Our deconstructive refusal of closure opens the rifts within contradictions of capitalism and the death penalty AND it opens the discourse of Marxism to reinvention and innovation against the culdesacs of Marxism’s 20th century failures.

Beyond this targeting of certain elements in Marx’s work – too metaphysical, too logocentric, too Hegelian, too idealist – Derrida finds something else there. When Specters of Marx arrives, Derrida makes it clear that he thinks Marx still has a place in our world, claiming that there will be no future without him. He argues that if deconstruction has so far ‘been prudent and sparing but rarely negative in the strategy of its references to Marx’, it is because Marx seemed to have been ‘taken over’, ‘welded to an orthodoxy’. But not only are there no objections to an encounter between Marxism and deconstruction, Derrida also goes so far as to place his own work ‘in the tradition of a certain Marxism’, and even talks of ‘this attempted radicalization of Marxism called deconstruction’ (Derrida, 1994: 92). He affirms this in the face of a contemporary discourse – of politicians, academics, journalists – which declares the ‘death’ of Marx and Marxism and the triumph of political and economic liberalism. Derrida probably overplays the oppositional status of his book: there is always someone somewhere announcing the death of Marx and always someone else resurrecting him or calling on his ghost – and as he himself admits, his intervention comes after a longstanding demand to write about Marx. Nevertheless, the background to both Derrida’s book and the conference which gave birth to it was marked by a conspicuously self-congratulatory tone on the part of Western liberals following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a celebration epitomized by Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) The End of History and the Last Man (which Derrida submits to a brief but amusing and effective critique). Yet this liberal triumphalism is at once jubilant and anxious, manic and troubled: desperate to announce the benign and auspicious victory of liberal capitalism despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Against this anxious triumphalism, Derrida throws the spotlight on that which it would hide, detailing the suffering, exclusion, oppression, and violence that exist in the world, despite – or because of – the triumph of neo-liberal virtues, offering a list of ten ‘plagues’ of the ‘new world order’, including inter-ethnic conflict, developing-world debt, and the spread of nuclear weapons: Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating ‘the end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth. (Derrida, 1994: 85) This stirring indictment of global injustice is made in the name of a new, radicalized critique ‘inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx or of Marxism’ (Derrida, 1994: 86). The spirits of Marx or Marxism: it is a central hypothesis of Specters of Marx that there is more than one ‘spirit’ of Marx. Like all texts, Marx’s writings are radically heterogeneous: his work offers a number of alternatives, many Marxes. Like Lyotard, Derrida is not interested in Marx’s work as a unified system. As inheritors of the spirits of Marx, we must distinguish between them, ‘filter, sift, criticize . . . sort out several different possibles’, in order to reaffirm this inheritance (Derrida, 1994: 16). Derrida goes even further: for while all ‘inheritance is always . . . a critical, selective, and filtering reaffirmation’ (91–2), there is something in Marx’s work which calls for its own reinvention: To continue to take inspiration from a certain spirit of Marxism would be to keep faith with what has always made of Marxism in principle and fi rst of all a radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake its self-critique. This critique wants itself to be in principle and explicitly open to its own transformation, re-evaluation, self-reinterpretation. (Derrida, 1994: 88) Not only does Marx offer numerous possibilities to choose from, ‘[w]e do not have to solicit the agreement of Marx’ for the choices we make. ‘And we do not have to suppose that Marx was in agreement with himself’ (Derrida, 1994: 34). This does not mean that Marx is simply a blank canvas on which we can sketch our own theory: Derrida often points to Marx’s unique value in providing resources for the analysis of contemporary relations between nation-states, the market, international law, technological innovations, and capital. Yet Derrida does not provide these analyses himself: ‘what I am putting forward here . . . corresponds more to a position-taking than to the work such a position calls for, presupposes, or prefigures’ (53). In fact he is clearer about those spirits of Marx he wants to reject. We have already seen Derrida suspicious of the metaphysics in Marx. In Specters of Marx he expands on this identification of the unwelcome spirits of Marx, Marxisms that should be left to one side: We would be tempted to distinguish this spirit of the Marxist critique [as critique of liberal capitalism and its ills], which seems to be more indispensable than ever today, at once from Marxism as ontology, philosophical or metaphysical system, as ‘dialectical materialism,’ from Marxism as historical materialism or method, and from Marxism incorporated in the apparatuses of party, State, or workers’ International. (Derrida, 1994: 68) The identification in this passage of Marxism as ontology is important: the interrogation of Marx’s ontology is one of the most important themes of Derrida’s book. It relates the reading of Marx strongly to Derrida’s work hitherto, aligning it with his deconstruction of the onto-theological heritage of Western metaphysics from Plato onwards. Against Marx’s ontology Derrida proposes a ‘hauntology’: the study of the spectral. For the ‘spectres of Marx’ refer not only to the ghosts of Marx that haunt us today, but also to the spectres that haunted Marx himself.4 It is using the figure of the spectre that Derrida deconstructs Marx.