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Written in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and within the context of a critique of a ''new world order'' that proclaims the death of Marx and Marxism, Jacques Derrida undertakes a reading of Marx's ''spectropoetics'' -- his obsession with ghosts, specters and spirits. Derrida argues that there is more than one spirit of Marx and that it is the responsibility of his heirs -- we are all heirs of Marx -- to sift through the possible legacies, the possible spirits, reaffirming one and not the other. He leads beyond the deafening disavowal of Marx today, a disavowal he sees as an attempt to exorcise Marx's ghost. Specters of Marx represents renowned philosopher Jacques Derrida's first major work on Marx and his definitive entry into social and political philosophy.
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Jacques
Derrida Specters of Marx The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International
Translated from the French by Peggy I certain others. 7 At this moment rather than at some other moment. By forgetfulness (guilty or innocent, it little matters here), by foreclosure or murder, this watch itself will engender new ghosts. It will do so by chOOSing already among the ghosts, its own from among its own, thus by killing the dead: law of finitude, law of decision and responsibility for finite existences, the only living-mortals for whom a decision, a choice, a responsibility has meaning and a meaning that will have to pass through the ordeal of the undecidable. Which is why what we are saying here will not please anyone. But who ever said that someone ever had to speak, think, or write in order to please someone else? And if one interprets the gesture we are risking here as a belated-rallying-to-Marxism, then one would have to have misunderstood quite badly. It is true, however, that I would be today, here, now, less insensitive than ever to the appeal of the c