Derrida and Marx: The "Spectropolitics" Guiding Future Justice
From deconstructing justice to "hauntology," we find the intellectual destination of French theorist Jacques Derrida, as well as the vivid expression of the demand for justice within his theoretical critique. The reason Derrida provoked such extensive debate and reproach both during his life and after his death is precisely because his deconstructionism possesses an uncompromising critical stance and a radical, counter-current spirit—qualities that kept him consistently at the forefront of contemporary Western thinkers. Derrida’s textual criticisms, which may appear apolictical or quasi-playful, are not only filled with the dismantling of and rebellion against established intellectual hierarchies and institutions, but are also theoretical defenses of humanity’s ideals of fairness and justice. At a time when clamorous claims that "history has ended," "Marx is dead," and "communism has perished" were reaching a fever pitch, Derrida stepped forward to declare his identity as an heir to Marx. He explicitly noted: "One must accept the heritage of Marxism, its most 'vital' part... A heritage is never a given, it is always a task. Just as we are unquestionably heirs to Marx, even before we wish or refuse to be his heirs, this mission is placed before us." Against the broad background of Western leftist academia scrambling to discuss "whither Marxism," Derrida, proceeding from the standpoint of deconstructing justice, proposed his "hauntology" [1] regarding the inheritance of Marxism’s critical spirit and its spiritual legacy. For Derrida, in today’s "time out of joint," [2] within a "New World Order" that disparages Marxism and believes in the "End of History," the "specter of Marx" has returned to visibility, still haunting Western society. The proof of this lies in the continuous call for a "New International" and its attendant fairness and justice.
As a deconstructionist version of Marxism, Derrida’s "hauntology" first fixes its gaze upon the critical spirit and skeptical attitude of Marxism; this is the intellectual link where Marxism and deconstruction happen to coincide. However, what Derrida emphasizes even more is the Messianic "promise" of Marxism—the communist ideal of human liberation. Therefore, when he claims to remain loyal to Marxism and to be an heir of Marxism, the Marxism in his mind represents a Messianic eschatology. Yet, when he explicitly declares that he is not a "Marxist" and that there is more than one spirit of Marxism, he is refusing to accept a Marxism that advocates historical determinism or manifests in the form of political parties. The reason Derrida speaks of the "specters of Marx" (plural) is that he believes Marx’s spiritual legacy is by no means singular, but plural. To inherit Marx is not to recite his ready-made answers, but to let his spiritual legacy live again; only this counts as a true inheritance of the Marxist critical spirit.
I. Moving Beyond the "End of History"
Derrida’s deconstruction has long been viewed by critics as a non-political intellectual game. Although he had many points of intersection with thinkers such as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, Derrida never published a distinct political stance, let alone a formal commentary on Marx and Marxism. In a dialogue with Élisabeth Roudinesco, Derrida emphasized that his Specters of Marx "was written shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall." The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989; in April 1993, Derrida was invited to give a lecture titled "Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International," which was later expanded into a book. The interval was a mere three years, which shows how profound an intellectual impact the collapse of the Berlin Wall had on him. This is the structural context for our understanding and evaluation of Derrida’s "hauntology" and the intellectual reversal experienced by the entire Western left, represented by Derrida at that time. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, "whither Marxism" became a hot topic in Western intellectual circles. This topic was particularly heavy and urgent for the Western left (whether old or new), and especially so for Derrida, a thinker whose heart once surged at the sound of the Internationale. He once explicitly stated that writing Specters of Marx was, first and foremost, a political act: "The most important thing was not the work of interpreting Marx’s writing... What was of current significance, and what made me raise my voice in the context of taking a political stance, was the growing impatience I felt—and I think I was not the only one to feel it—in the face of this ridiculous euphoria and consensus spreading to all discourse... Every reference to Marx became something cursed. I believe there was a desire for disenchantment and complicity here that deserved to be analyzed and resisted. In a way, my book is a book of resistance."
