Of Derrida’s Inheritance of Marx
Aniruddha Chowdhury More than one/No more one ~Specters of Marx In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida reaffirms his inheritance of the Marxist tradition. The reaffirmation is singular and timely. Derrida insists on the co-belonging, in an almost genealogical manner, of deconstruction and the tradition of a certain Marxism. “Deconstruction … would have been impossible and unthinkable in a pre-Marxist space.” 1 In his early career, Derrida, on more than one occasion, spoke of his allegiance to Marxist materialism, especially to its anti-idealist program.2 But the tone is unfailingly political now. Derrida deploys his notion of conjuration to remark on a veritable counter-revolution that tirelessly erases the memory of the Marxist or communist past in order to devastate its future possibility. “Conjuration”, Derrida explains, means primarily “conjurement” (exorcism) that “tends to expulse the evil spirit” through invocation, or better convocation — a political pact, a plot, or a conspiracy (SM, 47). “Effective exorcism pretends to declare the death only in order to put to death” (SM, 48). No one can really contest, Derrida notes, that there is a worldwide dominant discourse, a hegemonic discourse, on Marxism, International, universal revolution, and so on. “This dominating discourse often has the manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of the mourning work… Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here’s to the survival of economic and political liberalism!” (SM 51-52). Derrida analyses the distinct forms of this conjuration: political, cultural, and scholarly. There is a spectrality to the dominant “conjuring trick.” There is a disavowal in this triumphant conjuration, it hides from itself, from the fact that that whose survival is championed is as threatening as it is threatened. It invokes the ‘red specter’ in order to put it to death, which is impossible. How can one put to death a specter? Derrida returns to Marx, it is an unheard-of return – neither a phenomenology of life nor structural Marxism, but a certain post-phenomenological, post-critical ‘philosophy’, a quasi-atheistic religion of revenant and arrivant. In contrast to early Marx’s ‘life-philosophy’ and Michel Henry’s” hyper phenomenology” of life, Derrida posits sur-vie as opposed to la vie: “We are attempting something else. To try to accede to the possibility of this very alternative (life and/or death), we are directing our attention to the effects or the petitions of a survival or of a return of the dead (neither life nor death) on the sole basis of which one is able to speak of “living subjectivity” (in opposition to its death)” (SM, 187). Inheritance is never homogeneous, let alone self-identical. Inheritance involves decision, it involves affirmation through choosing. Derrida decides on Marx, his spirit, to choose one instead of another. For the Marxist tradition is anything but homogeneous. More importantly, there is a spectrality to Marx and the Marxist tradition that Derrida affirms, so to speak, against Marx. Marx invokes spirit and specter, but, “with a burst of laughter,”Marx too chases away the specters, and wants to annihilate them in the name of life and reality. “Marx does not like ghosts any more than his adversaries do. He does not believe in them. But he thinks of nothing else” (SM 45-46). Marx too conjures away the ghosts like his adversaries. Derrida, it is important to note, distinguishes his ‘return’ to Marx as something other than merely scholarly exercise and discourse. It is to a certain spirit of communism to which Derrida seeks to ‘return,’ – and that’s certainly how Derrida would have intended the work to be read, – which Derrida does not hesitate to call (pace Postmodernism?) a certain spirit of “emancipation” (SM, 75), a certain spirit of emancipation that Derrida calls eschatological. “Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism” (SM, 92). So, it is a matter of spirit whose paradoxical phenomenality is a specter, which is thus “almost” distinct from the speculative discourse of spirit a la Hegel. “Almost,” because the spirit in Hegel, Derrida reminds us, is also a specter. “The semantics of Gespenst themselves haunt the semantics of Geist” (SM, 107). Yet, it is of utmost importance to separate specter from spirit despite their common ‘genealogical’ co-belonging. What separates them “is doubtless a supernatural and paradoxical phenomenality, the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible, or an invisibility of a visible X … it is also, no doubt, the tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but still the body of someone as someone other. And someone other that we will not hasten to determine as self, subject, person, consciousness, spirit and so forth” (SM, 7) This paradoxical visibility of the invisible, in Hamlet as in Marx’s The German Ideology, is what Derrida terms the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us (SM, 7). There is an uncanniness, even despotism, in being observed by someone other who hides from visibility. This simulacrum that is “virtually more actual than what is so blithely called a living presence” (SM, 13) is what causes not only fear but also anxiety. The visor effect, Derrida suggests, is what destabilizes synchrony, and its uncanniness consists in being referred to “anachrony.” Anachrony is the time of the specter and it is the anachrony of the visor effect that “makes the law” (SM, 7). It is the visor effect on the basis of which we inherit from the law. The anachrony is also diachrony: repetition and thefirst time, which is the question of the event of the ghost, a spectral event (SM, 10). A ghost or a revenant “begins by coming back” (SM, 11). Repetition and the first time and also the last time. Each visitation is singular without being self-identical. The extremity of the eschaton is also a