Specters of Marx
Specters of Marx (French: Spectres de Marx: l'état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale) is a 1993 philosophical book by Jacques Derrida, originating from lectures given at the University of California, Riverside's "Whither Marxism?" conference earlier that year.[1][2] In it, Derrida contends with the apparent demise of Marxism following the Soviet Union's collapse, rejecting triumphalist declarations of history's end—such as Francis Fukuyama's thesis of liberal democracy's universal triumph—as premature and haunted by unresolved inheritances from Marx.[2][3] Drawing on Shakespeare's Hamlet and Marx's own invocation of communism as a "spectre haunting Europe," the text employs deconstructive analysis to argue that Marx's legacy persists as ghostly apparitions demanding ethical response, rather than obsolete ideology.[4] The book introduces "hauntology," a neologism blending "haunting" with "ontology," to frame how absent presents and future pasts disrupt linear teleologies of progress, influencing subsequent thought in cultural theory, media studies, and postcolonial critique.[3] Derrida calls for a "new Internationale," not a political party but a spectral solidarity attuned to justice beyond existing nation-states or markets, mourning failed emancipatory projects while inheriting their messianic promise without eschatological closure.[1] Though praised in continental philosophy circles for revitalizing Marxist critique amid neoliberal ascendancy, the work's dense, allusive style—characteristic of deconstruction—has drawn accusations of evading substantive engagement with Marx's economic analyses in favor of rhetorical spectrality, reflecting broader debates over postmodernism's empirical deficits.[5][6]Origins and Historical Context
Post-Cold War Intellectual Climate
The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, initiated a cascade of revolutions across Eastern Europe, leading to the ousting of communist governments by 1990 and the reunification of Germany.[7] This event symbolized the unraveling of Soviet-dominated regimes, culminating in the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, after failed attempts at reform under Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost policies.[8] The collapse stemmed from systemic inefficiencies in centrally planned economies, including chronic shortages, technological lag, and annual GDP growth averaging under 2% during the Brezhnev-era "Era of Stagnation" from the 1970s onward, exacerbated by external shocks like the 1986 oil price crash that slashed export revenues. These regimes, ostensibly guided by Marxist-Leninist principles, devolved into authoritarian structures marked by political repression, with human costs including Stalin's Great Purge (1936–1938) claiming 700,000 to 1.2 million lives and the Holodomor famine (1932–1933) killing 3.5 to 5 million in Ukraine alone.[9] Empirically, the downfall served as a stark refutation of Marxism's viability in practice, as state ownership and central control stifled innovation and incentives, yielding stagnation rather than the promised abundance, while suppressing dissent through gulags and secret police apparatuses that claimed an estimated 20 million Soviet lives across the regime's history.[9][10] Intellectual responses in the West embraced neoliberal optimism, exemplified by Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that the ideological triumph of liberal democracy marked the endpoint of history's dialectical struggles, with no credible alternative to market-driven capitalism and representative government.[11] In Western academia, the post-1989 era witnessed a sharp decline in Marxism's standing as a prescriptive economic or political theory, with its social-scientific pretensions eroded by the observable failures of implementation.[12] Yet Marxist-derived critiques endured in cultural and humanities fields, such as through Gramscian hegemony concepts in cultural studies, where theoretical abstraction from real-world outcomes allowed persistence amid the regimes' discredit, reflecting academia's relative insulation from practical accountability.[13] This intellectual climate, blending triumphalism with residual ideological hauntings, framed the urgency of reevaluating Marx's legacy beyond discredited state socialism.Lecture Series at UC Riverside
