Proper Responses
—On Spectrality
What does it mean to respond to one another, to have a dialogue or polylogue? What does it mean to respond properly to another? Is the ‘proper’ the ethical, the political, the emancipatory? Is it a matter of timing? From whose view should we judge the ‘proper’?
These questions mark our uncertainties, and yet we are all responding all the time. We find ourselves already responding prior even to consolidating our own identity and place in the world. Nonetheless, despite all of our experiences of responding, the question of how to respond properly—the question underpinning all ethical, political and emancipatory thought—still holds our attention and still, itself, provokes us into responding. It is this question that informs Jacques Derrida’s writing, haunting the very fabric and work of Derrida’s (always plural) deconstructions, regardless of whether he is addressing—responding to—the works of Plato or Joyce or global events. Many of these responses, however, remain just that. Certainly they demonstrate a ‘thinking conversation’ (to borrow Heidegger’s phrase)1 with the texts, thinkers, traditions and events they address, and they provoke further responses in their turn, not to mention always setting a place for interlocution and interruption—‘interrupt me’, Derrida writes in ‘At This Very Moment Here I Am’—but they are dialogic, polylogues, only in these senses. This is of course not always the case; sometimes the addressee responds back. And in these instances, the demands of responding properly—as thought proper by both or all respondents—shape the ensuing work. Of these instances, one of the most responsive to such pressures is the Derrida-Levinas exchange, comprising not only the series of works they address to the other, but those in which they engage in discussions that look to be informed by the other, as well as their actual exchanges with each other and their friendship.2 Their exchange has been described variously as emphasising, if not enabling, an attunement of Derrida’s work to questions of ethics and justice, and as indicating once and for all their dissemblance from the other.3
Regardless of these diverse readings, what is clear is that his exchanges with Emmanuel Levinas have afforded Derrida a highly productive forum in which to tease out the problematic of responding properly to the other while responding to the other. Indeed, describing his exchanges with Levinas, direct and indirect, Derrida noted as part of his speech delivered at Levinas’s funeral on 27 December 1995, that responding to Levinas ‘will never come to an end for me as long as I live’ (Adieu, 5), despite the fact that this—like any—responding is ‘also always a non-response, a question-prayer that ... would be anterior to all dialogue” (13).4 It is thus a response that cannot not be a question, that cannot not keep on asking how to respond (properly) despite no expectation of a response coming back. In turn, from Derrida’s own ongoing response, we have learnt that fulfilling an obligation, giving a response to an other—in this case, to Levinas—can never simply be single-stranded or finished, once and for all.5 It must rather always be more: plus d’un.
It is this connection, then, that marks the scene of my response, itself not a single strand, being comprised on the one hand of my response to a call from Niall Lucy and Robert Briggs to be a part of what they see as a long overdue response to Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and The New International, to the text’s exchanges with its ‘source’ figures; and on the other of my resultant response being a response to the barely present trace of Levinas within this text of Derrida’s. Cited just once by name (twice if you count the citation), Levinas nonetheless haunts the text, present as that third person, that other other, who, as both Derrida and Levinas note, does not need to be actually there to have an effect, to leave a trace.6 More than this, I will argue that such a haunting, these traces, the text in fact of Specters of Marx, should be read as part of Derrida’s multi-stranded, ongoing response to Levinas with regards to the question, first, of the proper response to the other (and other others) and secondly, and relatedly, to that of the time of this response: a question thus of the relation of justice and anachrony.
Responding properly
The question of the (proper) response is of course integral to Derrida’s work in toto, but it informs Specters of Marx on multiple levels. The first, most obvious, of these is that the text I am reading and responding to is itself based on Derrida’s response to an invitation to participate in a multinational and multidisciplinary conference entitled ‘Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective’. This response—his plenary address in fact—was proper in any number of ways: it was delivered, it was presumably on and in time, it responded to the conference theme, it provided a basis for further scholarly response (see, for example, Sprinker, Ghostly and Derrida, ‘Marx’), and furthermore it marked a response to another pressing question—when was Derrida finally going to respond to the work of Marx and Marxism? In the words of Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, the conference organisers, ‘a sustained reflection on Marx by Derrida’, ‘something he had not yet been able to do’, ‘would be of intrinsic as well as historical importance’ (‘Introduction’, ix).7 The second level concerns the question of what a proper response to Marx and Marxism would be. Here Derrida begins (although this is not the beginning of his address) by noting that a response is itself proper. In his words: ‘It will always be a fault not to read and reread and discuss Marx’ (Specters, 13) insofar as ‘fidelity to the inheritance of a certain Marxist spirit [remains] a duty’ (87). Why? Because while noting—and not mourning—the disappearance of ‘the “Marxist” ideological apparatuses (States, parties, cells, unions, and other places of doctrinal production)’ (13), Derrida announces that ‘if there is a spirit of Marxism which I will never be ready to renounce’, it is that of a ‘certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise’, as well as of a ‘certain idea of justice’ (89-90). Such a spirit, he contends, is integral given that the (then, but also still) current euphorically neo-liberal world order is riven by ten plagues (81-4): ‘never’, he writes, ‘have violence, inequality, famine and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity’ (85).
