضار للشبح للمثول أمام التاريخ ، مع انه مستحضر عبر المخلوقات اللامرئية الى مساحة المشاهدة وحضور المعاينة ، استحضار للنقد والتفكيك والموائمة مع الأفكار التي سبقته وعاصرته وتجاوزته ، حيث لازالت افتراضاتها تحاور الوضع السياسي في صيغة تكوين الدولة أهي دولة شيوعية أم ليبرالية ديموقراطية على غرار ما طرحه فوكوياما في كتابه نهاية التاريخ وهي النهاية التي افترضها للمجتمعات " نهاية سعيدة " لتكون ديموقراطية ليبرالية في إلغاء نهاية الشيوعية كفكرة كانت كالطيف في الحياة ، كما تحاور الوضع الاقتصادي في حرية السوق وعلاقتها بالرأسمالية المتوحشة ، فهناك من يؤمن بعودة طيف ماركس نفسه مخلص على صورة المسيح الموعود ، فكرة الدين المخلِّص تتطابق مع زفرة البؤساء من جشع رأس المال .
أطياف ماركس كتاب مغلق ، تحتاج ان تفتحه من خلال امتلاك مفاتيح التفكيك التي اختلقها دريدا ليس كلفظ له معنى لغوي بل كأداة احترافية من صنع محترف ليس لها تعريف محدّد .
Read
August 21, 2017As a reading of Marx this is terrible. This is slightly alleviated by Derrida's deafening refrain that he is only using "a certain Marx", but once I fully ingested his triangulation of spectrality and the inapparent (or felt like I did, anyway), how they haunt the veil of presence, his misreadings and intellectual errors RE basic Marxist concepts become small potatoes. I'm still chewing on this book, which is all I've read from Derrida since I skimmed Structure, Sign & Play as an undergraduate, and I think it's terribly good, worthy of rereading and reconsideration. His reading of Heidegger's reading of Anaximander's concept of ‘apeiron’ is something I’m already returning to with alacrity--well worth grinding my teeth as Derrida gets Marxist directives on exchange / use value 100% wrong.
And its made me want to get into Hauntology about a decade too late.
And its made me want to get into Hauntology about a decade too late.
Read
February 24, 2025"Die Zeit ist aus den Fugen"
Ich fand es erst weird, dass ein Buch, das Marx im Titel hat, sich mindestens eben so sehr, wenn nicht mehr, mit Shakespeare als mit Marx beschäftigt. Aber auch wenn ich sicher mehr nicht verstanden als verstanden habe, hat es sich trotzdem gelohnt. Viele Wortspiele und Referenzen, die die Übersetzung auch gut erklärt. Viel gelernt über Gespenster in der Deutschen Ideologie und dem Kapital und über die Präsenz von Vergangenem und Zukünftigen in der Gegenwart, am meisten aber darüber wie man Texte auch lesen kann.
Ich fand es erst weird, dass ein Buch, das Marx im Titel hat, sich mindestens eben so sehr, wenn nicht mehr, mit Shakespeare als mit Marx beschäftigt. Aber auch wenn ich sicher mehr nicht verstanden als verstanden habe, hat es sich trotzdem gelohnt. Viele Wortspiele und Referenzen, die die Übersetzung auch gut erklärt. Viel gelernt über Gespenster in der Deutschen Ideologie und dem Kapital und über die Präsenz von Vergangenem und Zukünftigen in der Gegenwart, am meisten aber darüber wie man Texte auch lesen kann.
January 22, 2025
tiden är ur led... jag fatta inte allt men wowwww cool bok ju
Read
July 4, 2025voy a hacer como que me he enterado de todo lo de aquí. los primeros tres capítulos son aceptables hay muchas ideas muy bien hiladas y sorprendentes. los últimos dos capítulos son un dolor de cabeza, demasiado repetitivo y un vómito de léxico y no llega a lugares tan interesantes como los capítulos iniciales.
en algún momento releeré algo porque tfm
en algún momento releeré algo porque tfm
September 6, 2014
Someone, I don’t know who, said I should read Derrida’s Specters of Marx, finally. Why finally? What does the finality of this reading of Specters of Marx entail? That I should at last read Specters of Marx having attempted and deferred reading it two (perhaps three, perhaps more) times before. That perhaps, this time the reading would differ and I would not defer reading yet again in the endless repetition of picking up reading and deferring? That I should read it once, consume it, and extract from it some value, leaving only the useless behind? Or perhaps, to read Derrida on Marx finally, is to read Derrida on Marx at a certain fin de siecle, at an end of a time of Marxism when the fall of the Soviet bloc gave rise to academic discussions of where, whence and how would Marx and Marxism remain relevant as a philosophical and as a political program. Or is reading Derrida reading Marx at last, finally, to relegate Marx (and Marxism) to a historical canon, the revolutionary call to justice tamed, dismissed and enshrined in a bygone era, the specters finally exorcised once Marx has been canonized?