The "Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective" conference took place at the University of California, Riverside, from April 22 to 24, 1993, organized by philosophers Bernd Magnus and economist Stephen Cullenberg to examine Marxism's viability amid the Soviet Union's 1991 dissolution and the perceived triumph of liberal capitalism.[14][15] Derrida delivered the opening plenary address, titled "Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International," in two sessions on the evenings of April 22 and 23.[1] This oral presentation formed the textual basis for the subsequent book, with its structure reflecting the spoken format's emphasis on invocation and repetition rather than linear argumentation.[16] Derrida invoked Shakespeare's Hamlet—specifically the line "The time is out of joint"—to introduce the specter as a metaphor for Marxism's untimely persistence, framing the lectures as a response to the conference's query on Marxism's direction without affirming orthodox interpretations.[17] The event's multinational, multidisciplinary scope, including participants from philosophy, economics, and political theory, positioned Derrida's intervention as a deconstructive critique that questioned declarations of Marxism's death while avoiding programmatic revival.[18] Transcripts and recordings of the lectures circulated informally post-conference, influencing academic discussions on post-Cold War ideology before the book's formal publication.[19]Derrida's Evolving Engagement with Marx
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Jacques Derrida's deconstructive projects primarily targeted structuralism, phenomenology, and Western metaphysics, with only marginal and indirect allusions to Marx rather than sustained political or economic analysis.[20] In works such as Glas (published December 1974), Derrida juxtaposed Hegel, Jean Genet, and Ferdinand de Saussure in a fragmented textual montage that evoked Marxist themes of commodity fetishism and dialectical tension without explicit endorsement or critique of Marx's system.[21] Similarly, in Positions (1972), a collection of interviews, Derrida addressed Marxism as one of French intellectual life's preoccupations alongside psychoanalysis, yet confined discussion to deconstruction's implications for ideological critique rather than class struggle or historical materialism.[22] Derrida's approach drew partial influence from Louis Althusser's structuralist reinterpretation of Marx, which emphasized ideological state apparatuses and anti-humanist breaks from Hegelian dialectics, as well as Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic inflection of Marxist alienation through the symbolic order.[23] However, deconstruction diverged sharply by privileging aporias, undecidability, and infinite deferral (différance) in textual interpretation over Althusserian overdetermination or Lacanian determinism rooted in economic base or the Real.[21] Unpublished seminars, such as the 1974–1975 GREPH sessions on ideology, engaged Marx's concepts of division of labor and sexual difference from The German Ideology (1845–1846), framing them through "agonistic différance" to question naturalized hierarchies, but these remained archival and non-confrontational toward orthodox Marxism.[21] This pattern of avoidance persisted into the 1980s, with Derrida maintaining a noted public silence on direct Marxist politics amid deconstruction's institutionalization, prioritizing philosophical margins over partisan ideology.[23] The empirical collapse of Soviet-style communism—marked by the Berlin Wall's fall on November 9, 1989, and the USSR's dissolution on December 26, 1991—prompted a pivot, as neoliberal triumphalism demanded a spectral inheritance from Marx to counter presentist historiography.[24] In this exigency, Derrida's 1993 lectures at the University of California, Riverside (April 22–24), culminating in Specters of Marx, represented a rare explicit turn toward Marx's texts, not as ideological commitment but as hauntological exigence to mourn failed emancipatory promises without teleological closure.[3]Publication Details
Composition and Initial French Edition
The book Spectres de Marx: l'État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale originated as an expansion of lectures delivered by Jacques Derrida at the University of California, Riverside, in April 1993, during the conference "Whither Marxism? Global Shifts in Politics."[25] These oral presentations formed the core of the inaugural chapter, which Derrida subsequently developed into a cohesive monograph comprising ten chapters, incorporating additional textual elaborations and rhetorical devices such as invocations of spectral motifs from Shakespeare's Hamlet and Marx's Communist Manifesto.[26] The subtitle's components—state of debt, work of mourning, and new International—function as organizing principles that delineate the textual architecture without advancing dogmatic political programs.[27] Published by Éditions Galilée in 1993, the French edition spans 278 pages, reflecting Derrida's methodical revision process to integrate philosophical exegesis with contemporary geopolitical reflections post-Cold War.[28] This composition phase involved synthesizing the lecture's improvisational elements into a printed form amenable to deconstructive analysis, prioritizing iterative hauntological inquiries over linear narrative progression.[29] The resulting volume maintains fidelity to the spoken origins while augmenting them with bibliographic apparatuses and intertextual allusions, ensuring the work's status as a testament to unfinished Marxist legacies.[2]English Translation and Dissemination
