Injunctions of Marx: A Detailed Analysis of Chapter 1 from Derrida's Spectres of Marx

Introduction: The Time Out of Joint

Jacques Derrida's first chapter of Spectres of Marx opens with one of the most famous lines from Shakespeare's Hamlet: "The time is out of joint." This phrase becomes the organising principle for the chapter and for Derrida's entire engagement with Marx's legacy. The phrase captures something fundamental about temporality itself: a disjunction, a dis-adjustment, a fracture in time that cannot be repaired or synchronised.

The chapter begins with the declaration: "Maintaining now the spectres of Marx," yet Derrida immediately problematises this "now," this present moment from which he speaks. It is a "disjointed or disadjusted now," unstable and incoherent, never allowing us to situate ourselves confidently in relation to Marx's thought— an "out of joint" now that "always risks maintaining nothing together in the assured conjunction of some context whose border would still be determinable."

This opening move is characteristic of Derrida's deconstructive approach. We cannot assume we stand in some neutral present from which we can look back at Marx objectively. The very ground from which we speak is already fractured, already out of joint. Our "now" is contaminated by what is no longer present and what is not yet present: by ghosts, by spectres, by what haunts without simply being.

The Plurality of Spectres: Plus d'un

Why does Derrida use the plural "spectres" and not the singular? The question is not trivial. He asks: "Would there be more than one of them?" The French phrase he uses, "Plus d'un," simultaneously means "more than one" AND "no more one." This double meaning is irreducible and points to something essential about spectrality itself.

"More than one" can signify a crowd, masses, a horde, a society, a population of ghosts with or without a people, a community with or without a leader. It suggests multiplicity that might still cohere in some fashion, that might still constitute some kind of collective entity. Yet "Plus d'un" also means "no more one," the less than one of pure and simple dispersion, with no possible gathering together, no unity whatsoever.

When we speak of Marx's spectres, we must hold both possibilities in tension. Are we dealing with multiple spirits that somehow belong together (various interpretations of Marx, different Marxist traditions, plural readings that nonetheless refer to something identifiable as "Marxism")? Or are we dealing with pure dispersion, with no centre, no essence, no identity that could gather these spectres into any coherent whole?

This ambiguity leads Derrida to pose a provocative question: If the spectre is always animated by a spirit, who would dare speak of "a spirit of Marx," or even more seriously, of "a spirit of Marxism"? Not merely to predict a future for them today, but to appeal even to their multiplicity, or, more seriously still, to their heterogeneity. The presumption of speaking about "the spirit of Marx" already assumes a unity that the concept of spectres (plural, dispersed, heterogeneous) calls into question.

The Manifesto's Opening Ghost: A Confession

Over a year before delivering this lecture, Derrida had chosen to title it "Spectres of Marx." The title had been printed, was already on the poster, yet very recently he reread The Manifesto of the Communist Party. Then comes his confession, remarkable for its candour and its implications: "I confess it to my shame: I had not done so for decades, and that must tell one something."

Here is Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential philosophers of the late twentieth century, preparing to deliver a major lecture on Marx at a conference titled "Whither Marxism?", admitting he had not read the Communist Manifesto in decades. What does this tell us? Perhaps it speaks to the status of Marx in Western intellectual culture after 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism. Perhaps it reveals how Marx had become simultaneously omnipresent (as reference, as spectre) and strangely absent (as actually-read text, as living engagement).

Derrida knew, he says, that there was a ghost waiting there, "and from the opening, from the raising of the curtain." Upon rereading, he discovered (or rather, he remembered what must have been haunting his memory all along) that the first noun of the Manifesto, and this time in the singular, is "spectre": "A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism." In German: "Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa, das Gespenst des Kommunismus."

The coincidence is striking but not accidental. Both Hamlet and the Manifesto open with the apparition of a spectre. Both texts begin with haunting, with the spectral, with absence made visible. Everything begins by the apparition of a ghost, or more precisely, by the waiting for this apparition, the anticipation of its coming.

Everything Begins with Waiting: The Structure of Anticipation

The anticipation is "at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated." The thing, "this thing," will end up coming. The revenant is going to come. It won't be long, yet how long it is taking. This temporal structure is crucial: we are waiting for something that will arrive, that is imminent, but that makes us wait. The future is certain (it will come) but indefinitely deferred (when? how long must we wait?).

More precisely still, everything begins in the imminence of a re-apparition, a re-apparition of the spectre as apparition for the first time in the play. The spirit of the father is going to come back and will soon declare "I am thy Fathers Spirit," 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.

