Specters of Marx Reading Group Meeting Agenda # 1

2 August 2024 6pm GMT

Preliminaries

Introduction of new participants

Any suggestions or other business

Introductory Discussion

How do we feel about Marxism nowadays? Derrida writes (on page 14) of his 'experience of Marxism' and
that of his generation—people who were relatively young intellectuals in 1960s France. What is your
generation's experience of Marxism? Is it still today true to say, as Derrida does on the subsequent page
that, " We all live in a world, some would say a culture, that still bears, at an incalculable depth, the mark of
this inheritance, whether in a directly visible fashion or not"?

Questions relating to the Exordium

1. What are we to make of the phrase 'I would like to learn to live, finally', with which Derrida begins
the lecture? [Quotation 1]
2. What is the difference between 'the future' 'l'avenir' and 'the future-to-come' 'l'à-venir'. [Quotation
3]
3. What is the difference between 'justice' and 'law'? [Quotation 2 and Quotation 5]

Questions relating to Chapter 1 (pages 1 – 34) Etymological Wordplay

Derrida etymologically relates the terms 'joint,' 'junction' and

1. Derrida uses various etymologically connected 'just'. All are supposed to derive from the Proto-Indo-
words in the first sentence of Chapter 1 in relation European root *yeug- (join, yoke), the 'joint' family of words
through Latin via French, the junct- family of words directly
to the phrase from Hamlet 'the time is out of from Latin, and the 'just' family from the Latin preposition
joint': 'conjuncture', 'disjointed', 'disadjusted', 'juxta' – next to.

'disadjoined', 'conjunction'. He also puns on the The word 'conjuncture' in English is rare. In Portuguese
'conjuntura' it is, however, commonly used in left-wing
French word maintenant – 'now' and political jargon; often simply as a synonym for 'context,' but
'maintaining'. What is he trying to say about time? with connotations of 'crisis', a coming together of key events..
French 'conjoncture' has something of the same meaning. In
[Quotation 6] English, we can say 'at this juncture' to mean 'at this point in
2. Derrida makes a distinction between 'spirit' and time', the implication often being that some decision is to be
made, there is some parting of the ways in store.
'specter' on page 5 and makes much of
Shakespeare's use of the word 'thing' to refer to In French and in Portuguese, two nouns with different
meanings can be derived from the adjective 'juste/justo'.
the ghost of Hamlet's father. What does this tell 'Justice/justícia' has the same meaning as in English, while
'justesse/justeza' have the sense of 'exactness', 'precision',
us about the ontological/hauntological status of 'good proportion', 'appropriateness' or 'tightness of fit' in
the ghost? Can we relate this to the Freudian Portuguese.
unconscious/the Freudian thing? [Quotation 7] Note the overlap with the word 'articulation', which we saw
3. On page 6, Derrida uses the term 'visor effect' to in Of Grammatology.

refer to the ghost seeing us not seeing it. Derrida Note also the use of well-adjusted/maladjusted in a moralistic
will use similar language later in reference to psychological sense in English.

