I just finished Derrida’s Specters of Marx. My plan to strangle my love of reading continues apace. I really disliked this book. (Sorry Rob.) Of course, to be fair, I set myself up to dislike it by listing it as one of the enervating works I planned to read this summer (for the record, though, I dragged myself cursing and spitting the whole way through my early encounters with Marx and with Kant, both of which ended up having a dramatic impact on me, so I’m open to enervating proving useful in the end). This wasn’t just a joke on my part, though. Reading this book really did sap my will to read anything. I only got through it by upping the pace and lowering the quality of my reading. So perhaps I’ve misread parts of it (is misreading better than sheer bafflement, or worse? I ask because I found big stretches of the book incomprehensible).
First off, being snarky, Derrida is ridiculous when he says he is making a “political gesture” which “avoid[s] the neutralizing anesthesia of a new theoreticism” in the reading of Marx and that his is not a “philosophico-philological return to Marx.” His reading of Marx strikes me as precisely philosophico-philological, so perhaps then it’s not a “return” or not a return _to Marx_. (32.)
I’m not 100% convinced that Derrida was right that “communism was essentially distinguished from other labor movements by its international character.” (38. Derrida’s treatment of Marx and Engles would be interesting to contrast with Ranciere’s in The Philosopher and His Poor.)
I’m suspicious of what Derrida means and of who “us” is when he writes that we inherit from Marxism something which “leads us to be suspicious of the simple opposition of dominant and dominated” and “of the idea that force is always stronger than weakness”, particularly when he writes of not “necessarily subscribing to the concept of social class by means of which Marx so often determined (…) the forces that are fighting for control” in society. (55.) In my view, readings of Marx break down into two initial camps which can then be internally differentiated: classist readings and non-classist readings. By classist I mean workerist or working class separatist readings - readings which take the proletariat as the sole or at least the primary concern and subject and which point toward the suppression of the class relation by the proletariat in an action which will also abolish economic class at least in the capitalist sense. Non-classist readings are like the formal equalities of capitalist economic exchange: they mask - and are not likely to be helpful to critically understanding - substantive unfreedoms.
Derrida writes that “[u]nemployment (…) deserves another name today. All the more so in that tele-work inscribes a new set of givens that perturbs both the methods of traditional calculation and the conceptual opposition between work and non-work, activity, employment, and their contrary. (…) The function of social inactivity, of non-work or of underemployment is entering into a new era. It calls for another politics. And another concept.” (81.) This sounds a fair bit like some of the post-operaist thinkers on immaterial labor and, like that discourse, contains a fair bit of near-nonsense. Notable here is that there is no criticism of the traditional calculations and conceptual oppositions, implying that they once sufficed and only now have become outmoded due to a technological change. This omission is probably sexist - the sphere of unemployment qua nonwaged activity is counted as social inactivity but is not actually inactivity and is not actually unproductive for capital, as the Boydston article shows, among other works. And this is not a new condition but one as old as capitalism, at least.
Here’s something I like: “ruthless economic war (…) controls everything, beginning with other wars.” (81.) It links up with Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts where the distinction between economy (at least in its capitalist instantiation) and war is troubled. This isn’t particularly surprising, though, since part of the point of Marxism is that the economy is class war. Calls for class war from the left are merely calls to make explicit what happens implicitly (with the degree to which the class war is carried out non-explicitly being perhaps one element which helps contribute to the bourgeoisie’s continued success in that war).