This creates a paradoxical temporal structure. The ghost is returning (re-apparition, coming back), yet it is also appearing for the first time (at least theatrically, on stage, in the play). How can something return for the first time? How can a re-apparition be an inaugural appearance? This impossibility defines the logic of the spectre. The ghost disturbs the clean distinction between past and present, between what is and what was. It belongs to neither category: neither simply past (something that was and returns) nor simply present (something that is here now for the first time).

First Suggestion: Haunting is Historical but Not Dated

In brackets (indicating a subsidiary yet crucial point), Derrida offers his "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.

The point is fundamental: we cannot say that Europe existed first in some pure, unhaunted state, and then at some datable moment became haunted by the spectre of communism (or by Marx's ghost, or by whatever spectre we are tracking). Not that the guest is any less a stranger for having always occupied the domesticity of Europe. The spectre remains foreign, other, strange—yet it was always already inside, never arriving from outside to disturb an interior that pre-existed it.

"But there was no inside, there was nothing inside before it." This is the radical claim. 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.

Haunting is constitutive of Europe itself, no accident befalling European history from outside. There is no pre-spectral Europe that then becomes haunted. The haunting is original, inaugural, constitutive. Europe exists as the place of this haunting. Its very identity, its relation to itself, is opened (made possible) by what haunts it.

Marx's Dramaturgy: Staging the Spectre

The experience of the spectre, Derrida writes, 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 Marx represented it or staged it. Marx was also a dramatist, a theatrical thinker who staged, represented, theatricalised the spectral logic of capitalism and of Europe's grand historical projects, going beyond the economist or political theorist producing neutral analysis.

In the shadow of a filial memory, Shakespeare will have often inspired this Marxian theatricalisation. The debt to Shakespeare is not incidental. Marx's use of theatrical metaphors, his staging of historical conflicts, his dramatisation of class struggle, his invocation of ghosts and spectres: all of this bears the mark of Shakespearean influence.

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 Paul Valéry. Derrida traces a genealogy: Shakespeare qui genuit Marx qui genuit Valéry (and a few others). Shakespeare who begat Marx who begat Valéry. A chain of inheritance, a filiation of spectres, ghosts generating ghosts across generations.

Derrida then asks a crucial question: What goes on between these generations? His answer is striking: An omission, a strange lapsus. Da, then fort, exit Marx. The reference to Freud's fort-da game (the child's game of throwing away and retrieving, disappearance and return) signals that something is being repressed, something is disappearing and returning according to an unconscious logic.

Valéry's Strange Omission: The Disappearing Name

Derrida performs a close reading of two texts by Paul Valéry. In "La crise de l'esprit" ("The Crisis of Spirit," written in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I), Valéry writes: "As for us, civilisations, we know now we are mortal..." The name of Marx appears just once in this text, inscribed as "the name of a skull to come into Hamlet's hands."

Valéry evokes the European Hamlet standing on an immense terrace of Elsinore that stretches across the battlefields of World War I, from Basel to Cologne, touching the sands of Nieuport, the lowlands of the Somme, the chalky earth of Champagne, the granite earth of Alsace. This European Hamlet looks at thousands of spectres. He is an intellectual Hamlet who meditates on the life and death of truths. His ghosts are all the objects of our controversies; his remorse is all the titles of our glory.

When this Hamlet seizes a skull, it is always an illustrious skull. "Whose was it?" This one was Leonardo; this other skull is that of Leibniz who dreamed of universal peace; this one was Kant qui genuit Hegel, qui genuit Marx, qui genuit... Hamlet does not know what to do with all these skulls, yet if he abandons them, will he cease to be himself?

Marx appears here in the genealogy of European thought, positioned after Hegel in the chain: Kant who begat Hegel, who begat Marx, who begat... The genealogy trails off without completion, suggesting an ongoing chain of inheritance still unfolding.

Here is what happens next: later, in another text called "La politique de l'esprit," Valéry quotes himself. He reproduces this very passage about the European Hamlet and the skulls of great thinkers. Curiously, with what Derrida calls "the errant but infallible assurance of a sleepwalker," Valéry omits from the self-quotation only one sentence, just one, without even signaling the omission by an ellipsis: the sentence that names Marx, in the very skull of Kant.

"And this one was Kant qui genuit Hegel, qui genuit Marx, qui genuit..." This sentence simply disappears from the self-quotation. No explanation, no ellipsis, no acknowledgment of the excision. Marx's name is silently erased from the genealogy.

