I came for the general thoughts on hauntology and managed to make it through the convolutions on Marx contra Stirner. ( )

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! ( )

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.
( )

Referenced in https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g6UAKCU5vEs

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." ( )