David Anshen

Department of Comparative Literature
SUNY Stony Brook
Danshen@ic.sunysb.edu

 

Michael Sprinker, ed. Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx. “New York: Verso, 1999.

 

The whole point, however is that Marx… did not confine himself to ‘economic theory’ in the ordinary sense of the term, that, while explaining the structure and the development of the given formation of society exclusively through production relations… [he] clothed the skeleton in flesh and blood.

 

–Henri Lefebvre, quoting Lenin

It is high time that communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the specter of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

 

–Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto

The time is out of ioynt: Oh cursed spight,/ That ever I was born to set it right./ Nay, come, lets goe together.[Exeunt]

 

–Jacques Derrida, quoting Hamlet

 

Ghostly Demarcations, a collection of essays edited by Michael Sprinker, is the first book-length response to the four ruminations that comprise Jacques Derrida’s beautifully written and brilliantly considered treatment of Marx’s thought and Marxism, Specters of Marx. This anthology, made up mostly of responses by theorists on the Marxist side of the Marxist/Derridian (dis)juncture, takes the reader into either a haunted house of thrills and chills, or a fun-house of mirrors that distort and alter but also allow views from many angles. The nature of the reading experience is determined by what the reader brings to this carnival of mediations, incantations, and speculations. Those who prefer the certainties of traditional thought may find themselves surrounded by unfamiliar apparitions, images that seem intangible and difficult to grasp. After all, the intellectual movement required by these works (Specters of Marx and Ghostly Demarcations), back and forth between deconstruction and Marxism, necessarily exposes one to radical and unconventional ways of thinking. But the effort pays off. Although at times confusing, out of this work real insight can develop.

 

The task of my essay will be to promote the need for a reading of Ghostly Demarcations along with Derrida’s exegesis of Marx’s texts, at a time when many readers may question the value of another treatment of the Marxist-deconstruction divide. There have been many polemics by Marxists against deconstruction, and the related but distinct formations of postmodernism and poststructuralism.¹ There have also been numerous moments when attacks on “metaphysics,” “ontology,” “teleology,” “presence,” or even more directly, “metanarratives,” “totality,” and “representation,” have become attacks on Marxism, or at least, as Derrida says, certain “spirits” of Marxism.

 

This long and often heated argument reverberating through the halls of the academy is reopened in these works at a very high level. Even Derrida’s sharpest opponents in the anthology acknowledge his critical acumen. The volume also includes an essay in which Derrida responds to, and at times fiercely polemicizes against, his critics, who include Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Pierre Macherey, Aijaz Ahmad, and Antonio Negri. Although the essays are uneven, all of them offer rewards commensurate with the time and effort required to read them.

 

The stakes at issue in these essays are high. Derrida’s Specters was also a consciously timed political intervention. It was a response to what he terms “dogmatics attempting to install its worldwide hegemony in paradoxical and suspect conditions” (51). What are these “conditions”? Derrida “cries out” in a particularly lucid manner that we live in “a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy… [despite the fact that] never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity” (85). Derrida forcefully explains that the so-called end of Marxism, the death of Marx, and the attempts to exorcise Marx’s spirit(s) and specter(s), are all forms of political dogma that he rejects. He also maintains, in his exchange with his critics, that he has never been engaged in such a project. This is met with skepticism by some, such as Terry Eagleton, who labels this “a handy piece of retrospective revisionism which hardly tallies with the historical phenomena known in Cornell and California as deconstruction, however much it may reflect the (current) intentions of its founder” (84). Be this as it may, the various responses collected in Ghostly Demarcations open up a set of real questions that must be posed to Derrida and his readers.

 

In his introduction, Michael Sprinker, who is no stranger to Derrida, deconstruction, or Marxism, suggests three problems that are central to thinking through Ghostly Demarcations, and by extension Derrida’s work². The first problem concerns understanding our present moment in history. This becomes an object of debate because of the different views the various contributors have towards, as Sprinker puts it in his introduction, “the nature of capitalism as it has mutated since Marx’s day”; the second concerns politics, and arises from Derrida’s “insistent questioning” of the fundamental project of Marxist politics, namely the “mass organization of the working class”; and the third concerns ideology, and arises from Derrida’s steadfast refusal “to concede what Marx asserted (most directly in The German Ideology)… that ideology can be banished by the science of historical materialism” (2-3). These central, recurring issues as outlined by Sprinker provide a useful way to map the various contributors and their essays. Certain other questions recur throughout the collection as well: how to interpret the figures of the ghost and the specter in Marx; whether Marx, or Derrida, or both, should be understood as practicing philosophy; whether Derrida’s understanding of the problems of our historical moment is informed by a Marxist conception of social class; and whether Marxism can and should transcend what Derrida calls “Ontology.” None of these problems or questions is solved here, of course. But each of them is addressed and worked on from a variety of perspectives.

