technology, panoptical surveillance via satellite, nuclear threat,
and so forth). Let us accelerate things. Beyond these two types
of war (civil and international) whose dividing line cannot
even be distinguished any longer, let us blacken still more the
picture of this wearing down beyond wear. Let us name with
a single trait that which could risk making the euphoria of
liberal-democratic capitalism resemble the blindest and most
delirious of hallucinations, or even an increasingly glaring
hypocrisy in its formal or juridicist rhetoric of human rights”
( 80 ). The prophetic tone here takes on active scorn for the
rhetoric of justice under “liberal-democratic capitalism”: such
rhetoric, Derrida tells us, is merely “formal or juridicist.” As in
his Cardozo lecture, Derrida suggests that there is a truer, mes-
sianic justice, antithetical to the workings of the law.
From time to time, Derrida salutes “those who are
working... in the direction of the perfectibility and emanci-
pation of institutions that must never be renounced” ( 84 ). But
this obligatory nod to liberalism is in jarring contrast to the
apocalyptic coloring that saturates Specters of Marx.The re-
forming of institutions pales next to the ghostly techno-hell
of the “so-called liberal democracies” with their “media tele-
technology,” which afflicts us in its “irreducibly spectral dimen-
sion” ( 53 ). Derrida had apparently lost his faith in liberalism.
To praise an apocalyptic Marxism and scorn the “so-
called liberal democracies,” as Derrida does, slights the fact
that the struggle for political freedom, the fight against corrupt
governments and corporations, is much easier in liberal de-
mocracy than in any other kind of society. As Wolin argues,
Derrida in his Marx book, like Heidegger in his famous last
testament, the interview with Der Spiegelreleased after his
death, is looking for a god to save us: an unimaginable future
that might transport us out of the degraded present. In Spec-
230 Politics, Marx, Judaism