{"id":10969,"date":"2013-05-08T10:14:28","date_gmt":"2013-05-08T15:14:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=10969"},"modified":"2013-05-08T10:19:58","modified_gmt":"2013-05-08T15:19:58","slug":"wither-marx-20-years-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/05\/08\/wither-marx-20-years-later\/","title":{"rendered":"wither marx 20 years later"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Time of Marx: Derrida\u2019s Perestroika by Peggy Kamuf<\/a><\/p>\n

April 23rd, 2013<\/p>\n

ON THE OCCASION of the 20th anniversary of the \u201cWhither Marxism?\u201d conference conceived by Stephen Cullenberg and Bernd Magnus and organized by the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside, we asked Peggy Kamuf to reflect on the lecture that Jacques Derrida delivered there: \u201cSpecters of Marx.\u201d The lecture was eventually published as a book, translated into English by Kamuf, and subtitled\u00a0<\/em>The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. It stands as a landmark text in Derrida\u2019s oeuvre.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI meant to read Marx my way when the time came.\u201d So Jacques Derrida declared in an interview with Michael Sprinker in 1989. Four years later, the conference \u201cWhither Marxism?\u201d was going to give him the occasion to do just that: read Marx his way. That was also the year, of course, the Berlin Wall fell, and then the dominoes continued to fall all over the former Communist bloc. So \u2014 in the ruins of Marxism, on the grave (good riddance!) of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism, or whatever name is finally settled upon for the monstrous construction that had just fallen apart \u2014 the time had finally come to read Marx.<\/p>\n

What an event!<\/p>\n

A kind of academic urban legend has it that \u201cSpecters of Marx,\u201d the lecture given at the Riverside conference, was Derrida\u2019s first foray into Marx and Marxist theory. It\u2019s a particularly American type of legend, one that casts Derrida\u2019s thought somewhere outside the circle of Marx\u2019s influence. This version says more, no doubt, about the American reception of Derrida than it does about how his work was brought to the juncture of\u00a0Specters of Marx<\/em>. Perhaps Derrida also sought to forestall that misunderstanding by reminding his largely American audience that, for him and his generation, Marxism was mother\u2019s milk. He does this in passing, and by way of announcing a temptation he will have to resist in the lecture: the temptation of recounting from memory:<\/p>\n

[W]hat was for me and for those of my\u00a0generation<\/em>\u00a0who shared it during a whole lifetime, the experience of Marxism, the quasi paternal figure of Marx, the way it fought in us with other filiations, the reading of texts and the interpretation of a world in which the Marxist inheritance was \u2014 and still remains, and so it will remain \u2014 absolutely and thoroughly determinate.<\/p>\n

He is not just boasting when he claims filiation from Marx. In\u00a0The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945-1968 <\/em>(Cambridge University Press, 2011),\u00a0Edward Baring largely fills in the particulars of the memory Derrida so quickly evokes here. Baring\u2019s meticulous archival reconstruction of the philosopher\u2019s early intellectual itinerary tends strongly to confirm, and in considerable detail, the portrait of a generation that was determined by Marx \u201cabsolutely and thoroughly,\u201d in a manner specific to that time and place.<\/p>\n

The time was postwar France, the 1950s and 60s, and the place was the elite training center for French philosophers, the \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure. Derrida was admitted to its rarified air as a student in 1952, and in 1965 he returned there to teach philosophy. As Baring documents, a doctrinaire Marxism dominated the intellectual currents at ENS in the early 1950s. There was a student cell of the PCF, the French Communist Party, and the pressures were stiff to join it or be considered almost an enemy of the people. The other strong current, decidedly less Stalinist, was the mix of Christian thought and phenomenology that had largely guided Derrida as a student up to that point. Needless to say, these currents and the groups formed around them were mutually exclusive. As Baring recalls, a papal decree in 1949 had excommunicated all Communist Party members. But for Derrida, who, as a Jew from Algiers, already qualified as an outsider on at least two counts, the greater pressure was exerted by the Communists to join the Party and toe the line. \u201c[W]hen I was a student at the \u00c9cole Normale,\u201d he recalls in the 1989 interview with Sprinker,<\/p>\n

the school\u2019s Communist group was truly hegemonic \u2014 Stalinist and hegemonic. And it was extremely difficult for someone on the Left (need I remind people that I\u2019ve always been on the Left?) to be thought of only as a crypto-Communist or fellow traveler. It was very difficult not to join the Party.<\/p>\n

