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.

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.

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.

The Spectre Returns: Derrida's Critique of the "End of History" and the Rehabilitation of Marxist Spirit

Introduction: A Spectre Is Haunting the 1990s

In 1993, Jacques Derrida delivered a series of lectures at the University of California, Riverside that would become Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. The timing was no accident. The Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989, the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991, and Francis Fukuyama had proclaimed "the end of history" in a triumphant celebration of liberal capitalism's supposed final victory. Marxism, it seemed, was dead, a failed experiment consigned to history's dustbin.

Yet Derrida opened his lectures with a defiant observation: a spectre was haunting the entire world, beyond Europe alone, and that spectre was Marx. This spectre, far from being exorcised by liberal capitalism's declarations of victory, was returning with renewed urgency precisely at the moment of its supposed elimination. The attempt to kill the ghost of Marx through triumphalist proclamation had failed, and what was repressed was coming back to haunt those who most vehemently denied its presence.

This article examines Derrida's sophisticated intervention in the debates of the early 1990s. Through close analysis of his critique of Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis and Alexandre Kojève's concept of post-history, his careful distinction between the "spirit" of Marxist critique and Marxist dogmatism, his devastating diagnosis of ten interconnected global crises, and his proposal of a "New International" as an adequate form of contemporary solidarity, we can trace Derrida's attempt to think what it means to remain faithful to Marx without being a Marxist, to preserve the emancipatory promise while rejecting teleological certainty.

Part I: The Ideological Function of "End of History" Thinking

Fukuyama's Paradoxical Ideal

Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992) claimed that liberal capitalism and Western parliamentary democracy represented the final stage of human political development. Drawing on Alexandre Kojève's Hegelian-Marxist interpretation of history, Fukuyama argued that with the collapse of Soviet communism, humanity had reached its political terminus. History, understood as the struggle for recognition and the evolution of political forms, was effectively over.

Derrida identifies a fundamental paradox at the heart of Fukuyama's thesis. The ideal Fukuyama proposes is simultaneously infinite and finite: infinite because it remains distinguished from any empirical reality and persists as a tendency "in the long run," yet finite because it has supposedly "already happened" as an ideal, meaning history is concluded. This contradictory structure allows Fukuyama to claim that history has ended while simultaneously acknowledging that the liberal democratic ideal has not been fully realised, a sleight of hand that immunises the thesis against empirical falsification.

When confronted with massive inequality, violence, or injustice in actually existing liberal democracies, Fukuyama can retreat to the claim that these are merely failures to achieve the ideal, not evidence against the ideal itself. Conversely, when pointing to capitalism's "victory" over communism, he can invoke empirical events as proof of historical inevitability. The argument shifts opportunistically between empirical and transcendental registers, never remaining still long enough to be refuted.

The Unexamined Foundation: "Man as Man"

Beneath this methodological sleight of hand lies an even more troubling foundation: Fukuyama's reliance on an utterly unexamined concept of "man as man" or "natural man" as a trans-historical standard for measuring historical progress. Fukuyama claims that we cannot speak meaningfully about history without reference to a "permanent, trans-historical standard" grounded in nature itself.

Derrida observes with barely concealed astonishment that Fukuyama appears completely oblivious to centuries of philosophical critique of such universal abstractions. Marx himself, in The German Ideology, excoriated Max Stirner for invoking the "ghostly abstraction" of Man as such. Nietzsche demolished the concept of universal human nature. Freud complicated any notion of human dignity by revealing the unconscious drives that structure subjectivity. Heidegger fundamentally questioned the nature of being itself. Even Hegel (whom Fukuyama claims as his philosophical ancestor) was decidedly not a philosopher of natural or trans-historical man.

The irony is acute: Fukuyama invokes Hegel while ignoring everything that makes Hegel philosophically significant. When pressed to define his trans-historical standard, Fukuyama appeals to "the first man" or "natural man," concepts whose genealogy he never interrogates. He even invokes a synthetic construction he calls "Hegel-Kojève," a purely artificial philosophical hybrid so inconsistent and insubstantial that Derrida dismisses it as a mere "symptomatic montage" designed to reassure anxious audiences, never to think seriously.