Derrida asks: Why this omission, the only one? The name of Marx has disappeared. Where did it go? "Exeunt Ghost and Marx," Shakespeare might have noted. The name of the one who disappeared must have gotten inscribed someplace else.

Derrida is identifying a symptom, a return of the repressed, more than a scholarly observation about textual variants. When Valéry quotes his own text about the chain of great European thinkers—skulls that Hamlet contemplates on the battlefield of European civilisation—he silently removes only Marx. The omission is too precise, too surgical to be accidental. Marx's ghost is being exorcised, expelled from the genealogy of legitimate European thought.

As Derrida's entire project will demonstrate, you cannot simply exorcise a ghost by not naming it. The ghost returns. If Marx's name has been erased from this particular text, it must have gotten inscribed somewhere else. The repressed always returns, though perhaps in displaced, disguised, unrecognisable forms.

Three Things Concerning Spirit

What Valéry reminds us of, both in what he says and what he forgets to say about skulls and generations of spirits, are three things concerning "this thing that is called spirit."

The First Thing: Paradoxical Incorporation

As soon as one no longer distinguishes spirit from spectre, the former assumes a body, incarnating itself, as spirit, in the spectre. Or rather, as Marx himself will spell out (and Derrida promises we will get to this), the spectre is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit.

It becomes, rather, some "thing" that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other. For it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition, but which disappear right away in the apparition, in the very coming of the revenant or the return of the spectre.

This is the first crucial paradox of spectrality: the spectre has a body (it appears, it is phenomenal, it is visible in some sense), but this body hovers between material and ideal. It is flesh that is not quite flesh, a body that is not quite a body. Moreover, this flesh and phenomenality that make the ghost visible also disappear in the very moment of apparition.

There is something disappeared, departed in the apparition itself as reapparition of the departed. The ghost appears, but in its appearing, something vanishes. The visibility of the spectre is inseparable from a certain invisibility. What makes it appear is also what makes it disappear. The apparition is simultaneously a disappearance.

The Second Thing: What Spirit and Spectre Have in Common

The spirit and the spectre are not the same thing, and Derrida says we will have to sharpen this difference later in the argument. As for what they have in common, one does not know what it is, what it is presently.

It is something that one does not know, precisely, and one does not know if precisely it is, if it exists, if it responds to a name and corresponds to an essence. The unknowing here is structural: 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.

One does not know if it is living or if it is dead.

This is the fundamental epistemological problem posed by the spectre. It escapes the categories by which we normally organise knowledge. We cannot say what it is (ontology fails). We cannot determine if it exists (the question of being/non-being doesn't apply cleanly). We cannot classify it as living or dead (the distinction breaks down). We cannot name it adequately (language fails to capture it).

The problem here is structural, irreducible to insufficient information or inadequate investigation. The spectre, by its very nature, does not belong to knowledge as we understand it. It falls outside the domain of what can be known in the traditional sense.

The Third Thing: This Thing That Looks at Us

Here is (or rather there is, over there) an unnameable or almost unnameable thing: something, between something and someone, anyone or anything, some thing, "this thing," but this thing and not any other, this thing that looks at us, that concerns us, comes to defy semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy.

The quotes are from Hamlet again: "Marcellus: What, ha's this thing appear'd againe tonight? Barnardo: I haue seene nothing."

The Thing is still invisible, it is nothing visible ("I haue seene nothing") at the moment one speaks of it and in order to ask oneself if it has reappeared. It is still nothing that can be seen when one speaks of it. It is no longer anything that can be seen when Marcellus speaks of it, but it has been seen twice.

The temporal disjunction is crucial. When you speak about the ghost, it's not there. It's invisible at the moment of speech. Yet it has been seen twice already. There's a gap between seeing and speaking, between the time of apparition and the time of testimony. When the ghost appears, you cannot quite grasp it in words. When you speak of it, it has already vanished.

It is in order to adjust speech to sight that Horatio the sceptic has been convoked. He will serve as third party and witness (testis): if this apparition comes again, "He may approue our eyes and speake to it." They need a witness, a third party, someone who can verify what they have seen, someone who can make speech match sight, someone who can confirm the vision and perhaps communicate with the ghost.

The Thing That Looks at Us: Spectral Asymmetry

Nor does one see in flesh and blood this Thing that is not a thing, this thing that is invisible between its apparitions, when it reappears. This Thing meanwhile looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there.

A spectral asymmetry interrupts here all specularity. It de-synchronises, it recalls us to anachrony.

