Specters of Marx was written after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. As liberal thinkers were proclaiming the collapse of communism, the death of Marxism, and the supposed triumph of democracy, Jacques Derrida was called to address the multidisciplinary conference, “Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective”. Derrida’s lecture became the book that this course will cover in its entirety. Reading will be supplemented through excerpts from Marxist texts that Derrida engages with to formulate a ‘spectro-poetics’ and hauntological response to Marx’s imperative to change the world. Our reading takes place at a time when the liberal public sphere is decrying the decay of democracy against the palpable rise of fascism. Returning to this text’s reflection that ‘the time is out of joint’ (Hamlet), we will reckon with the ghosts surrounding what Derrida calls a ‘democracy to come’ in the context of today. Marx’s ghosts join fellow phantoms as they battle over the mutual constitution of democracy, communism, socialism, fascism and anarchism in national and international affairs. Specters will prompt us to reckon with this political heritage and the state of international resistance to oppression.
Course Schedule
Seminar One: Appetisers and borders: the text and work of Specters
Reading Derrida is not easy, so the first seminar will focus on strategies for engaging with this book. We’ll launch discussion with Derrida's notoriously misunderstood phrase, il n’y a pas de hors texte (there is no outside text). This will guide us through questioning conventional divisions between the inside and outside of a text, which in turn will inform our reading of the Marxist opposition between ideality and materiality. Less cited, but as important, Derrida uses the term hors d’oeuvre (outside of work) in relation to the Greek word, parergon – a concept used to discuss the frame or outside to a work of art. As many have noticed, hors d’oeuvres also refers to the appetisers one may have outside the main course of the meal. In preparation for the main text, we will draw from these phrases to read only the front matter of Specters for the first seminar.
Reading
- Editor’s introduction, note on the text, dedication, exordium, epigraph, Specters of Marx, pp: vii-xx, p. 1.
Seminar Two: Chapter One, Injunctions of Marx
Derrida does not begin in the disciplinary domain of either politics or philosophy to approach Marx, but literature. Framing his discussion with an epitaph and quotation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet—the time is out of joint—we re-read Marx through a reflection on ‘a disjointed or disadjusted now’. We'll reflect on dis-jointure as a ‘de-totalizing condition of justice’. The figure of the ghost, or spectre, speaks to the opening of The Mainfesto of the Communist Party where Marx and Engels announce that ‘A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism’. Derrida tracks Marx’s own battles with making the specter present, by following Blanchot’s identification of three voices within Marx as the ontological, political and scientific. Through reckoning with the heritage of these voices in the dis-adjusted time and place of the present, we are also asked to think about relations between theory and practice as necessarily discontinuous, heterogeneous and unable to be gathered into a unified ‘actual reality’. We’ll ask how this affects ‘doing politics’.
Reading
- Chapter One, Injunctions of Marx, pp. 3-48
- K Marx and F Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party
Seminar Three: Chapter two, Conjuring Marxism - & Chapter three, Wears and Tears.
What happens in Marx’s name in space/time, and what sort of injunction is pledged by those who affirm or reject his works and calls for action? We'll follow Derrida's meditation on Marx’s Thesis XI— “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”—to wrestle with the relationship between political position-taking and the idea of ‘an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets’ (p. 51). As we examine the status of Marxism in public discourse, repeated in the apparatuses of political parties and politicians, media and information dissemination, and academic scholarship, we’ll use the idea of hegemony to assess how a reinvigorated critique of relations between capitalism and liberal democracy emerges. Signalling that the concepts of the State, nation-state and international law will be put to the test as we diagnose Marx’s injunctions today, Derrida lists ‘the blackboard picture ‘of ‘ten plagues’ that indicate the wears and tears of a bleak world that is still going badly. Action and critique will have to find its way between the impossible poles of the empirical world of facts and ideal world of abstraction.
Reading
- Chapter Two, Conjuring—Marxism, pp. 49-76
- Chapter Three, Wears and Tears (tableau of an ageless world), pp. 77-94.
Seminar 4: Chapter four, In the name of revolution, the double barricade (impure “impure impure history of ghosts”)
The title of this chapter alone gives us a lot to think. For Derrida, reckoning with Marx cannot be separated from a certain trauma and work of mourning over what occurs in his name and in the name of revolution. The emancipatory promise that calls communism to present itself and end its spectral status is tied to an historical mess where distinguishing between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces on the ground loses assurance. The battle between specters for the spirit of Marx and communism is therefore one that will always risk the worst, where emancipation can turn to an opposing totalitarian form. The specter of totalitarianism that communism’s name has become entangled with in the West has been mostly studied in relation to nation states, though Derrida stresses that the Marxist communist project is an internationalist injunction. To concretise some of the themes that Derrida raises about Marx’s own battles with materiality of being and ideality of consciousness in revolutionary projects, we'll take a detour through engaging with the concepts of self-determination, national consciousness, and settler colonialism both ‘here’ and ‘abroad’.
Reading
- Chapter Four - In the name of revolution, the double barricade (impure “impure impure history of ghosts”), pp. 95-124
- Marx, selected passages from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Seminar five: Chapter 5, Apparition of the inapparent - the phenomenological “conjuring trick”
Through reading passages from Marx’s German Ideology and Capital, Derrida reflects on the contradictions the former runs into when trying to maintain pure division between the oppositional poles of the material and ideal, use value and exchange value, science and ideology. When oppositional logic runs into an aporia, deconstructive work takes off through another type of logic. Having to distinguish several specters of Marx from the spirit he affirms as a pledge for justice, Derrida offers the logic of hauntology, which he uses alongside the term spectrality, from which to proceed toward an ethico-political analysis of the world’s ‘plagues’ and call for action. If the exordium prepared us for reckoning with ghosts, the concluding chapter pushes us to attend to the work of inheritance and promise for justice as a hauntological project for a ‘democracy to come’.
Reading
- Chapter Five – Apparition of the inapparent – the phenomenological “conjuring trick”, pp. 125-176