The English translation of Derrida's Spectres de Marx was completed by Peggy Kamuf and released by Routledge in 1994, bearing the title Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. This edition retained the core structure of the French original while adapting terminology to idiomatic English, enabling broader accessibility for non-Francophone scholars engaged with continental philosophy.[1] The volume featured an introduction by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, which framed Derrida's spectral motifs as interventions into debates on deconstruction's implications for political economy and ideology critique.[30] Publication coincided with a post-Cold War intellectual landscape marked by skepticism toward Marxist frameworks, yet the translation amplified Derrida's text by integrating it into Anglophone curricula in philosophy, literature, and critical theory programs.[17] Routledge's distribution networks facilitated initial sales exceeding typical niche philosophical releases, with the book entering university syllabi amid efforts to reassess Marx beyond orthodox communism.[31] Kamuf's rendering preserved the rhetorical density of Derrida's prose, including neologisms like "hauntology," which gained traction in English-language discourse on temporality and inheritance. Subsequent reprints under the Routledge Classics imprint from 2006 onward sustained dissemination, countering the era's diminished enthusiasm for Marxist theory by embedding the work in enduring collections of postmodern thought.[32] Digital editions and library holdings further extended its reach, with over 3,000 cataloged copies in WorldCat-participating institutions by the early 2000s, ensuring availability for researchers examining spectrality in global capitalism. This propagation occurred independently of mainstream Marxist revivalism, highlighting deconstruction's role in reframing Marx for liberal-democratic contexts wary of historical materialism.[33]Core Content and Structure
Book Organization and Chapter Summaries
Specters of Marx comprises an Exordium followed by five chapters, derived from Derrida's ten-lecture series delivered in April 1993 at the University of California, Riverside.[17] The structure eschews linear progression, instead employing a performative, iterative style that echoes the disruptive nature of spectral returns, interweaving textual citations from Marx, Shakespeare, and contemporary figures without systematic resolution.[34] This organization facilitates thematic echoes across sections, prioritizing invocation and visitation over argumentative closure.[1] The Exordium invokes the ghost from Hamlet ("The time is out of joint") alongside the "specter of communism" from the opening of the Communist Manifesto, establishing the motif of untimely inheritance and the injunction to address Marx's lingering presence amid proclamations of his demise.[35] It frames the text as a response to deconstruction's encounter with Marxist apparitions, setting the stage for analyses of haunting beyond ontological presence or absence.[34]- Chapter 1: Injunctions of Marx explores the spectral call to inherit Marx, using Hamlet's visitation to interrogate how Marx's texts summon ghosts of revolution and ideology, emphasizing the disjointed temporalities that demand ethical response rather than exorcism.[34][36]
- Chapter 2: Conjuring Marxism addresses attempts to conjure away Marxism through critiques of fetishism and ideology in Marx's Capital, contrasting spectral survival with efforts at dialectical mastery or liberal disavowal.[34][35]
- Chapter 3: Wears and Tears (Tableau of an Ageless World) examines the commodity form's eternal present in Marx, portraying a tableau where historical time erodes into atemporal simulation, haunted by unfulfilled messianic promises.[34][35]
- Chapter 4: In the Name of the Revolution: The Double Obliteration analyzes revolutionary naming and its effacement, drawing on Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire to depict barricades and state power as sites of spectral double bind, where tradition and novelty mutually obliterate.[34][37]
- Chapter 5: The Ghosts of Marx culminates in reflections on messianicity without messianism, articulating a "new international" beyond state communism, tied to justice, democracy-to-come, and the work of mourning outstanding debts to the spectral other.[34][37]