Hence for Derrida—and the other conference participants—the question is how to respond properly to Marx (and Marxism) post-1989. For Derrida this means initially resisting three pathways. First, that of memory, of simply recounting his (and his generation’s) own experience of Marxism as a determinate inheritance and of Marx as a ‘quasi-paternal figure’ (13-14); secondly, that of the effulgent eschatological themes of the ends of both history and Marxism in currency at the time, and which Magnus and Cullenberg refer to as an ‘orgy of self-congratulations’ in their editorial introduction (vii); and finally that of the canon, of respecting ‘the norms of hermeneutical, philological, philosophical exegesis’ and thereby neutralising Marx’s own injunction to change the world rather than simply interpret it (31-2). It is, Derrida says, ‘something altogether other that I wish to attempt here as I turn or return to Marx’ (32). This something other is the tracing of filiation, of indebtedness, and of ghosts: Marx’s, Marxism’s, Derrida’s and deconstruction’s. It is also an investigation into learning how to live, finally, with one’s ghosts.8 (After all, as Derrida notes, ‘no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of Marx’s ghosts’—Specters, 37.) Under this framework, Derrida makes three points: 1) that although he is not a Marxist (echoing Marx’s own phrasing), this does not equate to a renunciation of Marx; 2) relatedly, that deconstruction itself ‘has never had any sense or interest ... except as a radicalisation, which is to say [it is] also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism’ (92); and 3) that a certain spirit of Marx’s own injunction to change the world still holds.9
Deconstruction and Specters of Marx, then, are both a response and an heir to Marx and Marxism, both ‘proper’ in the sense of acknowledging their inheritance of a certain spirit of Marxism.10 But both are also ‘improper’. First, in the views of certain of the conference participants, Derrida, Specters of Marx and deconstruction—especially in calling for a ‘new International’—are calling for a ‘Marxism without Marxism’ (to use the title of Terry Eagleton’s rejoinder to Derrida): for Eagleton, Derrida wants ‘to exploit Marxism as critique, dissent, conveniently belabouring instrument, but is far less willing to engage with its positivity’ (‘Marxism’, 86). Such a Marxism, according to Aijaz Ahmad, ‘presupposes the abandoning of all the familiar categories of political Marxism’ (‘Reconciling’, 107). For Eagleton and Ahmad (among others), then, Derrida’s response is improper not only for abandoning all that they see as integral to Marxism (and Marxists) as a living tradition, but also for failing to fulfil the academic Left’s hopes that, as Tom Lewis puts it, ‘deconstruction might be politicized in a Marxist direction and that Marxism might be de-Stalinized thanks to a deconstructive turn’ (‘Politics’, 134-35).11 Secondly, deconstruction and Specters of Marx are improper responses because they mark the inheritance of and fidelity to only a certain spirit of Marxism while, as Derrida notes from the outset, ‘there is more than one of them, there must be more than one of them’ (Specters, 13). This response, then, this fidelity, is always at the expense of possible others: ‘one must filter, sort, criticize’ (16), Derrida writes, one must choose and thereby ‘engender new ghosts’ (87). One must also choose in the light of undecidability, with no guarantee of what the choice will bring. Elsewhere Derrida has described this or any choosing, this or any fidelity as betrayal: one can only choose ‘between betrayal and betrayal, always more than one betrayal’ (Adieu, 34); and indeed he acknowledges in Specters of Marx that his choices here ‘will not please the Marxists, and still less all the others’ (87).