Here Derrida introduces what will become a central concept: "We will call this the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us."

Even though in his ghost the King looks like himself ("As thou art to thy selfe," says Horatio), that does not prevent him from looking without being seen. His apparition makes him appear still invisible beneath his armour ("Such was the very Armour he had on").

Derrida emphasises that we will probably abandon the phrase "visor effect" after this point, yet it will be presupposed by everything we advance on the subject of the spectre in general, in Marx and elsewhere.

This is a foundational claim. The visor effect—we do not see who looks at us—structures everything that follows in Spectres of Marx. The spectre sees us, but we cannot see it seeing us. We cannot return its gaze. We cannot make eye contact. We cannot establish reciprocity of vision.

There is an absolute asymmetry in the gaze. Specularity (mutual reflection, reciprocal seeing, the mirror relation) is broken, interrupted, made impossible. The spectre looks at us from a position we cannot occupy, from a time we cannot synchronise with, from a place we cannot locate.

This asymmetry will prove crucial for understanding inheritance, law, justice, and responsibility—all of which will be grounded in our relation to ghosts we cannot see but who see us, who look at us, who regard us, who concern us.

Distinguishing the Spectre: The Non-Sensuous Sensuous

What distinguishes the spectre or revenant from the spirit, including the spirit in the sense of ghost in general? Derrida will spell this out later based on The German Ideology and Marx's argument with Stirner, but here he offers preliminary distinctions:

It is doubtless a supernatural and paradoxical phenomenality—the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible, or an invisibility of a visible X. It is that "non-sensuous sensuous" of which Capital speaks (we will come to this) with regard to a certain exchange-value.

This phrase, "non-sensuous sensuous," will become crucial. Derrida is pointing ahead to Marx's analysis of the commodity in Capital, where Marx describes how exchange-value gives commodities a strange spectral quality. They become non-sensuous (abstract, not materially present in their physical properties) yet sensuous (appearing, manifesting, taking phenomenal form).

The spectre is also the tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but still the body of someone as someone other. We will not hasten to determine this someone other as self, subject, person, consciousness, spirit, and so forth.

This already suffices to distinguish the spectre from the icon, the idol, the image of the image, the Platonic phantasma, and the simple simulacrum of something in general—categories to which it is nevertheless close and with which it shares more than one feature.

The spectre exceeds the category of image, of mere representation, of copy referring to something present elsewhere. It has a peculiar kind of quasi-bodily presence that distinguishes it from these other categories of the unreal or the representational. Yet it shares features with all of them, resembling the icon, the simulacrum, the phantasm, without being reducible to any of them.

Another Suggestion: Absolute Anteriority and Asymmetry

That is not all, and that is not the most irreducible. Derrida offers "another suggestion":

This spectral someone other looks at us. We feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority (which may be on the order of generation, of more than one generation) and asymmetry, according to an absolutely unmasterable disproportion.

Here anachrony makes the law.

This is one of the most important claims in the entire text. We feel ourselves seen by the spectre before we can look at it, beyond any look we might direct toward it. The spectre's gaze precedes ours absolutely, coming from an anteriority we cannot master, from past generations, from a time before our time, from a temporal position we cannot synchronise with our present.

This anteriority is "on the order of generation, of more than one generation." It comes from the dead, from those who came before, from ancestors, from a past that persists, never simply over and done with, continuing to regard us, to look at us, to make claims on us.

This produces the law. Anachrony (being out of time, out of sync, temporally disjointed) makes the law. We inherit law through being seen by what we cannot see, never choosing it, never consenting from some neutral position. We inherit through being addressed by what we cannot master temporally, through being called to responsibility by those who came before us and who continue to look at us even in death.

To feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross: that is the visor effect on the basis of which we inherit from the law.

Blind Submission to the Secret: The First Injunction

Since we do not see the one who sees us, and who makes the law, who delivers the injunction (which is, moreover, a contradictory injunction), since we do not see the one who orders "swear," we cannot identify it in all certainty. We must fall back on its voice.

The one who says "I am thy Fathers Spirit" can only be taken at his word. An essentially blind submission to his secret, to the secret of his origin: this is a first obedience to the injunction. It will condition all the others.

It may always be a case of still someone else. Another can always lie, he can disguise himself as a ghost. Another ghost may also be passing himself off for this one. It's always possible.

This is fundamental to Derrida's argument about inheritance and law. We cannot verify the ghost's identity. We cannot see behind the visor, cannot confirm who is speaking. We have only the voice claiming "I am thy Fathers Spirit."

