Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx

by Jacques Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson

Fredric Jameson, Antonio Negri, Terry Eagleton, Pierre Macherey and others engage in a debate on Marx with Jacques Derrida.

With the publication of Specters of Marx in 1993, Jacques Derrida redeemed a longstanding pledge to confront Marx's texts directly and in detail. His characteristically bravura presentation provided a provocative re-reading of the classics in the Western tradition and posed a series of challenges to Marxism.

In a timely intervention in one of today's most vital theoretical debates, the contributors to Ghostly Demarcations respond to the distinctive program projected by Specters of Marx. The volume features sympathetic meditations on the relationship between Marxism and deconstruction by Fredric Jameson, Werner Hamacher, Antonio Negri, Warren Montag, and Rastko Mocnik, brief polemical reviews by Terry Eagleton and Pierre Macherey, and sustained political critiques by Tom Lewis and Aijaz Ahmad. The volume concludes with Derrida's reply to his critics in which he sharpens his views about the vexed relationship between Marxism and deconstruction.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Politics

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.

Reviews

[Jonatan Södergren · Rating 3 out of 5]

”There is today in the world a dominant discourse [...] it proclaims: Marx is dead, socialism is dead, very dead, an 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!”

In this collection of essays reflecting on the Derridean ”reconciliation” with Marxism and its deconstructionist radicalisation (dare I say a deconstructive solidarity?), some profound musings and reflections are provided. I did, for instance, appreciate Eagleton’s rather ludicrous criticism regarding Derrida’s ”opportunism” (e.g., where was Derrida when we needed him?) altough the superior essays by far are Jameson’s exellent ”Marx’s Purloined Letter” and the enjoyable one by Hamacher where he connects ”Specters of Marx” with Derrida’s previous engagement with performativity and speech act theory. Furthermore, I enjoyed exploring the concept of spectrality, specifically its relation to nostalgia and mythologies.

[Dearwassily · Rating 3 out of 5]

My professor compared this to a “Real Housewives...” reunion episode.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

One could argue that there are two fundamental orientations present here, alongside attempts to "split the difference," so to speak, between the two: a sort of insipid excoriation of Derrida for evacuating Marx of Marxism, for depoliticizing or deradicalizing him, or of a patient reading of Specters of Marx for its implications in the domains of philosophy, ontology, politics, and literature. I think Eagleton clearly falls into the first camp, Jameson in the second, and we could generate a spectrum for all the other authors with those as the two poles. I think Ahmad would have to fall directly after Eagleton, then Lewis, then Negri and Macherey, then Montag, Močnik, and Hamacher, some of whose works barely address Derrida, and mostly work on Marx directly. Spivak, who is absent from this collection, is positioned in Derrida's response in proximity to Ahmad's response. The criticisms mostly fall flat, and Derrida adequately addresses most: there are conflations between "postmodernism" and deconstruction, misquotations that frame Derrida as having abandoned the category of class altogether, bitterness or resentment towards followers of deconstruction's personal politics, or for Derrida's not speaking up earlier, allegations that Derrida is simply taking the less popular position, and therefore only taking up the banner of Marxism once the fall of the Soviet Union has made it unpopular to do so, and Derrida is precisely correct (to follow Spivak) in diagnosing a certain "proprietary" relation to Marx that, rather ironically, undergirds these critiques - and Derrida notes that he already heads off this problematic in advance by taking up the question of inheritance (and thus of filiation) directly in Specters, especially in his treatment of Hamlet. I think Derrida is also right to gawk at the idea that Lewis forwards that Stalinism is simply bureaucratic state capitalism, thus wiping his hands clean of the ordeal and stating that there is nothing for him to mourn, as well as Ahmad's surprise that Derrida is mourning anything at all, given the fact that Derrida did not explicitly support "really existing socialism" in this specific modality. I think Derrida's recourse to a "messianicity without messianism" makes it clear that the USSR held within it a certain Communist potential, a certain "spirit of Marx," that one cannot simply ignore, but that can be separated from its actuality. Despite Jameson's praise for the work, Derrida bristles at the imputation of an "aesthetics" and of "Utopianism" to his work, which seems to me a misunderstanding on his part, for I think Jameson's conception of utopia can indeed be reconciled with Derrida's messianicity, and I also think that Jameson's conception of aesthetics is more cavernous or spacious than Derrida takes it to be. Overall, I appreciate the invitation to reflect further on Derrida's work, even if some of the responses are not particularly charitable or close reads.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of the collected essays are content to deflate Derrida’s intervention, treating him as a flash in the pan, after which we can return to our scheduled programming. Hamacher sees that Derrida has changed things, that our Marxism must now reckon with its messianic rhetoric. The difference between them is telling. JD’s messianism is figured as an undeconstructable legacy, a spectral memory of failed revolutions refusing to be forgotten. WH’s messianism, in contradistinction, is the unique language commodities speak to each other, characterized by a grammar of redemption and equivalence. If we take JD’s messianism to its conclusion, we end up with a pre-Marxist socialism, weakly affirming politics as eschatology. WH’s path is more promising: once we can identify the distinctive tics of commodity-language, we can approach afresh the difficult question of Marxism and religion. On Hamacher’s account, a core aspect of Marx’s achievement was describing the discursive idealism produced by the rising bourgeoisie. Marxism is messianic, then, in a self-cancelling sense, sublating the messianic language of capital.