It is here, then, within this elaboration of the inter-relations of choice, betrayal and debt that I mark a continuation of Derrida’s earlier discussion, apropos of Levinas, of proper response. For instance, in ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’, Derrida’s second direct response to Levinas (the first being ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, a response to Levinas’s Totality and Infinity), he picks up, among other questions, the question of how one should read and respond to the work of another. Responding to Levinas’s argument that, given philosophy’s desire to ‘reabsorb every Other into the Same and to neutralize alterity’ (Levinas, ‘Meaning’, 48), one should therefore offer a work—an other—‘radical generosity’ with no expectations of gratitude (49), Derrida embarks on an attempt to do just this, to give Levinas’s work the proper ingratitude. One must, he writes, ‘read him otherwise’ (‘Moment’, 420), which means, according to one critic, that Derrida is ‘only permitted to understand [Levinas] wrongly, to be at fault, to wrench his work out of joint’ (Riessen, Man, 88). So he may respond, as indeed Derrida does in this text, to those others not present(ed)—to ‘elle’ rather than ‘Il’ or ‘E.L.’—or to that which is spectral, to the spectres haunting Levinas’s work: ‘woman’ and ‘sexual difference’, for instance. For both Levinas and Derrida, this would be the proper improper response, the im/proper response, and it is this that informs the response Derrida gives to Marx and Marxism in Specters of Marx. Rejecting the proper responses to Marxism—those engaging with the familiar categories of political Marxism, for instance, or celebrating the supposed end of Marxism—Derrida offers an im/proper response in which he chases after Marx’s, Marxism’s and the current world order’s spectres and, through them, the conditions for a ‘re-politicization, perhaps for another concept of the political’ (Specters, 75).
The proper response is thus improper, albeit also proper by virtue of being a response: the phrase ‘he will have obligated’ sounds throughout ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’, and in Specters of Marx we are told that not to respond is a fault. So while how to respond and to whom is problematised here, both Derrida and Levinas (and Marx, too) agree that we are obligated to respond anterior to all dialogue and all invitations. They also agree on the inevitability of bad conscience: ‘whatever choice I might make, I cannot say with good conscience that I have made a good choice or that I have assumed my responsibilities’ (Derrida, ‘Remarks’, 86). This is brought to the fore for Derrida and Levinas with the question of the third person. For Levinas, of course, the appearance of the third person is what troubles our asymmetrical relation of radical generosity and infinite obligation to the singular other, of being for that other.12 With the third person—another other—‘proximity becomes problematic: one must compare, weigh, think; one must do justice’ (Levinas, God, 82). Importantly, however, the third person does not actually have to make an appearance to have such an effect. Levinas stresses, rather, that ‘in the very appearance of the other the third always regards me’ (82).13 The situation is similar for Derrida. The third, other others, trouble obligation, they make fidelity (to one) betrayal (to others), and remind us that any decision to favour one over another comes both with a cost and without guarantee. Such a point resounds within Specters of Marx, with Derrida responding here im/properly to both Levinas and Marx. For instance, in responding to Marx, Derrida reminds us (and Levinas) that the third who is due justice—whose approach, Levinas claims, marks the very appearance of justice—may not in fact make a recognisable approach, and may deconstruct our being for the other that for Levinas comes first. Not only does the third not wait (Derrida, Adieu, 32) but it may be both spectral and spectralising, deconstructing the opposition between ‘actual, effective presence and its other’ (Derrida, Specters, 40), wrenching it out of joint, making it and justice undecidable:
The specter weighs [pèse], it thinks [pense], it intensifies and condenses itself within the very inside of life, within the most living life, the most singular (or, if one prefers, individual) life. The latter therefore no longer has and must no longer have, insofar as it is living, a pure identity to itself or any assured inside.... (109)
The effect of this, Derrida argues, is that
I no longer know if you are saying what his work says. Perhaps that comes back to the same. I no longer know if you are saying the contrary, or if you have already written something wholly other. I no longer hear your voice, I have difficulty distinguishing it from mine, from any other, your fault suddenly becomes illegible to me. (‘Moment’, 420)
Levinas, conversely, while recognising that the third may be spectral, does not seem to see the third as constitutively spectralising, as entailing what Derrida calls a general ‘hauntology’ (Specters, 10). Rather the third for Levinas promises justice and propels us into the calculations due to justice, the law and the political (Otherwise, 150). The promise of justice is thus recognition of and entrance into the ‘political world of the impersonal “third”—the world of government, institutions, tribunes, prisons, schools, committees, etc.’ (Levinas, ‘Ethics’, 65). Certainly this is a world implicating the ethical asymmetrical relation of the one for the other—the ethical and the political are not absolutely distinct for Levinas, but he does nevertheless describe justice as the resolution, the regulation, the ordering, the ontological mediation and the incessant correction of the criss-crossing infinite and asymmetrical responsibilities (Otherwise, 157-60). It is, however, a particular kind of ordering he has in mind. It is a justice where one must be able to make distinctions and count, and which, Levinas contends, is tied to a particular kind of society: ‘justice remains justice only, in a society where there is no distinction between those close and far off, but in which there also remains the impossibility of passing by the closest’ (159).
