The Three Things of the Thing: Mourning, Language, and Work in Derrida's Spectres of Marx

Introduction: Decomposing Spirit

Having established the fundamental logic of spectrality through his analysis of Hamlet, Derrida turns to what he calls "the three things of the thing." These three things decompose in analysis the single thing called spirit, or spectre, or king. This decomposition performs an analytical unpacking of what constitutes the spectral as such, what makes a ghost a ghost, what makes inheritance possible and necessary.

The three things are mourning, language (particularly the voice and the name), and work. Each proves essential to understanding both the spectre in general and the spectres of Marx that haunt contemporary discourse about the end of history and the supposed triumph of liberal capitalism.

The First Thing: Mourning and Ontologisation

"We will be speaking of nothing else," Derrida declares. The entire text of Spectres of Marx is about mourning: mourning Marx, mourning Marxism, mourning the Soviet experiment, mourning the grand narratives of emancipation.

Mourning is philosophical through and through, extending far beyond the emotional. It consists in attempting to ontologise remains, to make them present by identifying bodily remains and localising the dead. All ontologisation, all semanticisation (whether philosophical, hermeneutical, or psychoanalytical) finds itself caught up in this work. By posing the question of the spectre, Derrida positions himself before mourning has accomplished its ontologising mission, wanting to think the spectre as spectre and refusing to reduce it to presence or absence.

The imperative of mourning is knowledge: one must know who and where, whose body it is and what place it occupies. The dead body must stay in its place. Hamlet demands to know both to whom the skull belonged and to whom the grave belongs. Nothing could be worse for mourning than confusion or doubt. One must know who is buried where, and ensure that in what remains of him, he remain there.

This reveals the deeper anxiety: that the dead might not stay put, might return, might haunt. Mourning attempts to contain the dead, to transform them into pure pastness, something finished and safely behind us.

This is precisely what fails with the spectre. The ghost does not stay in its place. It moves, returns, haunts. It refuses ontologisation, refuses to submit to mourning's work. The spectre is neither present nor absent, neither living nor dead, occupying a third position that traditional philosophical categories cannot accommodate.

The Second Thing: Language, Voice, and the Name

One cannot speak of generations of spirits (Kant qui genuit Hegel qui genuit Marx) except on the condition of language, the voice, that which marks the name or takes its place.

Hamlet picks up Yorick's skull and remembers: "That Scull had a tongue in it, and could sing once." The dead were once living speakers, and what remains of them in memory, what gets transmitted across generations, depends on language: the marks they left, the names they bore, the words they spoke or wrote. Without language, there is no inheritance, no transmission, no possibility of the dead addressing the living.

Paul Valéry, the French poet and essayist, traced a famous genealogy of European spirit: "Kant qui genuit Hegel qui genuit Marx" (Kant who begat Hegel who begat Marx). Derrida returns to this passage repeatedly in Spectres of Marx, finding in it an exemplary meditation on intellectual inheritance. The genealogy Valéry traces is a genealogy of proper names, signatures, texts bearing those names. These thinkers live on through their names and the corpus of writing associated with them. The inheritance is linguistic, textual, marked by the name that persists even when the body has decayed.

Valéry's omission of Marx's name when quoting himself testifies to the name's power, the anxiety it produces, the need to exorcise it. The attempt to silence the name is evidence of its continuing efficacy. If Marx were truly finished, there would be no need for erasure.

Language and voice are the medium through which the dead address the living, through which spectres make demands. "I am thy Fathers Spirit": this declaration comes through speech we must take on faith, that we cannot verify through vision, that we must accept based on the claim itself.

The proper name always remains to come, always exceeds any present meaning, always haunts future interpreters who must decide what fidelity to that name requires. "Marx" names something each generation must interpret anew, never settling into fixed content.

The Third Thing: Work and the Spirit of Spirit

Marx qui genuit Valéry brings us to work. The thing works, whether it transforms or transforms itself: the spirit, the "spirit of the spirit" is work.

Valéry underscores it: "By 'Spirit' here I mean a certain power of transformation...the spirit...works." Spirit is transformative activity, labour, work, never substance or fixed essence. The spirit of the spirit is the work of the work: transformation, production, the power to change and be changed.

Marx understood this better than anyone: consciousness is produced through material activity, through labour, through transforming the world. Human beings make themselves through work. This insight applies reflexively to Marx's own thought. Marxism is a working force, existing in its effects, in how it continues to transform political and economic discourse.

