CR: The New Centennial Review

Editor's Note

Scott Michaelsen — 2024-07-23

On the Scattered Legacy of Specters of Marx

Peggy Kamuf — 2024-07-23

How to inherit Specters of Marx? How to inherit this work that is all about inheritance as the irreducible condition of any possible relation to a past and also to a future, the future of Marx and Marxism, but also to any future whatsoever? How to receive its legacy while acknowledging the ways it complicates this scene and yet without merely folding it back on itself, applying it to itself in an act of repetition that ends up finally inheriting little or nothing? More specifically, how to inherit Specters of Marx as a book about reading? This narrower question has in view Geoffrey Bennington’s Scatter 2: Politics in Deconstruction, which describes itself as “a book of reading(s) and a book about reading” and which begins with a quote from Specters of Marx: “To be … means to inherit.”

Spectral Survivals

Francesco Vitale — 2024-07-23

Spectres of Marx is the first text in which the syntagm "life and death" reappears twice, thirty years (1975-1976) after the seminar of the same name, now finally published, and fifteen years after its last public appearance in "Legs of Freud" (The Postcard), which comes from that seminar. One of these occurrences appears to be decisive since it allows us to recognize in the question of life not only the main track that Derrida follows in his reading of Marx but also what it is necessary to take on from Marx's legacy:

“Have Marx and his heirs helped us to think about and treat this phenomenon? If we say that the answer to this question is at once yes and no, yes in one respect, no in another, and that one must filter, select, differentiate, restructure the questions, it is only in order to announce, in too preliminary a fashion, the tone and the general form of our conclusions: namely, that one must assume the inheritance of Marxism, assume its most "living" part, which is to say, paradoxically, that which continues to put back on the drawing board the question of life, spirit, or the spectral, of life-death beyond the opposition between life and death. This inheritance must be reaffirmed by transforming it as radically as will be necessary.” (SM, p. 67)

We intend to show that to pass to the sieve of deconstruction the inheritance of Marx's philosophy of life, it is necessary to frame it against the background of the seminar Life Death in which Derrida elaborates a deconstruction of philosophy and the life sciences that elsewhere we have called “Biodeconstruction.”

Impure Beginnings: Arendt and Derrida on the Temporality of Political Action

Javier Burdman — 2024-07-23

Should emancipatory political projects break with past? Or should they continue inherited emancipatory projects? This article reads Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx as a response to this question, and develops a contrast with Hannah Arendt’s views on the issue. Arendt, I show, believes that political action should institute a “new beginning” that radically breaks with the past. Surprisingly, this position brings her conception of political action close that of Marx, an author that she generally criticizes for his misunderstanding of politics. Derrida, by contrast, believes that any break with the past is only possible on the basis of borrowing from it. As a consequence, any “new beginning” is necessarily impure, because it must both break with and rely on the past. Far from preventing political action, this temporal paradox is essential to it, insofar as any break with the past requires some kind of relationship to it. Derrida’s critique of Marx aims at his desire of an absolute new beginning, which is symptomatic of a metaphysical longing for purity. The critique also concerns contemporary political theorists critical of Marx, such as Arendt.

Nationalism, Mania, and Specters of Neoliberalism

Naomi Waltham-Smith — 2024-07-23

Specters of Justice: An Essay on the Documentary Films of Patricio Guzmán, Justice and Ghosts

Paula Cucurella — 2024-07-23

According to Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx, a specter, a ghost, is not simply nothing, and the urgency to address their existence—to address them—can be incited in the name of justice—thought as a certain kind of specter. Justice, for Derrida, is a specter insofar as justice as such is only present “where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights” (Derrida 1994, xviii; 1993, 15). What Derrida has in mind when he writes these lines is the paradox at the core of justice, an intrinsic contradiction and impotence expressed in the impossible universalization of justice. Justice, which in principle and by principle should serve all (otherwise, how could it be just?) can only enact its principle through rights and laws, the unavoidable generalization of which—a byproduct of its universalizing aim—makes them blind to the needs of each case, to the nuances of the singular.

At the core of justice’s blindness is a problem of recognition. One could think that the universal principle of justice is not universal enough to include “all.” However, the limitations to justice’s capacity for recognition are endemic to the operation of universalization itself.

Resorting to the notion of “symbolic justice” to reflect on Patricio Guzmán’s documentaries, is to think and imagine alternative ways through which justice can perform the basic act of recognition implied in its claims of universalization. In Nostalgia de la Luz, La Perla de Nacar, and Allende, Patricio Guzmán documents the absence and erasure of the history of Chile's disappearances during the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1989). In these documentaries, Guzmán creates an object from what remains (like the blurry aftermark that lingers on a piece of paper after you erase pencil writing), from the suppression and erasures that constitute Chile’s official history. Here, I read these documentaries and the specters they conjure up as a form of symbolic justice. The reading I present takes what I consider to be necessary steps to understand how deconstruction’s elucidation of the spectrality of justice can inform the notion of symbolic justice that I propose for reading Patricio Guzmán’s documentaries. Finally, I inquire and speculate on the chances of symbolic justice to inform law and rights.

The Criticism of Value and the Question of Automation between Specters of Marx and Post-Operaism

Fabio Tesorone-Lebro — 2024-07-23

Hamlet’s Rest II

James Martell — 2024-07-23

This text begins with the question: Between Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari: How can we tally the specters of Marx? Or, in other words, do the spectral multiplicities of Derridean deconstruction communicate or resonate with Deleuzo-Guattarian multiplicities and pluralities? If what distinguishes these multiplicities is a concern with mourning, and consequently, with the narcissistic trait of any tallying in Derrida’s thought, how does this inform his own vision of Marx’s and Marxism’s ghosts? As this text tries to show, the question of such tallying of (the) specter(s) brings about both the main differences between Deleuze and Guattari's and Derrida’s Marxian heritage, as well as the undecidable space of their similarity, where hauntology haunts ontology—and vice versa. Whither such a space, and what is its relation to both literature (Hamlet) and a sexual difference (between Ophelia and Khôra) is its final question.