Derrida’s im/proper response to this is clear: the third, justice, calculation and the promise are always already hollowed out by undecidability. Injustice is inscribed in the very possibility of justice, ‘hospitality and exclusion go together’ (Specters, 141) and there is always plurivocity.14 The third’s promise of justice is thus always a spectral promise through and through. All this, of course, informs Derrida’s response to Marx and Marxism when he—im/properly responding in the first case to a certain spirit of Marxism minus its expected political accoutrements, which for Derrida include ‘its supposed systemic, metaphysical, or ontological totality’ and ‘the history of its apparatuses (projected or real: the Internationals of the labor movement, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the single party, the State, and finally the totalitarian monstrosity)’ (Specters, 88)—sets out to remind Marx of the spectrality his analyses already make room for, but then seem to forget in the shift from critique to a positive promise of justice and a new order. ‘The universal Communist Party, the Communist International will be, said the Manifesto in 1848, the final incarnation, the real presence of the specter, thus the end of the spectral’ (Specters, 103). Indeed, a central part of Specters of Marx is concerned with showing how Marx already recognises the spectrality inherent in any conceptual, political or economic order, including that of the communist project itself. This spectrality (or hauntology, as Derrida also puts it)—manifest in Marx’s recognition of the spectrality of communism itself, his analyses of technology and media, and his analyses of commodity fetishism, exchange value and ideology—is, however, as Derrida shows, concurrently overwritten by Marx. After all, given that one of Marx’s key concerns was to shift the focus of philosophy from spectrality to reality (with spectrality here incorporating both the illusions that he, and the Young Hegelians, saw as commonplace in the philosophical tradition and those identified through his own analyses of the bourgeois economy), he gives himself the injunction of chasing ghosts, of distinguishing between them and the real. This latter process, furthermore, this critique of spectrality, is founded by Marx on what Derrida describes as an ontological conception of life, praxis, production and labour, a move apparently forgetful of Marx’s own analyses as to the irrecusability of spectrality in any order.15
Derrida’s response is plain. Diagnosing that ‘the figure of the ghost is not just one figure among others ... [but] ... perhaps the hidden figure of all figures’ (Spectres, 120), he claims that hauntology is ‘not merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being’ but that it would ‘harbour within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves’ (10). His im/proper response to Marx, then, is that he configures—spectralises—Marx and Marxism to show that spectrality, despite all efforts, cannot be repressed.16 Marx’s own chasing away of spectrality—of spectres—can only be a conjuring of them, insofar as hauntology—spectrality—is the condition of possibility for any ontology and indeed any eschatology, not to mention thought: ‘we are wagering here that thinking never has done with the conjuring impulse. It would instead be born of that impulse’ (Specters, 165). Indeed Derrida’s im/proper response to Marx comes to the fore when, in responding to Marx and the Marxist promise of justice, for instance, he calls for a ‘new’ new International, describing it as
An untimely link, without status, without title, and without name, barely public even if it is not clandestine, without contract, ‘out of joint,’ without coordination, without party, without country, without national community (International before, across, and beyond any national determination), without co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class ... it marks a call to the friendship of an alliance without institution ... to those who continue to be inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx ... in order to ally themselves in a new, concrete and real way. (Specters, 85-6).
It seems clear that even with the qualifier of this ‘untimely link’ marking a ‘new, concrete and real’ alliance, Derrida sees this new International itself as thoroughly spectralised, and thereby promising a justice that finds distinguishing, counting and comparing difficult. This is not, of course, to say impossible. Derrida is very clear in Specters of Marx and elsewhere that an irrecusable spectrality—undecidability—does not entail a refusal or abandonment of calculation and justice: ‘the demand of justice ... by definition is impatient, uncompromising, and unconditional’ (Specters, 31). We must, however, calculate better while recognising that any promise of justice is ‘always untenable at least for the reason that it calls for the infinite respect of the singularity and infinite alterity of the other as much as for the respect of the countable, calculable, subjectal equality between anonymous singularities’ (65).
