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Chapter 10 LETTER TO MARTIN MCQUILLAN, CONCERNING “THE NEW INTERNATIONAL”: THE INDELIBLE MARX OF HAUNTING Dear Martin, Thank you, first of all, for inviting me to participate in the edition of Parallax addressing the question of “the New International,”1 as that figure is raised in Specters of Marx. I’m writing this letter in lieu of an article or essay because I don’t have the time to write something that might be, on the one hand, more formalized, and, on the other, more formulaic, although , doubtless, there’s the risk of the formula in the format of the letter also. Concerning Specters of Marx, the question of time or, I should say, untimeliness or anachrony, is of great importance, as you well know. In relation to this, there is also a matter of hurriedness. In fact, there has always been a question of hurrying, and of a lack of time, of not taking enough time, not to mention intemperance, with regard to Specters and its reception. After the event, in his contribution to Ghostly Demarcations even Derrida has admitted of Specters that he preferred “to rush headlong into defeat.”2 This is part of its “history,” as well as the burden it bears, in the guise of the manifestation of the various critical receptions and resistances. Of the lack of time taken as a general avoidance of the impossible time of reading, Derrida remarks that there “is no excuse for contenting oneself with flying through a text . . . the effects of thus skimming . . . on the fly are not limited to the hastily formed impression.”3 We should bear this in mind throughout as a caveat. 227 Let me then start with a remark concerning an aspect of time with regard to readings—or not-readings—of Specters of Marx before I address the question of “the New International” for you. Let me say this at the beginning: First remark: there has been and will have been a rush. This motif is indissociable from, and is perhaps the motif par excellence apropos of, Specters in particular and the political in general. There will have been a rush, today, several months before the deadline for submission of responses to Parallax (one sign of which being that this letter finds itself with you six months or so before that submission date) over this matter, and the immateriality , of “the New International.” Indeed, there already has been, and that is commented on in the beginning of this letter, in its inaugural remarks . There has also been a rush to interpret, to analyze Specters of Marx, to render or translate it into an intelligible commentary, or the failure of such, on the supposed debates between deconstruction, so-called, and Marxism. In their different ways one could refer, if one had the time, or took the time, to those essays by Eagleton, Ahmad, Jameson, and Spivak, all of which can be found in Ghostly Demarcations. We won’t get into all the ontological and epistemological problems pertaining thereto, in a statement such as “between deconstruction and Marxism.” You and I know all of these. As Derrida has said, its exhausted, we’re all exhausted,4 and, anyway, there isn’t time, and I’m in—doubtless, too much of—a rush (like Matthew Arnold in response to the notion of Geist),5 to comment on the rush to comment in any other way than that evinced so far. In any case, there has been a rush to pin down Specters of Marx (bearing, in some cases, the signs of a certain commodity fetishization or fetishistic commodification in the guise of a mapping and domestication of figures, themes, interests, etc.). There has been an effort to tease out Specters’—and, therefore, by the operations of a logical economy, Derrida ’s, deconstruction’s—allegiances to Marx and Marxism, finally and unequivocally. And, more generally, for Marxists of a certain kind, of a proprietorial or “prioprietorial” kind, as Derrida puts it—he asks of Marxism : “is it still the private preserve or personal property of those who claim or proclaim that they are ‘Marxists’?”6 —there is the always hurried attempt to claim ownership to Marx, to the correct Marx, and to have Derrida spell out his and, by extension, so-called deconstruction’s socalled affiliation to Marxism; which, by the way, is not so much an affiliation as the determination of or desire for a hierarchical subservience; 228 Affirmative Resistances [18.216.186.164] Project MUSE (2024...

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