Specters of Marx 1993–1995 467
represented by such a work, written by such a prestigious fi gure.
L’Humanité, which had already published extensive highlights from
Specters of Marx on 23 September, provided a thoughtful review
on 13 November. Derrida immediately thanked Arnaud Spire, and
through him the whole editorial board, for the ‘generous attention’
they had shown him: ‘I felt I must tell you how touched I am – as by
a good sign, an encouraging sign, and not just for me – by the open-
minded welcome that has just been shown, on two occasions, thanks
to you, in L’Humanité. The future will doubtless have more to say
about this than I can say here.. .’^13 A few weeks later, it was the
turn of L’Humanité Dimanche to hail the work. And Robert Hue,
the fi rst secretary of the Communist Party, said he was touched by
Derrida’s latest move.^14
But Derrida was not the man of any one party. Le Nouveau
Politis, Révolution, and Critique Communiste, which all represented
diff erent tendencies of the radical left, also congratulated them-
selves on having found in him a signifi cant new ally, at a time when
revolutionary ideals were ebbing. Pierre Macherey, an alumnus of
Normale Sup and co-author of Reading Capital, summarized the
situation most eloquently:
Derrida took everyone by surprise, tripped them up, bowled
them over, when, relatively late in the day, in 1993, he started
speaking about Marx, speaking ‘Marx’, Marx’s language,
getting Marx to speak, en diff éré as it were. There was a reason
for this anachronism, and even a sort of necessity: it was just at
the moment when Marx had been shovelled into a hole, dead
and buried, reduced to silence, treated like a dead dog, denied
and almost cancelled out, [.. .] that the time seemed to have
come to let him again have, if not ‘his word’ – a word that was
properly his, his own word, fully integrated ‘into the identity
of his living presence – at least the spectral word of a ‘ghost’
[revenant] attributed to him by Specters of Marx.^15The reaction to this ‘little book’ – as Derrida would continue to
call it, even if the French version is over three hundred pages long
- was not, however, unanimous on the part of those who claimed
to be followers of Marx. The debates around the work covered so
many positions that Michael Sprinker, who ran the review Thinking
Marxism, asked for the reactions of ten or so intellectuals, mainly
English-speaking Marxists, and published them together with a
reply by Derrida in Ghostly Demarcations.^16 Only Derrida’s text was
published in French, under the title ‘Marx & Sons’: he discussed the
issues fi rmly but serenely with his critics, reserving his most virulent
attacks for the article written by his former disciple Gayatri Spivak,
which he found ‘unbelievable from fi rst to last’.^17