We must take it at its word, an act of faith, a blind submission to an unverifiable claim. There is always the structural possibility of imposture, of fraud, of another ghost impersonating this one, of a lie disguised as truth. We can never be certain. The secret remains secret. The origin remains hidden.

Yet we must obey anyway. This first obedience to an unverifiable voice, this blind submission to a secret we cannot penetrate, this response to an injunction we cannot fully understand or verify: all this conditions all other obediences, all other responses to law, all other acknowledgments of responsibility.

We inherit the law through this primal scene of being addressed by a voice we cannot verify, being seen by eyes we cannot see, being called to responsibility by one whose identity and legitimacy we must take on faith. Rational understanding, contractual agreement, informed consent: none of these ground the inheritance.

The Society of Spectres and the Problem of the Armour

Later, Derrida says, we will talk about the society or the commerce of spectres among themselves, for there is always more than one of them. Spectres exist in relation to each other, form communities, engage in commerce. There is a social life of ghosts, a world of the dead that continues in some spectral form.

The armour, this "costume" which no stage production will ever be able to leave out, we see it cover from head to foot, in Hamlet's eyes, the supposed body of the father. We do not know whether it is or is not part of the spectral apparition.

This uncertainty is crucial. Is the armour part of the ghost, intrinsic to its spectral being? Or is it separate equipment, a technological prosthesis that covers and hides whatever ghostly body might lie beneath? We cannot decide. The armour might be the very body of the ghost (what appears when the ghost appears). Or it might be an artefact covering the ghost, disguising it, making its true form invisible.

This protection is rigorously problematic (and Derrida notes that problema also means shield in Greek), for it prevents perception from deciding on the identity that it wraps so solidly in its carapace. The armour may be but the body of a real artefact, a kind of technical prosthesis, a body foreign to the spectral body that it dresses, dissimulates, and protects, masking even its identity.

The armour lets one see nothing of the spectral body. At the level of the head and beneath the visor, it permits the so-called father to see and to speak. Some slits are cut into it and adjusted so as to permit him to see without being seen, but to speak in order to be heard.

This is the essential function of the armour-visor apparatus: it enables asymmetrical vision and speech. The ghost can see us without being seen. It can speak to us without revealing its face, its identity, its truth. Communication flows in one direction only. We hear but cannot verify. We are seen but cannot see in return.

The Helmet as Insignia of Power

The helmet, like the visor, did not merely offer protection: it topped off the coat of arms and indicated the chief's authority, like the blazon of his nobility. The helmet signified rank, power, legitimacy. It was a sign of sovereignty.

For the helmet effect, it suffices that a visor be possible and that one play with it. Even when the visor is raised, in fact, its possibility continues to signify that someone, beneath the armour, can safely see without being seen or without being identified.

Even when it is raised, the visor remains, an available resource and structure, solid and stable as armour. It is part of the armour, attached to it, ready to be lowered again at any moment.

This is what distinguishes a visor from a mask. Though both share this incomparable power (perhaps the supreme insignia of power: the power to see without being seen), the visor remains structurally available even when raised.

The helmet effect is not suspended when the visor is raised. Its power, namely its possibility, is in that case recalled merely in a more intensely dramatic fashion.

This is brilliant. Even when the visor is up, even when the face is momentarily visible, the structural possibility of lowering it remains. The visor effect doesn't disappear just because the visor happens to be raised at this particular moment. The very existence of the visor, raised or lowered, establishes and maintains the asymmetry of vision, the power to see without being seen.

This is, Derrida suggests, perhaps the supreme insignia of power itself: the power to observe without being observed, to see without being seen, to know without being known, more subtle and more absolute than brute force or the ability to harm.

Hamlet's Interrogation: The Questions About Armour and Face

When Horatio reports to Hamlet that a figure like his father's appeared "Arm'd at all points exactly, Cap a Pe" (from head to toe, completely covered in armour), the son is worried and questions. His interrogation follows a revealing pattern.

He first insists on the armour and the complete coverage. Hamlet asks "Arm'd, say you?" and Barnardo and Marcellus reply "Arm'd, my Lord." Hamlet presses further: "From top to toe?" They confirm: "My Lord, from head to foote."

Hamlet needs confirmation that the ghost was completely armoured, covered from head to foot. This matters. The armour signifies something: perhaps authenticity (the king's armour), perhaps authority (military power), perhaps protection, perhaps disguise.