Why did Derrida say Specters of Marx was a book of resistance? Because he had to rebel against the "End of History," the dominant Western discourse of the time. In the summer of 1989, American scholar Francis Fukuyama published a long article in The National Interest titled "The End of History?", emphasizing that the democratic system is "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution" and the "final form of human government," thus achieving the "end of history." For Western right-wing scholars like Fukuyama, this signified not only the "end of history" but also the "end of Marxism." In Fukuyama's view, "the most remarkable development of the last quarter of the twentieth century has been the revelation of enormous territorial and cultural vulnerabilities in the world's most seemingly monolithic authoritarian heartlands, whether of the right-wing military variety or the totalitarian left. From Latin America to Eastern Europe, from the Soviet Union to the Middle East and Asia, strong governments have collapsed over two decades. While they have not all given way to stable liberal democracies, liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures across the globe. Additionally, liberal principles in economics—the free market—have spread, and have succeeded in producing unprecedented levels of material prosperity, both in industrially developed countries and in those that had been, at the close of World War II, part of the impoverished Third World. A liberal revolution in economic thinking has sometimes preceded, sometimes followed, the move toward political freedom." Derrida believed that Fukuyama’s influential discourse became the dominant mainstream discourse of the time. "This dominant discourse often takes a manic, jubilant, and demagogic form... To the rhythm of a quickstep march, it proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is finished, really finished, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It cries: Long live capitalism, long live the market, long live economic and political freedom."
In the face of the "End of History" touted by Fukuyama and other right-wing thinkers, as well as the actual plight of Marxism and communism, Derrida directy gave his response: "If there is a spirit of Marxism which I will never give up, it is by no means only the critical idea or the questioning stance (a consistent deconstructive theory must emphasize these aspects, even though it knows they are not the last or first word). It is even more fundamentally a certain emancipatory and Messianic affirmation, a certain promise that one can be free from any dogma, even any metaphysical-religious determination and any Messianic experience. The promise must guarantee its fulfillment, which is to say, not remain in a 'spiritual' or 'abstract' state, but lead to the promised event, or new effective forms of action, practice, organization, etc." This statement clearly shows that Derrida stood up to defend Marx and Marxism because the Marxist promise of human liberation is by no means merely spiritual and abstract, but is rooted in action and organization. To respond to those erroneous arguments equating Marxism and communism with totalitarianism or even Nazism, Derrida made a specific distinction between Marxism and totalitarianism. In his dialogue with Roudinesco, Derrida pointed out: "The communist ideal is a struggle for human justice, and to this day this ideal continues to inspire and guide countless men and women who believe in communism; this objective has no similarity, proximity, identity, or comparability at all with the Nazi 'ideal.' We must resolutely distinguish the 'communist ideal' from Nazi atrocities... From the perspective of 'communism,' the errors of totalitarianism, though cruel, were deviations occurring in the process of achieving the goal or struggling for the ideal. But the deviation is not the goal or the ideal itself. Nazi totalitarianism was the opposite; its goal itself was perverted and anti-human."
Clearly, in Derrida's view, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet and Eastern European socialist camps, and the setbacks and crises encountered by Marxism and the communist cause were not caused by the emancipatory promise of Marx and Marxism itself. He reminds us that, as heirs of Marx, we should read and discuss Marx repeatedly—especially today, reading Marx is more necessary than ever. He also points out that there is an essential affinity between Marx's promise of justice and liberation and a certain Messianic spirit; it is a movement that remains open to the coming future, and therefore history has not ended. In Specters of Marx, Derrida lists the "ten plagues" brought by the "New World Order": (1) new forms of unemployment and poverty under conditions of global competition for new technologies and markets; (2) the deprivation of democratic participation rights for the homeless and immigrants; (3) economic wars between states and regions; (4) protectionism and interventionism under the concept of the free market; (5) the starvation and despair caused for the majority by heavy foreign debt and other deteriorating mechanisms; (6) the arms industry and trade becoming the world's largest business, alongside the growth of the drug trade; (7) the proliferation and uncontrolled trend of nuclear weapons; (8) the intensification of ethnic wars driven by concepts of community, nation-states, and sovereign borders; (9) the growth and borderless nature of mafia-like organizations and drug cartels haunting the world; (10) the challenges and crises faced by international law and its relevant institutions. These plagues not only happen around us constantly but also show a trend of intensifying; they are insoluble by contemporary capitalist society. In other words, the "New World Order" has not brought fairness and justice; the world remains in a state where justice is absent. We cannot ignore the facts visible to the naked eye: "It already constitutes an incalculable number of specific sites of suffering: no progress allows us to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth." Therefore, we cannot join the revelry of the "End of History" to celebrate the victory of liberal democracy. The "End of History" preached by Fukuyama and others is untenable; human history has not reached the end of justice, and globalization is not the ideal or end point of human pursuit. As long as real suffering persists, the "specter of Marx" will "manifest" and be resurrected in the form of "invisible visibility."
