The Three Apparatuses of Dominant Discourse

When Derrida speaks of a "dominant discourse," he is having recourse to received concepts, particularly that of hegemony and that of testimony. He implicitly refers to what organises and commands public manifestation or testimony in the public space. In question is a set constituted by three indissociable places or apparatuses of culture:

First, there is the culture called more or less properly political: the official discourses of parties and politicians in power in the world, virtually everywhere Western models prevail, the speech or rhetoric of what in France is called the "classe politique."

Second, there is what is rather confusedly qualified as mass media culture: "communications" and interpretations, selective and hierarchized production of "information" through channels whose power has grown in an absolutely unheard-of fashion at a rhythm that coincides precisely, no doubt not fortuitously, with that of the fall of regimes on the Marxist model. This fall to which media power contributed mightily occurs in forms and modes of appropriation, and at a speed, that also affect in an essential fashion the very concept of public space in so-called liberal democracies.

Third, there is scholarly or academic culture, notably that of historians, sociologists and politologists, theoreticians of literature, anthropologists, philosophers, in particular political philosophers, whose discourse is itself relayed by the academic and commercial press, but also by the media in general.

These three places, forms, and powers of culture are more than ever welded together by the same apparatuses or by ones that are indissociable from them. These apparatuses are doubtless complex, differential, conflictual, and overdetermined. Whatever may be the conflicts, inequalities, or overdeterminations among them, they communicate and cooperate at every moment toward producing the greatest force with which to assure the hegemony or imperialism in question.

As it has never done before, either to such a degree or in these forms, the politico-economic hegemony, like the intellectual or discursive domination, passes by way of techno-mediatic power, a power that at the same time, in a differentiated and contradictory fashion, conditions and endangers any democracy.

The Question of Techno-Mediatic Power

This power, this differentiated set of powers, cannot be analysed or potentially combatted without taking into account spectral effects: the new speed of apparition (understood in its ghostly sense) of the simulacrum, the synthetic or prosthetic image, the virtual event, cyberspace and surveillance, the control, appropriations, and speculations that today deploy unheard-of powers.

Have Marx and his heirs helped us to think and to treat this phenomenon? If the answer is at once yes and no, yes in one respect, no in another, and that one must filter, select, differentiate, restructure the questions, it is only to announce the tone and general form of Derrida's conclusions: one must assume the inheritance of Marxism, assume its most "living" part, which is to say, paradoxically, that which continues to put back on the drawing board the question of life, spirit, or the spectral, of life-death beyond the opposition between life and death.

This inheritance must be reaffirmed by transforming it as radically as will be necessary. Such a reaffirmation would be both faithful to something that resonates in Marx's appeal, in the spirit of his injunction, and in conformity with the concept of inheritance in general. Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task. It remains before us.

We Are Heirs

Unquestionably we are heirs of Marxism, even before wanting or refusing to be, and, like all inheritors, we are in mourning. In mourning in particular for what is called Marxism. To be (this word in which Derrida earlier saw the word of the spirit) means, for the same reason, to inherit. All questions on the subject of being or of what is to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance.

There is no backward-looking fervor in this reminder, no traditionalist flavor. Reaction, reactionary, or reactive are but interpretations of the structure of inheritance. That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not.

As Hölderlin said, we can only bear witness to it. To bear witness would be to bear witness to what we are insofar as we inherit, and that (here is the circle, here is the chance, or the finitude) we inherit the very thing that allows us to bear witness to it. Hölderlin calls this language, "the most dangerous of goods," given to man "so that he bears witness to having inherited what he is."

Critical Inheritance of Marxist Concepts

When Derrida advances the hypothesis that the dogma on the subject of the end of Marxism is today, tendentially, a "dominant discourse," he is speaking in the Marxist code. He must not deny or dissimulate the problematic character of this gesture. Those who would accuse it of being circular or begging the question would not be altogether wrong.

At least provisionally, Derrida is placing trust in this form of critical analysis inherited from Marxism: in a given situation, a hegemonic force always seems to be represented by a dominant rhetoric and ideology, whatever may be the conflicts, contradictions, overdeterminations that complicate this schema.