animals. He also relates this here to the Marxian 'Rejoinder' originally has a legal sense of 'answering a charge'.
This connects with the idea of responsibility.
interpretation of exchange value. [Quotation 8]
And also, on page 7, to the law ("Since we do not In Hamlet Act 1 Scene 2 Claudius describes Gertrude as a
'jointress', a legal term meaning 'heir of property (not power)
see the one who sees us, and who makes the law, settled on her, upon her marriage to her late husband' So, the
who delivers the injunction") term is also related to the idea of inheritance. The word
'jointure' used in the translation of Derrida's text can also
4. On page 9, Derrida makes three points about the have this meaning.
ghost as thing. First it is mourned—he adds that
all ontologization involves a certain mourning.
Second it requires language, a voice. And third, it does some kind of work. It has a certain power of
'transformation'. How do we understand these three points?
5. On page 10, Derrida asks " What does it mean to follow a ghost? And what if this came down to
being followed by it, always, persecuted perhaps by the very chase we are leading?" This again is
echoed later by comments he will make concerning animals.
6. Derrida first introduces the term 'hauntology' in relation to repetition and singularity and compares
a haunting to any event and to the end of history, in particular. On page 11 he says " A question of
repetition: a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it
begins by coming back."
7. On page 12, Derrida speaks of a Marcellus complex. Marcellus is the watchman in Hamlet who
assumes that Horatio can speak to the ghost because he is an educated man (a 'scholar'). This is
akin to Lacan's notion of the 'supposé savoir'. Derrida suggests that it is precisely such a scholar (as
spectator/observer) who is incapable of addressing ghosts. Scholars make too sharp a distinction
between 'real' and 'unreal'. For this reason, they are also incapable of talking about Marxism.
[Quotation 9]
8. Derrida notes that the metaphor of 'inheritance' or 'legacy' associated with a famous thinker such
as Marx involves a certain paternalism. Later (page 18), he suggests that a legacy is always radically
and necessarily 'heterogeneous'. The same argument could I suppose be applied to interpretation
in general. [Quotation 10] Blanchot (see Appendix I) writes of 'three voices of Marx'.
9. For Derrida, Fukuyama's idea of the end of history, and this kind of apocalypticism in general, is
nothing new. He argues that such discourse was already widespread in the 1950s, an era when
scholars were talking of the 'end of ideology', 'the end of art,' 'the end of philosophy' and so forth.
We have observed this tendency before in our discussion of 'catastrophe' in Of Grammatology.
Here, Derrida describes Fukuyama wittily as 'arriving late to the end of history' and asks what an
event would be after the end of history. This "obliges one to wonder if the end of history is but the
end of a certain concept of history"
10. Hamlet sees his own avenging mission as being itself a symptom of the time being 'out of joint'.
The need to put things right is part of the twistedness of the story. [Quotation 11] “The time is out
of joint. O cursèd spite,/ That ever I was born to set it right!” (Commentators argue that 'spite' here
refers to the spiteful hand that fortune has dealt Hamlet, but it could also – mixing objective and
subjective genitive—refer to Hamlet's own feelings of anger. There may also be an echo of the
word 'sprite'.)
11. A law without vengeance is something messianic that belongs to the time after the end of history
[Quotation 12 and "Injustice would however seem to be necessary for justice to exist. "Is not this
disjuncture, this dis-adjustment of the “it’s going badly” necessary for the good, or at least the just,
to be announced? Is not disjuncture the very possibility of the other?"]
12. "Heidegger [on a fragment of Anaximander] interprets Dikē
Anaximander
(the Ancient Greek word often translated as 'justice' or
'order') as joining, adjoining, adjustment, articulation Anaximander is credited with being the
first pre-Socratic Ancient Greek
of accord or harmony" [p. 27], using the German word Fug. philosopher to have argued that
There have been many attempts to translate this notoriously everything is composed of some indefinite
obscure Presocratic fragment. Kirk and Raven suggest "And substance, rather than a specific element
the source of coming to be for existing things is that into (water, air, fire and so forth). This is
described as 'to apeiron' (the
which destruction too happens (according to necessity); for limitless or boundless). Anaximander
they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their appears to have believed in multiple
injustice according to the assessment of time."1 Derrida universes, which come in and out of
draws some conclusions regarding the jointedness of the existence.
present. [Quotation 13] Justice/jointure is thus a gift, without
debt, of something that is not possessed of the present. Derrida relates this to the 'supplement'.
[Quotation 14 and Quotation 15], to the work of deconstruction [Quotation 16], and to the legacy
of Marx [Quotation 17].

1
The original Greek, as quoted by Simplicius, runs as follows:
Selected Quotations

Quotation 1 [p. xvii] "If it—learning to live—remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. Neither in
life nor in death alone. What happens between two, and between all the “two’s” one likes, such as between life and
death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost... So it would be necessary to
learn spirits. Even and especially if this, the spectral, is not. Even and especially if this, which is neither substance, nor
essence, nor existence, is never present as such. The time of the “learning to live,” a time without tutelary present,
would amount to this, to which the exordium is leading us: to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the
conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise,
and better. No, not better, but more justly. But with them."

