Spectres of Class: Marxism, Deconstruction and the Politics of Affiliation (original) (raw)
Related papers
Contexto Internacional, 2020
Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference 'Whither Marxism?' hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida's analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this sixth group of contributions, Jean Tible sketches how spectrality and phantasmagoria continue to animate recent inheritances of both Derrida's and Marx's texts so as to inspire novel thought-struggles; Dirce Eleonora Nigro Solis considers Derrida's engagement with the question 'Whither Marxism?' as a politico-philosophical model of deviation that provokes the displacement of Marxian axioms and a renovation of Marxist and deconstructive thinking for the period of neoliberalism; finally, Michael Shapiro traces a different detour in Derrida's thought and shows that Derrida's deviant reading of Freud's construction of repression opens up the past and the archive to non-official constructions of collective history.
Contexto Internacional
Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. Maja Zehfuss, Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo and Dan Bulley and Bal Sokhi-Bulley offer sharp, occasionally exasperated, meditations on the political import of deconstruction and the limits of Derrida’s diagnoses in Spe...
Contexto Internacional
Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this sixth group of contributions, Jean Tible sketches how spectrality and phantasmagoria continue to animate recent inheritances of both Derrida’s and Marx’s texts so as to inspire novel thought-struggles; ...
Contexto Internacional
Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this group of contributions, Aggie Hirst and Tom Houseman, Paulo Cesar Duque-Estrada, Jenny Edkins and Cristiano Mendes reflect on the legacies of Marx and Derrida: on whether Derrida emphasized the wrong Ma...
2020
Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference 'Whither Marxism?' hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida's analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this fourth group of contributions, Thomas Clément Mercier shows how Der-rida's book, besides questioning reception and influence, yet remains to be read, especially in light of ongoing archival research on Derrida's engagements with Marx's writings in seminars from the 1970s; and Paulo Chamon offers a critical assessment of Derrida's promise of a 'New International' by considering how the book spooks itself in such a way as to raise serious questions in regard to sovereignty and subjectivity.
Jacques Derrida’s Marxism: An Althusserian Analysis
Journal of European Studies (JES)
The on-going research study tends to conduct the textual analysis of Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1994) by Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) to discuss and trace the impact of Marxism on him and in turns his responses towards it. He defended Marxism against world capitalism in the post-Cold War “New World Order” after the fall of Communism in 1989. He made a great contribution to the development of Marxist discourse from a deconstructive perspective. Therefore, the research paper focuses on the question, how did Derrida come under the influence of Marxism in his later career? It is mostly concerned with the critical responses of Derrida’s contemporary Marxist critics to Derridean deconstruction in general and to the publication of the book cited-above in particular as well as Derrida’s responses to them. In this way, the study attempts to explore the ways in which Marxism and deconstruction encounters and influences each other. Thoug...
'Politicizing Deconstruction': On not treating _Specters of Marx_
Rethinking Marxism, 1999
The argument of this paper is that the indeterminacy of Derridean 'justice' is precisely what lends deconstruction its peculiar moral force. Those who understand deconstruction as no more than an indeterminate indecisionism are therefore missing a crucial feature of the Derridean project. These readers, I propose, falsely collapse the conditions and the consequences of ethical-political decision. From this point of view, Derrida's Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International may be understood as neither more nor less directly political than those of Derrida's works which do not directly address Marxism. My conclusion is that the deconstructive practice of exposing différance at the heart of any presence is integral to Derrida's on-going project of political contestation and, further, is directly germane to the theorization of Marxist politics.
Silence, in the Archives: Derrida's Other Marx(s)
Aisthesis, 2020
The idea that Jacques Derrida kept silent on Marx and Marxism before the publication of Spectres de Marx, in 1993, has become a commonplace in Derrida studies and in the history of Marxism and French 20th century political thought. This idea has often been accompanied by a certain representation of the relationship (or absence thereof) between deconstruction and dialectical materialism, and fed the legend of deconstruction's «apoliticism» – at least before what some have called Derrida's «ethico-political turn», usually dated in the early 1990s. Against this narrative, this essay analyzes Derrida's notorious «silence on Marx» before Specters of Marx from the perspective of the archives. Archival research transforms the narrative: Derrida's «silence on Marx» was only «relative». Beyond the scene of publications, archives reveal another scene: multiple engagements with Marx and Marxist thought, marked and remarked in many archival documents – more particularly in a series of early seminar notes from the 1960s and 1970s. How does this archival scene transform our interpretation of Derrida's «silence»?
Deconstruction As Social Critique: Derrida on Marx and the New World Order
History and Theory, 1998
revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable (xix), Specters of Marx delineates the contours of a critique of the contemporary world which calls for a fundamental break with the present. In the face of the new world order following the collapse of the Soviet Union and European Communism, and the widespread claims that Marx and Marxism are finally dead, Derrida takes a strong stand against the triumphalism of economic and political neo-liberalism. He scathingly criticizes capitalism, defiantly presents deconstruction as the heir of a certain spirit of Marx, and calls for a new International as a response to the new Holy Alliance of the outgoing twentieth century.