II. Inheriting the Spiritual Legacy of Marx
Derrida’s "politics of specters" begins with a political reading of "specters." In Specters of Marx, Derrida uses the aphorism "to learn to live" as an "exordium," further emphasizing the need to "learn to live with ghosts." The ghosts Derrida refers to here are "victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalism, racism, colonialism, sexism and other such catastrophes, [and] victims of capitalist-imperialist oppression or any form of totalitarian oppression." He says, "If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, or about the generation of ghosts—that is to say, about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us—it is in the name of justice," because in the presence of these "ghosts," any justice is impossible and unthinkable. In Derrida’s view, without responsibility and respect for these "victims" or "sufferers," and without a longing for future justice, it is meaningless for us today to talk about "where we are going" or "what tomorrow will be." Therefore, Derrida advocates for humanity to live in a different way—not only to live better, but to live more justly. This means reviving the spirit of Marx’s justice, living with the absent Marx, and coexisting with the specter of Marx. Borrowing the metaphor of the scene from Shakespeare’s Hamlet ("Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost"), Derrida points out that because justice has never found a footing in reality, the specter of Marx reappears. This specter is Marx's spiritual legacy, which requires us to read and discuss it. At a time when the "end of history" has become the mainstream public opinion and dominant discourse, and when people seem unable to envision a future better than the present, the ghost of Marx has been resurrected, manifesting and beckoning to us from afar. On this basis, Derrida provides a "specter-political" answer to the "long-repeated topic" among contemporary Marxists of "whither Marxism," which he calls "a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations."
Pierre Macherey [4] once evaluated Derrida’s "politics of specters" thus: "Precisely at the moment when Marx is hidden in the depths of the tomb, dead, buried, forced into silence, denied and disappeared... the time seems to have come to give him back his speech—if not 'the' speech that belonged to him personally, sheltered in the identity of his living presence, then at least the spectral speech of the 'revenant' [5] bestowed upon him by Specters of Marx." Derrida links the "specter of communism" from the opening of the Communist Manifesto with the ghost of the late King in Hamlet. Through the resonance between these two ghosts, he conjures the "specter of Marx." As the heir to the King, Hamlet’s mission is to avenge his father and reclaim his kingship to comfort the wronged soul of his dead father; as an heir to Marx, Derrida takes as his mission the revival of the critical spirit of Marxism and adherence to Marx’s ideal of future justice. In his view, on the one hand, under the dual pressure of real suffering and the need to change the world, we need to inherit Marx’s spiritual legacy, which contains both negation and hope. On the other hand, we must have a sense of responsibility toward the legacy Marx left behind, as well as toward the future. "An heir bears a double responsibility: to inherit the legacy of predecessors, while simultaneously deconstructing that legacy so it may be passed down to future generations in a new form."