Quotation 2 [p. xviii] "No justice—let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws—seems
possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins
the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars,
political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of
the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism"

Quotation 3 [p. xix] "what stands in front of it must also precede it like its origin: before it. Even if the future is its
provenance, it must be, like any provenance, absolutely and irreversibly past… To be just: beyond the living present in
general—and beyond its simple negative reversal. A spectral moment, a moment that no longer belongs to time, if
one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual present: “now,” future present)
… Furtive and untimely, the apparition of the specter does not belong to that time "

Quotation 4 [pp. xix-xx] "This resembles an axiom, more precisely an axiom concerning axiomatics itself, namely,
concerning some supposedly undemonstrable obvious fact with regard to whatever has worth, value, quality (axia).
And even and especially dignity (for example man as example of a finite and reasonable being), that unconditional
dignity (Würdigkeit) that Kant placed higher, precisely [justement], than any economy, any compared or comparable
value, any market price (Marktpreis)."

Quotation 5 [p. xx] "Is there ever justice, commitment of justice, or responsibility in general which has to answer for
itself (for the living self) before anything other, in the last resort, than the life of a living being, whether one means by
that natural life or the life of the spirit? Indeed. The objection seems irrefutable. But the irrefutable itself supposes
that this justice carries life beyond present life or its actual being-there, its empirical or ontological actuality: not
toward death but toward a living-on [sur-vie], namely, a trace of which life and death would themselves be but traces
and traces of traces, a survival whose possibility in advance comes to disjoin or dis-adjust the identity to itself of the
living present as well as of any effectivity. There is then some spirit. Spirits. And one must reckon with them. One
cannot not have to, one must not not be able to reckon with them, which are more than one: the more than one/no
more one [le plus d’un]."

Quotation 6 [p.1] "Maintaining now the specters of Marx. (But maintaining now [maintenant] without conjuncture. A
disjointed or disadjusted now, “out of joint,” a disajointed now that always risks maintaining nothing together in the
assured conjunction of some context whose border would still be determinable.)"

Quotation 7 [p.5] "One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present,
this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one
thinks one knows by the name of knowledge."

Quotation 8 [p.6] "it is also, no doubt, the tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but still the body of
someone as someone other. And of someone other that we will not hasten to determine as self, subject, person,
consciousness, spirit, and so forth. This already suffices to distinguish the specter not only from the icon or the idol
but also from the image of the image, from the Platonic phantasma, as well as from the simple simulacrum of
something in general to which it is nevertheless so close and with which it shares, in other respects, more than one
feature."

Quotation 9 [p. 12] "the last one to whom a specter can appear, address itself, or pay attention is a spectator as such.
At the theater or at school... As theoreticians or witnesses, spectators, observers, and intellectuals, scholars believe
that looking is sufficient. Therefore, they are not always in the most competent position to do what is necessary:
speak to the specter."
Quotation 10 [p. 18] "If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and
at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. We would be affected by it as
by a cause—natural or genetic"

Quotation 11 [p. 23] "[Hamlet] even curses the fate that would have caused him to be born to set right a time that
walks crooked. He curses the destiny that would precisely have destined him, Hamlet, to do justice, to put things back
in order, to put history, the world, the age, the time upright, on the right path, so that, in conformity with the rule of
its correct functioning, it advances straight ahead [tout droit]—and following the law [le droit]. This plaintive
malediction itself appears to be affected by the torsion or the tort that it denounces. According to a paradox that
poses itself and gets carried away by itself, Hamlet does not curse so much the corruption of the age. He curses first
of all and instead this unjust effect of the disorder, namely, the fate that would have destined him, Hamlet, to put a
dislocated time back on its hinges—and to put it back right, to turn it back over to the law. He curses his mission: to
do justice to a de-mission of time. He swears against a destiny that leads him to do justice for a fault, a fault of time
and of the times… He swears against this misfortune, and this misfortune is unending because it is nothing other than
himself, Hamlet. Hamlet is “out of joint” because he curses his own mission…"

