The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary

Exorcisms Without End

18 The Passing of Postmodernism employ the metaphor of the specter: that which is and (yet) is not, that which returns for the first time, that which “begins by coming back” (Specters 11).25 It is with this ironic, or paradoxical, metaphor in mind that I want to continue my inspection of the postmodern debate. By viewing the postmodern as an episteme defined on both sides by certain discernable “ruptures,” while understanding it as a periodization or epistemological reconfiguration animated by a certain persistent specter or inheritance (passed on to, and in turn, by, modernism), we can begin to see a way out of our current dilemma. Modernism and postmodernism and, now, this newly emergent epoch can indeed be viewed as singular events, or epistemes; they are also, though, epistemological reconfigurations, reconfigurations of an unavoidable relationship with a certain repeating—we might say passing, or “passed on”—aporia: a certain inheritance, a certain specter. Exorcisms Without End In Specters of Marx, Derrida argues that Marxism was haunted by various spirits. According to Derrida, one of these spirits cannot be ignored; it cannot be ignored because it compels movement—that is, critical, aesthetic and/or revolutionary movement. But a spirit, Derrida insists, arrives, or manifests, as a ghost, a specter. It is both seen and unseen, present and absent; or, if we employ Derrida’s earlier terminology, the spirits of Marxism exist only as trace and differance. What is interesting about Derrida’s “essential” specter—and the use of the possessive has double significance, for Derrida (like Marx before him) possesses, or is possessed by, the very specter he is discussing—is that it is associated with “emancipatory and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise” (89). The specter of Marx—the one that Derrida is concerned with, the one that continues to haunt and thus compel deconstruction—is the one motivating spirit haunting all past idealism(s): faith in god, humanism, meaning, telos, truth, and so on.26 Ironically, these “spectral effects,” these ideological tendencies, are the very “opiates” of which Marx (at least according to Derrida) would like to rid the world. Yet the very specter, or teleological aporia, that compels the ideological tendencies to which Marx is opposed animates the discourse of Marxism, the discourse that is intent on exorcising all specters once and for all. Simply, if more crudely, the specter of a “true and final” state of communism haunts, and thus compels, the subversive implications of historical materialism; the very ideal of com- 19 The Phantom Project Returning munism is, Derrida seems to suggest, wholly contrary to the anti-idealist discourse that is ultimately animated by the possibility of communism. And it is, as I’ve already intimated, this specter of the messianic, of the promise “to come,” that effected the very shape of postmodernism as a cultural dominant. That being said, I’d like to move slowly at this point. To fully understand Derrida’s argument—and, in turn, to make it fully applicable to a discussion of the passing of postmodernism as an episteme— we need to keep in mind that a specter is always a revenant (i.e., of the past) and a promise, or sign, of the future, a future to come. It returns from the past to herald the future. The ghost of Hamlet’s father is, as Derrida’s analysis of Hamlet demonstrates, a useful point of reference . The dead King returns, but his return as a revenant speaks to the possibility of a future, a time when justice is fulfilled, time is back “in joint” and the revenant is allowed to rest, dissipate, dissolve finally—at which point the future would be present; the possibility of the future, of the promise, would cease to be a possibility (for the condition of a promise, of its possible fulfillment, as Derrida asserts on numerous occasions, is its impossibility). The specter of Marx can be understood, then, as the animating factor in all past ideological revenants that beckon toward the horizon of the future. The specter represents the promise of a future that is forever “to come,” or what Derrida refers to as “a messianic without messianism” (Specters 59). Now, I have repeatedly associated the specter in question with a certain inherited aporia, namely, a certain teleological aporia.27 This is because this aporia can be defined as a desire for, or latent belief in, finality, a faith that will never be...