As a thinker who consistently employed deconstructive strategies, Derrida maintained his habitual theoretical posture toward Marx’s spiritual legacy. He noted: "Deconstruction is the structural decomposition of a text; while respecting the text's connotation, it unearths the text's value so that the concepts of the text are fully manifested... Deconstruction acquires many concepts, while also creating and inheriting concepts until others grasp and understand them. Deconstruction attempts to understand the limits of concepts, even to transcend those limits, and regards this act as a joyful and exciting affair." In other words, the aim of the deconstructive strategy is to restore and reveal the "multiple meanings" of textual concepts, allowing the intellectual text to become something completely open. Naturally, in Derrida’s eyes, deconstruction is not only a theoretical activity of dismantling but is also intended to change real life. Accompanying the social transformations and the themes of the era since the 20th century, the theoretical problems of Marxism have continually emerged. Theorists of different positions explain the essence of Marxism according to their own ideological perspectives, which has led to Marx’s thought being constantly dismembered as well as dressed in various theoretical new clothes. After Marx, from the Marxism of the Second International to "Leninist Marxism," and from various "Western Marxisms" to various "post-Marxisms," theorists have continuously debated the essential characteristics and methodology of Marxist theory. They have interpreted Marx from the perspectives they value—philosophy, science, politics, ethics, aesthetics, and even religion—attempting to reconstruct the theoretical system and methodology of Marxism. The rise of "Western Marxism" in the 1920s was undoubtedly the most prominent appearance of the "specter of Marx." At that time, the emerging European revolutionary movements seemed to perform a historical drama of "revolt against Capital" [6]; the victory of the Russian October Revolution stood in sharp contrast to the failure of the European workers' movement, and Marxism faced a theoretical crisis of reconstruction. As the first generation of Western Marxists, Georg Lukács sought to reconstruct Marxism's methodology of historical initiative based on the category of "totality"; Antonio Gramsci interpreted Marxism as a "philosophy of praxis" centered on the struggle for "cultural hegemony"; and Ernst Bloch attempted to use the "philosophy of hope" to deepen the utopian content of Marxism.
In today’s "out of joint" [7] era, Derrida declared once again that we still need to inherit Marx’s spiritual legacy: "There is no future without Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx: in any case of a certain Marx, of his genius, of at least one of his spirits. For this will be our hypothesis or rather our bias: there are more than one of them, there must be more than one of them." Here, Derrida believes there are multiple "spirits of Marx," but the "spirit" he refers to generally contains two meanings. First, the spirit is a "specter." As an intangible existence, the spirit is like a departed soul—invisible and untouchable, yet still existing and playing a role. Just as the reappearance of the late King’s ghost in Hamlet reminds Hamlet to avenge him and informs him of his inescapable responsibility as the princely heir, the significance of the "specter" lies in its presence as something absent—as something remembered, inherited, and in the process of becoming. In Specters of Marx, Derrida first explains the presence and absence of the "specter of communism" through the Communist Manifesto, and, combining Marx’s theoretical analyses of the "specter" in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The German Ideology, and Capital, emphasizes the "presence of the absence" of the specter as a departed soul. He explicitly states: "When we study political reality, we cannot ignore the potential role of specters. I have studied almost all ghostly phenomena, especially the kind of specter that Marx himself exorcised (which he both explored and wished to distance himself from); he reminded people of how much European society feared the specter of communism."
Second, spirit is an ideal, representing hope and the future. As mentioned above, the "critical spirit of Marxism" as understood by Derrida is embodied more as a Messianic ideal of justice. He points out that while waiting for the "Messianic call," and while summoning a "comer [8] who represents the coming of justice," "we believe that this Messianic call remains an indelible mark of Marx's inheritance—a mark that neither can nor should be erased, and it is undoubtedly the mark of the experience and act of inheritance in general."
In Derrida’s view, people inherit Marx’s spiritual legacy in order to respond to today’s world theoretically and practically, and to change this world. However, how is this legacy to be inherited? Or rather, what can people do with Marxism? Derrida believes the current theoretical state of Marxism is manifested as being "both indispensable and insufficient." "Indispensable" refers, of course, to the critical spirit of Marxism and its Messianic prophecy of liberation and promise of justice; "insufficient" refers to the fact that "it is impossible for Marx to conform to our experience and expectations... today." Therefore, Derrida proposed the "New International" and "New Politics" as the concrete conceptions of his "politics of specters."
