Specters of Marx 1993–1995 465
A ‘new international’ is being sought through these crises of
international law; it already denounces the limits of a discourse
on human rights that will remain inadequate, sometimes hypo-
critical, and in any case formalistic and inconsistent with itself
as long as the law of the market, the ‘foreign debt’, the inequal-
ity of techno-scientifi c, military, and economic development
maintain an eff ective inequality as monstrous as that which pre-
vails today; to a greater extent than in the history of humanity.
For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity
to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democ-
racy that has fi nally realized itself as the ideal of human history:
never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus eco-
nomic oppression aff ected as many human beings in the history
of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of
the ideal of liberal democracy and the capitalist market in the
euphoria of the end of history; instead of celebrating the ‘end of
ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let
us never neglect this evident macroscopic fact, made up of innu-
merable singular sites of suff ering: no degree of progress allows
one to ignore that never before, in absolute fi gures, never have
so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved,
or exterminated on the earth.^7Enlarged over the next few months, Specters of Marx was pub-
lished almost immediately, as if with a feeling of urgency. This is
how Derrida presented it in a letter to Françoise Dastur, in which
he asked her to forgive him for his delay in replying: ‘In the midst of
my usual tiredness and overwork, I’ve been working on a little book
on ghosts [.. .] in which, in my brusque and clumsy fashion, I try to
imagine what “Wir sterben um zu leben” [“We die in order to live”]
might mean without managing really to believe in it, and that’s also
my weakness.’^8
The various digressions and the acute analyses do not stop the book
as a whole from being sustained by a real lyrical élan and a great nobil-
ity of spirit. Marguerite remembers reading the proofs of Specters of
Marx in Iceland; she had accompanied Jacques to Reykjavik before
his departure that evening for the United States. At night, in her hotel
bedroom, the text moved her so much that she wept.
The reception of the book would be completely diff erent from that
of Derrida’s previous works. Specters of Marx came just at the right
time. The title was intriguing and striking: it corresponded to hazy
expectations. Le Quotidien de Paris, unsurprisingly, waxed ironical
over ‘Marx, a phantasm* of Derrida’s’, while Bernard-Henri Lévy,
- Fantasme also means ghost. – Tr.