Fielding Derrida: Philosophy, Literary Criticism, History, and the Work of Deconstruction

Foretellese

8 Foretellese Futures of Derrida and Marx The near-term context of Jacques Derrida’s engagement with Marxism in Specters of Marx is provided by Francis Fukuyama’s The Ends of History. This strange, yet provocative book declares—in part on the basis of what was then called the collapse of the Soviet experiment—that the end of history in a Hegelian sense has arrived: that in principle the best form of human governance and the best life for human beings is now known. Fukuyama thus projects the present historical moment (at least in 1992 in a large portion of the West) out onto an eternal or supratemporal plane.1 The circumstances surrounding us now, the absence of a comprehensive alternative to republican government and liberal economics, Fukuyama argues, are determinative for the future, indeed for all time. In this sense, the end of history has been reached. The timeless dimension of Fukuyama’s analysis bears emphasizing, first of all, since Derrida, in his discussion of Fukuyama in his 1993 Specters of Marx (SM), surprisingly does almost, if not quite, the same thing. Over and against Fukuyama’s claim that Marxism is over, Marxist thought gone by the wayside, Derrida insists that Marxism is as relevant as ever, that it has informed, still informs, and indeed will inform all political discussion henceforth, all future politics. Though Derrida’s treatment of temporality, Marxism, and Marxism’s futures takes place in a number of registers, in at least one of these Derrida as resoundingly casts Marx in a permanent role (albeit as revenant, or ghost) as Fukuyama denies this status to him. 187 For both authors, accordingly, the only significant alternatives appear to be either Marxism or the current order; they omit the fact that the demise of Marxism as a viable political outlook might well someday take place and Fukuyama’s conclusion still not be true: other forms of government , novel political and social institutions and arrangements might arise, really owing nothing to Marx, but which would not necessarily be liberal, neoliberal, republican, or even parliamentary-democratic.2 This possibility of genuinely unforeseen political inventions and arrangements, of discontinuous political and social change (whether desirable or no) thus plays no role in at least this phase of Derrida’s rejoinder (there are others where it does), and the absence of this alternative is even more glaring in others’ discussions of Specters, a work to which a good deal of critical ink has already been devoted.3 A number of Derrida’s critics, sympathetic to Marx, indeed went even further than Derrida. Not only did they assume the present (and continuing ) relevance of Marxism, but, in order to brandish a supposedly more potent, radical, activist Marxism over what they saw as the more milquetoastish , liberal, reformist Derridean alternative, they acted as if Marxism still exists today in the West as an ongoing political struggle, as an active political movement—that, in this sense, Marxism today is no different from what it was when the Manifesto was written, when Marx and Engels were alive, or in the nineteen-tens and -twenties in Europe and the U.S.: namely, an organized revolutionary movement aimed at seizing state power in the name of the working class by whatever means necessary.4 So doing, these writers did as great a disservice to themselves and the Marxist tradition as they did to Derrida’s thought, since this tradition, at least since the ’50s, has for the most part consistently strived to take into account major changes in historical circumstances and new political experience . In the meantime, many ‘‘defenders’’ of Derrida were guilty of the symmetrically opposite error: basically, they wished to assure us that in some sense Derrida was a Marxist after all—deconstruction a more subtle version of Marxist/post-Marxism—thereby, as we shall see, themselves losing sight of just what is most novel and difficult in Derrida’s late political writings, including Specters.5 To focus on the larger point, this omission of the possibility of new reference points for political struggle, this overhang of previously fixed positions—so massive a sedimentation that its very existence as well as its potential irrelevance cease altogether to be noticed—allows us to begin to gauge the actual pragmatics of Derrida’s discourse, the real, not imaginary , politico-theoretical situation in which it took place. Fukuyama’s belief in the coming or arrival of a neoliberal ‘‘endless summer’’ (since 188 Derrida and the Problem of...