By the time he returned to ENS in 1965, this picture had not changed very much.\u00a0 Although Stalinism had been largely forgotten, the Party still ruled, with Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in command not only of the school\u2019s Party members but of the whole PCF\u2019s theoretical wing. As a consequence, Derrida faced intimidating challenges from his own students, who wanted him to rally round what Althusser was saying about an \u201cepistemological break\u201d that supposedly set a later scientific Marx apart from an earlier humanist one. But that distinction, as Derrida saw it, relied far too much on metaphysical concepts \u2014 concepts, for example, of science and history \u2014 and homogenized Marx\u2019s text on either side of a presumed divide that masked other, more complex or decisive patterns. It was then Derrida began to elaborate a grammatological thinking that hewed closely to the grain of a philosophical text, whether Husserl\u2019s, Rousseau\u2019s, Nietzsche\u2019s or, yes, Marx\u2019s.<\/p>\n

So, once again, Derrida resisted the demand to endorse an accepted, hegemonic reading of Marx. Already, he wanted \u201cto read Marx my way.\u201d And yet, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he held back on putting his signature to a deconstructed Marx. His silence on the subject was received in certain circles as a lacuna, or even a gaping hole. One of these circles was the group\u00a0Tel Quel<\/em>, into which Derrida had been welcomed after the success of\u00a0Of Grammatology<\/em>\u00a0in 1967. But\u00a0Tel Quel<\/em>, like ENS, also had its hard Marxist wing, and it too, like Derrida\u2019s students, pushed him to answer for his silence on Marx.<\/p>\n

In a long interview published in 1971, Derrida has to explain himself before the pressing questions of\u00a0tel quelien<\/em>\u00a0Jean-Louis Houdebine, which conclude with this one: \u201cAnd could you tell us why,\u201d Houdebine asks, \u201cyou refer to Nietzsche and Freud, while suspending (but this suspense is itself perfectly readable) the reference to Marx and with Marx, to the dialectical materialist text?\u201d Kicking off his long response, in which he sounds a little exasperated, Derrida says:<\/p>\n

You may well imagine that I was not totally unaware of it. That said, I continue to believe that there is no benefit to be had, either theoretical or political, by hastening to make connections or articulations so long as the conditions for doing so have not been thoroughly elucidated [\u2026] Do me the credit of believing me when I say that the \u201clacunae\u201d to which you alluded are explicitly calculated to mark the coordinates of a theoretical elaboration that remains,\u00a0for me<\/em>\u00a0in any case,\u00a0still to come<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Derrida goes on to outline some principles for a deconstructive reading of Marxist texts over the remaining five pages of this response, which breaks off with the reminder that \u201cthe improvised speech of an interview cannot be substituted for the textual work.\u201d It would be more than twenty years before he was ready to fill in this improvised outline with\u00a0Specters of Marx<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Well, not ready, no; no one was ready for what happened in 1989, not even Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan, who were ready only to take credit for events that they did not predict anymore than anyone else. This unforeseeability is what marks the event out of which\u00a0Specters of Marx<\/em>\u00a0precipitated, like a compound held in suspense for at least 40 years, the four decades of the Cold War. To help convey this sense of the sudden arrival of what was not foreseen, Derrida confides in a parenthesis in\u00a0Specters of Marx<\/em>: \u201c(In 1981, while I was imprisoned in Prague by those then in power, I said to myself with a na\u00efve sense of near certainty: \u2018This barbarism could last for centuries […]\u2019)\u201d. This candid memory (which conjures up Derrida\u2019s arrest on spurious drug charges, engineered \u2014 and subsequently dropped \u2014\u00a0by the Czech government) is evoked by the necessity to account for a certain delay or precipitation that affects temporal experience. Because it is essentially conditioned by events that can overtake it, this experience is put out of sync with itself as present. \u201cTime out of joint,\u201d Hamlet called it, in the phrase set as epigraph to\u00a0Specters of Marx<\/em>.\u00a0 Derrida calls it \u201cspectrality.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I must not launch into a dissertation on the book\u2019s arguments. Anyone can read them for herself and, besides, this is not the place. To the commemoration of this event, I ought to bring some account of what I witnessed, interrogate my own memory and make it yield up telling details. I suppose I could tell the story again about the weeks during which\u00a0\u201cSpectres de Marx\u201d\u00a0was being translated as its pages came off Derrida\u2019s printer. He was writing fast, as always, but time was short. That\u2019s what I especially remember: time running short, being almost out of time. As one measure of the breathlessness with which everything took place, the dedication to Chris Hani, Head of the South African Communist Party, was not written until at least a week after Hani\u2019s assassination on April 10, 1993 and thus barely a few days before the conference opened. It\u2019s also a measure of how the book emerged along\u00a0with<\/em>\u00a0events, whether in their wake when they are tragic like Hani\u2019s murder, or tensing to meet who knows what events yet to come.<\/p>\n

