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A review by thebestmark
Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International by Jacques Derrida
medium-paced
Not my all-time favorite of Derrida's, but this book is probably the single greatest embodiment of Derrida's/deconstruction's importance as a fixture of literary criticism. I want to be careful not to get bogged down in my aesthetic or structural appreciation for this book and risk disregarding its actual political content, but I was awestruck by the method of analysis, here. The initially arbitrary-seeming connection Derrida unearths within Hamlet, Marx and Fukuyama is, in actuality, a functioning ideological mechanism which produces our collective imaginary of legacy and responsibility.
For Derrida, Hamlet is a text about a political power that is rendered 'un-aligned' by a ghost; that is, a functioning power, conditioned by the power structure that it violently superseded, contains within itself the seeds of that superseded power through a literal and metaphorical haunting, and therefore manifests the potential of its own destruction. Hamlet is relevant to Marx because Marx frequently uses Shakespeare as a literary frame of reference for his ideas, which we must take seriously as readers, because it forms the lens that enables us to understand Marx's ideas. And ghosts/specters/conjuration, not as literal entities, but as a metaphysical and ontological process of ideological production, are not totally incidental concepts for Marx - "A specter is haunting Europe," begins his most widely read text. Like Hamlet and the ghost of his father, Fukuyama's 'The End of History,' which proudly and repeatedly declaims communism to have been killed or destroyed, is nevertheless utterly, reflexively fixated - that is, haunted - by Marx and communism. In this 'hauntological' read of Hamlet, Marx's manifesto and The End of History, Marx seems to embody Hamlet's father, murdered and replaced by Fukuyama, who therefore takes the place of Claudio, his murderer, who is anxious, brooding, and ultimately unable to disguise his fear of the ghost he, himself, produced.
To oversimplify, Derrida is basically framing Marx as, in a very literal way, Obi-Wan Kenobi from the original Star Wars movies, struck down by a tyrannical figure only to become more powerful in death, not because communism produces acrobatic space wizards with cool swords (although, who knows, maybe it does that), but because capitalism's structurally, reactionarily antithetical relationship to communism not only defeats but immortalizes communism, as a fundamental aspect of the structure of society. Communism, as a phenomena, is in this sense a load-bearing aspect of capitalism, to the extent that a knowledge of it, and what it represents, is essential to understand capitalism. Otherwise, a book like The End of History would not need to exist, or it would, at least, not need to so consistently assert itself, as a pro-capitalist text, as antithetical to communism.
The use of Hamlet as a frame of reference to understand the contemporary political landscape suggests that all change which has occurred and which is likely to occur again is propelled by annihilation. This is the most brutal and insidious contradiction Derrida unpacks from contemporary capitalist discourse: we're to understand that capitalism is the final stage of the structuring of society, that we've tried the alternatives and finally found the most stable, and therefore, morally righteous formation of society that can exist. Yet, the fundamental force which sustains this society is dominance and destruction. The only way for a person to achieve their maximum possible status in society is to push others further away from that preferable higher status, to stand on their shoulders and reap the profits of their labor, in perpetuity.
This contest between the haves and have-nots, of people being extracted from in the hopes of later being the extractor, is itself literally and inherently unstable. Fukuyama, and the 'New International' who embody capitalist ideology for Derrida, argue that perpetual instability is the ultimate stability. Of course, the system of capitalism does not only produce dominance on an interpersonal level, but on a deeper, structural level, further and further elevating the haves higher and higher over the have notes, dividing the power of society into fewer and fewer hands and, importantly, pushing the have-notes, even in their oppression, further and further into the majority category of person. If the antithesis of capitalism, the specter haunting capitalism, is communism, then the final figure in the Hamlet metaphor, the figure of the protagonist, Hamlet, would seem to be the collective people, doomed to a pyrrhic victory in which both sides are annihilated.
