Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Can we disavow Marx?

Well, these days I've been reading a lot of Jacques Derrida, the deconstructionist philosopher. One of his major works is Specters of Marx. What exactly is his reading of Karl Marx and Marxism? Derrida is not only a fine incisive analyst, he is also a brilliant writer - with great imagination and moral vision.

"Our hypothesis is that the same is true for Marx's spectrology. Is this not our own great problematic constellation of haunting? It has no certain border, but it blinks and sparkles behind the proper names of Marx, Freud, and Heidegger: Heidegger who misjudged Freud who misjudged Marx. This is no doubt not aleatory. Marx has not been received...Marx remains an immigrant chrez nous, a glorious, sacred, accursed but still a clandestine immigrant as he was all his life. He belongs to a time of disjunction, to that "time out of joint" in which is augerated, laboriously, painfully, tragically,a new thinking of borders, a new experience of the house, the home,and the economy. Between earth and sky. One should not rush to make of the clandestine an illegal alien or, what risks coming down to the same thing,to domesticate him. To neutralize him through naturalization.To assimilate him so as to stop frightening himself (making oneself fear) with him. He is not part of the family, but one should not send him back, once again, him too, to the border."
page 174.

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