It's time to continue our Memes with Citations series with my favorite work by everybody's poster child of postmodern literary theory, Jacques Derrida. His entire shtick, in a nutshell, is a continuation of Marxist materialism into the literary sphere that he called "deconstruction." Truth, justice, fact? All hogwash—all that exists is the sign, and signs derive meaning via contrast with other signs. "There is no outside-text," and all meaning must exist in conversation with everything else. This is all great and fun, but we're here to talk about his "political turn" in the 90's, and specifically his Spectres of Marx.
He wrote the book in 1993, after the collapse of actually existing communism with the left in total disarray. It was the "end of history" as Fukuyama declared, and neoliberalism was the "one true" system left. Not so fast, wrote Derrida. As he explains (and this is the meme):
Capitalist societies can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished since the collapse of the totalitarianism of the twentieth century and not only is it finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost. They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself: a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.
Through this comment, the study of hauntology was born. A ghost from the past, haunting the present with a promised future that never came. It's been applied to all sorts of things, from music (see Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life) to climate change (by yours truly), but the kernel of the study is that Marxism will forever haunt the West, for it can never be truly killed.
The gall that Derrida has to write this book is amazing, for it seemed all was lost for the worldwide left. Destroyed in Europe, in retreat everywhere else, it was truly the end times. And here was this literary theorist, the boogeyman of the culture wars of the 80's and 90's, writing about how communism can never truly be killed.
Want to also share the following passage, which I think is the best arguement against capitalism in the modern era ever formulated. For every chud that screams at you that "poverty has never been lower," just tell them something like the following:
For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.