But Derrida also considers the notion of responsibility from one movement within history to another in this text, and suggests that the form a revolutionary movement can take does not necessarily map, mathematically, back into this sort of structure of hauntology and annihilation. Even in this uncharacteristically 'direct' (scare-quotes placed here intentionally) argument from Derrida, in which his politics are pretty clearly placed in the center of the text, Derrida is not a writer concerned with inevitabilities. He is a voice which argues against the naturalization of non-natural processes, and is not the kind of writer who dooms the reader that way. The positive possibilities of change, therefore, remain intact.
For Derrida, Hamlet is a text about a political power that is rendered 'un-aligned' by a ghost; that is, a functioning power, conditioned by the power structure that it violently superseded, contains within itself the seeds of that superseded power through a literal and metaphorical haunting, and therefore manifests the potential of its own destruction. Hamlet is relevant to Marx because Marx frequently uses Shakespeare as a literary frame of reference for his ideas, which we must take seriously as readers, because it forms the lens that enables us to understand Marx's ideas. And ghosts/specters/conjuration, not as literal entities, but as a metaphysical and ontological process of ideological production, are not totally incidental concepts for Marx - "A specter is haunting Europe," begins his most widely read text. Like Hamlet and the ghost of his father, Fukuyama's 'The End of History,' which proudly and repeatedly declaims communism to have been killed or destroyed, is nevertheless utterly, reflexively fixated - that is, haunted - by Marx and communism. In this 'hauntological' read of Hamlet, Marx's manifesto and The End of History, Marx seems to embody Hamlet's father, murdered and replaced by Fukuyama, who therefore takes the place of Claudio, his murderer, who is anxious, brooding, and ultimately unable to disguise his fear of the ghost he, himself, produced.
To oversimplify, Derrida is basically framing Marx as, in a very literal way, Obi-Wan Kenobi from the original Star Wars movies, struck down by a tyrannical figure only to become more powerful in death, not because communism produces acrobatic space wizards with cool swords (although, who knows, maybe it does that), but because capitalism's structurally, reactionarily antithetical relationship to communism not only defeats but immortalizes communism, as a fundamental aspect of the structure of society. Communism, as a phenomena, is in this sense a load-bearing aspect of capitalism, to the extent that a knowledge of it, and what it represents, is essential to understand capitalism. Otherwise, a book like The End of History would not need to exist, or it would, at least, not need to so consistently assert itself, as a pro-capitalist text, as antithetical to communism.
The use of Hamlet as a frame of reference to understand the contemporary political landscape suggests that all change which has occurred and which is likely to occur again is propelled by annihilation. This is the most brutal and insidious contradiction Derrida unpacks from contemporary capitalist discourse: we're to understand that capitalism is the final stage of the structuring of society, that we've tried the alternatives and finally found the most stable, and therefore, morally righteous formation of society that can exist. Yet, the fundamental force which sustains this society is dominance and destruction. The only way for a person to achieve their maximum possible status in society is to push others further away from that preferable higher status, to stand on their shoulders and reap the profits of their labor, in perpetuity.
This contest between the haves and have-nots, of people being extracted from in the hopes of later being the extractor, is itself literally and inherently unstable. Fukuyama, and the 'New International' who embody capitalist ideology for Derrida, argue that perpetual instability is the ultimate stability. Of course, the system of capitalism does not only produce dominance on an interpersonal level, but on a deeper, structural level, further and further elevating the haves higher and higher over the have notes, dividing the power of society into fewer and fewer hands and, importantly, pushing the have-notes, even in their oppression, further and further into the majority category of person. If the antithesis of capitalism, the specter haunting capitalism, is communism, then the final figure in the Hamlet metaphor, the figure of the protagonist, Hamlet, would seem to be the collective people, doomed to a pyrrhic victory in which both sides are annihilated.
But Derrida also considers the notion of responsibility from one movement within history to another in this text, and suggests that the form a revolutionary movement can take does not necessarily map, mathematically, back into this sort of structure of hauntology and annihilation. Even in this uncharacteristically 'direct' (scare-quotes placed here intentionally) argument from Derrida, in which his politics are pretty clearly placed in the center of the text, Derrida is not a writer concerned with inevitabilities. He is a voice which argues against the naturalization of non-natural processes, and is not the kind of writer who dooms the reader that way. The positive possibilities of change, therefore, remain intact.