In describing the promise of justice as spectralised through and through, Derrida here disjoins the promise from any socio-historical organising, a disjointure that again comprises im/proper responses to Levinas and Marx, insofar as they both stress the irrecusability of such organisation for any productive promise of justice. Both, indeed, are optimistic with regards to particular possibilities. Marx of course ties the fulfilling of the emancipatory promise to the realisation (and withering away) of the communist state, with the subsequent end of the political.17 Levinas, in his turn, ties it to a certain spirit of Judaism, to a ‘messianic triumph’ at which point ‘the perpetual is converted into eternal’ and thereby ‘secured against the revenge of evil’ (Totality, 285). What if, Derrida asks of them both (also addressing Francis Fukuyama), ‘disadjustment were on the contrary the condition of justice?’ (Specters, 19-20). What if the emancipatory promise—the messianic promise, as Derrida also writes in Specters of Marx—cannot be matched with any determinate program or regulatory ideal? What if any determinate program or regulatory ideal is always already spectralised?
Re-reading anachrony
Derrida, of course, is asking here about anachrony, about what he sees as the integral disadjustment of the emancipatory promise from any proposed response, and this is a question about the time of justice. Indeed Specters of Marx (with ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’) is often described as Derrida’s treatise on justice, his questioning elaboration—deconstruction—of our traditional paradigms of justice, his driving a distinction—always contaminated, of course—between the promise of justice and its proposed or actual instantiations. Specters of Marx (with ‘Force of Law’) is his reminder to us that we can never say, at any moment, that there ‘is’ justice. After all, as Derrida writes:
At no moment, it seems, can a decision be said to be presently and fully just: either it has not yet been made according to a rule, and nothing allows one to call it just, or it has already followed a rule—whether given, received, confirmed, preserved or reinvented—which, in its turn, nothing guarantees absolutely; and, moreover, if it were guaranteed, the decision would have turn[ed] back into calculation and one could not call it just. (‘Force’, 24).
Justice, then, can be no more and no less than a promise, and any realisation of this promise remains always to come. Hence Derrida speaks of an untimely new International and new Enlightenment, of a democracy always to come. More than—or not as much as—regulatory ideas, these promises do not point to or prescribe any specific program, but rather haunt and spectralise all existing ones, deconstructing them in the name of the promise’s own undeconstructibility. They are thus ‘neither real nor ideal, neither present nor future-present, neither existent nor idealizable’ (Caputo, ‘Commentary’, 128). Emancipatory promises, then, are anachronistic through and through. More than this, Derrida sees anachrony as the very possibility of the promise: ‘is not this disjuncture, this dis-adjustment ... necessary for the good, or at least the just, to be announced?’ (Specters, 22).
This is also the site of Derrida’s im/proper response to Marx. Marx, after all, is a key thinker of the time of justice. His texts call for—promise—justice, for a new international association able to oppose the old, established paradigms of control and justification. It is in his view ‘high time’ for a new international to declare itself:
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism ... It is high time that the Communists openly set forth before the whole world their perspective, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this fairy tale about the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the Party itself. (Marx and Engels, ‘Manifesto’, 1031).
So Marx’s view is that the time for spectrality is past; the instantiation of the new international is imperative. It is past time to ‘battle for the attainment of the immediate aims’, to labour for the ‘solidarity and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries’: ‘Proletarians of all lands unite!’ (‘Manifesto’, 1046). The time for justice, in other words, is now, and justice is contingent on the instantiation of this new association. And yet, as Derrida’s response to Marx’s promise makes clear, Marx’s promise—the communist project—is constitutively spectralised. Having come and gone (in the eyes of some), it in fact remains still to come. It is still due, past time, and its injunction is thereby still anachronistic, still haunting our dreams of justice. It is, in other words, still a promise, the ‘being-promise of a promise’ (Specters, 105), and we can never be done with it. ‘Is there not’, Derrida asks, ‘a messianic extremity, an eskhaton whose ultimate event (immediate rupture, unheard-of interruption, untimeliness of the infinite surprise, heterogeneity without accomplishment) can exceed, at each moment, the final term of a phusis, such as work, the production, and the telos of history?’ (Specters, 37).