Derrida’s Specters of Marx attempts to discern the continued timeliness of Marx’s untimely texts. In doing so, he interprets the timing of revolution and revolutionary ideology as the timing of justice, as justice as timing, as justice not as a quietism, but as an action that requires good timing, bringing the times to justice. Touching on Blanchot and Heidegger (its touching, his touching on Heidegger), he then proceeds to discuss the specter of Justice within the timing of western triumphalism articulated by Francis Fukuyama that dismisses the timing of justice in Marx and Marxism and instead declares an end to history and with it and end to both time and justice. Derrida then attempts to conjure the ghosts of this triumph, those currently haunting the triumph and the ghosts of the injustices past and future that make this triumphalism disjointed, unjust, a triumph of injustice that attempts to at last (finally?) erase justice, the work of mourning, and the memory, the specter of justice. For Derrida justice is one of the specters of Marx, the call to see the injustice of the times not as some Hegalian spectator quietly dismissing the spectacle of suffering (historical and present) as only a spectacle on the way to the denouement of justice, but as one called to act (to the work of mourning) by the specter of justice in order that the times might be set right.
So what do I think of this book? Of what use is this book, and is it sufficiently useful that one can draw value from it? A value that can then be exchanged in the marketplace of ideas? And, perhaps, (finally?) a book whose value is not derived from its use but from the exchange value of its specters? For me, anyway, the value of Derrida’s text involve a greater investment than return. The value derived from the Specters of Marx lies in the specter of justice underlying time, as the basis of time. However, the extended meditation on Fukuyama and the attempted critique of western capitalist triumphalism short changes the reader, especially in light of more valuable critiques of the culture industry coming out of critical theory. Moreover, Derrida fails to address the other specters of Marx: of the proletariat in particular but not just the proletariat, of the party (and parties) and of the history and histories of Marxist thought and practice since Marx. And to this failure to provide for a reckoning of this history, those participants and the concepts that animate Marxism, Derrida’s usage of Marx fails to reckon with the specters of Marx. In the end, I felt toward this text as I feel toward other works of Derrida: the philosophical insights are themselves spectral: disembodied bodies that dissipate as light and a new day approaches, incapable of having much impact on a text or a philosopher beyond rattling some chains and moving some tables.
Derrida’s Specters of Marx attempts to discern the continued timeliness of Marx’s untimely texts. In doing so, he interprets the timing of revolution and revolutionary ideology as the timing of justice, as justice as timing, as justice not as a quietism, but as an action that requires good timing, bringing the times to justice. Touching on Blanchot and Heidegger (its touching, his touching on Heidegger), he then proceeds to discuss the specter of Justice within the timing of western triumphalism articulated by Francis Fukuyama that dismisses the timing of justice in Marx and Marxism and instead declares an end to history and with it and end to both time and justice. Derrida then attempts to conjure the ghosts of this triumph, those currently haunting the triumph and the ghosts of the injustices past and future that make this triumphalism disjointed, unjust, a triumph of injustice that attempts to at last (finally?) erase justice, the work of mourning, and the memory, the specter of justice. For Derrida justice is one of the specters of Marx, the call to see the injustice of the times not as some Hegalian spectator quietly dismissing the spectacle of suffering (historical and present) as only a spectacle on the way to the denouement of justice, but as one called to act (to the work of mourning) by the specter of justice in order that the times might be set right.
