464 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
know? Will we ever know how to live and fi rst of all what ‘to
learn to live’ means? And why ‘fi nally’?^4But he soon announced the tenor of his discourse: it was indeed
Marx, his persistence and his pertinence, that Derrida was going to
talk about. In Derrida’s view, ‘it will always be a fault’ not to read
him, reread him and discuss him, and now more than ever:
When the dogma machine and the ‘Marxist’ ideological appara-
tuses (States, parties, cells, unions, and other places of doctrinal
production) are disappearing, we no longer have any excuse,
only alibis, for turning away from this responsibility. There will
be no future without this. Not without Marx, no future without
Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx: in
any case of a certain Marx, of his genius, of at least one of his
spirits. For this will be our hypothesis or rather our bias: there
is more than one of them, there must be more than one of them.^5At the same time as wishing to give a rightful place to ‘one at
least’ of Marx’s spirits, Derrida brought out the spectral dimension
running through several of his texts, right from the fi rst sentence of
the The Communist Party Manifesto: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe
- the spectre of communism.’ He read Marx as a philosopher and
a writer, as he had never been read before, echoing the many allu-
sions to Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, that are found in his most
theoretical works. While the theme of spectrality had preoccupied
Derrida ever since the fi lm Ghost Dance, and while the concept of
hauntology looked like a new way of designating what he had long
designated as diff érance, he was very far from having invented these
themes: he revealed their presence within The German Ideology and
other of Marx’s works. As Derrida had announced twenty-two
years earlier in a letter to Gérard Granel, before he could emerge
from his silence about the author of Capital, he needed to ‘do the
work’. He had already sensed that this work would not lead to a
‘conversion’, ‘but to oblique incisions, tangential displacements,
following this or that unnoticed vein of the Marxist text’.^6
Specters of Marx was not just a new reading, it was a thoroughly
political intervention. In particular, it was a response to Francis
Fukuyama, whose The End of History and the Last Man had been a
great success the year before. Replying to the triumphalist discourses
that had followed the fall of Communist regimes, Derrida numbered
the gaping wounds of the ‘New World Order’: unemployment, the
massive exclusion of the homeless, economic warfare, the aggrava-
tion of foreign debt, the arms industry and arms trade, the spread
of nuclear power, inter-ethnic wars and reactionary nationalisms,
mafi a and traffi cking... No, history was not over.