Ok, so here I’m gong to start posting some of my notes on Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Others around the place have been doing this (notably Rough Theory and Praxis), and I certainly don’t expect to reach the complexity or length of their posts. Let’s just go piece by piece.
From my point of view, the key feature of Specters is the way in that it mobilises a certain reading of time: the time of the ghost. The specter is, I think, a piece of pedagogical brilliance on Derrida’s part. Ghosts – as is so ably illustrated by Shakespeare’s Hamlet – aren’t normal. They’re there, but not there, out of their time, a ghost of the past, or possibly of the future. They upset the here, (where are they from? Where do they go?), and they disrupt the now.
Time is in large part the thrust of the group of questions that are arranged around the exordium; “someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn how to live”. In the background here is Heidegger’s Being-towards-death and his destruction of the history of metaphysics, which takes aim at, you guessed it, time. Also along for the ride is Levinas, for, in exploring the modalities of this question of learning to live, there is the question of the relation to the other, (which is justice), but also the time of the other. This is the ghost. And thus we arrive at an axiom for Specters, the “non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present.” Here, just for good measure, we now have a reference to Derrida’s earliest work on Husserl, and the voice, which, as you might suspect, also involved a critical analysis of Husserl on “time-consciousness”.
All of this is why Derrida inserts a lengthy reflection on Heidegger’s Der Spruch des Anaximander into the first chapter, which is otherwise mostly a general discussion and introduction of themes he will introduce later in the book. At this point, Derrida’s “book on Marx” is looking decidedly Marx-less.
Now, Derrida has spoken about the Anaximander Fragment before. It forms a critical reference in the opening two essays of Margins of Philosophy, “La differance” and “Ousia and gramme”. In particular, this latter essay is important here, being a very detailed reading of Aristotle, Hegel and Heidegger on time.
Alright, lets leave it there. I realise I have only grouped together a bunch of references – a frame, if you will – for a reading, which I’ll endeavour to post in due course. But at any rate, I hope you can gather the picture I am trying to paint here. The “Specter” is a very successful embodiment (ha!) of critical elements of Derrida’s work, right from it’s earliest days. It is interesting that he captures all this with a question of learning to live. For all the notorious difficulty of Derrida’s work, is this here some attempt to make clear the existential nature of his work?
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