However, critical inheritance means one may speak of dominant discourse or dominant representations without necessarily subscribing to the concept of social class by means of which Marx so often determined the forces fighting for control of hegemony. When the Manifesto declares that "the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class," a selective critique can filter the inheritance of this utterance, keeping some elements while discarding others.

One may continue to speak of domination in a field of forces while suspending reference to the identity and self-identity of a social class, while suspending credit extended to what Marx calls the idea, the determination of the superstructure as idea or ideal or ideological representation, indeed even the discursive form of this representation. All the more so since the concept of idea implies this irreducible genesis of the spectral.

Fukuyama as Exemplary Case

Derrida retains provisionally the schema of dominant discourse. If such discourse tends today to be getting the upper hand on the new geopolitical stage, it is one that diagnoses, in all sorts of tones and with unshakeable assurance, the end of societies constructed on the Marxist model, the end of the whole Marxist tradition, even of reference to Marx's works, the end of history itself. All of this would have finally come to term in the euphoria of liberal democracy and the market economy.

This triumphant discourse seems relatively homogeneous, most often dogmatic, sometimes politically equivocal and, like dogmatisms, like all conjurations, secretly worried and manifestly worrisome. The conference protocol evokes the example of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. Is this not a new gospel, the noisiest, the most mediatized, the most "successful" on the subject of the death of Marxism as the end of history?

This work frequently resembles the disconcerting and tardy by-product of a "footnote": nota bene for a certain Kojève who deserved better. Yet the book is not as bad or as naive as one might be led to think by the frenzied exploitation that exhibits it as the finest ideological showcase of victorious capitalism in liberal democracy which has finally arrived at the plenitude of its ideal, if not of its reality.

It remains essentially, in the tradition of Leo Strauss relayed by Allan Bloom, the grammar school exercise of a young, industrious, but come-lately reader of Kojève. Yet one must recognize that here or there this book goes beyond nuance and is sometimes suspensive to the point of indecision. It on occasion ingenuously adds what it calls "two broad responses, from the Left and the Right, respectively." It would thus merit very close analysis.

The Neo-Evangelical Structure

Derrida calls Fukuyama's book a "gospel" by design. Why a gospel? Why neotestamentary? This book claims to bring a "positive response" to a question whose formation and formulation are never interrogated in themselves. The question is whether a "coherent and directional History of mankind" will eventually lead "the greater part of humanity" toward "liberal democracy."

Fukuyama answers "yes" to this question while admitting awareness of everything that allows one to doubt: the two world wars, the horrors of totalitarianism (Nazi, fascist, Stalinist), the massacres of Pol Pot, and so forth. One can assume he would have agreed to extend this disastrous list, though he does not, and one wonders why and whether this limitation is contingent or insignificant.

According to a schema that organises the argumentation from one end to the other, all these cataclysms (terror, oppression, repression, extermination, genocide), these "events" or "facts" would belong to empiricity, to the "empirical flow of events," they would remain "empirical" phenomena accredited by "empirical evidence." Their accumulation would in no way refute the ideal orientation of the greater part of humanity toward liberal democracy. As telos of progress, this orientation would have the form of an ideal finality. Everything that appears to contradict it would belong to historical empiricity, however massive and catastrophic and global and multiple and recurrent it might be.

Even admitting the simplicity of this summary distinction between empirical reality and ideal finality, one still would not know how this absolute orientation, this anhistoric telos of history, gives rise very precisely in our day to an event which Fukuyama speaks of as "good news" and dates very explicitly from "the most remarkable evolution of the last quarter of the twentieth century."

The Promised Land and Christian Vision

The neo-evangelistic insistence is significant. Fukuyama writes that we have become so accustomed to expect bad news with respect to democratic political practices that we have problems recognizing good news when it comes. "And yet, the good news has come."