I find Derrida unconvincing when he writes of “a fortunate perfectibility” and “undeniable progress” in international institutions. The parallel here again with post-operaismo, particularly Negri, is striking - the call for the constitution of Empire rests on implicit claims like this. (83.) Certainly some international institutions are better than others. There are better and worse police orders, to paraphrase Ranciere. One form of waged labor corrects the abuses of another form, to paraphrase Marx. Marx underscores, however, that waged labor is always an abuse and must be suppressed in the long term. I also wonder at Derrida’s internationalism - is the term ‘international’ a misnomer? If not (and claims made on Derrida’s behalf to being tremendously deliberate and careful with his terms would suggest not) then the international in a sense preserves the national, being predicated on relationships between nations or nationally located actors. I also find Derrida unconvincing when he writes that “[j]ustice demands” paying “tribute to certain of those working within them in the direction of the perfectibility and emancipation of institutions that must never be renounced.” Them being these international institutions. (84.) A further failure of class perspective in my view.
As is this: “The “New International” (…) is an untimely link (…) without common belonging to a class.” (85.) Perhaps Derrida here is playing on the notion of class. If so, then he is not offering a class collaborationist perspective. If that’s the case, then the minimal criticism is that he is unclear - not distinguishing his “political gesture” (32) from class collaborationist ones, in such a way which muddies the point and the category. I suspect that’s not what he’s doing, as he’s already spoken of not holding to a marxist definition of class and has praised those (not named as a class but forming a class and having class interests) who work in and for international states.
Derrida continues, “[t]he name of new International is given here to what calls to the friendship of an alliance without institution among those who, even if they no longer believe or never believed in the socialist-Marxist International, in the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the messiano-eschatological role of the universal union of the proletarians of all lands, continue to be inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx or of Marxism and in order to ally themselves, in a new, concrete, and real way, even if this alliance no longer takes the form of a party or a workers’ international, but rather of a kind of counter-conjuration in the critique of the state of international law.” (86.)
First, Derrida conflates different things in his list of what is no longer or never was believed in by these alleged internationalists. There were several Internationals, not one. The dictatorship of the proletariat has meant many things to many people in those different internationals, including some people who rejected the term. As for rejecting the ‘workers of all countries, unite’ idea, well, that could be problematized and nuanced and so on - and has been by different marxists - but its simple rejection is as problematic as its simple assertion. Derrida makes a similar conflation earlier, speaking of “the “communism” that we will later nickname the new International” as “without organization, without party, without nation, without State, without property.” (29) Of course in both lists he doesn’t _say_ all of these are the same, allowing a measure of Derridean plausible deniability (one can, after all, always be accused of missing a nuance, a key step in stultification among other things). But at a minimum Derrida, being a careful reader and writer attentive to his audiences, should have been more careful and attentive here in distinguishing his terms and saying what he meant by his lists. That aside, what is “an alliance without institution”? Insofar as the New International will be “without organization” then Derrida’s (probably) class collaborationist calls are relatively harmless, since without organization there is little efficacy (though the organized systems of dissemination of ideas which Derrida was employed in might make this work less harmless, at least in the view of those who take the category of ideology more seriously than I do.)
Derrida distinguishes the self-critical moment - what he calls a spirit - of marxism (a moment or spirit celebrated also by Lukacs - this agreement and Lukacs’ at best problematic politics might be useful for pressing exactly how useful or not Derrida’s work is here) from “other spirits of Marxism” that take this self-critical spirit and “rivet it to the body of Marxist doctrine, (…) to its fundamental concepts of labor, mode of production, social class, and consequently to the whole history of its apparatuses (projected or real: the Internationals of the labor movement, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the State, and finally the totalitarian monstrosity).” (88.) This strikes me as a rejection of the listed concepts, and (because of) an identification of those concepts with the attendant “apparatuses.” Nonsense.