[宗儒 李 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the authors, e.g. Eagleton, Ahmed, I think probably didn’t even bother to read beyond the introduction of Specters of Marx? No wonder why Derrida’s so mad about them in the essay at the end of the book. Personally I find Jamesons’ article very enlightening, literally bought several of his books after reading that.

[Sarita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it before Spectres of Marx. Multiple writers strengthens the critiques and analysis of Spectres of Marx. I especially loved references of ghosts and haunting as a reference for the loss of cultural and economic change we continuously mourn generation to generation. The author's expanded on the nostalgia beautifully.

[Zeynep]

I am just going to mark this as read - although I am sure I missed one or two essays. Well. Can always come back.

[Eamonn Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terry Eagleton calls the kind of jargony terminology combination Derrida indulges in often (theologico-socio-political, etc.) "Late-Frankfurt Swearing" and I felt that deep in my soul.

[Peter Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book probably won't make much sense if you haven't read Specters of Marx by Derrida, but is I think required reading if you have. It consists of a number of commentaries and responses to Derrida's original text, finishing with a final essay where Derrida himself responds. For me, the critiques of Derrida from the left by Eagleton and Ahmad which are explicitly criticised by Derrida in his response make most sense. While Specters of Marx itself can be read somewhat sympathetically from a Marxist perspective (I believe) Derrida's response to his Marxist critics makes it clear the extent to which he does not approach his analysis from a position that has much (if anything) in common with Marx. His essay here is fascinating to me for demonstrating that Derrida can write in clear text and without all the deconstructive language games which are on display in Specters of Marx itself (and which Eagleton rightly - in my view - lampoons). It is genuinely comic that Derrida finds fault it his critics for misunderstanding him when he writes in such an opaque style.

Regardless, this book is an excellent companion to the original Specters of Marx.

12 June 2022: On second reading, after re-reading Specters of Marx itself, I largely agree with what I wrote after first reading. I don't think Derrida's work is a "gesture of affiliation" with Marx, analytically it has little in common with Marx's work, although I have a little more sympathy second time around for Derrida's criticism of the dogmatic Marxist response to his work. Jameson's essay is probably the most interesting contribution, engaging critically but without dismissing Derrida (as Eagleton does for example). The one I found least interesting is Hamacher's, which is buried in complex deconstructive language and doesn't feel (to me at least) like it is adding much to our understanding of either Marx or Derrida's engagement with Marx.

The essays here, including Derrida's reply, remain essential to a critical reading of Specters of Marx itself.

The rough notes I made on reading Specters of Marx are here: https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2...

I recommend reading Peter Salmon's biography of Derrida before reading both this and Specters of Marx for a sense of the concepts Derrida is using here.

[Leonardo]

Con este pasaje la fase deconstructiva del pensamiento crítico, que desde Heidegger y Adorno hasta Derrida ha constituido un instrumento poderoso para escapar de la modernidad, ha perdido su efectividad.

Ver el ensayo de Antonio Negri sobre la obra de Jacques Derrida Specters of Marx, “The Specter´s Smile”, en Michael Spinker, ed. Ghostly Demarcations (London: Verso, 1999) pp. 5-16.

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