Then Hamlet gets to the head, to the face, and especially the look beneath the visor. As if he had been hoping that, beneath an armour that hides and protects from head to foot, the ghost would have shown neither his face, nor his look, nor therefore his identity.

Hamlet asks: "Then saw you not his face?" Horatio replies: "Oh yes, my Lord, he wore his Beaver up."

The beaver is the visor. It was raised—so yes, they saw the face. The ghost's identity was visible, recognisable. It looked like the old king.

Notice Hamlet's question. He asks it in a way that suggests he was hoping for a negative answer. "Then saw you not his face?", as if hoping they would say no, the visor was down, we didn't see the face, we cannot confirm the identity.

Why would Hamlet hope they didn't see the face? Perhaps because if the face is visible, if the identity is confirmed, then Hamlet must respond. He must acknowledge this is his father. He must accept the burden of whatever will be commanded. The visible face creates an obligation, a responsibility that Hamlet might prefer to avoid.

The raised visor doesn't eliminate the visor effect; it just makes the revelation more dramatic, more undeniable, more demanding of response.

Three Things Decompose Spirit: The King as Thing

Derrida concludes this section by saying that three things, then, would decompose in analysis this single thing: spirit, or spectre, or king.

For the king occupies this place, here the place of the father, whether he keeps it, takes it, or usurps it. There is the return of the rhyme (for example "The Play's the thing,/Wherein Ile catch the Conscience of the King").

King is a thing. Thing is the King, precisely where he separates from his body which, however, does not leave him.

This refers to the medieval and early modern doctrine of the king's two bodies: the mortal, physical body of the individual man, and the immortal, mystical body of sovereignty that never dies ("The king is dead, long live the king"). The king both is and is not his body. He has a contract of secession with his own body, a necessary pact in order to have more than one body.

This splitting, this having-more-than-one-body, is what makes it possible to reign, and first of all, to inherit royal dignity, whether by crime or election. Power must be transmissible, must pass from one body to another while remaining the same power. The king's body dies, but kingship continues.

Hamlet says: "The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body. The King, is a thing."

The King is a thing, split from his body even while having it, possessing it. This is the necessary structure of sovereignty, the condition of possibility for political power to be inherited, transmitted, maintained across generations.

This brings us full circle to where we began: with spectres, with the plurality and dispersion captured in "Plus d'un" (more than one/no more one), with the question of what it means to inherit, to maintain, to be addressed by ghosts who are neither simply living nor simply dead, who see us without being seen, who make the law without being verifiable, who call us to responsibility from a position of absolute asymmetry.

Conclusion: The Foundation of Inheritance and Law

This opening section of Chapter 1 establishes the fundamental architecture of Derrida's reading of Marx. Everything that follows in the book, including his analysis of conjuration, his critique of Fukuyama, his discussion of messianicity without messianism, his concept of hauntology, and his defence of a certain spirit of Marx, is built on this foundation.

The logic of the spectre is the logic of inheritance. We do not choose our inheritance. We do not stand in some neutral present from which we can decide whether or not to accept what has been bequeathed to us. Rather, we are always already heirs, always already addressed by those who came before, always already seen by eyes we cannot see, always already called to responsibility by voices we cannot verify.

The visor effect, the fact that we do not see who looks at us, is the condition of our relation to the law, to justice, to the past, to the future. We inherit through this primal scene of asymmetry, through this original disproportion, through this absolute anteriority that precedes any present we might claim to occupy.

Anachrony makes the law. The time is out of joint, and we are born to set it right, though as Hamlet laments, this is a "cursed spite," an impossible burden, a task that can never be completed because the disjunction is constitutive, not accidental. The time cannot be put back in joint because it was never in joint to begin with. The haunting is original.

This is the condition under which we must think about Marx, about Marxism, about inheritance, about justice, about politics. We think from an unstable present, with partial visibility and uncertain identity, in the mode of being addressed by spectres we cannot fully see, cannot fully know, cannot fully verify; they see us, know us, call us to account.

The injunctions of Marx come to us with this spectral structure. Derrida's title, "Injunctions of Marx," is plural, suggesting multiple, perhaps contradictory commands. We do not see clearly who commands. We cannot verify the source with certainty. We must respond anyway, in a mode of blind faith, of essentially blind submission to a secret that remains secret.

This is what it means to inherit. This is what it means to be responsible. This is what it means to be subject to the law. This is the condition under which Derrida will attempt to think what remains living, what remains to come, what remains as task and promise in the spectral legacy of Marx.