The spectre works. It transforms, produces effects, does work in the world even without a living body. Marx's spectre continues to produce effects in contemporary discourse, even (or especially) when people declare him finished. Every invocation of "class," every analysis of "exploitation," every critique of "capitalism" is an effect of Marx's continuing work.

Whither Marxism? Following the Ghost

"So 'Whither Marxism?'" Derrida asks. Why does it whisper to us to follow a ghost? What does it mean to follow a ghost? What if this came down to being followed by it, persecuted by the very chase we are leading?

We think we are pursuing the question, but what if it pursues us? What seems to be out front, the future, comes back in advance from the past. Following a ghost means accepting that direction is uncertain, that agency is unclear, that who leads and who follows cannot be definitively determined. The future (whither we are going) is also the past (where the ghost comes from), and both haunt the present.

The question "Whither Marxism?" is also secretly "Is Marxism dying?" To ask where something is going is to ask the ghost where it will take us. This reverses at any moment into the possibility that we are being followed, being haunted.

Hauntology: A New Logic

Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost. What is a ghost? What is the effectivity of a spectre, of what seems to remain as ineffective and insubstantial as a simulacrum?

The ghost troubles the distinction between thing and simulacrum. It appears, speaks, produces effects, and yet lacks a living body, cannot be grasped. It occupies a third position challenging the binary logic of presence/absence, being neither simply absent nor simply present.

Let us call it a hauntology. This logic of haunting is larger than ontology or thinking of Being. It harbours within itself, as circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves.

Hauntology is something fundamentally different from a larger ontology: a way of thinking that refuses to reduce everything to presence or absence, being or non-being. It thinks the spectre as spectre by acknowledging its irreducible spectrality. Ontology asks: what is? What exists? Hauntology asks: what haunts? What returns? What makes claims from a position neither simply present nor absent?

After the End of History

Hamlet began with the expected return of the dead King. After the end of history, the spirit comes by coming back (revenant), figuring both a dead man who returns and a ghost whose expected return repeats itself, again and again.

A spectre is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back. Think of Macbeth, of Caesar's spectre. After expiring, he returns. The spectre is constitutively repetitive. This means history cannot simply end. What has been will return, will haunt, will make claims on the future.

The Scholar Cannot Speak to the Spectre

What seems almost impossible is to speak always of the spectre, to speak to the spectre, to speak with it. This seems even more difficult for what Marcellus calls a "scholar." Perhaps for a spectator in general. The last one to whom a spectre can appear is a spectator as such.

As theoreticians, observers, and intellectuals, scholars believe looking is sufficient. Therefore they are not always competent to do what is necessary: speak to the spectre.

Herein lies an indelible lesson of Marxism. The traditional scholar believes that spectating from a distance is sufficient, yet you cannot relate to a spectre that way. It addresses you, makes demands, calls you to responsibility. It requires responding, speaking to, speaking with, being in conversation with, going beyond mere observation.

The traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts, nor in the virtual space of spectrality. There has never been a scholar who does not believe in the sharp distinction between real and unreal, actual and inactual, living and non-living. Beyond this opposition, for the scholar, there is only theatrical fiction, literature, speculation. This structural limitation is built into the scholarly position itself.

The Complex of Marcellus

"Thou art a Scholler, speake to it, Horatio," Marcellus says naively, as if taking part in a colloquium. He appeals to the learned intellectual as one who better understands how to establish necessary distance or find appropriate words. This is what Derrida calls "the complex of Marcellus," the illusion that scholarly authority extends to the spectral domain.

Horatio enjoins the Thing to speak, ordering it in a gesture at once imperious and accusing. He commands the ghost and interrogates it, attempting to master what addresses him. This is conjuration: the attempt to control the ghost, force it to speak on his terms, stabilise its meaning. The ghost cannot be arrested, stabilised, made to submit to scholarly interrogation.

Inversely, Marcellus was perhaps anticipating another "scholar" who would finally be capable, beyond the opposition between presence and non-presence, of thinking the possibility of the spectre. This requires a different mode of thought, one that does not seek mastery, does not demand certainty. It requires hospitality to the ghost: openness, listening, responsiveness.

The Manifest Spectre: Rereading the Manifesto

It was a fault on Derrida's part to have forgotten what was most manifest about the Manifesto. What manifests itself first is a spectre, this first paternal character, as powerful as it is unreal, a simulacrum virtually more actual than what is blithely called living presence.

The Communist Manifesto begins: "A spectre is haunting Europe." Marx does not begin with argument, analysis, or doctrine. He begins with apparition. This is the most obvious fact about the Manifesto, yet perpetually forgotten or treated as rhetorical flourish. Derrida insists we take it seriously: Marx introduces Marxism as spectre, never as science.