Why This Book? The Psychology of Disavowal

Derrida poses a crucial question: Why has this philosophically naive book achieved such prominence? Why has it become a "media gadget" consumed in "the ideological supermarkets of a worried West"?

The answer lies in its ideological function, never in the book's intellectual rigor. Fukuyama's text provides reassurance through what psychoanalysis would call "manic disavowal." At precisely the moment when liberal capitalism's actual state is most critical, fragile, and threatened, even catastrophic, triumphalist declarations of its final victory proliferate. The media amplification of the "end of history" narrative reveals anxiety and the desperate need to suppress what everyone half-knows, never confidence or security.

What must be suppressed is the persistent relevance of what Derrida calls "the spirit of Marxist critique." If this critique were truly dead and irrelevant, there would be no need for constant exorcism. The very insistence that "Marxism is finished" betrays the fear that it retains the power to articulate what liberal ideology cannot acknowledge about its own failures and contradictions.

In Freudian terms, Fukuyama's text performs unsuccessful mourning work. It cannot genuinely put to rest what it claims to have buried, so it resorts to jubilatory, manic assertions that betray the repressed anxiety underneath. The spectre returns precisely because the attempt to kill it through declaration alone can never succeed.

Part II: The Spirit of Marxism vs. Marxist Systems

A Crucial Distinction

Derrida's most important theoretical move is to carefully distinguish between four things that are often conflated: first, Marxism as ontology or metaphysical system (dialectical materialism, the claim that matter is fundamental and history unfolds through dialectical laws); second, Marxism as historical method (the reduction of all history to economic base and ideological superstructure); third, Marxism as institutional apparatus (the party, the State, the International, the dictatorship of the proletariat); and fourth, the spirit of Marxist critique (the capacity for radical self-interrogation and emancipatory thinking).

The first three, Derrida argues, must be rejected or at least radically questioned. Marxist ontology shares with liberal ideology the same onto-theo-teleological structure: the assumption that being, divine order, and predetermined end form an intelligible totality. This structure "locks up, neutralizes, and finally cancels historicity" by converting the radically open future into a predetermined destination.

Similarly, Marxist apparatuses (the vanguard party, the single-party state, the totalitarian machinery that claimed to represent workers) have failed in ways that revealed something problematic in the very structure of Marxist thought. The move from critique to organisation, from theory to practice, was inherent in how Marxism constituted itself as a systematic doctrine claiming access to historical truth, never an external corruption.

Yet the fourth element, the spirit of Marxist critique, remains "more indispensable than ever." This spirit consists of two essential components that must be preserved:

First, the principle of radical and interminable critique. Marx's greatest contribution was a method of questioning that was willing to challenge fundamental assumptions others took for granted, never a closed system. This critique was radical (questioning entire structures, not just surface symptoms), self-critical (subjecting its own assumptions to constant revision), and open to transformation (learning from historical changes and adapting accordingly).

Second, the emancipatory and messianic affirmation. Beyond mere critique, Marx carried a promise of liberation: the conviction that another world beyond domination and exploitation is both necessary and possible. This promise is valuable precisely as promise, as an opening to a future that cannot be predetermined. Once it becomes a specific program (the dictatorship of the proletariat, the communist society as determinate form), it closes off the very openness that makes emancipation genuinely possible.

The Messianic Without Messianism

Derrida introduces a crucial conceptual innovation: the distinction between messianism and the messianic structure.

Messianism is any specific doctrine about how history will end, whether religious (Christ will return), Marxist (the proletariat will triumph), or liberal (democracy and free markets will prevail). Messianism knows in advance what the future will bring and claims access to the path that leads there.

The messianic structure, by contrast, is the formal necessity of promise, hope, and obligation without predetermined content. It is the recognition that we are always already oriented toward a future we cannot calculate or control, that responsibility and decision address us even when we lack guarantees about outcomes.

This distinction allows Derrida to preserve what is most valuable in Marx (the emancipatory impulse, the conviction that justice demands radical transformation, the openness to an incalculable future) while rejecting the dogmatism and teleological certainty that have plagued Marxist movements. We can affirm that another world is necessary without claiming to know what that world will look like. We can work for emancipation without believing that historical laws guarantee its achievement. We can maintain hope without succumbing to utopian fantasy.

