Table Tournante
One might read the whole German Ideology , we will not do it here,
as the inexhaustible gloss on this table of ghosts. For one can take it
in this way, as a table, a Table of the law in ten parts, the specter of
a Decalogue and a decalogue of specters. The new table is presented also
as a tableau, the ironic tabularization, the fictive taxonomy, or the statistic
of ghosts. A table of the categories of the object or of being as specter
in general. And yet, despite the stasis that is appropriate for the exhibition
of a tableau or picture, this one knows no rest in any stability. This tableau
of spirits moves on the model of a seance table (table tournante) .
It begins to dance before our eyes, like a certain "table" in
Capital which we will later see move, when its becoming-commodity
opens up the dimension of secrecy; mysticism, and fetishism. For in this
list of ghosts, in this new table whose capital categories stand like the
counts of an indictment, the concepts cannot be distinguished. They are
not added one to the other, they supplement each other and thereby pass
in turn one into the other, each figuring a turn of the other. We cannot
read here The German Ideology , which at bottom is but the developed
exposition of this table. Without even quoting the mocking remarks in the
exclamatory style (the curious reader is referred to them) with which Marx
accompanies each one of the ten apparitions, we will limit ourselves to
a few observations about this or that distinctive trait. Whereas in the
"pure history of spirits" (reine Geistergeschichte), Marx had
counted "ten theses," here, a few pages later, in the "impure
history of spirits," he banks on (table sur) ten ghosts:
Gespenst no. 1: the supreme being, God. Not a minute is wasted speaking
of this "incredible belief," Marx notes. Neither Stirner nor Marx,
moreover, stops to consider the essence of believing, here the essence of
faith par excellence,which can only ever believe in the unbelievable, and
would not be what it is without that, beyond any "proof of the existence
of God."
Gespenst no. 2: Being or essence (Das Wesen). Apparently,we are going down:
from the highest, das höchste Wesen to the less high, das Wesen period.
An old problem, at least since Aristotle. Descending hierarchy, from theology
to ontology. Will it be so simple? Wesen remains the common concept, as
we shall see, and the guiding thread of this classificaiton that therefore
remains essentially ontological, in truth onto-theological.
Gespenst no. 3: the vanity of the world. Nothing to say about that, notes
Marx, except that it serves to introduce what follows, to link "easily,"
"lightly," leicht with what follows. And what is lighter, in fact,
more vain, precisely, more non-existent (here, no more Wesen) than the shadow
and the vanity of a ghost? The vanity of the world, then, just to make a
link with what follows, namely
Gespenst no. 4: good and evil beings (die guten und bösen Wesen). Das
Wesen has come back but, notes Marx, Max has nothing to say on this score,
even if there is so much to be said. It is just to make a link with what
follows, namely:
Gespenst no. 5: Being and its realm (das Wesen und sein Reich). This is
the first determination of Being. It possesses an empire, whence its metamorphosis
(Verwandlung) into a plurality of beings. This is the first birth of the
plural, birth itself; the origin of number and progeniture. Of course, the
word "realm" already transfers the table of the commandments or
the table of categories from Being to an evangelical ground.
Gespenst no. 6: beings, therefore (die Wesen). We have passed over into
the Plural, into the proliferation of the progeniture from 5 to 6, through
metamorphosis and spontanelous generation (daß es "das Wesen"
ist - worauf es sich flugs in Gespenst no 6 "die Wesen" verwandelt).
Gespenst no. 7: the Man-God (der Gottmensch). In this descending hierarchy,
this is, in sum, the moment of conversion or reversibility (descent and
ascension). It is also the category of the third, the middle or the mediation,
for the synthesis of speculative idealism, the hinge (charnière)
of this onto-theology as anthropo-theology of the ghost. Does not the
Man-God play the same role in the Phenomenology of Spirit ? This
articulating joint also situates the place of the becoming-flesh, the privileged
moment of the spectral incarnation or incorporation. It is not at all surprising
that Marx, following Max, devotes his longest commentary to it, which is
also, precisely, the most relentless (acharné) the most captivated.
Is not the Christic moment, and within it the eucharistic instant, the hyperhole
of acharnement itself? If every specter, as we have amply seen, is distinguished
from spirit by an incorporation, by the phenomenal form of a quasi-incarnation,
then Christ is the most spectral of specters. He tells us something about
absolute spectrality. Stirner himself would be ready to grant him the singularity
of this transcendental privilege. Without this incarnation, would the concept
of incarnation have any sense at all, any historical chance? Jesus is at
once the greatest and the most "incomprehensible of ghosts" (unbegreiflichste
Gespenst). Marx insists on this:
Of him Stirner is able to say that he was "corpulent"
(daß er beleibt gewesen ist). If Saint Max does not believe in Christ,
he at least believes in his "actual corpus" (an seinen wirklichen
Leib). According to Stirner, Christ introduced great distress into history,
and our sentimental saint relates with tears in his eyes, "how the
strongest Christians have racked their brains in order to comprehend him''
- Yes "there has never been a specter that caused such mental anguish."
It is thus easy to go from him to the "horrible being" (zum grauenhaften
Wesen):
Gespenst no. 8, man. Here we come closest to ourselves but also to the most
terrifying thing. It is of the essence of the ghost in general to be frightening.
