Derrida's Spectres of Marx: Hauntology, Inheritance, and the Conjuration Against Marxism

Introduction: Marx, Shakespeare, and the Spectre of Money

Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx begins with an exploration of how Marx himself engaged with spectral imagery, particularly through his frequent evocations of Shakespeare's works. In The German Ideology, Marx repeatedly references Timon of Athens and The Merchant of Venice, using these plays to illuminate the phantom-like nature of money and value under capitalism. The chapter on "The Leipzig Council—Saint Max" provides what Derrida calls "a short treatise on the spirit or an interminable theatricalization of ghosts."

Central to Derrida's analysis is Marx's use of a passage from Timon of Athens that appears in multiple works, including A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. What interests Derrida is Marx's concept of money as a "spectralizing disincarnation": the apparition of a bodiless body. Money is neither a lifeless cadaver nor living flesh; it exists as a life without personal life or individual property. It has a kind of identity (the ghost is a "who," more than a simulacrum), a kind of body, yet without property, without "real" or "personal" right of property.

Marx analyses how the general property of money (Eigentum) neutralizes, disincarnates, and deprives of difference all personal property (Eigentümlichkeit). Shakespeare, Marx argues, understood this phantomalization of property centuries before modern political economists. The genius of Shakespeare serves as reference, guarantee, and confirmation in Marx's polemic about the monetary spectre. Marx writes that Shakespeare knew better than contemporary theorizing petty bourgeois "how little connection there is between money, the most general form of property, and personal peculiarity."

The Imprecation: Marx's Prophetic Rage

Derrida emphasizes that Marx didn't merely cite Shakespeare analytically; he appropriated the words of Timon's imprecation with unmistakable delight. An imprecation is fundamentally different from theoretical analysis. It doesn't calmly describe how things are; rather, it cries out the truth, it promises, it provokes. As its name indicates, it is nothing other than a prayer. Marx, Derrida suggests, appropriates these words with a kind of passionate engagement whose signs are unmistakable.

In the passage from Timon of Athens (Act IV, scene iii), Timon declares his hatred of humanity ("I am Misanthropos and hate mankind") with the anger of a Jewish prophet, sometimes using the very words of Ezekiel. He curses corruption, casts down anathema, swears against prostitution, both prostitution in the face of gold and the prostitution of gold itself. Yet even in his rage, Timon takes time to analyse the transfiguring alchemy of money, denouncing the reversal of values and falsification of which it is the law.

The words Marx transcribed at length capture money's transformative power: "Thus much of this will make / Black white, foul fair, wrong right, / Base noble, old young, coward valiant." Money is the "visible god" that "sold'rest closest impossibilities / And mak'st them kiss." Derrida imagines Marx's "impatient patience" as he transcribed this prophetic imprecation in his own hand, in German, recognizing in Shakespeare's rage something essential about capitalism's spectral operations.

The Double Bind of Oath and Perjury

Among the many dimensions of Timon's curse, Derrida identifies a crucial paradox that Marx had to efface in his citation but which remains central to understanding spectrality: the aporias and double binds that carry the act of swearing and conjuring into the history of venality itself.

At the moment Timon prepares to bury gold, shovel in hand, he is more than a humanist prophet-gravedigger. He doesn't merely evoke the breaking of vows and the birth and death of religions ("This yellow slave / Will knit and break religions; bless the accurs'd"). Timon also conjures the other, pleading with them to promise, yet he conjures by perjuring and confessing his perjury in the same bifid gesture.

He conjures by feigning the truth, by feigning at least to make the other promise. If he feigns to make the other promise, it is in truth to make the other promise not to keep their promise: not to promise even as they pretend to promise, to perjure or abjure in the very moment of the oath. Following this logic, he begs them to spare all oaths.

It's as if Timon were saying: I beg you, do not swear, abjure your right to swear, renounce your capacity to swear. Moreover, no one is asking you to swear; you are asked to be the non-oathables that you are ("you are not oathable"). Addressing the prostitutes, he speaks to those who are prostitution itself, who give themselves to gold and for gold, who are destined to general indifference, who confuse in equivalency the proper and improper, credit and discredit, faith and lie, the true and false, oath, perjury, and abjuration.