III. The "New International" and "New Politics"
Derrida’s "politics of specters" not only seeks to inherit Marx’s spiritual legacy but also attempts to continue advancing the Marxist cause of justice. Naturally, he has his own unique understanding of Marx’s promise of liberation; that is, he does not proceed from the historical necessity advocated by the materialist conception of history, but understands it based on the "hope of liberation." In other words, his political ideal is to a large extent a Messianic eschatology. He explicitly noted: "After rereading the Manifesto and several other great works of Marx, I must admit that I know very little, even nothing, of the texts in the philosophical tradition, if we consider what Marx and Engels said about their own potential obsolescence and their inherent, insurmountable historicity (for example, Engels' remarks in the 1888 preface to the Manifesto). Their lessons seem particularly urgent today. What other thinker has ever issued a similar warning in such a clear manner? Who else has ever demanded a transformation of the conclusions of their own research subjects?" Clearly, Derrida found sufficient justification for his theoretical interpretations and intellectual developments. In his view, since the old international order—or the "New World Order" identified by right-wing scholars like Fukuyama—has not realized true equity and justice, and since people are unwilling to give up hope for the eventual arrival of equity and justice, they must learn to wait and to innovate. Thus, he proposed the basic conceptions of a "New International" and a "New Politics."
Targeting the ten plagues of the "New World Order," Derrida advocated for the establishment of a new international organization to combat the ills existing in today’s world. He said: "I believe that all of humanity should strengthen solidarity and seek new ways to solve problems. As for the form of this international organization, it is not for me to decide, but what can be clarified is that this organization is not composed of national governments, nor is it an international political party organization... The international organization I am talking about is not the 'Comintern' of the past, nor an international alliance of other political parties. But I am willing to retain the word 'International,' and to capitalize its first letter, so that people can be reminded of the significance of this word in the past and preserve it." So, what kind of organization is the "New International" exactly? Perhaps it is merely a vision in Derrida’s mind. He believed that with the development of science and technology and the integration of the global economy, concepts of territory and nation, as well as geopolitics, are all undergoing major changes. The democracy of the future should break through national boundaries, and the concepts of citizenship and human rights should also break through the boundaries of nationality.
For Derrida, many major events occurring at the time—whether the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, or various disputes and conflicts breaking out around the world—could be seen as symptoms of the development of the world situation, foreshadowing that a new form of international alliance was in the process of formation. For Derrida, this "New International" implied a brand-new concept of politics and revolution, requiring that we "must change our understanding of the concept of revolution. For a long time, people have believed that revolution is the process of seizing power; everyone naturally thinks of the revolutionary actions of 1789, 1848, and 1917. In fact, these are traditional, old-fashioned concepts of revolution, a model that cannot be implemented in today's society. The revolution I understand is an act of interruption, a radical examination of the normal course of history. All revolutions must bear ethical responsibility and break with the dominant system and prevailing social standards."
Of course, Derrida’s "New International," as an embodiment of a new political concept, is not entirely hollow or abstract; rather, it is anchored in the international law and series of judicial principles he proposed (such as laws concerning the death penalty and animal protection). He even argued: "Specters of Marx is perhaps first of all a work on justice, a work on justice as distinct from harmony and order." Shortly after the publication of Specters of Marx, Derrida published Force of Law in 1994, a book in which he painstakingly elucidated the cosmopolitan political view that "deconstruction is justice." Revolving around the relationship between law and justice, Derrida discussed the deconstructability of law and the indeconstructability of justice. In other words, he believed that the law can be modified (for example, the abolition of the death penalty), whereas justice cannot be changed; justice is superior to the law because justice is the Messianic promise. He firmly believed: "Justice will come, it must come, it will necessarily come, it is going to come; it possesses the fundamental attribute of an event that must necessarily come." He argued that this is why justice—insofar as it is not merely a judicial or political concept—opens the door to the future: a future of reforming, recasting, and reconstructing law and politics. Thus, it is evident that future justice is the ultimate goal of Derrida’s "hauntopolitics."