More of the same: “all men and women, all over the earth, are today to a certain extent the heirs of Marx and Marxism (…) heirs of the absolute singularity of a project (…) proposing a new concept of the human, of society, economy, nation, several concepts of the State and its disappearance.” (91.) All? Okay, in a sense I suppose. Insofar as anything left by someone who dies is left in the world and insofar as anything the world can be said to belong to everyone in the world. That “insofar” isn’t very far, though. Put differently - the inheritance Derrida mentions was not apportioned equally among all men and women but rather was differentially distributed in better and in worse ways. Two further objections: First, the heirs and inheritance talk implies being dead - one inherits from someone who has passed on - which is not at all clear in the case of Marx and marxism. Second, Marx and marxism are multiple, not unitary. Althusser, for instance, identified an aleatory Marx and a determinist Marx. And there have been many marxisms, many of which were in conflict with each other. None of this is present in Derrida, though he makes room for Shakespeare, Heidegger, Freud etc. It’s also a shame that Derrida merely gestures at “the most concrete history of the apparatuses and strategies of the worldwide labor movement” rather than writing anything about them, or engaging with anything written by anyone involved in them. Or simply saying who or what he has in mind. (89.)
I like this: “To break with the “party form” or with some form of the State or the International does not mean to give up every form of practical or effective organization. It is exactly the contrary which matters to us here.” (89.) This has been said before, repeatedly, from within marxisms and labor movements, but it bears repeating. Except, when Derrida says this - who said this break meant this giving up? And what sort of break is this, with what historical scope? “The party no more…” or “the party never was…”?
I like this as well: “[I]n saying, “of commodities could speak”, Marx implies that they cannot speak.” (157.) Derrida seems to say that for Marx commodities do speak, which I think is a misreading. In any case, this would work well with a gloss on Marx’s transition at the end of chapter 6 of v1 of Capital, the departure from the noisy sphere of circulation. This implies that production is not noisy or is less so. Production is, of course, often physically very loud. It’s also a place of speech - orders given, but also the speech of workers, involved in cooperation both in ways productive for capital and in other ways, some of which are subversive. A different gloss could be given here - circulation is not “noisy” in the sense of “loud” but in the sense of signal vs noise - that is, the most meaningful information is to be found in production, not least precisely because of the presence of workers’ speech there.
I find Derrida confusing and perhaps confused on use value. To say the table “comes on stage as a commodity after having been but an ordinary thing in its use-value is to grant an origin to the ghostly moment.” (159.) First, the individual table if produced in a capitalist society is not first a use-value, ‘first’ understood as temporal progression. Tables produced as commodities are produced as exchange values and as use values at the same time in the production process. ‘First’ does have a temporal component in that use value pre-exists exchange value historically (there were objects that people did things with other than sell them prior to the sale of objects). That’s not very interesting, though. ‘First’ also indicates what for Marx is a logical priority of use value over exchange value (I prefer to think of exchange value as a subspecies of use value, so I would say there’s a logically priority of some other uses than exchange over the use[s] known as exchange), in that the table will not be purchased by someone if it has no use other than that of being sold by the seller. This is not a complicated point. All this means is that, generally speaking, people who buy things do so for reasons other than (or in addition) sellers’ desire for buyers to buy.
“[T]he commodity-form began before the commodity-form,” the use-value of the “ordinary sensuous thing (…) must indeed have at least promised it to iterability, to substitution, to exchange to value (….) A culture began before culture - and of humanity. Capitalization also. Which is as much as to say that, for this very reason, it is destined to survive them.” (160.) I take this to mean that capitalism was possible prior to capitalism existing. Fair enough, but only trivially true. This also means that capitalism’s abolition and communism are both possible prior to their existing. This also means that, insofar as use values will exist after capitalism ends, use value “must have at least promised” to post-capitalist society, to communism. The last three sentences of that quote exasperate me in particular. “A culture began before culture - and of humanity. Capitalization also. Which is as much as to say that, for this very reason, it is destined to survive them.” Where does the “also” place capitalization in relation to the terms in the preceding sentence? “A culture began before culture - and of capitalization.” ? “A capitalization began before capitalization - and of humanity.” ? “A culture began before capitalization” or “A capitalization began before culture”? (And again, why write like this?) (And what sense of “before” - temporal? or logical? Both? Neither? Is the production all of these questions marks a mark of the productivity of Derrida’s remarks on Marx?)