The prostitutes of money would go so far as to abjure their very trade or vocation for money, like a madam who would give up even her prostitutes for money. This represents an absolute double bind on the subject of bonds themselves, an infinite misfortune and incalculable chance of the performative.

Timon tells Alcibiades: "Promise me friendship, but perform none. If thou wilt promise, the gods plague thee, for thou art a man. If thou dost not perform, confound thee, for thou art a man." Then to the prostitutes who ask for gold: "Enough to make a whore forswear her trade... You are not oathable, / Although I know you'll swear, terribly swear... Spare your oaths; / I'll trust to your conditions. Be whores still..."

Addressing himself to prostitution, to the cult of money, to fetishism or idolatry itself, Timon trusts. He gives faith, he believes, he wants to credit ("I'll trust"), but only in a paradoxical hyperbole: he pretends to trust in that which, from the depths of abjuration, from the depths of that which is not even capable or worthy of an oath, remains nevertheless faithful to a natural instinct. There is a pledge of instinct, a fidelity to itself of instinctual nature, an oath of living nature before the oath of convention, society, or law. It is fidelity to infidelity, constancy in perjury.

This life enslaves itself regularly; one can trust it to do so. It never fails to kneel to indifferent power, to that power of mortal indifference that is money. Diabolical, radically bad in this way, nature is prostitution. It enslaves itself faithfully; one can have confidence in it. It enslaves itself to what is betrayal itself: perjury, abjuration, lie, and simulacrum.

Marx's Spectral Definitions of Money

Derrida emphasizes that these themes of spectre, simulacrum, and apparition are never far from Marx's analysis. Marx always described money, and more precisely the monetary sign, in the figure of appearance or simulacrum, more exactly, of the ghost. He described and defined them this way, though the figural presentation of the concept seemed to describe some spectral "thing," which is to say, "someone."

What is the necessity of this figural presentation? What is its relation to the concept? Is it contingent? These are classic questions, fundamentally Kantian in form, which seem to marginalize the figural schema even while taking it seriously. Derrida, however, doesn't believe in any contingency here and begins to worry about the classical form of the question itself.

The Critique of Political Economy explains how the existence (Dasein) of money, metallic Dasein, gold or silver, produces a remainder. This remainder is, it remains precisely, the shadow of a great name: "Was übrigbleibt ist magni nominis umbra." The body of money is but a shadow (nur noch ein Schatten).

The whole movement of idealization (Idealisierung) that Marx describes, whether of money or ideologems, is a production of ghosts, illusions, simulacra, appearances, or apparitions (Scheindasein of the Schein-Sovereign and Schein-gold). Later Marx compares this spectral virtue of money with that which, in the desire to hoard, speculates on the use of money after death, in the other world (nach dem Tode in der andern Welt).

The German words cluster significantly: Geld (money), Geist (spirit), Geiz (avarice), as if money were the origin both of spirit and avarice. Pliny, quoted by Marx, says: "Im Geld liegt der Ursprung des Geizes" (In money lies the origin of avarice). Elsewhere, the equation between gas and spirit joins the chain.

The Spectropoetic Metamorphosis of Commodities

The metamorphosis of commodities (die Metamorphose der Waren) was already a process of transfiguring idealization that may legitimately be called spectropoetic. When the State emits paper money at a fixed rate, its intervention is compared to "magic" (Magie) that transmutes paper into gold. The State appears then (for it is an appearance, indeed an apparition); it "seems now to transform paper into gold by the magic of its imprint."

This magic always busies itself with ghosts, does business with them, manipulates them, becomes a business: the business it conducts in the very element of haunting. This business attracts the undertakers, those who deal with cadavers but to steal them, to make the departed disappear, which remains the condition of their "apparition." It's a commerce and theater of gravediggers.

In periods of social crisis, when the social "nervus rerum" (nerve of things) is buried alongside the body whose sinew it is, the speculative burying of treasure interns only useless metal, deprived of its monetary soul (Geldseele). This burial scene recalls not only the great graveyard scene in Hamlet, when the gravedigger suggests that his work lasts longer than any other, until Judgment Day, and also evokes more precisely Timon of Athens.