The spectre is paternal (an inheritance), unreal (no body, no institution), yet more effective than presence (it terrifies ruling powers, reorganises alliances). Power responds to what threatens to return, to what haunts, to what may exist as much as to what already exists. This is hauntology in action: the virtual is more actual than the present.

Upon rereading the Manifesto, Derrida knows of few texts whose lesson seems more urgent today, provided one takes into account what Marx and Engels themselves say about their own possible "aging" and irreducible historicity. What other thinker has called for transformation of his own theses, incorporating in advance the unpredictability of new knowledge, techniques, and political givens? Marx and Engels explicitly warned that their concepts would age, their formulations require revision. This separates Marx from dogmatic Marxism and makes him indispensable precisely because he refuses systematic closure.

No text seems as lucid concerning globalisation, the irreducibility of technology and media, law, international law, and nationalism. These insights extend beyond specific technologies of his time to the structure of technological transformation itself.

It will always be a fault not to read and reread Marx. When dogma machines and Marxist ideological apparatuses are disappearing, we no longer have excuses, only alibis, for turning away from this responsibility. There will be no future without Marx, without the memory and inheritance of a certain Marx, of at least one of his spirits. For there is more than one of them, there must be more than one of them.

Déjà Vu and the Experience of a Generation

One need not be Marxist or communist to accept this obvious fact: we all live in a world that still bears, at incalculable depth, the mark of this inheritance. This inheritance operates whether we affirm it, deny it, or pretend it is over. The categories through which we think politics, economics, and society are marked by Marx. Inheritance precedes choice.

For Derrida's generation, the question "Whither Marxism?" is as old as they are. The discourse of the end of Marxism, communism, philosophy, and history did not begin in 1989. It was dominant in the early 1950s. For many, a certain end of communist Marxism did not await the USSR's collapse. Therefore the question resonates like old repetition.

Many young people today probably no longer realise that eschatological themes of the "end of history" and "last man" were, forty years ago, daily bread. They formed the canon of modern apocalypse: end of History, end of Man, end of Philosophy (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, with their Kojevian codicil). Such was the element in which deconstruction developed; one can understand nothing of this period without taking this historical entanglement into account.

For those who shared this singular period, the media parade of current discourse on the end of history looks like tiresome anachronism. Those celebrating appear as latecomers, boarding the "last train" after it has departed. How can one be late to the end of history? If the "end" repeats, if it produces déjà vu, then the event has not been thought. The discourse of the end mistakes repetition for completion.

Blanchot's Marx: The Three Voices

Derrida turns to Maurice Blanchot's "Marx's Three Voices," subscribing to it without reservation. With sober brilliance, these pages are less full response than the measure of what we must respond to today, inheritors of more than one form of speech, of an injunction that is itself disjointed.

Blanchot considers the radical and necessary heterogeneity of an inheritance, the difference without opposition that must mark it, a "disparate" quasi-juxtaposition without dialectic. An inheritance is never gathered together, never one with itself. Its presumed unity can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing. "One must" means one must filter, sift, criticise, sort out several possibles inhabiting the same injunction in contradictory fashion around a secret.

If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, we would never have anything to inherit from it. We would be affected by it as by a natural cause. One always inherits from a secret, which says "read me, will you ever be able to do so?"

The critical choice called for by any reaffirmation of inheritance is the condition of finitude. The infinite does not inherit. The injunction can only be one by dividing itself, differing/deferring itself, speaking at the same time several times, in several voices.

Blanchot writes: "In Marx, we see three kinds of voices gathering force and taking form, all three necessary, but separated and more than opposed, as if juxtaposed. The disparate that holds them together designates a plurality of demands to which, since Marx, everyone who speaks or writes cannot fail to feel subjected, unless he is to feel himself failing in everything."

Marx speaks in multiple voices: scientific analysis, political injunction, messianic promise. These cannot be unified, reconciled, or reduced to a single system. They coexist in tension.

The phrase "since Marx" names a time still open, a past that remains to come, a future that assigns us, meaning far more than simply "after Marx." The past commands us from the future. If "since Marx" names a future-to-come as much as a past, it is because the proper of a proper name will always remain to come, and secret.

The Time is Out of Joint

Blanchot does not name Shakespeare, yet Derrida cannot hear "since Marx" without hearing "since Shakespeare."