This Christian figure crosses the Jewish prefiguration of the Promised Land, only to take distance from it. If the development of modern physics is not for nothing in the advent of good news, notably inasmuch as it is linked to a technology permitting "limitless accumulation of wealth" and "increasing homogenization of all human societies," it is "in the first place" because this "technology confers decisive military advantages on those countries that possess it."

Yet although essential and indispensable to the advent of good news, this physicotechno-military given only leads us to the gates of the Promised Land. "But while modern natural science guides us to the gates of the Promised Land of liberal democracy, it does not deliver us to the Promised Land itself, for there is no economically necessary reason why advanced industrialization should produce political liberty."

Derrida takes seriously the insistence of this rhetoric. What does it say? That the language of the Promised Land—promised but refused (to Moses)—is, at least by itself, better fitted to the materialism of physics and economism. Fukuyama associates a certain Jewish discourse of the Promised Land with the powerlessness of economist materialism or rationalism of natural science. Elsewhere he treats as an almost negligible exception that what he with equanimity calls "the Islamic world" does not enter into the "general consensus" around "liberal democracy."

One can form at least a hypothesis about which angle Fukuyama chooses to privilege in the eschatological triangle. The model of the liberal State to which he explicitly lays claim is not only that of Hegel, the Hegel of the struggle for recognition; it is that of a Hegel who privileges the "Christian vision." If "the existence of the State is the coming of God into the world," as one reads in The Philosophy of Right invoked by Fukuyama, this coming has the sense of a Christian event. The French Revolution would have been "the event that took the Christian vision of a free and equal society, and implanted it here on earth."

This end of History is essentially a Christian eschatology. It is consonant with the current discourse of the Pope on the European community: destined to become a Christian State or super-State, this community would still belong to some Holy Alliance. It is thus not unconnected with the alliance spoken of explicitly in the Manifesto, which also named the Pope at that point.

The Middle East and Messianic Wars

In a crucial parenthesis, Derrida addresses what he considers the symptomatic or metonymic concentration of what remains irreducible in the worldwide conjuncture. This has its place, its figure, or the figure of its place in the Middle East: three messianic eschatologies mobilize there all the forces of the world and the whole "world order" in the ruthless war they are waging against each other, directly or indirectly.

They mobilize simultaneously, to put them to work or to the test, the old concepts of State and nation-State, of international law, of tele-techno-medioeconomic and scientifico-military forces (in other words, the most archaic and the most modern spectral forces). One would have to analyse, in the limitless breadth of their worldwide historical stakes, since the end of the Second World War, in particular since the founding of the State of Israel, the violence that preceded, constituted, accompanied, and followed it on every side, at the same time in conformity with and in disregard of an international law that therefore appears today to be at the same time more contradictory, imperfect, and thus more perfectible and necessary than ever.

Such an analysis can no longer avoid granting a determining role to this war of messianic eschatologies in what Derrida sums up elliptically as the "appropriation of Jerusalem." The war for the "appropriation of Jerusalem" is today the world war. It is happening everywhere, it is the world, it is today the singular figure of its being "out of joint."

To determine in its radical premises Middle-Eastern violence as an unleashing of messianic eschatologies and as infinite combinatory possibilities of holy alliances (plural, to account for what makes the triangle of the three religions said to be religions of the Book turn in these alliances), Marxism remains at once indispensable and structurally insufficient. It is still necessary but provided it be transformed and adapted to new conditions and to new thinking of the ideological, provided it be made to analyse the new articulation of techno-economic causalities and religious ghosts, the dependent condition of the juridical at the service of socio-economic powers or States that are themselves never totally independent with regard to capital.

There is no longer, there never was just capital, nor capitalism in the singular, only capitalisms plural, whether State or private, real or symbolic, always linked to spectral forces, or rather capitalizations whose antagonisms are irreducible.

Marxism's Messianic Structure

This transformation and opening up of Marxism are in conformity with what Derrida calls the spirit of Marxism. If analysis of the Marxist type remains indispensable, it appears to be radically insufficient there where the Marxist ontology grounding the project of Marxist science or critique also itself carries with it and must carry with it, necessarily, despite so many modern or post-modern denials, a messianic eschatology.