This is especially true of man, of the most "unheimlich" of all
ghosts, a word Stirner uses that the French translations overlook most often
and that interests us to the highest degree. It is the word of irreducible
haunting or obsession. The most familiar becomes the most disquieting. The
economic or egological home of the oikos, the nearby, the familiar, the
domestic, or even the national (heimlich) frightens itself. It feels itself
occupied, in the proper secret (Geheimnis) of its inside, by what is most
strange, distant, threatening. We will come back to this in conclusion.
If Christ, that absolute specter, causes fear and pain, the man that this
Gottmensch becomes (and man only arrives at himself, here, in this becoming)
causes even more fear as he comes closer to us. He is even more spectral
than the spectral. Man makes himself fear. He makes himself into the fear
that he inspires. Hence the contradictions that render humanism untenable.
We see rise up here the logic of this fear of oneself that is guiding our
remarks. The ipseity of the self is constituted there. No one will have
escaped it, neither Marx, nor the Marxists, nor of course their mortal enemies,
all those who want to defend the property and integrity of their home "chez
soi": the body proper, the proper name, nation, blood, territory, and
the "rights" that are founded thereon. Marx exposes the fatefulness
of this, but he does so in the other, precisely, exposed in the opposite,
on the side facing, Saint Max. It has to do with the phenomenological fold,
Marx seems to suggest, with that difference, both decisive and insubstantial
at the same time, that separates being from appearing. The appearing of
being, as such, as phenomenality of its phenomenon, is and is not the being
that appears; that is the fold of the "unheimlich":
Specter No. 8 man. Here our bold writer is seized
with immediate "horror" - "he is terrified of himself"
(er erschrickt vor sich selbst), he sees in every man a "frightful
specter" (einen grausigen Spuk), a "sinister specter" (einen
unheimlichen Spuk), in which something "stalks" (in dem es umgeht:
the same word as in the Manifesto). He feels highly uncomfortable. The split
(Zwiespalt) between phenomenon (Erscheinung) and essence (Wesen) gives him
no peace. He is like Nabal Abigail's husband of whom it is written that
his essence too was separated from his phenomenal appearance.
Everything always happens closest to the head and to the chief. This fear
of oneself could have led the writer to suicide. The writer, the man-writer
could have chased after himself, hunted himself down, Saint Max is ready
to blow his brains out (once again the sign of the hunt: eine Kugel durch
den Kopf jagt) from the moment the persecution is internal and the other
makes him suffer in the head. What saves this man from man is still another
ghost. He remembers that the ancients "took no notice of anything of
the kind in their slaves." He then thinks of the "spirit of the
people" wherever it is incarnated. This leads him to deduce (Dies bringt
ihn auf) the next ghost.
Gespenst no. 9: the spirit of the people (Volksgeist). There would be too
much to say today about this deduction not only ahout the realm of national-populisms,
but about what has always linked them, in the founding story they tell themselves,
to apparitions of revenants. The founder of the spirit of a people, one
could show, always has the figure of a revenant-survivant, a ghost-survivor.
It always obeys the temporality of its realm. Its reapparition is awaited
but obscurely feared. Marx speaks with so much lucidity elsewhere about
nationalism, but here he remains very laconic. He merely remarks the necessary
transition toward the final metamorphosis:
Gespenst no. l0: Everything. Max will have succeeded in transmuting every
thing, the All itself, into a ghost (Alles in einen Spuk zu verwandleln).
So we have to stop the counting. And the recounting. And the story, and
the fable, and the gothic novel. And the numerological occultism that puts
on airs of Aufklärung. One has to admit that, forthwith "all enumeration
ends" (alles Zählen aufhört) once everything comes back to
haunt everything, everything is in everything, that is, "in the class
of specters" (in der Klasse Gespenster). One could throw it all together
in any order, and Stirner does not fail to do so: the Holy Spirit, truth,
law, and especially, especially the "good cause" in all its forms
(die gute Sache, which Marx, who is as always a lucid analyst of modern
times, accuses Stirner of never being able to forget, as if he too had made
of good conscience, already, a vocation and of rightful law a technique
of personal promotion).
Stirner's exemplary fault, for which he must be judged, judged for the example,
would be the vice of modern speculation. Speculation always speculates on
some specter, it speculates in the mirror of what it produces, on the spectacle
that it gives itself and that it gives itself to see. It believes in what
it believes it sees: in representations. "All the specters that have
filed before us (die wir Revue passieren ließen) were representations
(Vorstellungen)" ( p. 160). In this sense, speculation is always theoretical
and theological. To explain the origin of this "history of ghosts,"
Marx refers to Feuerbach and to his distinction between ordinary theology
which believes in the ghosts of sensuous imagination, and speculative theology
which believes in the ghosts of non-sensuous abstraction. But theology in
general is "belief in ghosts" (Gespensterglaube). One might say
belief in general, the belief in this alliance of the sensuous and the non-sensuous
where the two theologies intersect, the ordinary and the speculative.
Jacques
Derrida: Spectres of Marx, Routledge 1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf, p. 142-146
Compare the German text.