Why This Spirit Is Indispensable Now

The contemporary moment, the moment of Fukuyama's "end of history," is precisely when we most need the spirit of Marxist critique. When liberalism and capitalism have become hegemonic, when the dominant ideology insists there is no alternative, when the future itself seems foreclosed by the claim that we have reached history's terminus, the Marxist spirit resists this closure.

It maintains the conviction that the current arrangement is contingent, never inevitable, and therefore transformable. It insists that critique of existing conditions remains possible and necessary. It affirms that justice demands we imagine and work toward different social arrangements. This sober recognition that any system appearing natural and eternal is in fact historical and contingent has nothing to do with romantic utopianism.

Moreover, liberalism must continually attempt to foreclose Marxist critique, to declare it dead, refuted, obsolete, precisely because it cannot actually refute it. If Marxist critique were genuinely superseded, liberalism would not need to keep exorcising it. The repetitive insistence that "Marxism is dead" reveals that it remains a threat to liberal self-understanding, a spectre that haunts precisely those who deny its presence most vehemently.

Part III: Kojève's Paradox and the Spectre's Resistance to Ontology

The Genealogy of Post-History

To understand Fukuyama, one must understand his philosophical ancestor: Alexandre Kojève, whose neo-Marxist and quasi-Heideggerian reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit shaped an entire generation of French intellectuals in the mid-20th century. Kojève's famous "Note" and "Postscript" on post-history claimed that the United States had already achieved "the final stage of Marxist communism" in the post-World War II period.

How could America represent communism's culmination? Kojève argued that American consumer abundance had eliminated the scarcity that historically drove social struggle. When material needs are satisfied without excessive labor, when "all members of a 'classless society' can appropriate whatever they like without having to work more than they wish to," the motor of historical development stops. Desire and need coincide, struggle ceases, and history, understood as the conflict-driven evolution of social forms, comes to an end.

This achievement, according to Kojève, represents something troubling: the reduction of humanity to animality. When material needs are satisfied and recognition struggles cease, human beings lose what made them distinctively human. Post-historical America, in Kojève's provocative formulation, represents a fall back into animal contentment, never the fulfilment of human potential.

The 1959 Revision and the Instability of the Thesis

Then something unexpected occurred. In 1959, Kojève visited Japan as a European Community official and returned with a radical revision. Japan, he now claimed, had surpassed America in achieving post-history through what he called "snobism in the pure state," the maintenance of cultural refinement and aesthetic formalism that saves post-historical man from mere animality.

Derrida notes with amusement the "French specialty" of returning from brief trips to foreign lands whose languages one doesn't speak and making peremptory universal judgments. Beyond the methodological absurdity lies a deeper revelation: the "end of history" thesis cannot hold its determinate form. Between 1946 and 1959, Kojève shifts the location of post-history's achievement, revealing that the thesis is a framework that precedes and shapes what gets observed, never grounded in careful observation.

More importantly, Kojève does not abandon his diagnosis of America when he adds Japan. Both represent post-history, merely through different paths. This proliferation reveals the essential instability of any attempt to declare history conclusively finished.

The Enigmatic "Doit": When Prescription Reopens the Future

Derrida identifies something extraordinary that both Kojève and Fukuyama miss: the most important sentence in Kojève's entire postscript. At the very moment of declaring history ended, Kojève writes a prescriptive utterance: "Posthistorical man doit [must/should] continue to detach 'forms' from their 'contents'..."

This single word, doit, contains within itself a paradox that undoes the entire thesis. The French "doit" can mean either "must" (logical necessity) or "should" (moral obligation), and the text leaves this indeterminate. Either way, the prescriptive structure points to futurity, obligation, and task. Even post-historical man has something he must do, some responsibility that addresses him, some future orientation that exceeds mere animal contentment.

Derrida's analysis is profound: "Whatever the promise promises, whether it be fulfilled or not, or whether it be unfulfillable, there is necessarily some promise and therefore some historicity as future-to-come." The very attempt to declare history finished inscribes within the declaration the reopening of historical time.

This reveals the fundamental impossibility of binding the spectre to ontology. The spectre (understood as the incalculable promise, the indeterminate obligation, the future that cannot be mastered) resists every attempt to make it determinate. Even Kojève, attempting to specify what post-historical man is and does, must appeal to a prescriptive structure that reopens the future his thesis claims to have closed.