It was thus a conjunction of delay and precipitation, deferral and haste, that produced\u00a0Specters of Marx<\/em>. That work was precipitated out of its long suspended state in the wake of a sudden, unforeseen acceleration of events in Berlin, Moscow, Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Sarajevo, and elsewhere. These were, Derrida remarks, events happening \u201cat a rhythm that no one in the world could calculate in advance, not even a few months before.\u201d In other words, the whole world was, just like the imprisoned philosopher in 1981, na\u00efvely thinking that \u201cthis could last for centuries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fast forward almost a decade, to February 1990: Derrida is invited to lecture for the first time in Moscow. His hosts are young philosophers associated with the Academy of Science of the USSR. Although no one could exactly foresee it, Gorbachev\u2019s\u00a0glasnost\u00a0<\/em>experiment, begun in 1986, was reaching its term. A year after Derrida\u2019s visit, in 1991, a coup would cut short Gorbachev\u2019s effort to rescue the USSR through\u00a0perestroika<\/em>. Remember\u00a0perestroika<\/em>? Well, then you recall how this untranslatable name also named the era and its events. We all learned to pronounce (more or less)\u00a0perestroika.\u00a0<\/em>In 1989, the word even entered the Oxford English Dictionary\u2019s Second Edition (\u201cin the former Soviet Union: the restructuring or reform of the economic and political system. Also: the period during which this restructuring was being implemented. Cf.\u00a0Glasnost<\/em>\u201d), which event is aptly marked by the first quoted use of the term from the\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0<\/em>in 1986: \u201cIf words can define an era, then\u00a0perestroika<\/em><\/em>\u00a0is the catchword here before Tuesday’s opening of the Communist Party Congress as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev enters a decisive phase of his leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this era-defining moment, then, Derrida travels to Moscow. Afterwards, he wrote only glancingly about the trip, notably in a text titled in English (via the Beatles): \u201cBack from Moscow, in the USSR.\u201d Among the very few first-hand anecdotes recounted there, Derrida mentions that \u201cseveral of my interlocutors […] told me that in their view the best translation for\u00a0perestroika<\/em>, the translation that they used among themselves, is \u2018deconstruction.\u2019\u201d And he recalls how a Soviet colleague even said to him \u201cDeconstruction? That\u2019s today\u2019s USSR.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perestroika<\/em>, then, had come to be one of the other names of deconstruction (and Derrida has always insisted on other names for deconstruction). By 1993, the Soviet Union having deconstructed itself and, with it, regimes all over Eastern Europe, it\u2019s not surprising that the oft-called \u201cfather of deconstruction\u201d is summoned to respond to the question \u201cWhither Marxism?\u201d Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, the conference organizers, explain it like this:<\/p>\n

[I]t seemed to us significant to provide a forum within which one of the most famous and influential contemporary philosophers \u2014 Jacques Derrida \u2014 could reflect on the conference\u2019s topic, something he had not yet been able to do in a sustained and systematic way in print.\u00a0 We thought that such a sustained reflection on Marx by Derrida would be of intrinsic as well as historical importance.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy ambition (which is perhaps excessive) is to call for a new reading of Marx,\u201d Derrida confesses in the 1989 interview with Sprinker. The reading he proposed 20 years ago was of a haunted and haunting Marx whose ghosts, he argued, we must continue to encounter in the future, and even\u00a0as\u00a0<\/em>the future. For a premise of this new reading is that specters come back as well from a future that is no more present, no less spectral than the past. It is well to remember that now, so as not to mistake\u00a0Specters of Marx<\/em>\u00a0for something that will be easily laid to rest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Time of Marx: Derrida\u2019s Perestroika by Peggy Kamuf April 23rd, 2013 ON THE OCCASION of the 20th anniversary of the \u201cWhither Marxism?\u201d conference conceived by Stephen Cullenberg and Bernd Magnus and organized by the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside, we asked Peggy Kamuf to reflect on the lecture … Continue reading “wither marx 20 years later”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,144],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-derrida","category-marx"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10969"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10974,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10969\/revisions\/10974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}