It would be tempting to read Derrida here as simply employing Levinas’s conception of anachrony in this explanation of his response to Marx, but this would be to forget Derrida’s own injunction that we must always read (Levinas) otherwise.18 Hence, although both Derrida and Levinas certainly describe their respective conceptions of responsibility, the proper response and the promise in terms of anachrony, they understand this relation quite differently. Levinas makes anachrony key, for example, to his thinking of the ethical asymmetrical relation of infinite responsibility. In his eyes, this relation holds only because of the absolutely anachronous trace of the absolute other, an appearance of the other that ‘has already withdrawn from every relation and every dissimulation’ (‘Trace’, 356), and that thereby does not give itself over to being known. As Levinas writes, this appearance—this anachronous trace or face, as he also calls it—always exceeds ‘the idea of the other in me’ (‘Meaning’, 50) and ‘destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me’ (51). This appearance, then, is not containable within my time and timing; it is absolutely other and, for Levinas, only thereby marks an ‘obligation anachronously prior to any commitment’ (Otherwise, 101). Anachrony, in other words, is the time of the absolutely other, it is the ‘antecedence of responsibility to freedom’ (122), and thus exemplifies the only possibility for a perfect and eternal peace.
In Derrida’s view, anachrony should be understood conversely in terms of both the undecidability and spectrality built into the emancipatory promise, and, more generally, the interval—differance, disadjustment—that he contends is inextricable from all supposed presence (and absence). In other words, anachrony does not designate any absolute absence or past or transcendence of the other, but rather the impossibility of any absolute being-in-itself:
An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present. (Margins, 13)19
Hence while it is true that, following Levinas here, ‘I can address the Other only to the extent that there is a separation, a dissociation’ (Derrida, ‘Roundtable’, 14) or an anachrony, this separation is due to undecidability and differance rather than to any absolute absence or unrecoverable presence. And this means that Derrida’s conception of anachrony as the undeconstructible condition for the emancipatory promise as promise can in fact be read as his im/proper response to Levinas’s conception of it in terms of the absolute antecedence both of the other and of perfect and eternal peace (the messianic triumph at the end of time).
Specters of Marx thus also sees Derrida tease out another point of his ongoing im/proper exchange with Levinas regarding anachrony and justice. Specifically, Specters sees Derrida further his point that, contra Levinas, anachrony marks the ground not for a perfect peace, but an irrecusable violence. First, as noted earlier, the other other—the spectre—may not always mark justice, but instead a threat. And secondly, more generally, it is not, after all, peace but violence that ‘interrupts time, disarticulates it, dislodges it, displaces it out of its natural lodging: “out of joint”’ (Specters, 31). Time, as Derrida remarks in Of Grammatology (166), is differance, the impossibility of any ‘in itself’ (whether of the one or the other). And this, as Derrida further reminds us, is no less than Levinas’s own description of violence insofar as the ethical (for Levinas) must be thought in terms of an other that cannot be appropriated, that is absolutely antecedent to both my time and knowing. None the less (again, as noted earlier), for Derrida it is this ‘“out of joint” dislocation in Being and in time itself ... that ... risking the evil, expropriation, and injustice (adikia) against which there is no calculable insurance, would alone be able to do justice or to render justice to the other as other’ (Specters, 27).
That is to say, it is in Specters of Marx that Derrida extends his engagement with Levinas’s conception of hospitality, an engagement that began back in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ where Derrida asked, apropos of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, whether it was in fact possible to interpret our proximity to the other solely in terms of peace, or whether there was rather an implicit form of violence in the other’s intrusion on the self.20 Derrida makes the point in Specters of Marx (and elsewhere) that ‘hospitality and exclusion go together’ (Specters, 141); in other words, that violence and discrimination are not in fact opposed to—or fully distinguishable from—justice and hospitality but are rather inextricable from the latter’s very possibility.21 Not to mention that, as noted earlier, any and every exchange is constitutively exclusive—a betrayal—of (other) others. Respecting anachrony, giving hospitality, then, is simply not itself a guarantee of perfect peace, but a risk; at best, the lesser violence. This is of course true for both Derrida and Levinas. For both of them, albeit (as I have argued) for different reasons, hospitality eludes the orders of knowledge. Never satisfied or done with, it is understood by both in terms of the gift as opposed to terms of reciprocity or recuperation. And yet, as Derrida reminds Levinas, we can never welcome the other as absolutely other, insofar as the other cannot be distinguished as absolutely other. Such a point—initially made in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (see esp. 126-30)—is driven home in Specters of Marx. The other and other others are indefinitely, not infinitely, other; uncanny, undecidable, the other, the spectre, es spukt (as Derrida puts it throughout Specters). Out of joint, the other and other others pose ‘the question of the relations between belonging and the opening of the question of closure’ (‘Violence’, 110). And this is enough. These others pose the questions of justice and obligation without needing to be tied to any immemorial past or absolute alterity or even material conditions. And this Derrida also stresses in Specters of Marx insofar as his im/proper response to Marx and Marxism still takes the form of his asserted fidelity to a certain spirit of the Marxist emancipatory promise. The others figured in this promise are thoroughly spectralised—unable to be completely grounded in any ontological order—but they also have no need of any trace of the infinite to demand response. The being-promise of a promise, moreover, has no need of the infinite to remain a promise. It is always already still to come, always already past time.
