466 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
in his column in Le Point, thought he was ‘dreaming’ when he heard
of a ‘return to Marx’.
In Le Nouvel Observateur, as the general tendency on the editor ial
board was one of hostility, Didier Eribon suggested a major inter-
view in New York rather than a review. He started by referring to
Derrida’s success in the United States, emphasizing that this was no
mere phenomenon of fashion, but ‘a vast intellectual ebullition in
scholarly circles’. With regard to Specters of Marx, Eribon noted
that this ‘peculiar book, which is simultaneously a political mani-
festo and a highly technical philosophical work’, was actually very
diffi cult to read. But he sensed that this would not stop it being a
major event. According to Derrida himself, Specters of Marx was,
fi rst and foremost, ‘a political act’:
The most important thing is not scrutinizing Marx’s texts.
[.. .] The most urgent business, and what has impelled me to
raise the tone by adopting a political position, is the growing
impatience I feel – and I do not think I am alone – at the kind
of consensus, both euphoric and grimacing, that is invading
every discourse. [.. .] Any reference to Marx has become, as it
were, cursed. I concluded that this showed a desire to exorcize
it, to spirit it away, that deserved to be analysed and that also
deserved to provoke insurrection. In some ways, my book is a
book of insurrection. It is an apparently untimely gesture, that
comes at the wrong time. But the idea of the ‘wrong time’ is at
the very heart of the book. [.. .] What one always hopes when
doing something ‘at the wrong time’ is that it will happen at the
right time, at the moment when it is felt to be necessary.^9In Libération, Specters of Marx was hailed in a major article by
Robert Maggiori. He emphasized that Derrida ‘has never been a
Marxist, even when everyone else was, and [.. .] has little intention
of becoming one’, and then went on to claim that his book ‘will be
one to mark with a white stone, as if it were an act of inaugura-
tion, if perchance the spirit of Marxism were again to blow across
our lands’.^10 In Le Monde, Nicolas Weill also acknowledged the
work’s importance and its author’s audacity, barely four years after
the fall of the Berlin Wall, even though he felt that ‘a debate with
contemporary liberal thought should not be limited just to refut-
ing Fukuyama’.^11 Like Gérard Guégan in Sud-Ouest Dimanche,
many readers declared their conviction that Specters of Marx would
restore confi dence to those who no longer dared utter Marx’s name,
let alone study him: ‘This is a book that is fully inhabited, and
around it will gather the heirs. [.. .] It is more than the history of
philosophy which demands as much; it is the fate of the world.’^12
The French Communists could not ignore the opportunity