Political Aporias

Among Derrida's texts on Shakespeare, Specters of Marx has attracted by far the most interest, albeit more for the fact that it is considered to be Derrida's most overtly ‘political’ book than because it is a book that closely engages with Shakespeare. Derrida tackled overtly political themes in the last two decades of his life. It would, nonetheless, be wrong to speak of a political turn in Derrida's work, as his readings of Shakespeare show. As I will argue, what is often called the ‘political’ dimension of his work is intrinsic to and present in it from the very beginning under the guises of a performance of and meditation on what reading can do.

In 1993, when it seemed that Marxism had once and for all been consigned to history, Derrida argued not only that Marxism was and would never be quite gone, but also confessed his indebtedness to a certain spirit or spectre of Marx. The striking image Marx and Engel's chose to open their 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party (‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism’) thus becomes occasion for Derrida to suggest that there is something essentially spectral about Marxism. Like Shakespeare, indeed like any other ‘signature’, Marx is subject to the twinned movements of différance and iteration and welcomes, even demands, the incalculable event of reading and of countersigning, singularily. There could, in this sense, perhaps not be anything more political than reading and thus countersigning Marx, or indeed Shakespeare or Celan or any other génie. As Simon Morgan Wortham suggests, it is in this injunction to inherit and to choose one, singular response here and now that Derrida locates ‘the possibility of justice in radical excess of existing apparatuses of law, morality, duty or right’. He continues: ‘in its profound affirmation of an unprogrammable justice always remaining possible in the “here-now”, deconstruction inherits a certain spirit of Marx, a certain messianic remains’.

For many of its left-leaning critics, Specters of Marx chartered an impassable political route, no doubt also because this characterisation of a haunting and iterable Marx does in fact not amount to a backing of Marxism, or in fact any ‘-ism’.