The spectres of deconstruction
It is in ‘Force of Law’ that Derrida speaks of the ‘suffering of deconstruction’, which he describes there as due to ‘the absence of rules, of norms, and definitive criteria to distinguish in an unequivocal manner’ such dyads as justice and ethics, one and the other (231). Such suffering is also due to the irrecusable spectralisation of all emancipatory promises, and to the undecidability informing all attempts to respond properly. And yet, at the same time, this is also the promise of deconstruction. Able to claim no more (and no less) than ‘at this very moment in this work here I am’, deconstruction is the ‘being-promise’ of justice, the undeconstructibility of justice, even though such a promise cannot ever completely distinguish itself from an act of betrayal, its injunction always already remaining ‘in deconstruction ... in the disjointure of the UnFug” (Specters, 28), always to come. As Derrida puts it in ‘Force of Law’: ‘Justice remains to come, it remains by coming [la justice reste à venir], it has to come [elle a à venir] it is to come.... It will always have it, this à-venir, and will always have had it’ (256). Perfectible as well as pervertible, this promise of justice, the spectralised emancipatory promise of deconstruction, Specters of Marx, is Derrida’s im/proper response to some of his and deconstruction’s ghosts: Marx and the Marxist promise/project, Levinas and the ethics of absolute alterity, and the question as to the justice of deconstruction.
Notes
1. Heidegger uses this phrase in Identity and Difference (45) to describe his interpretative engagements with such figures as Aristotle, Kant, Leibniz and Nietzsche. Joanna Hodge describes these engagements as Heidegger’s striving to ‘demonstrate the contribution of these previous thinkers, then show their limitations and then seek to break elements of their work free to be used in [his] new formation” (Heidegger, 149). I contend in The Post to Come that this kind of interpretative practice is integral to Derrida’s work. #back
2. Key texts in this exchange include Derrida’s ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, ‘At This Very Moment’ and Adieu, all of which are directly addressed to Levinas, as well as innumerable other works of Derrida’s that engage with Levinasian tropes. Levinas, in his turn, addresses Derrida directly in Proper Names and is commonly read as responding to Derrida’s ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ in Otherwise than Being. #back
3. Robert Bernasconi (‘Trace’, ‘Deconstruction’, ‘Justice’), John D. Caputo (Against, ‘Commentary’, Prayers), Drucilla Cornell (Philosophy) and Simon Critchley (Ethics of Deconstruction, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity), among others, have been instrumental in propounding the view that Derrida’s ethic is strongly informed by Levinasian themes. Martin Hägglund (‘Necessity’) has argued the reverse. #back
4. With this phrase ‘question-prayer’ Derrida is responding to Levinas’s own phrasing in Dieu (134). Compare Bettina Bergo’s translation in Levinas’s God (117). On the matter of the non-response, Derrida writes elsewhere: ‘At bottom I am only interested in what cannot be sent off, cannot be dispatched in any case’ (Post-Card, 14-15). #back
5. Levinas of course has interlinked response—our relation to the other—with teaching and learning in Totality and Infinity (51), an interlinking that Derrida responds to in Adieu (xx). #back
6. As Derrida writes in Specters: ‘The one who has disappeared appears still to be there, and his apparition is not nothing. It does not do nothing. Assuming that the remains can be identified, we know better than ever today that the dead must be able to work. And to cause to work, perhaps more than ever’ (97). Or in Niall Lucy’s words: ‘You don’t have to believe in ghosts to be affected by them’ (Dictionary, 111). #back
7. Up to Specters, Derrida had been cautious in engaging directly with Marx and Marxism, doing so only, as Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta note in an interview with him, in a ‘marginal’ or ‘lacunary’ fashion (Derrida, ‘Positions’, 61). In this same interview, Derrida responds by noting the necessity of a direct encounter—‘You can imagine that I have not been completely unconscious of it’ (62)—but also postponing it. ‘I persist’, he writes, ‘in believing that there is no theoretical or political benefit to be derived from precipitating contacts or articulations’, noting that this is a ‘theoretical elaboration which remains, for me, at least, still to come’ (ibid.). He then makes the point in Specters that his acceptance of Magnus and Cullenberg’s invitation was ‘first of all ... not to flee from a responsibility’ (51). #back