To maintain together what does not hold together can be thought only in a dis-located time of the present, at the joining of a radically dis-jointed time, without certain conjunction. This is a time without certain joining or determinable conjunction, a time constitutively lacking such conjunction. Time is not simply broken (which would imply it was once whole). This disjunction is the originary condition of temporality itself.

"The time is out of joint": time is disarticulated, dislocated, deranged, both out of order and mad. Time is off its hinges, beside itself. Says Hamlet, who thereby opened one of those breaches through which Shakespeare kept watch over the English language.

How to translate "The time is out of joint"? A striking diversity disperses across centuries. A masterpiece always moves in the manner of a ghost. The Thing haunts, inhabits without residing, without confining itself to numerous versions. In French translations, time is either le temps (temporality), or l'histoire (the way things are at a certain time), or le monde (the world as it turns, current affairs). Time, history, world: all three senses resonate.

The translations themselves are put "out of joint." However correct, they are all disadjusted, unjust in the gap that affects them. "Out of joint" would qualify moral decadence or corruption of the city, dissolution or perversion of customs. It is easy to go from disadjusted to unjust.

From Disadjustment to Injustice

That is our problem: how to justify passage from disadjustment (technico-ontological value affecting presence) to an injustice that would no longer be ontological?

What if disadjustment were the condition of justice? What if this double register condensed its enigma in what gives unheard-of force to Hamlet's words? Normally we assume justice equals order, harmony, things being "in joint." Derrida reverses this: justice may require disadjustment.

Hamlet opposes being "out of joint" to being-right, the straight path that walks upright. He curses the fate that caused him to be born to set right a time that walks crooked.

Hamlet does not primarily curse Denmark's corruption or Claudius's crime. He curses his mission, the destiny that makes him the one who must "set it right." "O cursèd spite, That ever I was born to set it right!" The tragedy is that Hamlet must repair time, not that time is out of joint.

He curses his mission: to do justice to a de-mission of time, to make rectitude and right a movement of correction, reparation, vengeance, punishment. This misfortune is unending because it is nothing other than himself. Hamlet is "out of joint" because he curses his own mission, the punishment of having to punish, exercise justice in the form of reprisals. Like Job, he curses the day that saw him born.

Justice arrives after the crime, after the wrong, after the damage. Justice is structurally late. The one who acts justly is always an heir, inheriting a crime they did not commit, a task they did not choose, a responsibility assigned before they can consent.

The Essence of Tragedy

There is tragedy only on condition of this pre-originary and spectral anteriority of the crime, the crime of the other, a misdeed whose truth can never present itself in flesh and blood, only be presumed, reconstructed, fantasised. Yet one bears responsibility nonetheless, beginning at birth.

Hamlet curses the destiny that made him a righter of wrongs, one who can only come after the crime, in a necessarily second generation, originarily late and therefore destined to inherit. One never inherits without coming to terms with some spectre, with the fault but also the injunction of more than one.

That is the originary wrong, the birth wound: time is "out of joint" is attested by birth itself when it dooms someone to be the man of right and law only by becoming an inheritor, redresser of wrongs, by castigating, punishing, killing. The malediction would be inscribed in the law itself: in its murderous, bruising origin.

If law stems from vengeance, can one not yearn for a justice that one day, a quasi-messianic day, would finally be removed from the fatality of vengeance? Better than removed: infinitely foreign, heterogeneous at its source? Is this day before us, to come, or more ancient than memory itself?

Justice to Come

If adjoining, the joining of the "joint," supposes the correctness or justice of time, what happens when time itself gets "out of joint"? Ana-chronique?

When time is out of joint, when the very condition of adjoining is disjointed, what becomes of justice? What becomes of responsibility? What becomes of inheritance?

If time were fully "in joint," everything would already be settled, no justice would be possible, no responsibility would remain, history would be closed. Time being out of joint opens the future, makes decision necessary, allows transformation, sustains the possibility of justice. The disjunction is the very condition of ethics, politics, and justice itself.

Justice and law are not the same. Law (droit) is codified, institutional, enforceable, historical, violent at its origin. Justice is not codifiable, not present, not fully knowable, not reducible to institutions. It is what exceeds law. Every legal system claims to embody justice, but justice itself is never present as such. Justice is what escapes, what remains to come, what calls every existing legal order into question.

Justice cannot be fully realised, completed, installed once and for all. If it were, history would be closed, nothing left to do, no responsibility to bear. Therefore Derrida insists on justice to come (la justice à venir). This means justice structurally cannot be present, only exists as opening toward the future, is a demand. It is never simply delayed or postponed.

