7 Specters of Marx 1993–1995
In February 1990, Jacques Derrida went to Moscow for the fi rst
time in his life. The Berlin Wall had fallen a few months earlier and
the USSR was collapsing. In a typical act of provocation, while in
Moscow Derrida talked about Marx, which caused something of
a stir. A few weeks later, in Irvine, describing his trip and analys-
ing the idiosyncratic literary genre of the ‘return from the USSR’,
Derrida clearly explained what his position had always been:
Even though I have never been either a Marxist or a Communist,
stricto sensu, even though, in my youthful admiration for Gide,
I read at fi fteen (1945) his Back from the USSR, which left no
doubt as to the tragic failure of the Soviet Revolution and today
still seems to me a remarkable, solid and lucid work and even
though, later, in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, I had to resist- and it was not easy – a terrifying politico-theoretical intimida-
tion of the Stalinist or neo-Stalinist type in my most immediate
personal and intellectual environment, this never kept me from
sharing, in the mode of both hope and nostalgia, something
of Etiemble’s disarmed passion or childish imaginary in this
romantic relation with the Soviet Union. I am always bowled
over when I hear the Internationale, I tremble with emotion and
then I always want to ‘go out into the streets’ to fi ght against
the Reaction. [.. .] I would not be able to describe what my trip
to Moscow was, in full Perestroika, if I had not said at least
something about this revolutionary pathos, about the history
of this aff ect or this aff ection, which I cannot, and in truth do
not want to, give up entirely.^1
Two years later, Bernd Magus and Stephen Cullenberg asked
Derrida to give the opening address at the international confer-
ence they were organizing in Riverside, a progressive campus at the
University of California where his friend Michael Sprinker taught.
The title ‘Whither Marxism?’ is a pun: where is Marxism going, but