8. Derrida glosses the phrase ‘learning to live finally’ in the exordium to Specters, contending that learning to live ‘can only happen between life and death’ and that it would therefore ‘be necessary to learn spirits’ and to ‘learn to live with ghosts’ (xviii). ‘Learning to Live Finally’ is also the title of the last interview he gave before he died, with Jean Birnbaum of Le Monde. Here Derrida makes the point again that ‘Learning to live should mean learning to die’ (Learning, 24). #back
9. In Specters, Derrida clusters this spirit of Marxism with his proposed ‘new International’ and ‘new Enlightenment’. Elsewhere he states: ‘We cannot and we must not—this is a law and a destiny—forgo the Aufklarung’ (‘Apocalyptic Tone’, 148). #back
10. To be Marx’s heir is difficult, however, as there is not one but a plurality of spirits. It is thus a question of ‘a certain Marx’ for ‘there is more than one of them, there must be more than one of them’ (Derrida, Specters, 13). #back
11. Lewis contends it is due to Derrida’s ‘fundamental lack of commitment to Marxism as an alive body of concepts’ that he ‘sets in motion a textual process that rhetorically buries the body of Marxism (the dead) while simultaneously conjuring certain spectres of Marx (the undead)’ (‘Politics’, 137). #back
12. Of our relation with the other, Levinas writes: ‘Responsibility for the Other is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it, has not awaited freedom, in which a commitment to the Other would have been made. I have not done anything and I have always been under accusation—persecuted. The ipseity, in the passivity without arche characteristic of identity, is hostage. The word I means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone’ (Otherwise, 114; see also 112, 117, 128, 141, 158, 167). #back
13. Elsewhere Levinas writes: ‘Everything that takes place here “between us” concerns everyone.... The third party looks at me in the eyes of the other ... the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity ... the whole of humanity, in the eyes that look at me’ (Totality, 212-13). Or again: ‘There are always at least three persons’ (‘Ethics’, 57). #back
14. As Derrida remarked in an interview with Elisabeth Weber, undecidability means that it can be ‘literally impossible for me to maintain a monologic discourse. Interlocution, the plurality of voices imposed itself in some way and I had to let it through’ (Points, 393). #back
15. As Marx puts it in The German Ideology, his approach begins ‘with real individuals, together with their actions and the material conditions of life, those in which they find themselves, as well as those which they have created through their own efforts’ (42). #back
16. Pierre Macherey, in responding to Specters of Marx, argues that Derrida effectively dematerialises Marx, reducing Marx’s thought ‘to a history of ghosts (‘Marx Dematerialized’, 20). #back
17. ‘Political power in the proper sense is the organised power of one class for the subjugation of another. When the proletariat during its struggle with the bourgeoisie is compelled to organise itself as a class, by means of a revolution makes itself the ruling class, and as the ruling class forcibly removes the old conditions of production, then, along with these conditions, it eradicates the conditions for the existence of class conflict and of classes generally, and thereby its own supremacy as a class’ (Marx and Engels, ‘Manifesto’, 1041). #back
18. Derrida further warns us explicitly against such a reading. In ‘Force of Law’ he writes that ‘since I would have other difficult questions about Levinas’ difficult discourse, I cannot be content to borrow a conceptual trait without risking confusions or analogies. And so I will go no further in that direction’ (250). #back
19. Derrida thus writes in Of Grammatology: ‘When the other announces itself as such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself.... The presentation of the other as such, that is to say the dissimulation of its “as such,” has always already begun and no structure of the entity escapes it’ (47). #back
20. ‘War presupposes peace’, Levinas claims in Totality and Infinity, ‘the antecedent and non-allergic presence of the other’ (199). In ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ Derrida writes: ‘There is a transcendental and pre-ethical violence.... This transcendental violence, which does not spring from an ethical resolution or freedom, or from a certain way of encountering or exceeding the other, originally institutes the relationship between two finite ipseities’ (128). #back
21. Martin Hägglund makes this point and argues that in Derrida’s eyes generally the ‘struggle for justice can thus not be a struggle for peace, but only for ... [a] ... “lesser violence”’(‘Necessity’, 47). Hägglund further contends that Derrida ‘neither deplores nor celebrates the constitutive violence’, but rather simply ‘accounts for violence as the condition for both the desirable and the undesirable’ (48). This is not to say that Derrida is not concerned with questions of ethics and justice, a point Hägglund stresses, but rather that his concern is not Levinasian at heart. #back
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