Specters of Marx 1993–1995 463
does it also risk withering away? Derrida, as was his wont, based
much of what he said on this ‘ambiguous title’.^2
For nearly thirty years, friends of his – especially in France – had
reproached him for having written nothing on Marx; there had
been Althusser and his associates at the École Normale Supérieure,
Sollers, Houdebine, and Scarpetta at the time of Tel Quel and
Promesse, Gérard Granel, and, more recently, Bernard Stiegler and
Catherine Malabou. And it was just when nobody was expecting
it, on the West Coast of the United States, that Derrida suddenly
decided to speak on this very subject. He explained his reasons in his
interviews with Maurizio Ferraris:
The conference on Marx might not have taken place, and in
that case perhaps I would not have written that book on Marx;
I hesitated, and I tried to ask myself whether responding on
that occasion was strategically well calculated. There was a
long period of deliberation, but at the end of the day, whatever
the calculation might have been, there came a time when I said
‘let’s accept’, and I accepted.^3Derrida had always been able to work fast. But never before had
he completed such a demanding task to meet such a tight deadline.
It was as if he had been bearing this book within him for a very
long time, simply waiting for a favourable opportunity. As J. Hillis
Miller recalls:
One day in 1993, at Irvine, it must have been at the beginning
of March, Jacques anxiously told me: ‘I have to write a con-
ference paper on Marx for the Riverside conference, but I’ve
got nowhere with it.’ He really had to get a move on, even if
Peggy Kamuf translated the pages as he wrote them. Four or
fi ve weeks later, the fi rst version of Specters of Marx was done.
He’d managed to complete this long text, completely new, even
though he’d still had to give his seminars, receive students,
and probably speak on two or three occasions outside the
university.On 22 and 23 April, Derrida opened the Riverside confer-
ence with one of those exorbitant lectures which he had made his
speciality. The opening was as mysterious as it was memorable:
Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to
learn to live fi nally.
Finally but why?
To learn to live: a strange watchword. Who would learn?
From whom? To teach to live, but to whom? Will we ever