So what do I think of this book? Of what use is this book, and is it sufficiently useful that one can draw value from it? A value that can then be exchanged in the marketplace of ideas? And, perhaps, (finally?) a book whose value is not derived from its use but from the exchange value of its specters? For me, anyway, the value of Derrida’s text involve a greater investment than return. The value derived from the Specters of Marx lies in the specter of justice underlying time, as the basis of time. However, the extended meditation on Fukuyama and the attempted critique of western capitalist triumphalism short changes the reader, especially in light of more valuable critiques of the culture industry coming out of critical theory. Moreover, Derrida fails to address the other specters of Marx: of the proletariat in particular but not just the proletariat, of the party (and parties) and of the history and histories of Marxist thought and practice since Marx. And to this failure to provide for a reckoning of this history, those participants and the concepts that animate Marxism, Derrida’s usage of Marx fails to reckon with the specters of Marx. In the end, I felt toward this text as I feel toward other works of Derrida: the philosophical insights are themselves spectral: disembodied bodies that dissipate as light and a new day approaches, incapable of having much impact on a text or a philosopher beyond rattling some chains and moving some tables.
August 16, 2025
Marx i Hamlet, czegoś chcieć więcej?
Pierwszy raz czytałam po polsku i przeklinałam tłumacza. Drugi raz po angielsku i wszystko nagle było uporządkowane i jasne, holy shit, rozumiem Derridę. Trzeci raz czytałam znowu po polsku, bo potrzebowałam cytatów z oficjalnego tłumaczenia, więc co mi tam, przeczytałam jeszcze raz całą książkę i cofam wszystkie przekleństwa rzucane na tłumacza. To jednak jest zrozumiałe.
Pierwszy raz czytałam po polsku i przeklinałam tłumacza. Drugi raz po angielsku i wszystko nagle było uporządkowane i jasne, holy shit, rozumiem Derridę. Trzeci raz czytałam znowu po polsku, bo potrzebowałam cytatów z oficjalnego tłumaczenia, więc co mi tam, przeczytałam jeszcze raz całą książkę i cofam wszystkie przekleństwa rzucane na tłumacza. To jednak jest zrozumiałe.
August 29, 2023
(li em português mas a edição em português aqui no goodreads não tem fotinho de capa)
To muito feliz de ter acabado esse aqui porque tinha um pouco de dificuldade de ler livros de filosofia do começo até o fim e acho que foi muito importante pra entender melhor o Mark Fisher - me parece que o Fisher pega a ideia de assombrologia estruturada aqui e consegue desenvolver ela bem melhor que o Derrida (que parece meio limitado pela ideia de descontração)
To muito feliz de ter acabado esse aqui porque tinha um pouco de dificuldade de ler livros de filosofia do começo até o fim e acho que foi muito importante pra entender melhor o Mark Fisher - me parece que o Fisher pega a ideia de assombrologia estruturada aqui e consegue desenvolver ela bem melhor que o Derrida (que parece meio limitado pela ideia de descontração)
July 31, 2022
muito foda !!!!!
February 4, 2025
بر اساس وایبچک بهش این نمره رو میدم
ولی به همراه کتاب قبلی از سختترین متونی بود که خوندم
ولی از نظر تاریخی قدم اول برای شناخت مفهوم هانتولوژی به کمک مارکس و هملته
ولی به همراه کتاب قبلی از سختترین متونی بود که خوندم
ولی از نظر تاریخی قدم اول برای شناخت مفهوم هانتولوژی به کمک مارکس و هملته
January 9, 2020
This was super interesting, yes pretty dense and frankly I wasn't sure what was happening in the last chapter, but that's on me for having never really read any Marx. (Why would you read this book without having read Marx? Because you like haunting I guess, I dunno, don't talk to me.) But honestly before the last chapter I was having a great time--it's very easy to sort of just submerge yourself in Derrida, in my experience, and this book really made me feel that way, and like I could mostly follow what was going on. Obviously I will have to go back and reread this, probably a couple of times, but I enjoyed it this first time around and am looking forward to understanding more on the next read!
