SILENCE VISIBLE AND PERPETUAL CALM

After the end of the Soviet empire in 1989, Jacques Derrida responded to the near-hysterical victory songs of many in the neoliberal West with a proclamation of radical historical changes potentially still to come. Many reservations have now been lodged and circulated about Derrida's long-awaited encounter with Marx (adumbrated as long ago as 1971 in Positions but still declared there as yet to happen). Nonetheless Specters of Marx remains spellbinding, and I find myself, like many others, haunted by its analysis of haunting and hauntology, not least because for a student of Romanticism the ghosts Derrida writes about are vividly apparent in the texts recording the condition of England around 1800. They have not always been so visible, although they have always been there. David Ferry and Geoffrey Hartman described Wordsworth's compulsive invocations of a liminal zone between life and death, but it is Derrida's return to Marx that opens up the potential for a historical understanding of the spectral figures in the Wordsworthian landscape, and construes them as still living among us. The haunted present that is contemporary life can then look to Romanticism as an exemplary form of its own preexistence. The ghosts and ghostly forms inhabiting Wordsworth's poetry bespeak a historical condition whose determinations we have not yet supplanted or displaced. This does not mean that nothing has changed, or that everything written around the year 1800 matters to the twenty-first century in the same way and to the same degree.