On this score at least, paradoxically and despite the fact that it necessarily participates in them, Marxism cannot be simply classified among the ideologems or theologems whose critique or demystification it calls for. In saying that, Derrida will not claim that this messianic eschatology common both to the religions it criticizes and to the Marxist critique must be simply deconstructed.

While it is common to both of them, with the exception of the content (but none of them can accept this suspension of content, whereas Derrida holds it to be essential to the messianic in general, as thinking of the other and of the event to come), it is also the case that its formal structure of promise exceeds them or precedes them.

What remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise. It is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice (which Derrida distinguishes from law or right and even from human rights) and an idea of democracy (which he distinguishes from its current concept and from its determined predicates today).

This is perhaps what must now be thought and thought otherwise in order to ask oneself where Marxism is going, which is also to say, where Marxism is leading and where is it to be led: where to lead it by interpreting it, which cannot happen without transformation, and not where can it lead us such as it is or such as it will have been.

The Twin Pillars and Thymos

Returning to Fukuyama's neo-evangelical rhetoric, Derrida notes how the Christian figure crosses with the Promised Land. The economist materialism or materialism of modern physics should yield the stage to the spiritualist language of "good news." Fukuyama thus deems it necessary to have recourse to what he calls "Hegel's non-materialist account of History, based on the 'struggle for recognition.'"

In truth, the whole book is inscribed in the unexamined axiomatics of this simplified, highly Christianized outline of the master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The dialectic of desire and consciousness is nevertheless presented, with imperturbable confidence, as the continuation of a Platonic theory of thymos, relayed all the way up to Hegel, and beyond him, by a tradition passing through Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and so on, despite so many differences and disagreements among these political thinkers.

The Anglo-Saxon conception of modern liberalism would also be exemplary. It would have sought to exclude all megalothymia (characteristic of Stalin, Hitler, and Saddam Hussein), even if "the desire for recognition remains all around us in the form of isothymia." Any contradiction would be cancelled once a State has succeeded in conjugating what Fukuyama calls the "twin pillars": that of economic rationality and that of thymos or the desire for recognition.

This would be the case, and the thing would have already happened, according to Kojève at least as he is interpreted—and seconded—by Fukuyama. The latter credits Kojève with having "identified an important truth when he asserted that postwar America or the members of the European Community constituted the embodiment of Hegel's state of universal recognition."

The Sophism of "Important Truth"

Derrida underscores the words "important truth." They give a pretty good translation of the sophisticated naïveté or crude sophism that impels the movement of such a book and sets its tone. They also deprive it of any credibility. For Fukuyama wants to find grist for the mill of his argument everywhere: in the "good news" as empirical and supposedly observable event (this is the "important truth" of the "embodiment of Hegel's state of universal recognition") and/or in the "good news" as simple sign of an as yet inaccessible regulating ideal that cannot be measured against any historical event and especially against any so-called "empirical" failure.

On the one hand, the gospel of politico-economic liberalism needs the event of the good news that consists in what has putatively actually happened (what has happened in this last quarter of the century, in particular, the supposed death of Marxism and the supposed realization of the State of liberal democracy). It cannot do without recourse to the event.

However, since actual history and so many other realities that have an empirical appearance contradict this advent of perfect liberal democracy, one must at the same time pose this perfection as simply a regulating and trans-historical ideal. Depending on how it works to his advantage and serves his thesis, Fukuyama defines liberal democracy here as actual reality and there as simple ideal. The event is now the realization, now the heralding of the realization.

Even as we take seriously the idea that a heralding sign or promise constitutes an irreducible event, we must nevertheless guard against confusing these two types of event. A thinking of the event is no doubt what is most lacking from such a discourse.

The Logic of the Ghost and Virtual Events

If Derrida has been insisting so much since the beginning on the logic of the ghost, it is because it points toward a thinking of the event that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic, the logic that distinguishes or opposes effectivity or actuality (either present, empirical, living—or not) and ideality (regulating or absolute non-presence).