December 3, 2024
me lo he leído para mi trabajo de hamlet y los fantasmas
August 14, 2011
It is interesting to take a look at the different claims about this book. I guess the case here is that there's not a single Derrida for all, but instead a brand new Derrida for every reader. However, my reading (influenced predominantly by Heidegger, Levinas and Nietzsche) treats Derrida as a political philosopher, in this (and not the only) case investigating the hub beyond Marx' arguably gothic attitude, which after a brilliant juxtaposing with Hamlet is revealed as something more than merely a set of metaphors. In fact, the metaphor of specter allows Derrida to demonstrate that before the dialectic is taking place, there is a certain existent tension between the past, present and future, which need to be simultaneously taken into a relationship and then dissociated. (To rephrase this, simply think of contingent, nonlinear associations of temporality which through Marx' employment of "the spectral" are disciplined into a "belief" in linear progression.) In this sense there is something puzzling, which, according to Derrida, does not belong only to Marx, but affects other influential texts, spanning from Hegel to Fukuyama. But precisely because there is a gap between a teleology and a more complex alignments of the past (be it Marx' dead [to bury their dead], perhaps the capital as vampire or "dead labor", etc.) and the things (and let's face it - there are many, be it democracy, justice, prosperity, emancipation, security...) imagined as 'to come' [which Derrida quite brilliantly captures with the term "the messianic"], there seems to be a certain ground which comes into presence as potentially unjust (especially vis-a-vis Levinasian claims to Justice through reconciling with the Other) and legitimizing, for example, revolutionary violence, while it is precisely this aporia of the messianic that could be experienced otherwise. While one might not agree with Derrida's resolution of the paradox, I find it a bit difficult to just sit and let something quite as puzzling to merely be.
September 1, 2021
Spooky hours! It's not hard to see why this one is so well-regarded. It's a really fantastic installation in the behemoth that is the Derridean oeuvre. I think Specters also features some of the most lucid deconstruction in practice, only it may be better to understand 'deconstruction' as 'hauntology' (superior name imo).
There's not a best intro to Derrida. One must start upon familiar ground- this is why I loved the Artaud essays in W&D so much. So make sure you've got some kind of familiarity with whatever primary text is at play. Here we have Marx, and, in the initial essay, Hamlet. Hamlet is a play I know better than any other and also possibly the most remarkable work of art in english from the last five centuries so I was as ecstatic as Artaud to see this come together. After this, we take a short dive into the kiddie pool to splash at Fukuyama. Appreciated D's look into Fukuyama's Kojèvian heritage. Then we have Stirner (es spukt!!), and a saucy lean towards Hegel. But I don't think one needs an encyclopædic knowledge of Marx for Specters. The Manifesto does well for most of it, and I'd recommend having read the first few chapters of Capital for the end. Also read Hamlet pls.
There's a rather covert (brilliant) use of Heideggerian temporality, so far as I can tell, in Derrida's concept of the specter/spirit/ghost/shadow. I was smug there. Was also wondering about D's treatment of Engels: he seems to nudge toward the idea of him as a shadow of Marx. I wonder.
It was only during the last essay that I realised 'hauntology/ie' is, in French, homophonic with 'ontology'. Derrida the beautiful madman. On that note, 'acceleration' appears, conspicuously, more than once. Sure there's scholarship there.
In all seriousness, I think there is something very philosophically special about Derrida's treatment of the ghost/specter (trace??). It'll take time for me, but I really love this book as an open door. Keep thinking keep thinking
There's not a best intro to Derrida. One must start upon familiar ground- this is why I loved the Artaud essays in W&D so much. So make sure you've got some kind of familiarity with whatever primary text is at play. Here we have Marx, and, in the initial essay, Hamlet. Hamlet is a play I know better than any other and also possibly the most remarkable work of art in english from the last five centuries so I was as ecstatic as Artaud to see this come together. After this, we take a short dive into the kiddie pool to splash at Fukuyama. Appreciated D's look into Fukuyama's Kojèvian heritage. Then we have Stirner (es spukt!!), and a saucy lean towards Hegel. But I don't think one needs an encyclopædic knowledge of Marx for Specters. The Manifesto does well for most of it, and I'd recommend having read the first few chapters of Capital for the end. Also read Hamlet pls.
There's a rather covert (brilliant) use of Heideggerian temporality, so far as I can tell, in Derrida's concept of the specter/spirit/ghost/shadow. I was smug there. Was also wondering about D's treatment of Engels: he seems to nudge toward the idea of him as a shadow of Marx. I wonder.
It was only during the last essay that I realised 'hauntology/ie' is, in French, homophonic with 'ontology'. Derrida the beautiful madman. On that note, 'acceleration' appears, conspicuously, more than once. Sure there's scholarship there.
In all seriousness, I think there is something very philosophically special about Derrida's treatment of the ghost/specter (trace??). It'll take time for me, but I really love this book as an open door. Keep thinking keep thinking
Displaying 1 - 30 of 155 reviews