Injunctions of Marx
Maintaining now the specters of Marx. (But maintaining now, maintenant
, without conjuncture. A disjointed or disadjusted now, "out of
joint, a disadjointed now that always risks maintaining nothing together
in the assured conjunction of some context whose border would still be determinable.)
The specters of Marx. Why this plural? Would there be more than one of them?
Plus d'un (more than one/no more one): this can mean a crowd, if
not masses, the horde, or society, or else some population of ghosts with
or without a people, some community with or without a leader - but also
the less than one of pure and simple dispersion. Without any possible gathering
together then, if the specter is always animated by a spirit, one wonders
who would dare to speak of a spirit of Marx, or more serious still, of a
spirit of Marxism. Not only in order to predict a future for them today,
but to appeal even to their multiplicity, or more serious still, to their
heterogeneity.
More than a year ago, I had chosen to name the "specters" by their
name starting with the title of this opening lecture: "Specters of
Marx," the common noun and the proper name had thus been printed, they
were already on the poster when, very recently, I reread The
Manifesto of the Communist Party. I confess it to my shame: I had not
done so for decades - and that must tell one something. I knew very well
there was a ghost waiting there, and from the opening, from the raising
of the curtain. Now, of course, I have just discovered, in truth I have
just remembered what must have been haunting my memory: the first noun of
the Manifesto, and this time in the singular, is "specter": "A
specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism."
Exordium or incipit: this first noun opens, then, the first scene of the
first act: "Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa - das Gespenst des Kommunismus."
As in Hamlet, the Prince of a rotten State, everything begins by the apparition
of a specter. More precisely by the waiting for this apparition. The anticipation
is at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated: this, the thing ("this
thing") will end up coming. The revenant is going to come. It won't
be long. But how long it is taking. Still more precisely, everything begins
in the imminence of a reapparition, but a reapparition of the specter as
apparition for the first time in the play. The spirit of the father is going
to come back and will soon say to him: "I am thy Fathers Spirit"
(1, iv), but here, at the beginning of the play, he comes back, so to speak,
for the first time. It is a first, the first time on stage.
(First suggestion: haunting is historical, to be sure, but it is not dated,
it is never docilely given a date in the chain of presents, day after day,
according to the instituted order of a calendar. Untimely, it does not come
to, it does not happen to, it does not befall, one day, Europe, as if the
latter, at a certain moment of its history, had begun to suffer from a certain
evil, to let itself be inhabited in its inside, that is, haunted by a foreign
guest. Not that that guest is any less a stranger for having always occupied
the domesticity of Europe. But there was no inside, there was nothing inside
before it. The ghostly would displace itself like the movement of this history.
Haunting would mark the very existence of Europe. It would open the space
and the relation to self, of what is called by this name, at least since
the Middle Ages. The experience of the Specter, that is how Marx, along
with Engels, will have also thought, described, or diagnosed a certain dramaturgy
of modern Europe, notably that of its great unifying projects. One would
even have to say that he represented it or staged it. In the shadow of a
filial memory, Shakespeare will have often inspired this Marxian theatricalization.
Later, closer to us but according to the same genealogy, in the nocturnal
noise of its concatenation, the rumbling sound of Ghosts chained to ghosts,
another descendant would be Valery. Shakespeare qui genuit Marx qui genuit
Valery (and a few others). But what goes on between these generations
- an omission, a strange lapsus. Da, then fort, exit Marx.)
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, tr. Peggy Kamuf, London:
Routledge 1994, 3-5
Siehe die deutsche Version.