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COPYRIGHT 2007 Boston University
As in Hamlet, the Prince of a rotten State, everything begins by the apparition of a specter. More precisely, by the waiting for this apparition. The anticipation is at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated: this, the thing ("this thing") will end up coming. The revenant is going to come.
--Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx
THERE ARE, OF COURSE, MANY DERRIDAS AND MANY ROMANTICISMS. AND the structure of a legacy, even if it is one among many, is to obviate the many in favor of the one. Exponents of a legacy know the one as the one prior to any identity before contingency. As Gayatri Spivak also reminds us, this is as much an issue about gender and sexuality as it is about ontology, insofar as a legacy is what our father leaves, or should leave, us. (1) Legacies are as well oftentimes mixed up with ghosts; so much so that, inevitably, a legacy is also what a ghost leaves. Derrida explicitly confronts this predicament of ghostly entailment in one work from his voluminous writings, in a way that also allows us to say something about the relation between Derrida and romanticism, and, as is usually the case with Derrida, much more. Derrida's text opens up a way for us to think about what I want to call ghost theory, whose significance lies not least in the redundancy of the term.
The text of Derrida that I refer to is his Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (1994), a work whose reception showed it to be something less and something more than what many had hoped it would be, the definitive negotiation between deconstructive and Marxist thought. One thing that Derrida's book is definitely is literary, and not simply by way of reading Marx; there is also as crucially the contemplation of Shakespeare's tragedy, so dominant in the romantic mind (as well as Marx's own): Hamlet. Playing off Marx's own particular love of Shakespeare, Derrida finds in this basic phoneme of Western culture one of the central tropes of his book: Hamlet's ghostly armored father, embodying what Derrida calls the "visor effect," the prosthetic ability of a ghost to see without quite being seen in any absolute fashion, while giving Hamlet the injunction to correct a primal wrong of family and state (7). The phantasmic as well as indeterminate nature of this injunction (Paternal law? Social justice? Dialectical inevitability?) is the father's legacy to Hamlet, and, according to Derrida, Marx's legacy to us. In both cases the power of the injunction lies not in its certitude but in exactly the opposite, its constative inconstancy, upon which, nevertheless, future action and historical event--revolution--rest.
For Marx, of course, the injunction of his manifesto defines itself against the necessarily incomplete, great bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century, as well as the necessarily uninformed, myriad visions of reform and partial revolution of the nineteenth century. However, in Derrida's reworked version of Marx's legacy, spectralized and thus preemptively autoimmunized from its own phallic authority, the ghostly yet discernible injunction for social transformation need not stay resolutely sequestered on one side of Marx's epochal divide. Indeed, are not such codified but still infinitely charged terms as the "Age of Revolution" and "Marx and Romanticism" already metonyms for this historical problematic? Is not the legacy of Derrida's Specters to romanticism the specter of romanticism itself, the ghost of history as revolution, the fatal intersection between representational knowledge and political action? Are not the spectral poetics that Derrida discovers in Marx prefigured in the phantom periodicity, the trope of exceptionalism, of romanticism itself? Is not the thinking through of the (non-)ontological nature of this situation, along with its ineluctable though by no means simply decipherable political articulation, one of Derrida's legacies to us all, the imperative of ghost theory?
Ghost theory is a theory about ghosts, theorized by ghosts--by a discourse structured around the de-ontologizing nature of the specter: spectral entities and phantasmic thought. The tangible intangibility of a ghost cuts across one key binary of both philosophy and political writing, a dichotomy historically linked to one of romanticism's own numerous recits, the material versus the ideal. Ghosts are precisely not material to the degree that that term stands for an ontological certitude based on the hypostasis of physical reality. But they are also not ideal to the extent that that word also refers to an ontology this time based on the reality of the non-physical--of Spirit [Geist]. Ghosts are neither material nor ideal insofar as the material is embedded within a materialism and the ideal within an idealism, ontological structures secured by the reifying tag of an ism. Ghosts are as real as everything else; everything else is real as a ghost. Ghosts delink the staging of the opposition between the material and the ideal from the ontological choice between one or the other, as well as from any Hegelian Aufhebung of the two.