 

Why is this so important? Fredric Jameson offers an explanation that might be accepted by all the contributors and Derrida himself, namely that “Derrida’s ghosts are these moments in which the present–and above all our current present, the wealthy, sunny, gleaming world of the postmodern and the end of history, of the new world system of late capitalism–unexpectedly betrays us” (39). The point is, to put it bluntly, we are at a historical conjuncture when there is a general crisis of critical thought of a systematic nature. Sprinker describes this as “a moment (April 1993) when the future of Marxism seemed bleaker than any time since the defeat of the Second German Revolution in 1923” (1). Pessimism about Marxism’s capacity to describe and challenge capitalism takes place ironically at the very moment when Derrida makes a compelling argument that the contradictions of capitalism have not withered away, but rather intensified. This explains Antonio Negri’s convincing assertion that, “Here, the question ‘whither Marxism?’ is inextricable from the question ‘whither deconstruction?’ and both presuppose a ‘whither capitalism?'” (6).

 

Negri, the influential Italian post-Marxist who is most known for his work Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, has long argued for an updating of Marx. He is the contributor to the anthology who most clearly believes that the “mutations” of capitalism have made the classical Marxist analysis of industrial capitalism obsolete. Negri reads Derrida’s conception of the “spectral” as a confirmation of his own view that “all traits of the Marxian critiques of value–more precisely, that theory of specters–stop short” due to what he terms a “new phase of relations in production… [and a] mutation of labor” (8). He solidly puts himself forward as a “postmodernist” and joins contributors such as Rastko Mocnik or Werner Hamacher, who argue, along various lines but always by extension from Derrida’s insights, that classical Marxism must be revised. At the other extreme of contemporary thinking on Marxism, we find such contributors as Tom Lewis, Aijaz Ahmad, and Terry Eagleton, who make forceful arguments about the continuing relevance of orthodox Marxism and question the real significance of Derrida’s intervention. Fredric Jameson, eloquently and in his usual fashion, avoids either extreme of partisanship or opposition but instead offers a reading that seems determined to avoid simple judgments. In effect, Jameson subsumes Derrida into his ongoing project of making Marxism “a wandering signifier capable of keeping any number of conspiratorial futures alive” (65). In a strange twist, both Warren Montag and Derrida himself, in his response to his commentators, seem to turn this dispute on its head by suggesting that those who place Derrida as a postmodernist, poststructuralist, or believer in the end of metanarratives, have misunderstood him all along, and that he has never been interested in furthering any simplistic or fashionable attacks on Marxism. And indeed, Derrida’s account of capitalism at the present moment is a far cry from the kind of “end of history” narratives we get from the U.S. State Department and from a good many postmodernists. A substantial portion of Specters of Marx is concerned with debunking the claims of Francis Fukuyama, and others, that “liberal democracy” represents the culmination of human history. Indeed, Derrida reminds us that similar arguments for “the end of ideology,” etc., were commonplace in the late 1950s. He even describes them in Specters of Marx as producing, today, “a troubling sense of déjà vu” (14).

 

The second of the key problems highlighted by Sprinker is that of Marxism’s politics of working-class organization. Again, the sides line up pretty much as expected with the more traditional Marxists (Ahmad, Eagleton, Lewis) in opposition to Derrida, and with the others largely ignoring this question. Mocnik is the exception, the non-orthodox Marxist, who most explicitly refers to the historical tragedies that have transpired in the name of Marxism, and ties his essay to the need to think through these questions in order to “redesign [Marx’s] early critique of human rights so as to articulate it to his critique of political economy” (120). His answer to this dilemma is a somewhat puzzling mixture of Althusser and Lukács, combined with an attempt to integrate Lacan’s theory of the symbolic with Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. A more historically grounded attempt to think through the failures of Marxist politics is offered by Lewis. He offers a theory of Stalinism based on the writings of a relatively obscure Marxist, Tony Cliff. Cliff’s theory that the former socialist camp should be understood as “state capitalist” is loosely influenced by the ideas of Leon Trotsky. While I applaud Lewis’s attempt–unique in this anthology–to ground his assessment of Marxism in concrete historical events, readers might be better served by returning directly to the neglected work of Trotsky himself and others in the Left Opposition.³ It is a sad legacy of history that Trotsky’s contributions to Marxism have been largely ignored in contemporary Marxist debate.