In Marx's funerary rhetoric, the "useless metal" of buried treasure becomes like burnt-out ashes (ausgebrannte Asche) of circulation, like its caput mortuum, its chemical residue. In his wild imaginings, his nocturnal delirium (Hirngespinst), the miser, the hoarder, the speculator becomes a martyr to exchange-value. He refrains from exchange because he dreams of a pure exchange.

The hoarder behaves like an alchemist (alchimistisch), speculating on ghosts, the "elixir of life," the "philosophers' stone." Speculation is always fascinated, bewitched by the spectre. That this alchemy remains devoted to the apparition of the spectre, to the haunting or return of revenants, is brought out in the literality of Marx's text. What operates in alchemical fashion are the exchanges and mixtures of revenants, the madly spectral compositions or conversions. The lexicon of haunting and ghosts (Spuk, spuken) takes centre stage.

Marx's Ambivalence: Hostility Toward Ghosts

In short, and Derrida returns to this repeatedly, Marx does not like ghosts any more than his adversaries do. He does not want to believe in them, yet he thinks of nothing else. He believes rather in what is supposed to distinguish them from actual reality, from living effectivity. He believes he can oppose them, like life to death, like vain appearances of the simulacrum to real presence.

Marx believes enough in the dividing line of this opposition to want to denounce, chase away, or exorcise the spectres—by means of critical analysis, avoiding counter-magic. Yet how to distinguish between the analysis that denounces magic and the counter-magic that it still risks being? This is a question Derrida asks repeatedly, particularly regarding The German Ideology, where "The Leipzig Council—Saint Max" (on Stirner) organises an irresistible but interminable hunt for ghosts (Gespenst) and for revenants or spooks (Spuk). Irresistible like effective critique, but also like a compulsion; interminable as one says of psychoanalysis, and the comparison is not fortuitous.

This hostility toward ghosts, a terrified hostility that sometimes fends off terror with a burst of laughter, is perhaps what Marx will always have had in common with his adversaries. He too tried to conjure away the ghosts, everything that was neither life nor death, namely the re-apparition of an apparition that will never be either the appearing or the disappeared, the phenomenon or its contrary.

Marx tried to conjure away the ghosts like the conspirators of old Europe on whom the Manifesto declares war. However inexpiable this war remains, and however necessary this revolution, Marx conspires with them in order to exorcise-analyse the spectrality of the spectre. This is today, as perhaps it will be tomorrow, our problem.

The Double Meaning of Conjuration

Derrida emphasizes that "conjuration" carries two essential meanings that structure his entire analysis.

First, conjuration means conspiracy or alliance, a political conjuration. It's a sworn-together pact (Latin: conjuratio), sometimes secret, to neutralize hegemony or overturn power. During the Middle Ages, conjuratio designated the sworn faith by which the bourgeois joined together, sometimes against a prince, to establish free towns. In this occult society of those who have sworn together, certain subjects represent forces and ally themselves in the name of common interests to combat a dreaded political adversary.

Second, to conjure means to exorcise: to attempt both to destroy and disavow a malignant, demonized, diabolized force, most often an evil-doing spirit, a spectre, a ghost who comes back or still risks coming back post mortem. Exorcism conjures away evil in ways that are also irrational, using magical, mysterious, even mystifying practices.

Without excluding analytic procedure and argumentative ratiocination, exorcism consists in repeating in the mode of incantation that the dead man is really dead. It proceeds by formulae, and sometimes theoretical formulae play this role with an efficacity all the greater because they mislead as to their magical nature, their authoritarian dogmatism, the occult power they share with what they claim to combat.

Effective exorcism, however, pretends to declare death only in order to put to death. Like a coroner certifying death in order to inflict it. This is a familiar tactic. The constative form tends to reassure. The certification is effective; it wants to be and must be in effect. It is effectively a performative, yet here effectivity phantomalizes itself. It is a matter of a performative that seeks to reassure, but first of all to reassure itself, for nothing is less sure, that what one would like to see dead is indeed dead.

It speaks in the name of life, claims to know what that is. It seeks to convince itself where it makes itself afraid: now, it says to itself, what used to be living is no longer alive, it does not remain effective in death itself, don't worry. What is going on here, though, is a way of not wanting to know what everyone alive knows without learning: that the dead can often be more powerful than the living. In short, it is often a matter of pretending to certify death where the death certificate is still the performative of an act of war or the impotent gesticulation, the restless dream, of an execution.

