Abstract
Derrida’s text, Specters of Marx (1994) carries a triple sub-title, the structure of which is worthy of more attention than so far has been given to it. The sub-title invokes the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. The intent of these remarks is to open out a discussion of these both as distinct elements, and as a single structure. The intent of this paper is to relocate the discussion of Marx and his New International back into the analyses of temporality invoked in the notions of debt and mourning, of the gift and the transmission of identity across actual deaths in the continuity, the ‘survivre’, the survival or living on, which is constituted in the rituals of mourning. The remarks in this paper are designed to re-situate Derrida’s analysis of futurity, of an ‘a-venir’, of the ‘to-come’, as a modification of and challenge both to Heidegger’s insistence on the priority of the future, over past and present, and to Levinas’ dedication of what there is to his god, in an ‘a-dieu’, in relation to an emphasis on finitude and on forgetting.
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Notes
- 1.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International, 1993, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
- 2.
See ‘Interpretations at war: Kant, the Jew, the German’ (1988), in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, trans. and ed. Gil Anidjar (London/New York: Routledge, 2001), 138–139. When Derrida announces two exemplary Germans for analysis in terms of this German -Jewish psyche, it is a surprise to find that the names given are not those of Sigmund Freud and Edmund Husserl, but of Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig.
- 3.
In the Foreword to Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 1994, trans. George Collins (London and New York: Verso, 1999) Derrida sets out the topics of his seminar from 1983 onwards, under the general heading, Nationality and Philosophical Nationalism (p. vii). A fragment from this enquiry surfaces in Oxford Literary Review (OLR), vol. 14, nos. 1–2, Oxford 1992, under the title ‘Onto-theology of National–Humanism’, pp. 2–24.
- 4.
Derrida pays special attention to the reception of Marx by Maurice Blanchot and his essay, “Marx’s Three Voices,” in Blanchot, Of Friendship, 1971, trans. Elizabeth Rottenburg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) and by Michel Henry, with a long footnote about his work on Marx (pp. 187–188). It is marked that he does not discuss the analyses of Jean Paul Sartre.
- 5.
See Michael Sprinker, ed. Ghostly demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (London: Verso, 1999).
- 6.
See Catherine Malabou, ‘Another Possibility’, in Research In Phenomenology, vol. 36, Special Issue on Jacques Derrida (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006), 115–129. This focuses on a modification of modality, which is also pursued at length across the various surfaces of Malabou and Derrida, Counterpath: Travelling with Jacques Derrida, 1999, trans. David Wills (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
- 7.
See ‘Faith and Knowledge: two sources of ‘religion’ at the limits of pure reason,’ 1994, in Acts of Religion, Gil Anidjar, ed., 40–101.
- 8.
See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, 1967, trans. Alan Bass (Routledge: London and New York, 1978).
- 9.
For Jean Luc Nancy, see The sense of the world, 1993, trans. Jeffrey S Librett (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). It is safe to presume that Derrida had access to pre-publication material for this text. See also Jacques Derrida, On touching: Jean Luc Nancy, 2001, trans. Christine Irizarray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
- 10.
See Jacques Derrida, ‘Le Toucher’, Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, vol. 16.2, On the Work of Jean-Luc Nancy, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 122–157.
- 11.
Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, 1990, trans. Marion Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). This text refuted the canard that Derrida had insufficient grasp of Husserl’s texts to be permitted to propose a critical transformation of them, as he does in Speech and Phenomenon, Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, 1967, trans. David Allison, Speech and Phenomena and other essays on Husserl’s theory of the sign (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1978). It is this text which gives rise to the identification of genesis as the basic problem of phenomenology.
- 12.
This is discussed by Len Lawlor, in his path breaking study, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), and see Jacques Derrida, “Review of Edmund Husserl: Phaenomenologische Psychologie: Vorlesungen Sommer Semester 1925 (HUA 9)”, Etudes Philosophiques 18, no. 2 (1963): 203–206.
- 13.
See again Catherine Malabou, ‘Another possibility’ p. 127. This is the mode of denegation described, but not directly invoked in the remarkable analyses provided by Derrida in his contribution to Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
- 14.
These remarks form an extended footnote to my study, Joanna Hodge, Derrida on Time (London/New York: Routledge, 2007).
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Hodge, J. (2012). Derrida’s Specters: Futurity, Finitude, Forgetting. In: Halsall, F., Jansen, J., Murphy, S. (eds) Critical Communities and Aesthetic Practices. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 64. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1509-7_11
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