In Derrida’s reading of Marx, Specters of Marx, in its first chapter, Derrida inserts, within parentheses, a reading of Blanchot’s Marx’s Three Voices, within which he inserts a reading of Heidegger’s The Anaximander Fragment.
These critical measures provide Derrida with the resources for his later analysis of Marx’s texts. Now, given Derrida’s invocation of The Anaximander Fragment on several important occasions (Différance , Ousia and Grammē, Geschlect II), that we should pay close attention to the way in which Derrida reads this essay. As I’ve already suggested, this text brings together many of the themes which persistently engage Derrida over the entire course of his work.
The reading of Blanchot’s essay – itself only 3 pages – begins following Derrida raising the question of the ‘end of history’, the curious déjà vu that was the “daily bread” of students and philosophers of post-war France. Here, within square brackets, (indicating material Derrida did not present at the conference which formed the basis of the book – but was this material nonetheless already written?), Derrida reads Blanchot’s and Heidegger’s essays.
Blanchot’s essay proposes three distinct, irreconcilable, disjointed voices in Marx, disparate, but nonetheless necessary and held together. “Since Marx”, writes Blanchot (and quoth Derrida), “everyone who speaks or writes can not fail to feel himself subjected” to the three voices of Marx, as to a plurality of demands. To not feel so would be to “feel [one]self failing in everything”. (p.17)
This “since” for Derrida “marks a place and a time that doubtless precedes us, but so as to be as much in front of us as before us. Since the future, then, since the past as absolute future”. Here we have the Heideggerian formula of the existential grasping of the past as a possible future. Derrida, therefore also reads this as the injunction of Marx’s voices (and Blanchot’s essay).
The maintenance (in French, maintenant is ‘now’) of the disparate voices of Marx signifies for Derrida the joining of a “radically dis-jointed time” (17). This leads Derrida to consider the translations and meanings of Hamlet’s formula, that time is ‘out of joint’. Whether it is le temps, l’histoire, or le monde which is out of joint, or all of these together.
Derrida here pulls of an interesting alliance. He reads the discourse of Hamlet in the terms of Heidegger’s Anaximander Fragment – though we have not read this yet. He foreshadows his reading, mingling their language (well, in translation at least).
Hamlet … [is called] to do right, to render justice, and to redress history, the wrong of history. There is tragedy, there is essence of the tragic only on the condition of this originarity, more precisely of this pre-originary and properly spectral anteriority of the crime – the crime of the other, a misdeed whose event and reality, whose truth can never present themselves in flesh and blood, but can only allow themselves to be presumed, reconstructed, fantasized. [Derrida's emphases] (21)
It is this “pre-originary crime” that Derrida is now going to explicate. This “necessarily second generation, originarily late and therefore destined to inherit” recalls Derrida’s early analyses of Husserl and writing, writing as supplement of the origin etc etc. This “crime”, or the originary adikia, or out-of-jointness of time, is the condition for a “quasi-messianic day”, “a day belonging no longer to history” (21). “Is this day before us to come, or more ancient than memory itself”. Again, this recalls certain formulas from Speech and Phenomena, (cf. p.103) regarding the origin of intuition etc. on the one hand, and on the other, from Derrida’s lengthy first essay on Levinas, Violence and Metaphysics. But in that text, it is precisely the formula of a “beyond history” that Derrida would appear to be uneasy about, or seek to complicate, c(f. p.148/185-6).
This choice, between an “ancient” pre-originary day, and a future-to-come, is impossible to decide. They are indistinguishable. This is, according to Derrida, because “the time is out of joint”. It is Ana-chronique. Derrida here suggests that our “ordinary” understanding of time, does not exist. “What does not happen in this anachrony! Perhaps “the time”, time itself, precisely” (22). But how to decide between disjunction, on the one hand as injustice, and on the other, disjunction as the necessary relation to the other?
In Ousia and Grammē, as well as ch. 5 of Speech and Phenomena, Derrida had already attempted to show how the moment, the now of the present, was not simple, that it welcomed the other of non presence into it. He will now read the Anaximander Fragment on the basis of this.
A rough translation of the fragment goes like this:
“But that from which things arise also gives rise to their passing away, according to what is necessary; for things render justice and pay penalty to one another for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time.” Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, p.20
Obviously, you can see here the nexus of concerns for Derrida, time, justic, and gift (ie. “render” etc, the gift to the other). As the fragment intimates, things come and go. The come into presence, linger awhile, and pass away. The complex formula that is translated roughly above undergoes a transformation in Heidegger’s hands, whereby the presencing, and fading away of beings becomes a “jointure”. But this supposes the adikia, the out of joint, for which beings therefore “render justice” and so forth. In this adikia Heidegger locates a “trace of the tragic”, such as that which Derrida had already suggested via Hamlet. This supposes, for Derrida A. The adjoining of the present, from the future to the past. But also B. That this jointure is only named on the condition of the disjointure, the adikia, “injustice”.
And here is Derrida’s question for Heidegger. Here the undecided oscillation between disjunction as injustice and disjunction as necessary relation to the other that we mentioned above is critical. For Derrida, Heidegger has played down the neccesary disjointure, required for the relation to the other, risking the reinscription of the gift of justice under the sign of presence (27). Rather, for Derrida, there must be a “dislocation in Being and in time itself”, always risking injustice, for there to be the possibility of any justice.
That is, justice, as does deconstruction itself, proceeds from the “irreducible possibility of the … anachronic disjointure” (27). It is this disjunction that Derrida is attempting to illustrate with the spectral, and what he means by the “non-contemporaneity of the present”. Because of this disjunction, these ghosts, addressing others, always across a gulf of time. This is also why it associated with technics and production because, as the ghost is always a repetition, returning, once more, it implies that “pre-originary crime” of the inaccessible origin, a primordial disjunction.
The formula on p.31, is, therefore, an account of this “temporality”: “no differance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now”, where, coming up from the depths, we only reach “here-now”, after the passing of others, who were never here or now.
Ok, now I’m not sure how coherent all of this is. Derrida mentions that his text isn’t the philosophical discourse that is required, and resembles more a “position taking”. I’m trying to fill in the gaps, because some of the formulas seem to bring together disparate themes that I haven’t come across together in other places. Then again, there might be better texts that I haven’t read yet. Anyway, I’ll leave it here, and then try to relate this to how Derrida reads Marx shortly.
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