björn thorsteinsson
and emancipatory promise as promise: as promise and not as onto-
theological or teleo-eschatological program or design. (74–75/125–126)In this way, as we have said, Derrida’s willingness to combat a
cancellation of historicity is patent: by his very effort to fight “onto-
theo-archeo-teleology,” he joins the ranks of thinkers of the Ben-
jaminian mould. Nevertheless, our question persists and continues to
haunt us: if we are to insist on the promise “as promise,” and never on
any type of “program or design,” this surely reduces the strength of the
promise itself. In this way, Derrida’s abhorrence of anything that
remotely looks like a dogma or, in more positive terms, a carefully
formulated theory on the concrete ways in which the current situation
can be radically changed, simply takes him too far, preventing his
hauntology from achieving the fullness of its potential strength. Let
us, finally, turn to Giorgio Agamben for a brief elucidation of these
issues.
Strengthening Hauntology
— Agamben and a Missed Rendez-vous
As the above-made remarks indicate, the crucial fault of Derrida’s
thinking seems to be the lack of an effective theory of subjectivity — such
a theory would be the tiny addition required for the theory really to
work the way intended by its author. And, as Giorgio Agamben
demonstrates (in passing) in his book The Time That Remains, this is
precisely what Derrida could have, and should have, learned from
Marx — and, one might add, from Benjamin. Such a subjective element,
Agamben suggests, could have been provided by revoking Marx’s
concept of class, which, as Derrida’s above-quoted formulations more
or less betray, is almost completely neglected in Specters of Marx. In this
respect it is important to realize that Marx’s concept of the proletariat
is precisely that of a class beyond classes, a class which is no more a
class in the traditional sense, a class which is more, or less, than a class.
A class which plays, to use the term coined by Badiou and Jacques
Rancière, “the part of no part” and has, literally, nothing to lose but its
chains. It is quite clear that Derrida’s idea of the new International, in
all its indeterminacy, is by no means sufficient in this regard: however,