Naturally, what touches the intellectual nerves of Derrida’s "hauntopolitics" even more—and what better reflects its practical concerns—are the "politics of hospitality" and "politics of friendship" he proposed later. These seemingly ordinary and everyday topics of "hospitality" and "friendship" not only manifest the micro-political turn represented by Derridean deconstructive justice but also reflect the recent ethico-political turn in contemporary Western philosophy. We can see that most contemporary Western political philosophy revolves around the ethical theme of social solidarity, from which one can discern the severe degree to which contradictions and conflicts have grown, both on a global scale and within national societies. For Derrida, the direct motivation for discussing "hospitality" and "friendship" was the increasingly prominent issues of migration and refugees in European society, along with the numerous social contradictions and conflicts they trigger. How should one treat the "outsider"? Or how should one treat the "Other"? These questions have transformed directly from everyday empirical issues into ethico-political problems, and even into problems at the philosophical level. "What does it mean to be an ‘outsider’? Who is strange? Who is the outsider? What is signified by ‘becoming an outsider’ or ‘coming from the outside’? We merely wish to emphasize, at the very least, providing the outsider with a definite extension—an everyday, usable definition—so that it can be commonly used in daily language." Faced with the global conflicts brought about by globalization, and the specific, realistic dilemmas brought to European society by the influx of migrants and refugees, the question of how to view Immanuel Kant’s "perpetual peace" and Emmanuel Levinas’s "absolute Other" became "new political" problems that Derrida sought to research and resolve through his "politics of hospitality." In Derrida’s view, there are on one hand "unconditional laws or the absolute desire for hospitality," and on the other hand "conditional laws, politics, and ethics." Between them, there is both "a difference" and "an inseparability," where "one calls upon, implies, or prescribes the other." Thus, "in the process of formulating laws for unconditional hospitality," how can one establish a "specific, limited, and definable law"? How can one establish a "concrete politics and ethics"? In short, how can one construct a "perfectibility"? Can one formulate a "politics, ethics, and law that responds to new demands under unprecedented new historical situations," and can one "adapt to these new demands" by "changing the laws" and re-"regulating citizenship, democracy, and international law"? These are precisely the problems that Derrida’s "New International" and "new politics" seek to resolve.
Clearly, Derrida’s "hauntopolitics" is a deconstructive interpretation of Marxism [9] and an ethical deployment of the critical spirit of Marxism. As he himself said, "there are several spirits of Marx." However, what he values is the spiritual heritage carrying the Messianic appeal for justice; yet he directly ignores Marxism as an ontology [10] and dialectical materialism, as well as Marxism as historical materialism. These spiritual heritages fall outside his intellectual scope. For him, we only need to inherit the "vital part" of Marx’s spiritual heritage—namely, the inherent critical spirit of Marxism. This critical spirit happens to coincide with his deconstructionist strategy. In his view, if we lose the critical spirit of Marxism today, if we fail to pay attention to the logic of the market and the growth of the power of capital, if we fail to reveal those new forms of slavery, and if we fail to reflect on the problems of hospitality generated in the process of globalization, then justice can never arrive.
From Derrida’s attitude toward Marx’s spiritual heritage, we can see with particular clarity the contemporary Western intellectual world’s thirst and longing for social solidarity, equity, and justice. It is precisely this thirst and longing that led Derrida to Marx and Marxism, making him believe: "What currently appears only as the image of a specter in the ideological representations of old Europe will necessarily become a present actuality in the future—that is, a living reality. The Communist Manifesto calls for and appeals to the emergence of this living reality: we must realize that in the future, this specter—which was first an association of workers forced into a state of secrecy until around 1848—will become a reality, and a living reality at that. This reality of life must manifest itself, show itself, and it must present itself within Europe, in the regions of old Europe or new Europe, and within a universal international scope." The theoretical goal of Marxism and the significance of its practical philosophy is the pursuit of human equity and justice. As long as true equity and justice remain to be realized, then all of us are, to some extent, the students and descendants of Marx, and will consciously or unconsciously become heirs to Marxism. This perhaps constitutes some of the intellectual inspiration that Derrida’s "hauntopolitics" brings to us.
(Author Profile: Jia Liyan, School of Cultural Communication and Art, China Women’s University) Web Editor: Tong Xin Source: National Theoretical Trends (国外理论动态), Issue 2, 2024