 

The third central issue that links the essays is the fascinating and contested question of ideology. Each essay treats this in some way. Throughout, it is linked to Derrida’s use of the concept of the “spectral” in Marx. Derrida is the first reader of Marx to emphasize so thoroughly the imagery of ghosts and haunting in Marx’s writing. This recurrent field of metaphors, which Derrida traces from The German Ideology through The Communist Manifesto into Volume One of Capital, is, in his account, no accident. It is the chain that binds together Marx’s explicit theory of ideology with his implicit theory of being, his ontology. If Marx’s project vis-à-vis ideology is concerned with exorcising ghosts, with freeing the world from unreal apparitions which produce real effects, then that project can seem, from a Derridean perspective, to be fatally reliant on the kind of ontological presuppositions that Derrida has so unrelentingly challenged. But this still leaves, indeed intensifies, the problem of how to theorize ideology and of how to conduct any form of ideology critique.

 

This is where this varied and at times quite exhilarating volume disappoints. The contributors either focus on the real affinities between Derrida and Marx, or criticize Derrida for his supposed political weaknesses. But in my view the most important issue is barely touched upon. The central problem in any proposed merger between deconstruction and Marxism lies in what are, perhaps, the ultimate philosophic differences between the two approaches. Any Marxism worthy of the name does affirm a “presence,” an “ontology,” a material reality that cannot be ignored in any ideology critique. For Marxism this is the premise of historical materialism, which unlike Derrida’s deconstruction, clings to the distinctions between different kinds of “ghosts.” It situates different specters or ideologies as historical products, not as categories of thought. When Derrida openly questions the possibility or desirability of exorcising ghosts we are left to wonder exactly what ghosts are. He wants to deploy the category of the specter within his broad critique of “presence,” a critique which extends to the effects of language as such, of the principles of presence and identity that language posits. For Marxism, the problem of ideology always remains narrower or more local than this, not a matter of a false metaphysics of being or of inherent features of language, but rather of specific inadequacies of thinking that are produced at a given moment in history. When Marx, in Volume One of Capital, offers his famous metaphor of commodity fetishism–the table that dances–he is suggesting something different from Derrida’s notion of spectrality. Marx is trying to bring to light a particular kind of spectrality, the ghostly presence of social relations within the sensuous object, which lends it an enigmatic and mysterious effect. To remove this effect of commodity-fetishism from its precise historical context is to miss the heart of Marx’s critique. To be sure, Derrida would distinguish commodity fetishism from the eternal play of language. But on his reading, the spectrality of Marx’s table would seem to be permanent. Derrida insists that the world cries out for better responses to intensifying economic and social horrors, but we must ask: does he offer a stable enough foundation for “changing the world”? His answer in Specters of Marx is to claim that “what remains irreducible to any deconstruction… [is] an idea of justice” (59). One wonders if this solution provides any advantage over the claims of classical Marxism. Hamacher points out that for Marx, “a language other than commodity-language is possible… something other than categorical language will be invented”–whereas, presumably, no such promise can be extracted from Derrida (180). This disjuncture seems to mark the ineradicable difference between Derrida and Marx. If capitalist spectrality cannot be overcome, the spirit of Marx is truly dead. Ironically, this is the very death that Ghostly Demarcations is most determined to reject.

 

Notes

 

1. See, for example, Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983); Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996); and E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Postmodernism and its Discontents: Theories, Practices (New York: Verso, 1989).

 

2. See, for example, Michael Sprinker, “Politics and Friendship: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in The Althusserian Legacy, eds. E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1993).

 

3. See, for example, Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1996) and Trotsky In Defense of Marxism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1995), both of which directly contest the “state-capitalist” view put forward by Cliff and revived by Lewis.

 

Works Cited

 

• Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. Trans. John Moore. New York: Verso, 1991.
• Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Pathfinder, 1998.
• Negri, Antonio. Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. Trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano. Ed. Jim Fleming. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1984.