Abstract
Friedrich Engels died in 1895. On the centenary of his death in 1995 it might have been appropriate, if anachronistic, to consider his legacy, especially in the wake of the publication of Jacques Derrida’s fullest, but by no means first, engagement with Marx. It may take a hundred years for the impact of Specters of Marx to be felt and its implications thought through, but one thing that disappointed me was the low visibility of Engels. It seems that Derrida finds it as hard as anyone else to keep Engels in mind, or in sight, when dealing with Marxism. One could count on the fingers of two hands the references to Engels, including one hyphenated allusion to a body called ‘Marx-Engels’.2
The specters of Marx. Why this plural? Would there be more than one of them?1
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Notes
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 3. I wish to thank FE for spiritual guidance in the preparation of this paper.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 37. For some provisional responses to Derrida’s intervention see Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Reconciling Derrida: Specters of Marx and Deconstructive Politics’, New Left Review 208 (1994), pp. 88–106; Marion Hobson, ‘Dead and Read’, THES (2 September 1994), p. 17; Graham McCann, ‘Phantom of the Pop Era’, THES (3 February 1995), p. 23;
Willy Maley, ‘Proletarian Poltergeist’, The Edinburgh Review 93 (1995), pp. 223–5; Jonathan Rée, ‘Shades of Politics’, New Statesman and Society (28 October 1994), pp. 36–9.
Cited in Teodor Ilyich Oizerman, The Making of the Marxist Philosophy (Moscow: Progress, 1981), p. 19.
On the self as host to the ghost, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Fors: the Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, trans. Barbara Johnson, Georgia Review, 31:1 (1977), pp. 64–116. For other Derridean encounters with the supernatural, see ‘Telepathy’, trans. Nicholas Royle, Oxford Literary Review 10 (1988), pp. 3–41; ‘Sending: on Representation’, trans. Peter and Mary Ann Caws, Social Research 79 (1982), pp. 294–326. For a more recent statement on hauntology, see ‘The Time is Out of Joint’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Anselm Haverkamp (ed.), Deconstruction is/in America: a New Sense of the Political (New York and London: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 14–38. For a non-hostile reception of Derrida’s obsession with ghosts, see Derek Attridge, ‘Ghost Writing’, in Deconstruction is/in America, pp. 223–7.
Terrell Carver, Engels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 2. Nobody reads Engels these days, at least not in Eng. Lit. Christopher Caudwell quoted from Anti-Dühring, but that was in the old days when reading was fashionable.
See Christopher Caudwell, ‘English Poets: the Decline of Capitalism’, in K. M. Newton (ed.), Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: a Reader (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 88.
Henri Lefebvre, ‘Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the Centenary of Marx’s Death’, trans. David Reifman, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 76.
Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, New Left Review, 209 (1995), p. 98.
Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (Moscow: Progress, 1978), p. 35.
See Terry Eagleton, ‘Marxism without Marxism’, Radical Philosophy, 73 (Sept./Oct. 1995), pp. 35–7, 37; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘At the Planchette of Deconstruction is/in America’, in Deconstruction is/in America, pp. 240–1. For a concise formulation of this concept, see Specters of Marx, where Derrida speaks of ‘a certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise that one can try to liberate from any dogmatics and even from any metaphysico-religious determination, from any messianism’, p. 89.
On the relationship between tears and vision, see Jacques Derrida, Memoires of the Blind: the Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1993), pp. 126–9: ‘Only man knows how to see this [voir ça] that tears and not sight are the essence of the eye’, p. 126.
Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 216–17, n. 13.
On the bond as band, tape or double-bind, see, for example, Jacques Derrida, ‘Ja, or the faux-bond II’, in Points … Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 30–77.
Friedrich Engels, ‘Natural Science in the Spirit World’, Dialectics of Nature (Moscow: Progress, 1954), pp. 68–82.
Engels, Anti-Dühring (Moscow: Progress, 1954), p. 15.
Pierre Macherey, ‘In a Materialist Way’, trans. Lorna Scott Fox, in Alan Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 136–7.
See Friedrich Engels, ‘On the History of Early Christianity’, in Lewis S. Feuer (ed.), Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (Glasgow: Fontana, 1959; 1969; 1976), pp. 209–35. The Revelation of St John is parodied — by Marx — in the conclusion to The Holy Family, in the form of a ‘Critical Last Judgement’. See The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Company (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), pp. 260–1.
Elsewhere, Derrida appeals to the evidence of handwriting — a strange thing for a deconstructivist to do, in order to authenticate authorship: ‘One imagines the impatient patience of Marx (rather than Engels) as he transcribes in his own hand, at length, in German, the rage of a prophetic imprecation.’ Specters of Marx, p. 43. See also Derrida, ‘Onto-Theology of National Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis)’, Oxford Literary Review 14 (1992), pp. 3–23; 20: ‘All the second volume of The German Ideology (manuscript in Engels’s hand) aims at those who lay claim to what they call “true Socialism”.’
Engels, ‘Natural Science in the Spirit World’, pp. 73–4. For a recent theoretical formulation that touches upon this new grammar of the self, see Hélène Cixous, ‘Preface’, Susan Sellers (ed.), A Cixous Reader (London: Routledge, 1994), p. xvii: ‘A subject is at least a thousand people. This is why I never ask myself “Who am I?” (qui suis-je?) I ask myself “Who are I?” (qui sont-je) an untranslatable phrase. Who can say who I are, how many I are, which is the most I of my I’s.’
Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp. 46–7. For a sophisticated and nuanced argument around exorcism that seems to me to make this point about magic and counter-magic, see Stephen J. Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (eds), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 163–87. Greenblatt also has some sharp things to say about the staging of the supernatural, and its translation from one cultural space to another.
Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), pp. 267–8.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 120.
Zhang Longxi, ‘Marxism: from Scientific to Utopian’, in Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (eds), Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective (Routledge: London, 1995), p. 68.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 47. It is worth noting that Deleuze and Guattari seem to endorse Engels’s contempt for those who actually believe ‘in myth, in tragedy’. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: The Athlone Press, 1984), p. 107; p. 297. At issue here is the status of allegory and of truth, and the limits of demythification, not to mention the metaphysical nature of such a demythification.
Terence Hawkes, ‘The Heimlich Manoeuvre’, Textual Practice 8:2 (1994), p. 305.
For an astonishing co-authored investigation of the fear and trembling induced by present-day capitalism, see Félix Guattari and Toni Negri, Communists Like Us, trans. Michael Ryan (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990), pp. 11–13. For a fascinating instance of a socialist acting as a medium, see E. P. Thompson’s remarks concerning his approach in The Making of the English Working Class,
in an interview cited in Richard Johnson, ‘Edward Thompson, Eugene Genovese, and Socialist Humanist History’, History Workshop, 6 (1978), p. 84: ‘But the fact is, again, the material took command of me, far more than I had ever expected. If you want a generalization I would have to say that the historian has got to be listening all the time. He should not set up a book or research project with a totally clear sense of exactly what he is going to be able to do. The material itself has got to speak through him. And I think this happens.’ (my emphasis)
See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Spectre of Stalin, trans. Irene Clephane (London: Hamilton, 1969).
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Maley, W. (1999). Spectres of Engels. In: Buse, P., Stott, A. (eds) Ghosts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374812_2
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