Deconstruction and Post-Marxism

I am currently reading Simon Critchley's essay on Derrida's "Spectres of Marx"(further references abbreviated to SOM), a chapter in his book "Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity" (Verso, 1999). I thought I would begin a brief discussion of a few of the concepts that Critchley picks up on in Derrida's book, even though I have not finished yet. Early on, speaking of the context to Derrida's overall argument, he has this to say:

"Within Marxism, a strong point of Derrida's reading is the link he draws between what he rather euphemistically calls 'the totalitarian heritage of Marx's thought' and the refusal of spectrality. Totalitarianism, or what Jean-Luc Nancy calls 'immanentism', in all its recent and less recent guises, is a political form of society governed by a logic of identification, where 'everything is political'. That is, it is a political form where all areas of social life are claimed to represent incarnate power... Totalitarianism is the phantasy of a complete and transparent social order, a unified people among whom difference or social division is denied." In terms of SOM, totalitarianism is premised upon a refusal of spectrality, it is, as Derrida puts it, a 'panic before the phantoms in general'; that is, before something which escapes, transcends and returns to haunt the social order".

There is a lot to say here, so I'm going to get straight to my points. I won't bother with Derrida's characterization of Marx's thought as 'totalitarian' as Critchley gets on to debunking this in the next sentence following the quote. (and to be fair, Derrida does say to the "heritage" of Marx's thought, and not to Marx's own works: he is likely thinking more of Lukacs, Trotsky, Althusser, Lenin, and especially Stalin when he makes this comment). My first issue has to do with Derrida's use of the term spectrality, and of course, it is the at the center of the book's construction-- spectres, ghosts, haunting (hauntologie), returns, monsters-- and similar figures return again and again. But is it really conceptually that rigorous, in spite of the literary dimension it adds to the text? My own feeling is no, it is not the best name for what Derrida is trying to describe. That term was already used by Adorno, in various works, namely, the non-identical (or sometimes, the particular). I don't believe I am diverging too far from the path Derrida wishes to pursue here, by seeking analogies between political totalitarianism, the maniacal desire to have every crack in the social order sealed, and Adorno's critique of philosophical totality and the violence that systematic thought tends to incur upon the particular. In addition, it also points to the 'quasi-transcendental' aspects to Derrida's thought, the hint that there are two orders of reality, divine and human, and that any translation between the two is a dicey business to say the least (particularly, for Derrida, in trying to incarnate the 'ideal'...but no room for more here, I'll pick this up again next time).

It seems to me that enough of the groundwork has been laid by thinkers like Adorno and Derrida to make Marxists, anarchists, social-democrats and radicals of all stripes and sizes, all pretty bloody aware by now (if we haven't been since about 1969) of the undesirability and impossibility of such totalizing systems as a replacement for the old, undesired capitalist-liberal democratic society. What seems to me much more vital and important is the question of how to do away with the political desire for this kind of symbolic closure, for making the political the site of permanence and the status quo, instead of precisely what it is (or at least should be) which is the site of a permanent contestation, deliberation, revolution, not excepting the very fundamental and ideological underpinnings of its own instantiation (whether it be founded on Marxist principles or what have you). (see Judith Butler's essay in "Feminists Theorize the Political" for a worthy discussion of the kind of anti-foundational foundationalism I'm trying to characterize here).

So, who really needs to continue to be lectured about the dangers of totality/totalitarianism and not creating room for anything opposed to 'its' point-of-view, is not today the political Left, but the political Right. It might seem at first glance, to translate this discussion into more real-world politics, that a nation like America would be the anti-totalitarian society par excellence. There is room for anyone to express their opinions, every crackpot with no need to offer proof of a brain or even a soapbox to stand on, can criticize openly the society in which they live. Yet, on the other hand there is actually no real contestation happening in the US today, because of the way the media only highlights the most polemical arguments on either side of the debates that are taking place. Commercialism/media profiteering is taking the fertile ground of political debate, civil society, and turning it into one giant Maury Povich episode. Without some form of recognition that we're on the same turf, (beyond the empty sound bites of patriotism and 'we're all Americans now'), that we're after at least some of the same goals, then there is no possibility for ironing out the specifics on how to accomplish any goals. As a result, there is a tendency for America to become increasingly totalizing because of the irrelevance of all the heckling and shouting that's going on. It's pure spectacle, no substance, therefore the administration can just continue with their fear-mongering and misinformation, push policy through, and not have anyone to answer to, at least until the next election.

The desire for totality comes initially from the Right. To paraphrase Benjamin, it is capitalism that is the runaway train, and Leftist revolution that is the emergency brake, although in the popular imagination it is always envisioned as the other way round. Or Brecht, who asks rhetorically, what is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of one?

Critchley goes into this in the next paragraph: "Outside of Marxism, and here we come to the real context for SOM, if there is a refusal of spectrality (again, compare with non-identity) within totalitarianism, then there is an equal refusal of it in that anti-Marxist consensus that celebrates 'the collapse of communism' in terms of the uncontestable triumph of liberal democracy." Derrida goes on to quote Fukuyama's much-discussed Hegelian arguments on the end of history in this section of the book.

Critchley then concludes this part of his discussion on SOM's context by demonstrating the ultimate confrontation between spectrality and phenomenology. "The spectre is precisely that which refuses phenomenologization, that retreats before the gaze that tries to see it, like the ghost of Hamlet's father." This leads into the question of what possible value the spectral has for a Marxist-infused politics, a seemingly groundless, floating-in-the-ether way of basing a political movement. Critchley discusses this in another part of his paper (specifically, Derrida's ambivalence surrounding a 'ground', or an 'ontology', which he sees as pre-deconstructive), and I shall discuss this in more detail next post. Suffice it to say, this is where I most strongly disagree with Derrida: any progressive politics, including any engagement with Marxism/Post-Marxism, requires a ground from which to begin (for Marx, rooted in 'life' and 'the conditions of people's real existence') and that the actual fear which Derrida (and Adorno) are concerned to avert (the problem of haunting that Derrida deconstructively probes out of Marx's own writings, the violence that tends to occur within a systematic body of thought as any aporias , any particulars that pose a threat are dialectically subsumed by the whole , for Adorno) are not necessarily inherent to either totalitarianism or totality, but, when under the watchful guidance-systems of Derrida (deconstruction) and Adorno (negative dialectics) we are forewarned, we can find creative ways of ensuring that concretization doesn't necessarily mean sealing every fissure that naturally forms in the concrete.