The Contemporary Conjuration Against Marxism

Derrida applies this double concept of conjuration to the contemporary moment. A time of the world, today, in these times, a new "world order" seeks to stabilise a new, necessarily new disturbance by installing an unprecedented form of hegemony. It is a matter of a novel form of war. It resembles a great "conjuration" against Marxism, a "conjurement" of Marxism: another attempt, a new, always new mobilization to struggle against it, against what and whom it represents and will continue to represent, and to combat an International by exorcising it.

Very novel and so ancient, the conjuration appears both powerful and, as always, worried, fragile, anxious. The enemy to be conjured away is called Marxism, yet people fear they will no longer recognise it. They quake at the hypothesis that, by virtue of one of those metamorphoses Marx talked about so much ("metamorphosis" was one of his favorite words), a new "Marxism" will no longer have the face by which one was accustomed to identify it and put it down.

Perhaps people are no longer afraid of Marxists, but they are still afraid of certain non-Marxists who have not renounced Marx's inheritance: crypto-Marxists, pseudo- or para-"Marxists" who would be standing by to change the guard, but behind features or quotation marks that the anxious experts of anti-communism are not trained to unmask.

Oath, Promise, and the Political

Derrida privileges the figure of conjuration for additional reasons. In its two concepts (conjuration and conjurement, Verschwörung and Beschwörung), we must take into account another essential meaning: the act that consists in swearing, taking an oath, therefore promising, deciding, taking a responsibility (in short, committing oneself in a performative fashion, in a more or less secret and thus more or less public fashion).

This is crucial because the frontier between public and private is constantly being displaced, remaining less assured than ever, as the limit that would permit one to identify the political. This important frontier is being displaced because the medium in which it is instituted, the medium of the media themselves (news, press, telecommunications, techno-tele-discursivity, techno-tele-iconicity, that which in general assures and determines the spacing of public space, the very possibility of the res publica and the phenomenality of the political), this element itself is neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it spectralizes.

It does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on the Being of beings, or to the essence of life or death. It requires what Derrida calls (to save time and space, avoiding neologism) hauntology. This category is irreducible, and first of all to everything it makes possible: ontology, theology, positive or negative onto-theology.

Performative Interpretation and Responsibility

This dimension of performative interpretation, of an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets, plays an indispensable role in Derrida's project. "An interpretation that transforms what it interprets" is a definition of the performative as unorthodox with regard to speech act theory as it is with regard to Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Derrida takes the floor at the colloquium to avoid fleeing from a responsibility, setting aside purely scholarly philosophical discourse. More precisely, to submit for discussion several hypotheses on the nature of such a responsibility. What is ours? In what way is it historical? What does it have to do with so many spectres?

No one can contest that a dogmatics is attempting to install its worldwide hegemony in paradoxical and suspect conditions. There is today a dominant discourse on the subject of Marx's work and thought, on Marxism, on the socialist International and universal revolution, on the destruction of the revolutionary model in its Marxist inspiration, on the rapid, precipitous, recent collapse of societies that attempted to put it into effect at least in what the Manifesto called "old Europe."

This dominating discourse often has the manic, jubilatory, incantatory form that Freud assigned to the triumphant phase of mourning work. The incantation repeats and ritualizes itself, holds forth and holds to formulas, like any animistic magic. To the rhythm of a cadenced march, it proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here's to the survival of economic and political liberalism.

The Paradox of Triumphalism

If this hegemony is attempting to install its dogmatic orchestration in suspect and paradoxical conditions, it is first of all because this triumphant conjuration is striving in truth to disavow, and therefore to hide from, the fact that never, never in history, has the horizon of the thing whose survival is being celebrated (namely, all the old models of the capitalist and liberal world) been as dark, threatening, and threatened.

This is the central irony: the very moment of declaring total victory is also the moment of unprecedented anxiety about capitalism's own future. This moment is "more 'historic'" by which Derrida means inscribed in an absolutely novel moment of a process that is nonetheless subject to a law of iterability.