Quotation 12 " If right or law stems from vengeance, as Hamlet seems to complain that it does—before Nietzsche,
before Heidegger, before Benjamin—can one not yearn for a justice that one day, a day belonging no longer to
history, a quasi-messianic day, would finally be removed from the fatality of vengeance?" [p.25]

Quotation 13 "The present is what passes, the present comes to pass [se passe], it lingers in this transitory passage
(Weile), in the coming-and-going, between what goes and what comes, in the middle of what leaves and what arrives,
at the articulation between what absents itself and what presents itself. This in-between articulates conjointly the
double articulation (die Fuge) according to which the two movements are adjoined (gefügt). Presence (Anwesen) is
enjoined (verfugt), ordered, distributed in the two directions of absence, at the articulation of what is no longer and
what is not yet. To join and enjoin. This thinking of the jointure is also a thinking of injunction." [p.29]

Quotation 14 "If one still translates Dikē with this word “justice,” and if, as Heidegger does, Dikē is thought on the
basis of Being as presence, then it would turn out that “justice” is first of all, and finally, and especially properly,
the jointure of the accord: the proper jointure to the other given by one who does not have it." [p.31]

Quotation 15 " Beyond right, and still more beyond juridicism, beyond morality, and still more beyond moralism, does
not justice as relation to the other suppose on the contrary the irreducible excess of a disjointure or an anachrony,
some Un-Fuge, some “out of joint” dislocation in Being and in time itself, a disjointure that, in always risking the evil,
expropriation, and injustice (adikia) against which there is no calculable insurance, would alone be able to do justice
or to render justice to the other as other? A doing that would not amount only to action and a rendering that would
not come down just to restitution?" [p.32]

Quotation 16 "This is where deconstruction would always begin to take shape as the thinking of the gift and of
undeconstructible justice, the undeconstructible condition of any deconstruction, to be sure, but a condition that is
itself in deconstruction and remains, and must remain (that is the injunction) in the disjointure of the Un-Fug." [p.33]

Question 17 "We believe that this messianic remains an ineffaceable mark—a mark one neither can nor should efface
—of Marx’s legacy, and doubtless of inheriting, of the experience of inheritance in general. Otherwise, one would
reduce the event-ness of the event, the singularity and the alterity of the other." [p.33]

Curiosity
In the first scene of the first act of Hamlet, which Derrida refers to here, Barnardo is about to tell the story of the
ghost's first appearance, when he is interrupted by the ghost's reappearance. The ghost upsets the narrative even of
itself.

Curiosity
Time out of Joint is the title of a 1959 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, set in a dystopian future of 1998, whose
protagonist lives in a constructed reality in which he is led to believe that it is 1959. The plot closely resembles that of
Peter Weir's film The Truman Show, which was released in 1998. The French translation of this novel is titled Le
Temps Désarticulé.
Bibliography

Blanchot, Maurice (1986). "Marx’s three voices." New Political Science, 7(1), 17–20. doi:10.1080/07393148608429609

Derrida, Jacques (1993) Spectres de Marx. L'État de la dette, le travail du deuil

et la nouvelle Internationale. Éditions Galilée.

Derrida, Jacques (1994) Specters of Marx. The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International.
Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Routledge.

Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. Macmillan.

Heidegger, Martin (1975) “The Anaximander Fragment,” in Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy.
Translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi.
Harper & Row.

Kirk, G.S. and Raven, J.E. (1957) The Presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge University Press.

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1967) The Communist Manifesto. Penguin.

Shakespeare, William (1982) Hamlet. Methuen.

Valéry, Paul (1957) “La Crise de l’esprit,” in Œuvres Tome I. Gallimard.

Appendix I

Maurice Blanchot 'Marx's Three Voices'