If such ghostly disarticulations are staged in the texts of romanticism, readers of romanticism have had difficulty always seeing it that way, choosing oftentimes instead to see the question of romanticism and ghosts as a debate over what is more real, the material or the ideal. If we now read romanticism and that debate differently, that's in large part due to Derrida and his fellow traveler, Paul de Man. The phenomenal as well as political question of materiality versus ideality was forever changed by their incursions into the study of language as something neither simply material nor ideal but actually prior to that distinction. If people today invoke the possibility of a "materiality without matter" or "an idealism without absolutes," that is in many ways because of the work of these two thinkers. (2)
Evoking the effects of Derrida's and de Man's writings inevitably calls to mind the consequences of theory, a term larger than but also metonymically tied (for good or ill) to the workings of deconstruction. Invoking theory also means questioning its relation to praxis, a logic that replays the dynamic between the material and the ideal, the substantial and non-substantial, the realm of action versus that of thought. Taking theory seriously doesn't necessarily mean, however, seeing thought as substance, or theory as praxis. It can also mean understanding theory as taking issue with the hypostatizations of thought and action, of unveiling the phantasmic character of each. Theory is also therefore no more idealist in the ontological sense than a ghost is; like a ghost, theory also disputes the non-material essence of idealism. Theory is a ghost, the ghost of a theory whose spectral state makes it no less urgent or compelling as the mise-en-scene within which we read.
For Marx, or one Marx, theory is nevertheless the unreal, idealist state eschewed in favor of a socially transformative practice: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." (3) This speaks to one portion of Derrida's reading in Specters, his interrogation of a Marx, chiefly glimpsed in the critique of Max Stirner in The German Ideology, who is intent upon exorcising ghosts from the world, with ghosts to be understood as the ontological truth of illusion, or false consciousness (120-47). And yet, Derrida argues, Marx cannot quite prevent the actions of ghosts and phantoms from contaminating key moments in his own prose, as the scene in Capital with the dancing table attests (161). One might note, however, that this tropic movement does not so much expose the fallacy of Marx's argument as set his claims spinning away from the centripetal force of their own metaphysics. The meanings of Marx are real, real as a ghost's. Derrida at times does seem to think that Marx finally falls on the side of exorcism rather than that of conjuration. But insofar as the intelligibility of Marx's writing depends on both the overt and subterranean exchanges between these two actions, Derrida's science of "hauntology" is itself already prefigured in Marx's handling of his own "predeconstructive" ontology (10, 170). In wrestling with the difficulty of ghosts, Marx's own discourse becomes one example of ghost theory.
(Derrida thus writes of Marx the exorcist, "Pre-deconstructive here does not mean false, unnecessary, or illusory. Rather it characterizes a relatively stabilized knowledge that calls for questions more radical than the critique itself and than the ontology that grounds the critique" (170). But is not the question of the difference between the pre-deconstructive and deconstructive precisely the uncertainty of this "call" as either communicative action or ghostly injunction--the call of the call, as it were? Insofar as this call and its indeterminacy emanate from Marx, his theory is enmeshed in ghost theory, just as is this oddly sensible moment in Specters that tries to place Marx's critique in some stable, pre-radical space elsewhere than, "before," deconstruction. In that sense the opposition between the ontological and non-ontological does not simply subtend our discussion but also participates in the relay of distinctions--material versus ideal, praxis versus theory--that we've been describing.)
If Marx cannot exorcise ghosts, we cannot exorcise Marx. As "'Marx-das Unheimliche,'" he "remains an immigrant chez nous, a glorious, sacred, accursed but still a clandestine immigrant as he was all his life" (Specters 174). Like Hamlet confronting his ghost, we cannot avoid Marx's injunction to change the world, words that literally come from (atop) Marx's grave and its epitaph. The injunction's very attempt to separate philosophy from action, or theory from praxis, paradoxically becomes a ghostly insistence that satisfies...
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