björn thorsteinssontype of thinking, this “thinking with” the phantom, the ghost, or the
spectre, is more pertinent than ever. Pertinent — that is to say, also,
just — and it is with this in mind that Derrida writes, in the “Exordium”
to Spectres of Marx, the following words:
If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and
generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others
who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside
us, it is in the name of justice. [...] It is necessary to speak of the ghost,
indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no
politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible or thinkable and
just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others
who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently
living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. (xix/15)Now we should recall that these formulations are made in the opening
pages of a book on Karl Marx, originally published in French in 1993.
As it turns out, the concept of hauntology plays a major part in the
text, not least in its attempts to come to grips with Marx’s legacy — that
is, to deploy Derrida’s own parlance, with Marx’s ghosts. But the issue
of justice towards those who are not present, of speaking to ghosts and
of being-with them, in their company, is also at the forefront of Der-
rida’s renowned and relentless attack, in Specters of Marx, on the neo-
conservative thinker Francis Fukuyama’s ideas on “the end of history”
and the accompanying common consensus that “Marx is dead.” In a
nutshell, Derrida’s charge against Fukuyama amounts to the claim
that any type of thinking that not only posits that there will be an end
to history, but goes on to claim that this end-of-history is already a
reality, turns out to be deeply deficient and fundamentally unjust. For
such a thinking cannot, for one thing, account for the suffering and
the injustices of the world — past, present, or future. In other words,
such a hypothesis flies in the face of the evident flaws in the present
situation, but more than that, it also neglects the claim staked on us by
those who are not “presently living,” those who “are no longer” or
“are not yet there.” Or, to put the same point differently, such a
“closed” thinking fails to uphold the messianic promise — the promise
of emancipation which is also the call of justice. Strictly speaking, a
thinking of this mould would leave us without a future in the proper