Similar question, what is the “it” and the “them”? What is destined to survive what (and why “destined”)? “It” being one and “them” being plural I take it that one of the three terms (culture, humanity, and capitalization) will survive the other two. Humanity surviving culture? Doesn’t make sense to me since humans are cultural animals. Culture surviving humanity? I suppose. I mean, I believe in non-human animals having cultures and this could increase over time (or perhaps D means extraterrestrials). A bit odd in a book on Marx, though. Culture surviving capitalization? Sure. Likewise humanity surviving capitalization. Capitalization surviving humanity? Again, I suppose… an extension of the culture surviving humanity idea I guess. All I can say is ugh.
I like this: “for its presumed first owner, the man who takes it to market as use value meant for others, the first use-value is an exchange-value.” (161.) That fits with how I want to understand the terms. The use of “man” rather than “bearer” is indicative, though. The owner, the man, also makes use of use-values produced and exchanged within the household and outside the household, by himself and likely by women (or a woman) and children. These are exchanged but not on the formal market - they don’t have an exchange value in Marx’s sense or in the capitalist sense.
I don’t know if Specters was productive for Derrida or for extending his work. I hope so. It’s given me very little that I didn’t have before (except exasperation). It strikes me as a rather unhelpful commentary on some of Marx’s works that I’m least interested in - the Manifesto and the German Ideology in particular, I’m slightly more interested in the 18th Brumaire. Derrida comments on the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy only in passing. He reads passages from Capital which are among the least interesting in the book (indeed, from the sections which Althusser recommended skipping on one’s first read, and which he later consigned to the Hegelian and determinist Marx - it’s a shame that Derrida reads none of the aleatory Marx in his book) and his reading doesn’t offer much to make those sections more interesting.
[Question for those who know Derrida - what do you recommend I read? What’s a strong work or two of Derrida’s, that makes a good case for him? Preferably an essay or essays. Electronically available texts would be awesome too.]
Hey Nate,
Interesting stuff, I’ve never had a huge interest in Derrida so it sounds like if I’ve got better stuff to peruse I’d be alright steering clear, sorry it wasn’t too useful for you.
Also, I’m a bit of a vocabulary novice, could you explain what you mean by Marx’s aleatory writing, the only def. I know for aleatory is something chance or accidental, and I’d like to know what you consider to be aleatory in that sense or just what you intended by the use.
By the way I’m reading through Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus right now and to be honest I’m having the same frustrations cause I find it pretty difficult, I mean I’ve read some Hegel and it was pretty hard but I got what I read, sometimes I don’t even know what these guys are talking about.
Thanks
Comment by Rob Odell — June 4, 2007 @ 11:58 pm
Hi Nate
This is a huge list of observations and criticisms, and I’d have no hope of responding to all of them, even given limitless time, space, etc. Also, I’m not convinced that my responses would be all that effective, nor even that I feel you should be convinced by whatever I would have to say. All of that goes without saying, but given that the question of Derrida’s reading of Marx (if not the question of how to read D’s reading of M) may count as one of the very few instances in which we might have major points of disagreement, I wanted to say it anyway. From now on, though, no apologies: I take it as given that you know that I (and vice versa) won’t take anything you say about D (or my defenses of D) personally, that I recognise that whatever you might argue here pertains largely to what we are talking about here, etc., etc., etc. So again (or in other words), there’s no need for apologies here.
On to the show, then. While there’s too much in the above to engage with comprehensively, I do want to make a couple of observations, which I will focus through an engagement with one particular paragraph in your discussion, which I will reformat into the three separate movements that constitute it:
1. More of the same: “all men and women, all over the earth, are today to a certain extent the heirs of Marx and Marxism (…) heirs of the absolute singularity of a project (…) proposing a new concept of the human, of society, economy, nation, several concepts of the State and its disappearance.” (91.) All? Okay, in a sense I suppose. Insofar as anything left by someone who dies is left in the world and insofar as anything the world can be said to belong to everyone in the world. That “insofar” isn’t very far, though. Put differently - the inheritance Derrida mentions was not apportioned equally among all men and women but rather was differentially distributed in better and in worse ways.