The lesson is crucial: the future cannot be foreclosed. Obligation, duty, and historicity return despite every attempt to eliminate them. The spectre persists because it is structurally unkillable, because it is the very openness of time itself.

Part IV: The Blackboard Picture: Ten Plagues of Global Capitalism

"The World Wears as It Grows"

Having established the theoretical inadequacy of "end of history" thinking and the persistent necessity of Marxist critique, Derrida turns to concrete diagnosis. Drawing on Shakespeare's Timon of Athens ("How goes the world? It wears, sir, as it grows"), he proposes to paint a "blackboard picture" of what is going catastrophically wrong in the contemporary world.

The image is striking: the world deteriorates precisely in its expansion, wears out precisely as it grows. This directly contradicts both Fukuyama's triumphalism and Kojève's post-historical contentment. The globalisation of capitalism is producing intensification of multiple interconnected crises, never universal prosperity and peace.

Derrida is careful to distinguish the current situation from conventional categories. This is not a "crisis" (implying temporary disorder that will resolve), not "maturation" (suggesting natural development toward fulfillment), not "agony" (implying narrative closure through death). Something else is happening, something that "strikes a blow at the teleological order of history" itself. The situation is post-categorical, escaping the frameworks through which we normally understand historical change.

The Crisis of Democracy and Public Space

Before enumerating specific plagues, Derrida identifies a fundamental transformation in the very structure of democratic politics. Liberal parliamentary democracy, he argues, has never been in greater dysfunction or occupied a more minority position globally.

The problem extends beyond the familiar distortions of money in politics. Techno-tele-media apparatuses have fundamentally transformed what counts as "public space." The presumption that there is a stable, identifiable location where public discourse occurs (the parliament, the town square, the newspaper) has been shattered. The public is now deterritorialized, existing nowhere and everywhere simultaneously, shaped by media algorithms and corporate interests, not deliberative reason.

This produces a paradox: traditional politicians become structurally incompetent despite their personal abilities. Media power simultaneously strips them of actual political authority (the power they held in parliamentary and party structures) while forcing them into spectacular performances for television cameras. As Derrida puts it: "They were thought to be actors of politics, they now often risk being no more than actors": performers without substance, spectacles without power.

The Ten Plagues

Derrida identifies ten specific, interconnected problems that characterize what he sardonically calls "the new world order":

1. Unemployment and the Deregulation of Labor

The "new unemployment" no longer resembles classical unemployment. Through systemic deregulation, the transformation of work into precarious tele-work, and the collapse of distinctions between labor and non-labor, a new form of suffering emerges that lacks adequate language to articulate itself. This deregulation is "at once mastered, calculated, 'socialized' (that is, most often disavowed), and irreducible to prediction." Capitalism knows it is creating mass insecurity but treats this as an acceptable cost of profit maximisation.

2. Massive Exclusion of the Homeless and Stateless

Within wealthy democracies, growing populations lack property, stable addresses, or the ability to participate in "normal" democratic life. Simultaneously, vast numbers are expelled as refugees, immigrants, and stateless persons. This signals a fundamental transformation: liberal democracy depends structurally on populations it systematically excludes. The new experience of borders and identity reveals that citizenship and belonging are mechanisms of exclusion, never universal categories.

3. Ruthless Economic War

Rather than harmonious free trade, global capitalism unleashes destructive competition between nations (US, Europe, Japan), within regions (European nations against each other), and between global North and South. Crucially, this economic war "controls everything, beginning with the other wars," because it determines how international law gets interpreted and applied. Military and political conflicts are settled according to economic interests of powerful states.

4. The Inability to Master Free Market Contradictions

Free market ideology claims that markets operate by natural laws, yet states constantly intervene through tariffs, subsidies, and protectionist measures. Wealthy nations shield their workers and industries while proclaiming devotion to free trade. The contradiction is irresolvable: one cannot simultaneously pursue competitive advantage in global markets and protect domestic "social advantages." The free market is a myth serving to justify exploitation while denying responsibility for consequences.

5. Foreign Debt and Structural Exclusion

Through debt mechanisms, entire nations are impoverished, populations driven to despair, and vast regions excluded from economic participation. The paradox: the logic seeking to extend markets worldwide simultaneously creates exclusion from those markets. Those too poor to consume become economically invisible, suffering the consequences of a system that has no use for them.