This logic of effectivity or actuality seems to be of limited pertinence. The limit, to be sure, is not new; it has always been leaving its mark on anti-Marxist idealism as well as on "dialectical materialism." But it seems to be demonstrated today better than ever by the fantastic, ghostly, "synthetic," "prosthetic," virtual happenings in the scientific domain and therefore the domain of the techno-media and therefore the public or political domain.

It is also made more manifest by what inscribes the speed of a virtuality irreducible to the opposition of the act and the potential in the space of the event, in the event-ness of the event.

Having neglected to re-elaborate a thinking of the event, Fukuyama oscillates confusedly between two irreconcilable discourses. Even though he believes in its effective realization (that is the "important truth"), Fukuyama does not hesitate all the same to oppose the ideality of this liberal democratic ideal to all the evidence that bears massive witness to the fact that neither the United States nor the European Community has attained the perfection of the universal State or of liberal democracy, nor have they even come close.

The Reality of Economic War

How can one overlook the economic war raging today both between these two blocs and within the European Community? How can one minimise the conflicts of the treaty and all that it represents, which the complex strategies of protectionism recall every day, not to mention the economic war with Japan and all the contradictions at work within the trade between wealthy countries and the rest of the world, the phenomena of pauperization and the ferocity of the "foreign debt," the effects of what the Manifesto also called "the epidemic of overproduction" and the "state of momentary barbarism" it can induce in so-called civilized societies?

In order to analyse these wars and the logic of these antagonisms, a problematics coming from the Marxian tradition will be indispensable for a long time yet. For a long time and why not forever? Derrida indeed says a problematics from the Marxian tradition, in its opening and the constant transformation that should have and will have to characterize it, and not from the Marxist dogmatics linked to the apparatuses of orthodoxy.

The Slide from Fact to Ideal

Since Fukuyama cannot deny, without inviting ridicule, all the violence, all the injustices, all the tyrannical and dictatorial manifestations of what he calls "megalothymia" (excess or asymmetry in the desire for recognition), since he must concede that they are raging in the capitalist world of a very imperfect liberal democracy, since these "facts" contradict the "identification" that he had nevertheless qualified as "an important truth," Fukuyama does not hesitate to slip one discourse in under the other.

For the announcement of the de facto "good news," for its effective, phenomenal, historical, and empirically observable event, he substitutes the announcement of an ideal good news, the teleo-eschatological good news, which is inadequate to any empiricity. Once obliged to de-historicize it in this way, he recognizes in this good news the language of a "Nature" (this is his word and one of the major concepts of the book) and identifies it according to "criteria" which he qualifies as "trans-historical."

In the face of so many disasters, in the face of all the de facto failures to establish liberal democracy, Fukuyama reminds us that he is speaking only on the "level of principles." He would limit himself, he says, to defining only the ideal of liberal democracy.

Recalling his first article from 1989, "The End of History?", he writes: "While some present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on."

It would be too easy to show that, measured by the failure to establish liberal democracy, the gap between fact and ideal essence does not show up only in these so-called primitive forms of government, theocracy, and military dictatorship (supposing even that all theocracy is foreign to the ideal State of liberal democracy, or heterogeneous to its very concept). This failure and this gap also characterise, a priori and by definition, all democracies, including the oldest and most stable of so-called Western democracies.

Democracy to Come

At stake here is the very concept of democracy as concept of a promise that can only arise in such a diastema (failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjustment, being "out of joint"). That is why Derrida always proposes to speak of a democracy to come, not of a future democracy in the future present, not even of a regulating idea, in the Kantian sense, or of a utopia—at least to the extent that their inaccessibility would still retain the temporal form of a future present, of a future modality of the living present.

Even beyond the regulating idea in its classic form, the idea, if that is still what it is, of democracy to come, its "idea" as event of a pledged injunction that orders one to summon the very thing that will never present itself in the form of full presence, is the opening of this gap between an infinite promise (always untenable at least for the reason that it calls for the infinite respect of the singularity and infinite alterity of the other as much as for the respect of the countable, calculable, subjectal equality between anonymous singularities) and the determined, necessary, but also necessarily inadequate forms of what has to be measured against this promise.