2. Two further objections: First, the heirs and inheritance talk implies being dead - one inherits from someone who has passed on - which is not at all clear in the case of Marx and marxism. Second, Marx and marxism are multiple, not unitary. Althusser, for instance, identified an aleatory Marx and a determinist Marx. And there have been many marxisms, many of which were in conflict with each other. None of this is present in Derrida, though he makes room for Shakespeare, Heidegger, Freud etc. .
3. It’s also a shame that Derrida merely gestures at “the most concrete history of the apparatuses and strategies of the worldwide labor movement” rather than writing anything about them, or engaging with anything written by anyone involved in them. Or simply saying who or what he has in mind. (89.)
Taking up No.2 first: I don’t know whether it’s because you’re so focussed on the detail that you’re not considering what might be called “the bigger picture”, or because you’re so familiar with Marx and Marxism that you’re main objective is to assess Derrida’s discussion in terms of the adequacy of its reading of Marx/Marxism, or because, as you sort of admitted, you’re somewhat predisposed to find fault with D’s argument (since you’ve set yourself up to dislike it), but presenting those two points as “objections” to D’s speculation just can’t go without, well, objection. If there is just one thing that anyone could get from Specters — if everything else D wrote was meaningless bar that one point — it would have to be that “Marx and marxism are multiple, not unitary…. there have been many marxisms, many of which were in conflict with each other”. First pages of Chapter 1:
“Maintaining now the specters of Marx… 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 some community with or without 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” (pp.3-4)
It’s possible (even likely?) that the many implications of that passage are not immediately evident, but I will assume for now that you can see why someone might object to your inference that D ignores the multiplicity and heterogeneity of Marx/Marxism. I’m happy to take it up further, but to save time for now I’ll move on.
If there were a second thing that one were to take from Specters, surely it would be that the conceptions (and opposition) of “living” and “dead” along with a pervasive (teleological) conception of temporality (and history), that together underpin a conventional idea of “inheritance” are the main targets of D’s critique and speculation on the specters of Marx. This is what’s at stake in D’s speculation on Hamlet: “The time is out of joint” (as the problematisation of temporality, as well as the affirmation of politics as inescapable), “the ghost” (as exceeding and enabling the opposition of the living and the dead), and their combination (as it were) to form a “concept” — which is actually a quasi-concept, a quasi-method, — of “hauntology” and the “logic of haunting”.
To present these two points as objections to D’s argument suggest, to me, that another reading is warranted. Just in passing, I would also say that a great many of your other objections take this similar form of presenting a point which is already implied, if not explicitly presented, elsewhere in the text (if not in the passage being cited).
Taking up No.3: I think you will agree that this doesn’t constitute a criticism of logic, so much as a question of interest or preference (disciplinary and political, among other forms of interest and preference). Then again, we might want to consider why you (or someone else; Eagleton, say) would want Derrida to present an analysis of “the most concrete history of the apparatuses and strategies of the worldwide labor movement” when there are already others doing that kind of work. Undoubtedly, there’s a politics at play in that desire, which is not to say that it’s necessarily a “bad” politics. But it is to say that there is, therefore, also a politics at play in questioning the origins or conditions of that desire, which again is not to say that it’s necessarily a “bad” politics.
In any case, my preferred response to No.3 would be to encourage you to consider the “time” of Specters. The book came out not long after the declared end of history (as the struggle between communism and democracy), and at a time when both Marx and Shakespeare were being declared “dead”, as something to eschew. In this context — which is to say, approaching Specters not just as an “argument” but also as an event — D’s text amounts to an affirmation of Marx (and of Shakespeare). It is an injunction not to abandon Marx (and Shakespeare), but rather to remember Marx (and Shakespeare): to remember “the” spirit of Marx. To the extent that Marxists don’t need to be told to remember Marx, the book is simply not for Marxists. To the extent, however, that Marxists might be prone — as everyone must be — to forgetting the spirit of Marx as the promise of a “radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake its self-critique” (p.88), the book is for Marxists too.
