Derrida’s “Specters of Marx”

In 1993, Jacques Derrida presented a paper entitled “Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International.” Later turned into a book of the same name, Specters represents a part of what some have called an “ethical turn” in the philosopher’s work. Coming so soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the “death of communism” as the cheerleaders of liberal democracy had it, Derrida’s work was provocative and controversial then and remains so now. This essay explores that text in detail, with particular emphasis on Derrida’s deconstruction of the notion of ghost, specters, and phantoms which haunt the work of that great materialist Karl Marx. Arguing that Derrida’s text has become ever more prescient in the wake of scares about such things as Cultural Marxism, it also explores the way that Specters inaugurates certain concepts to which Derrida would increasingly turn in the last decade of his life – such as “the promise,” “the gift,” and “mourning.” It also explores the ways in which these concepts represent a continuation of his earlier work, lending support to Derrida’s own contention that there was no turn, rather a shift in focus and a widening of worldly concerns, all of which are contained in the original concept of deconstruction. As Derrida noted at the time, we are not at the end of history as some such as Francis Fukuyama argued, and subsequent events have shown how misleading this idea was.