trump card. He found one in the one thinker who, before all
others, represents the conjunction of philosophy and politics:
Karl Marx. In fact, Derrida astonishingly stated in Specters of
Marx,deconstruction had always been, in a way, Marxist. “De-
construction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at
least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tra-
ditionof a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism”
( 92 ). The Derrida who had resisted the Communist allegiances
of Sartre and Althusser, and who had stood apart from the
doctrinaire Marxism of the École Normale, was now accom-
plishing a strange reversal. He had become not just an enthu-
siast of Marx but a Marxist ally, straining to prove that Marx-
ism and deconstruction shared the same spirit.
There was, of course, a problem with Marx in 1993.
Hadn’t Communism lost the Cold War? Yes, but the ideals of
Communism (or of “a certain Marxism,” as Derrida preferred to
put it) remained. Marx, who had famously announced in the
Communist Manifestothat a specter was stalking Europe, was
still haunting us. (Punning painfully, Derrida referred to his
project in Specters of Marxas a “hauntology” [ 10 ].) Of course,
virtually all the predictions and methods of Marxist theory
had failed, notably including the dictatorship of the proletariat
and the abolition of private property. Marxism, while it lived,
had been closely aligned with murderous authoritarianism.
Derrida honored the memory of the millions killed by
Stalin and Mao, mourning their suffering at the hands of
tyrants. But, he argued, this lethal history remained separate
from the ideaof Marx. And this idea was, for Derrida, the ob-
ject of a powerful nostalgic attachment. As Richard Rorty sar-
donically commented, “By saying that there are many Marxes,
and then leaving most of them aside, [Derrida] can preserve
228 Politics, Marx, Judaism