That’s not to say that Marxists are especially prone to forgetting that spirit or promise. It’s absolutely, most definitely NOT to say that such radical critique entails the “rejection” of particular Marxist concepts (since when has “rejection” ever been radical, ever challenged the utterly conservative and totalising logic of pure opposition?). It is to say, rather, that any “in-principle” devaluing of the kind of speculative work that constitutes “deconstruction” (say) in favour of “more concrete” analyses of labour, etc., rests on politico-philosophico-methodological belief in (and an institutionalised practicing of) the absolute difference between “speculation” and “politics”. D argues (and argues that Marx would argue), among other things, that such a belief forgets to remember the promise of radical critique and thereby risks becoming, entailing or animating a form of politics that is less than aware of its material conditions.
Finally, No. 1, which will be way too brief and underdeveloped: “All? Okay, in a sense I suppose. Insofar as anything left by someone who dies is left in the world and insofar as anything the world can be said to belong to everyone in the world. That “insofar” isn’t very far, though.” Again, that’s not a criticism. It’s an elaboration. “Put differently” — yes! that’s one of the aims and injunctions of Specters. Elsewhere you mentioned something about D muddying categories; yes, that’s what D does. Or rather he shows their already-muddiness (as it were). Reading his text according to those categories and distinctions is always going to lead to frustration or disappointment. (I’m not going to expand or defend this point here; it’s just too much to take up right now.) To that extent, Specters is not a reading of Marx/Marxism. It is a moment of movement within Marx/Marxism (which again is not to say that all marxists fail to appreciate the movements within Marx?Marxism, etc.).
That’s it for my response. Regarding commentaries on Specters, I would recommend chapter 8 of Niall Lucy’s Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction. There’s also a number of entries in his A Derrida Dictionary (including one on “The New International”) that come out of Specters. But these sources are likely to invite as many questions (for you) as they might answer, since they are written on the basis that Specters amounts to an injunction, and so they amount to actions or events in response to that injunction as much as they might be commentaries on D’s text.
Another person to try Michael Ryan, who writes a lot of stuff on deconstruction and marxism. I haven’t seen any particular commentaries on Specters from him, but he’s bound to have written about it somewhere. I’ll keep an eye out for reliable online sources too.
Cheers
rob
Comment by rob — June 5, 2007 @ 2:57 am
Nate, I’m just doing a quick search for what I would consider helpful commentaries on Specters, but I’m hitting the problem that most commentators (myself among them) tend to take from that book the “key” notions of hauntology and of democracy as always to come, rather than focusing on D’s book as a reading of Marx.
