Specters and Specters and Specters and... (Derrida's Infinite Regress)

Last week I read Specters of Marx and am still puzzling over...well...over how much I didn't like it.  I know that much of my reaction is based on a naive response to deconstruction and an unreasonable investment in the idea that Marx, despite the ambiguity we find at times in his language, was asserting definite ideas that don't always leave room for multiple interpretations.  Anyways, I'm fairly certain that you all haven't read it, but my hope that you've read enough Marx that this post is somewhat interesting.

First, a brief (and inevitably inadequate) recap: In Specters, Derrida undertakes an investigation of which aspects of Marxism might still be useful (in the 1990s, since the work was delivered as a plenary address in 1993).  This undertaking is not an application of Marxism, but a "spectropoetics," an examination of the ways in which Marx and Marxism still haunt us, still have influence.  Moving from Shakespeare to a critique of Fukuyama to a discussion of media and finally to a reading of the famous table-turning scene in Capital, Volume One, Derrida uses deconstruction to identify and set loose the many meanings (ghosts) within Marxism that grant the philosophy its longevity and relevance. *Spoiler alert* The book ends with a plea for constant and endless examination of such conjurations.  Derrida argues that Marx's specters' most urgent demand is to examine the issue of simulacra in a way that exposes the haunting and haunted-ness of phenomena that make and displace our political world.

Where I start to chafe is where Derrida sees the project of deconstruction participating in a gift economy of sorts.  Deconstruction suggests that it is precisely when times are most unjust that justice may be done. Derrida makes the claim that "without the opening of the possibility of evil, there remains perhaps, beyond good and evil, only the necessity of the worst. "  But just when it seems as if Derrida is suggesting that Marx wants a sort of redemptive Christian economy based on gift-giving, he interrupts his own text to compare deconstruction's ideas of gift-giving to Heidegger.  Where Heidegger's notions are clearly located in a yearning for a disembodied being or spirit, Derrida points out that for deconstruction, an economy of the gift would always be linked to the figure of the specter, the dead relative whose inheritance is, properly speaking, yours, but actually becomes that 'of the community.'  From this notion of inheritance, Derrida concludes that the specter is, and always will be, a threat.

That being said (I think that's what's been said anyways), Derrida is quick to point out that academics who mutate the gift economy described my Marx into the academic exchange value "Marxism" miss the point. Marx has given us injunctions that inform the very map upon which we currently interpret the terms "work," "worth," "community" and "subjectivity."  These injunctions include to effect change now, to see our lot as Hamlet's rather than Christ's, to understand a gift economy as Nietzsche might have it, rather than as Heidegger might like it.  Pretty vague, no?  If the difference between the future of communism and the communism of the future for Derrida lies in the process of forming an alliance with a "threat," I'd like to know what that looks like.  Isn't it more than intertextuality, wordplay, and allusion?

 

Speaking more generally, my own discomfort with Specters comes in response to Derrida's insistence that the project of deconstruction is inherently Marxist or that Marx's own method was, itself, deconstruction.  Although I admire the insistence that those who practice a certain methodology be invested in and aware of that method's politics, I find it self-aggrandizing and anachronistic in a problematic way to claim such an alliance between Marx(ism) and Deconstruction.  It also feels ironic, given Derrida's insistence on openness, endless possibility--the very notion of differance--that his claims sometimes seem to shut down potentially productive readings of Marx: readings that would necessitate a more fixed, singular interpretation than deconstruction can allow. All the while that Derrida is valorizing the irreducible heterogeneity of Marx, he is claiming Marx as "his," claiming that only deconstruction can properly respond to the legacy of Marx.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.