6. The Arms Industry and Permanent War Economy

Weapons manufacturing is structurally integrated into Western capitalism. Major corporations, employment systems, and investment patterns depend on arms production. The global arms trade exceeds drug trafficking and is often inseparable from it. Short of unimaginable revolution, the arms industry cannot be suspended without economic catastrophe. Peace becomes economically impossible: maintaining employment requires manufacturing weapons that require wars to consume them.

7. The Uncontrollable Spread of Nuclear Weapons

Nuclear proliferation now exceeds state control. The countries preaching non-proliferation are the greatest proliferators. Once nuclear technology exists, it cannot be un-invented or monopolized. The spectre of nuclear annihilation haunts all politics, yet no authority can contain it. International institutions prove impotent before the logic of mutual assured destruction.

8. Inter-Ethnic Wars Driven by Archaic Phantasms

Nationalist, ethnic, and religious violence proliferates precisely in the age of supposed globalisation. These wars are driven by archaic concepts (nation-state, sovereignty, blood purity, native soil) that should be obsolete in the era of electronic communication and transnational capital. Yet nationalism intensifies, refusing to dissolve. Derrida introduces the concept of "ontopology," the binding of identity and being to stable locality. Technology enables communication transcending location, yet this very dis-location generates frantic attempts to reassert territorial identity.

9. The Phantom-States: Mafia and Drug Cartels

Criminal networks operate with state-like power (controlling territory, enforcing rules, extracting resources) without formal state status. These "phantom-States" have infiltrated economic structures, financial systems, and state institutions themselves to the point where they are often indistinguishable from legitimate states. Paradoxically, they sometimes operate more efficiently than bureaucratic states, adapting rapidly to market conditions. Their symbiosis with democratic development (historical ties between Sicilian mafia and Allied forces, for instance) reveals that the line between organised crime and legitimate state apparatus has always been unstable.

10. The Crisis of International Law

Despite formal universality and genuine progress, international institutions suffer from two fatal limits. First, their norms depend on specific European philosophical concepts, particularly state sovereignty, whose historical limits are increasingly evident. Second, they are dominated in practice by powerful states that determine interpretation and application. International law remains formally universal while substantively particular, claiming to represent all humanity while serving the strongest military and economic powers. UN resolutions are enforced selectively, human rights rhetoric justifies military intervention, and powerful states remain exempt from accountability.

The Scale of the Catastrophe

Derrida makes an astonishing claim: "Never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity."

In absolute numbers, more humans suffer violence, exploitation, and exclusion now than at any previous moment. Yet this massive catastrophe is hidden, denied, celebrated as progress. Fukuyama sings liberal capitalism's triumph while unprecedented human suffering expands. The discourse of human rights becomes obscene when deployed to justify violence and exclude populations. No degree of progress in some regions excuses the expansion of poverty and violence in others.

Derrida also notes a question he must provisionally defer: "What is becoming of animal life in this history?" He acknowledges this as "indissociable" from questions of human justice and emancipation, recognizing that the logic of domination cannot be limited to human relations alone. The question haunts the text as a spectre requiring future attention.

Part V: The "New International" as Response

Beyond Classical Forms of Organization

In the face of these interconnected catastrophes, what response is adequate? Derrida proposes the concept of a "New International" as a necessary form of solidarity and critique, never as a solution or program.

This "New International" is explicitly not a revival of classical internationalism. The workers' International, in its various historical forms, operated through party structures, state power, and class essentialism. These forms have collapsed or proven catastrophic. The very concept of the working class as unified revolutionary subject has become problematic as capitalism has transformed labor beyond recognition.

Yet Derrida insists: rejecting classical forms does not mean abandoning organization and effective action. "It is exactly the contrary that matters to us here." The task is to think new forms of organization that do not reproduce the logic of domination they oppose.