At any rate, here’s a paper by a former colleague of mine, which looks useful insofar as it reads D’s argument about democracy alongside those from Rorty and Mouffe:
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol4no1_2005/mummery_rethinking.htm
Comment by rob — June 5, 2007 @ 4:29 am
Another interesting piece on Spectres is Macherey’s “Marx dematerialised and [l’esprit] of Derrida” which was published in Rethinking Marxism in 1995; its not on line but here is their summary;
It is within this framework of spectrality—bringing in the impossible but irrepressible relation between appearance and reality, materiality and ideality, spirit and “the real”—that Macherey reviews Derrida’s deconstructive reading of the Marxian legacy. In Ted Stolze’s translation, Macherey credits Derrida with encouraging a rereading of Marx that, in his view, leads “to a free appropriation of Marx’s ‘inheritance.”’ Macherey understands Derrida’s contribution to consist of a reconsideration of several of Marx’s key texts in which references to ghosts and the like are introduced “not only as a figure of rhetorical style but as a determination of those texts’ contents of thought.” The different forms of spectrality that Derrida finds suggests a Marx divided at times against himself and in turmoil over the distinction between the spirit world and the world of objects, over the demarcation between appearance and reality to which he turned incessantly and which, in the end, haunts his work. Yet, despite the value of showing the fundamental instability of these distinctions in some of Marx’s writings—the impossibility of preserving a notion of reality which is not also “apparent” and of preserving an apparition which is not simultaneously “real,” and hence creating a sense of the immaterial material, the insensible sensible—Derrida, according to Macherey, accomplishes his transformation of Marx’s spirit into something presumably usable today by reducing Marx’s work “to a history of ghosts.” In this sense, Macherey tells us, Derrida “dematerializes” Marx and “deontologizes” Marx’s thought, if only to provide us with a “new science of spirit.” We can detect, reading symptomatically if not spectrally, in Macherey’s appraisal a trace of doubt in the efficacy of Derrida’s project since, in his view, Derrida’s reduction involves drawing “Marx alongside his ghosts” and appears to succeed perfectly “on the condition of filtering his inheritance to the point of retaining from Capital only book 1, section 1: Marx without social classes, without the exploitation of labor, without surplus-value . . . [which] risks, in fact, no longer being anything but his own ghost.”
Btw I think that confusing passage about culture is the translator’s bad (going for a word for word thing). The thought I won’t apologise for, but the language is clear and natural enough:
“Une culture a commencé avant la culture - et l’humanité. La capitalisation aussi. Autant dire que, par là même, elle est destinée à leur survivre.” which is: A kind of culture had begun prior to culture - and to humanity. As had capitalisation. Which is to say, by the same token, it is destined to survive them.
(”humanity” doubtless not referring to our species but the idea of ourselves and quality of ourselves we produce through culture).
Comment by chabert — June 5, 2007 @ 7:08 am
i bring macherey up because he is, or once was, a favoured “structurally absent third” in discussions of “why/how to read derrida?”
If you want to like Derrida more, I’d suggest either his short, early monograph on Condillac “Archeology of the Frivolous” or the also short book “Spurs” about Nietzsche’s style. They’re super fun and politically/historically inconsequential.
Comment by chabert — June 5, 2007 @ 7:22 am
hi all,
I’ve been out of town (a wedding and a brief bit of tourism), sorry for the radio silence. Now I’m home with much other stuff to do so little time for bloggerly things. For now, thanks for the comments. Rob O - I don’t know enough about Derrida to say that he’s not worth reading altogether, but I definitely didn’t find his Marx book added anything to my understanding of Marx. It might be that the book is useful for people who aren’t hung up on Marx, or as an avenue into Marx for people are already into Derrida. ‘Aleatory’ is a term I got from reading Althusser, specifically this collection of stuff from late in his life called Philosophy of the Encounter. As I understand it, it means ‘nondeterministic’ and ‘nonpredictive’, so no more ‘inevitability of communism’ kinds of stuff. I don’t use the term because I think Althusser had some particularly unique insight into reading Marx this way. There are other sources for reading Marx this way as I’m sure you’re aware (some supposedly dialectical and some supposedely anti-dialectical like Althusser) including some things Marx wrote. I just like the term as a short-hand. More later…
take care,
Nate
ps - Rob, how far are you into that Deleuze book? That’s another one that’s on my summer reading list.
Comment by Nate — June 13, 2007 @ 9:41 pm
Hi Nate - I found your comments to be interesting. They are pessimistic concerning Derrida’s effort in Specters, but nevertheless to point out some of the weaknesses of the text.
Lately I have been reading a text called Negotations. It is a series of interviews with Derrida. In it there is one particularly useful dialogue called “Politics and Friendship.” I found that it helps to explain both Derrida’s critique of Marxism, but also his engagments with the “Althusserians” at the Ecole Normale. Many of his concerns during this time were explicitly incorporated into the Specters text. Thanks for your work!