Derrida introduces the messianic without messianism: this means expectation without content, openness without program, promise without timetable, structural waiting. It is stripped of theology, religious belief, historical Messiah, and teleological end of history. This is the structure of responsibility itself: to act without guarantee, decide without certainty, remain open to what cannot be programmed.

Because justice is never present, Derrida is often misunderstood as saying nothing matters, everything is undecidable, we should suspend action. This is precisely wrong. Because justice is never guaranteed, decisions are urgent, responsibility is absolute, action cannot hide behind certainty, ethics becomes more demanding, not less. Undecidability does not paralyse action; it intensifies responsibility.

Like justice, democracy is never complete, never achieved, always unfinished. Democracy to come (la démocratie à venir) does not mean future parliamentary reforms or gradual institutional improvement. It means democracy as open promise that cannot be closed, that must always exceed itself, that calls existing institutions into question. A democracy that claims completion has already betrayed itself.

Marxism matters because it keeps the question of justice open, refuses reconciliation with existing injustice, insists history is not finished, interrupts every declaration of closure. Its value lies in its power of interruption, beyond any doctrinal content, beyond predictive accuracy, beyond determinate solutions. It is the ghost at the feast of capitalist triumphalism, the spectre returning to say: not yet, not this, not enough.

What Derrida considers undeconstructible is not Marxist ontology, class theory, dialectical materialism, or economic determinism. It is the emancipatory promise: a promise with no fixed content that cannot be programmed or fulfilled once and for all, yet remains irreducible. Without it, critique collapses, politics becomes management, justice becomes administration, history closes. The promise is what keeps politics from closing, maintains opening toward justice, refuses to accept existing conditions as final.

This is why Marx haunts. The questions he posed remain unanswered: exploitation, domination, alienation, structural injustice, the violence of capital accumulation. These have not disappeared. The spectre returns because work remains unfinished. A fulfilled promise would no longer haunt.

Every declaration of finality (justice achieved, democracy realised, history completed) is dogmatic, attempting to close time, silence ghosts, escape responsibility, foreclose the future. Triumph is always premature. Every declaration of finality is haunted by what it excludes.

Conclusion: Living in Disjointed Time

The three things of the thing (mourning, language/voice/name, and work) decompose spirit into constituent spectral elements. This decomposition reveals what it means to inherit, to be addressed by the dead, to live in a time fundamentally out of joint.

Mourning attempts to ontologise the dead, to fix them in place, ensure they will not return. The spectre resists this, moves, returns, haunts, refuses to stay put.

Language and name are what get transmitted across generations, what allow the dead to address the living, what make inheritance possible. This transmission is never transparent. The name always remains to come, always requires new interpretation.

Work (the transformative activity of spirit) means spectres are active forces continuing to produce effects, transform reality, make demands. Marx's spectre works, reshaping discourse, returning in new contexts, making claims that cannot be dismissed.

All this takes place in a time out of joint, a time without certain conjunction, a dislocated temporality that is the very condition of inheritance, justice, and responsibility. We cannot put time back in joint because it was never in joint to begin with. The disjunction is originary condition of temporality itself. The task is response, never repair.

To inherit means accepting this condition, responding to injunctions from a disjointed time, taking responsibility for what came before us though we cannot master it, see it clearly, or verify its claims with certainty. Inheritance is active selection, transformation, responsibility to the spirit (or spirits), opening: it refuses passive reception, mere preservation, fidelity to the letter, and closure.

This is what it means to live with Marx's spectres, to inherit from a tradition that speaks in multiple voices, makes contradictory demands, addresses us from absolute anteriority and asymmetry. We must choose among voices but cannot escape the injunction. We must decide without guarantee. We must act without certainty.

The time is out of joint. We are born to set it right. This mission is cursed, impossible, unending, because disjunction is constitutive, not contingent. Yet we must respond anyway, inherit anyway, take responsibility anyway.

This is the condition of justice in disjointed time: to act knowing justice will never be present, history will never be complete, ghosts will continue returning with demands we cannot fully satisfy.

What remains is vigilance, responsibility, and opening: the refusal of despair, paralysis, and closure. Marx haunts because he sustains questions, because he provides no final answers. The spectre returns to insist work is unfinished, justice remains to come, history cannot be declared complete while exploitation, domination, and injustice persist.

To inherit Marx is to remain open to this haunting, listen to the ghost without trying to master it, accept the burden of a promise that can never be fully redeemed but that we cannot abandon without failing in everything.

The time is out of joint. It is precisely this disjunction that makes justice, responsibility, and inheritance possible.