Characteristics of the "New International"

Derrida describes this emerging formation as "a link of affinity, suffering, and hope, a still discreet, almost secret link, as it was around 1848, but more and more visible." It operates without status (no official recognition in international law), without title (cannot be named in conventional political terminology), without name (exceeds any single denomination), barely public (between public and clandestine), without contract (no formal agreement constitutes membership), "out of joint" (untimely, dislocated from conventional political time), without coordination (no central command or unified strategy), without party (transcends party structures and discipline), without country (genuinely international, across and beyond nations), without national community (refuses containment within national boundaries), without co-citizenship (members need not be citizens of any particular state), and without common belonging to a class (unites across class lines).

This structural necessity should never be mistaken for organisational weakness. The "New International" must be "a kind of counter-conjuration," a counter-spell against the attempt to exorcise Marx's spectre. Where liberal ideology attempts to foreclose critique, the "New International" keeps critique alive through shared commitment to interrogating international law, state sovereignty, and structures of domination.

It is united by shared recognition that the current arrangement is catastrophic and that another world is both necessary and possible, never by dogma or organisation. This recognition itself constitutes the bond, an affinity based on refusal to accept injustice as inevitable.

Two Interpretations Held in Productive Tension

How should we interpret the contemporary crisis? Derrida proposes two competing readings that cannot be collapsed into one:

Interpretation One: Even accepting liberal ideals (democracy, human rights, free markets) as valuable, the massive gap between ideal and reality demands indefinite Marxist critique to reduce that gap. We must work toward better realization of stated ideals while exposing their systematic violation.

Interpretation Two: The very concepts constituting liberal ideology (democracy, human rights, property, liberty, equality, fraternity, dignity, citizenship) must themselves be radically questioned and transformed. We cannot simply work toward better realization but must rethink the foundations.

Crucially, both interpretations are necessary. We cannot choose between them but must hold them in productive tension through "a complex and constantly re-evaluated strategy." Without this doubled approach, we risk either fatalist idealism (accepting ideals as eternal while acknowledging empirical failure) or abstract utopianism (proclaiming transformation without grounding in concrete struggle).

"I Am Not a Marxist"

Derrida invokes Marx's famous statement, reported by Engels: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist." Even Marx refused Marxism, refused to be bound by the systems and dogmas claiming to derive from his work.

This refusal is fidelity to what is most valuable in Marx: the capacity for self-critique. "To continue to take inspiration from a certain spirit of Marxism would be to keep faith with what has always made of Marxism in principle and first of all a radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake its self-critique."

The essence of Marxism, properly understood, is its capacity for self-negation. Marx's method was to develop critique capable of constant revision, never to achieve final truth. Every stage of capitalism generates new contradictions requiring new analysis. The critique must evolve or become obsolete.

The Emancipatory Promise Must Produce Effects

Derrida emphasises that the promise of emancipation must produce concrete effects: "A promise must promise to be kept, that is...to produce events, new effective forms of action, practice, organization, and so forth."

This guards against misreading deconstruction as merely textual or theoretical. Deconstruction has political consequences. It generates demands for practical transformation, for new forms of organization, for concrete resistance to injustice.

The "New International" must find ways to be effective (to coordinate action, to build solidarity, to resist domination) without reproducing party discipline, state power, or dogmatic certainty. This is extraordinarily difficult, but difficulty is not grounds for abandoning the task.

The Messianic Structure and Infinite Critique

The theoretical key is preserving what Derrida calls "the messianic without messianism": the formal structure of promise, hope, and obligation without predetermined content.

We must affirm that another world is necessary and possible (the messianic affirmation) without claiming to know what that world will look like or how to achieve it with certainty (rejecting messianism). This requires committing to "radical and interminable, infinite (both theoretical and practical) critique."

The critique is radical (questioning fundamental assumptions, going beyond surface symptoms), interminable (never reaching completion or final truth), infinite (opening to an incalculable future), and both theoretical and practical (irreducible to either alone).

This critique "belongs to the movement of an experience open to the absolute future of what is coming, that is to say, a necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other and for the event."

The experience is "desert-like," stripped of predetermined content, waiting in darkness for what may come. This very openness is what makes genuine emancipatory thinking possible. If we knew the future in advance, we would not need to decide, to risk, to take responsibility. Decision is only possible through the ordeal of undecidability.