Comment by NotOften — June 15, 2007 @ 4:21 am
Yeah, that “Politics and Friendship” interview (not to be confused with the Politics of Friendship book) is fab!
Comment by rob — June 15, 2007 @ 6:41 am
I have read both “Friendship” texts now (one book, one interview) and I was just thinking about the relationship between the two. I guess is has something to do about the political struggles of friendship? Any thoughts?
Comment by NotOften — June 15, 2007 @ 3:32 pm
Re: Searle/Derrida
The “left” seems to think Derrida won that little match hands down (well, assuming that there was a game to be “won”). I am not so sure. Searle’s naturalism is really closer to traditional materialism than to the Heideggerian-marxo-semiotic-anthropology of Derrida (tho’ of course the continental sort attaches “vulgar” to Searle’s naturalism, as he/she does to about any sort of “ism” hailing from Amerika); Of Grammatology is really overwhelming, exceedingly verbose, obscure bric a brac that makes Hegel’s Phenomenology seem about like Hobbes. It’s rather odd that Derrida is even taken to be a leftist or progressive, given the obscurity, the denial of denotation (including one would assume statements concerning economic injustice) and his praise of Heidegger (of course in the wonderland of postmod, Heidegger has more cred. than say a Carnap, even tho’ Carnap did align himself with socialists on occasion–as did other analytical types, including Russell). I don’t idolize Searle’s writing (he does seem a bit pedantic and somewhat obvious at times), but ontologically at least, his naturalism seems closer to an orthodox, if somewhat de-hegelized marxism, and constructivism, for lack of a better term. Like Marx, Johnny Searle read his Leviathan: more than most conties could say……………………
Comment by Perezoso — June 17, 2007 @ 7:48 pm
Re: Searle/Derrida
The “left” seems to think Derrida won that little match hands down (well, assuming that there was a game to be “won”). I am not so sure. Searle’s naturalism is really closer to traditional materialism than to the Heideggerian-marxo-semiotic-anthropology of Derrida (tho’ of course the continental sort attaches “vulgar” to Searle’s naturalism, as he/she does to about any sort of “ism” hailing from Amerika); Of Grammatology is really overwhelming, exceedingly verbose, obscure bric a brac that makes Hegel’s Phenomenology seem about like Hobbes. It’s rather odd that Derrida is even taken to be a leftist or progressive, given the obscurity, the denial of denotation (including one would assume statements concerning economic injustice) and his praise of Heidegger (of course in the wonderland of postmod, Heidegger has more cred. than say a Carnap, even tho’ Carnap did align himself with socialists on occasion–as did other analytical types, including Russell). I don’t idolize Searle’s writing (he does seem a bit pedantic and somewhat obvious at times), but ontologically at least, his naturalism seems closer to an orthodox, if somewhat de-hegelized marxism, and constructivism, for lack of a better term. Like Marx, Johnny Searle read his Leviathan: more than most conties could say……………………
Comment by Perezoso — June 17, 2007 @ 7:49 pm
you must be moderating comments now. Alas
Comment by Perezoso — June 17, 2007 @ 7:52 pm
hey Per,
Sorry about that. I’m not moderating comments deliberately. I’m not real good at a lot of the tech stuff and periodically comments go to moderation w/ out any pattern I can detect. (If you don’t put in a name, email adress, and URL sometimes that does it, but only sometimes, or if there’s a lot of URLs.) I’m really, raelly tired right now so I can’t respond in depth to you or the many other comments here. For now, I think it’s inaccurate to say that ‘the left’ has any consensus on Derrida, or the academic left, or even the philosophy/theory reading left. Some who describe themselves as leftists are pro- Derrida, others are anti-, others are indifferent. Also, and this may be only tangentially related, I’m not convinced that there’s any intrinsic (noncontextual) political content to his or any stuff — just like the same words can have very different meanings in an utterance depending on the context.
take it easy,
Nate
Nate
Comment by Nate — June 17, 2007 @ 8:27 pm