To this extent, the effectivity or actuality of the democratic promise, like that of the communist promise, will always keep within it, and it must do so, this absolutely undetermined messianic hope at its heart, this eschatological relation to the to-come of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated.

Messianic Hospitality

Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return and who or which will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, State, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity), just opening which renounces any right to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event that cannot be awaited as such, or recognized in advance therefore, to the event as the foreigner itself, to her or to him for whom one must leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hope—and this is the very place of spectrality.

It would be easy, too easy, to show that such a hospitality without reserve, which is nevertheless the condition of the event and thus of history (nothing and no one would arrive otherwise, a hypothesis that one can never exclude), is the impossible itself, and that this condition of possibility of the event is also its condition of impossibility, like this strange concept of messianism without content, of the messianic without messianism, that guides Derrida here like the blind.

It would be just as easy to show that without this experience of the impossible, one might as well give up on both justice and the event. That would be still more just or more honest. One might as well give up also on whatever good conscience one still claims to preserve. One might as well confess the economic calculation and declare all the checkpoints that ethics, hospitality, or the various messianisms would still install at the borders of the event in order to screen the arrivant.

The Ideal as Event

Returning to Fukuyama, what is more original than indisputable in his logic is the fact that this ideal is not posed as an infinite regulating ideal and the pole of an endless task or approximation, although often, and this is yet another incoherency, he declares that this "current trend toward liberalism," despite its tendency to "recede," "promises to be victorious in the long run."

Fukuyama considers this ideal also as an event. Because it would have already happened, because the ideal would have presented itself in its form as ideal, this event would have already marked the end of a finite history.

Conclusion: Inheriting and Transforming Marx

Derrida's analysis of Fukuyama's text reveals the structure of contemporary anti-Marxist conjuration. It is both a political conspiracy (a global alliance declaring Marxism dead) and a magical exorcism (an attempt to ensure Marx's spectre won't return). The very intensity and anxiety of this conjuration proves that the spectre remains active, continues to haunt.

The ghost cannot be exorcised because the material contradictions Marx identified—exploitation, class antagonism, the crises of capitalism—persist and even intensify. The attempt to declare Marx dead is itself a performative act of war, not a simple констатация of fact.

Against this conjuration, Derrida proposes a radical inheritance, abandoning orthodox defence of Marxism. To inherit Marx means to transform Marx, to assume the living part of his legacy while abandoning what no longer serves. This living part is precisely what continues to interrogate life and death, presence and absence, the spectral dimension of existence itself.

What remains undeconstructible in Marx is not the scientific pretension, not the ontology, not even the concept of class—it is the emancipatory promise, the messianic structure of hope for justice and democracy. This messianism without messianism, this promise without predetermined content, remains as the horizon that makes critique and transformation possible.

The task is to inherit Marx as a spectral presence, letting doctrine fall away, to let his ghost return, to listen to what his spectre still has to say to our moment, to our crises, to our wars, to our technologies, to our democracies. The spectre of Marx haunts because the questions he posed (about exploitation, alienation, the domination of capital, the possibility of emancipation) remain unanswered, remain urgent, remain with us.

In the face of techno-mediatic power, virtual events, global capitalism in its plural and antagonistic forms, and the messianic wars tearing apart the contemporary world, we need Marx's inheritance, transformed, radicalised, opened to what Marx himself could not have anticipated. We need hauntology, not ontology. We need the spectre, not the system. We need the promise, not the doctrine.

This is Derrida's wager: that by thinking spectrality, by thinking the logic of the ghost that exceeds the opposition of presence and absence, life and death, we can inherit Marx more faithfully than any orthodoxy ever could. The spectre of Marx will continue to haunt as long as the contradictions of capitalism persist, as long as the promise of justice and democracy remains unfulfilled, as long as we remain heirs to what we cannot escape inheriting.