Conclusion: Living with the Spectre

The Return of the Repressed

Derrida's intervention accomplishes something crucial: it demonstrates that the attempt to exorcise Marx's spectre through triumphalist declarations of capitalism's final victory necessarily fails. The spectre returns precisely because what it represents (the possibility and necessity of radical critique, the promise of emancipation, the refusal to accept existing arrangements as inevitable) cannot be eliminated by ideological assertion.

Fukuyama's "end of history" and Kojève's post-historical fantasies are revealed as forms of denial proportional to the anxiety they attempt to suppress. The more insistently liberalism proclaims Marxism's death, the more it reveals that Marxist critique retains the power to articulate what liberal ideology cannot acknowledge about its own catastrophic consequences.

The ten plagues enumerated by Derrida (unemployment, exclusion, economic war, market contradictions, debt, arms trade, nuclear proliferation, ethnic violence, phantom-states, and inadequate international law) demonstrate that the world is in acute, potentially terminal crisis, never at history's end. The spectre of Marx returns with renewed urgency precisely because the suffering and injustice it names are multiplying, never diminishing.

Fidelity Without Dogmatism

The most important achievement of Derrida's analysis is showing how to remain faithful to Marx's spirit without embracing Marxist dogmatism. By carefully distinguishing the spirit of radical critique and emancipatory promise from Marxist ontologies, methods, and apparatuses, Derrida opens a space for contemporary thought and action.

We can preserve the conviction that existing arrangements are contingent and never natural or inevitable, the insistence that radical critique of capitalism remains necessary, the affirmation that emancipation is both necessary and possible, and the commitment to infinite self-critique and openness to transformation. At the same time, we can reject dialectical materialism as systematic ontology, historical materialism as closed method, party discipline and state power as organisational forms, and teleological certainty about predetermined outcomes.

This is the only honest position for anyone taking both critique and responsibility seriously, never fence-sitting or tepid compromise. It requires holding in productive tension the need for concrete action and the recognition that the future cannot be calculated or controlled.

The Task Ahead

The "New International" Derrida envisions is an opening, a way of naming the emerging solidarities based on shared recognition of catastrophe and shared commitment to imagining alternatives. It points toward forms of organization that remain to be invented, practices of resistance that must be continually reinvented, and ways of living together in pursuit of justice without certainty about outcomes.

The contemporary world faces the plagues Derrida identified and many others he could not have foreseen: ecological catastrophe accelerating beyond human control, surveillance capitalism penetrating ever deeper into subjective life, algorithmic governance replacing human decision-making, authoritarian resurgence across the globe, new forms of precarity and exploitation enabled by digital technology. The "New International" names the necessary ongoing work of critique, resistance, and emancipatory imagination.

The Spectre's Final Lesson

What is the spectre of Marx ultimately? It is not a doctrine to be defended, not a system to be preserved, not a historical figure to be venerated. Rather, it is the insistence that time remains out of joint, that the present is always already disrupted by its relation to an incalculable future, that justice cannot be reduced to existing law, that emancipation remains a task we cannot abandon precisely because of our inability to guarantee its achievement.

To live with the spectre is to acknowledge that we are addressed by obligations we did not choose, by a past we did not make, by a future we cannot control. It is to recognize that responsibility persists even in the absence of certainty, that decision is only possible through the ordeal of undecidability, that action is required precisely when we lack guarantees about outcomes.

The spectre cannot be killed because it is the structure of temporality itself: the way the past persists in the present, the way the future already haunts what we call now, the way the present is never fully present to itself, always already disrupted, delayed, disjointed.

Fukuyama wanted to close the future by declaring history finished. Kojève wanted to bind the spectre to determinate ontology, to specify what post-historical man is and does. The spectre resists all such closures. It returns as the very opening of possibility that makes genuine politics thinkable.

In an age that insists there is no alternative, that claims history has reached its terminus, that proclaims the final victory of capitalism and liberal democracy, the spectre of Marx persists as a reminder that other worlds are both necessary and possible. The task is to remain faithful to the spirit of radical critique and emancipatory promise, to learn to live with the spectre, to accept what cannot die.

This is what Derrida means when he speaks of "a certain spirit of Marxism" worth preserving: a gesture, an opening, the courage to act despite uncertainty, the affirmation that justice demands we continue the struggle regardless of outcome. The spectre returns to remind us that the future remains radically open, that history is not finished, that emancipation remains our most urgent task.