Date: Sun, 14 May 1995 05:04:43 -0400 (EDT)
From: David Klepser Patterson <dkpp-AT-gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>
Subject: Re: Value, and Derrida


On Dana and the death of Marx again:

Might I suggest, Dana, that you direct your attention to Derrida's recent
book on Marx(ism), _Specters of Marx_ (Routledge, 1994).  As a reasonable
introduction to Derrida's intervention and "provocation," you also may wish
to read Fredric Jameson's essay, "Marx's Purloined Letter," in New Left
Review no. 209 (Jan/Feb 1995), which addresses Aijaz Ahmad's comments
(appearing in NLR 208) on Derrida's book (parts of which appeared in NLR
205) and engages Derrida himself in light of his (lifetime) relationship
to various specters of Marx. 
 
Derrida, and Jameson, ask: In the wake of the Soviet Union's demise, what
are we to make of those deafening members of the Fukuyama or apocalyptic
school of historical determinism who were (and many, of course, who are)
so intent on proclaiming the death of Marx(ism)?  As many on this list
will no doubt recollect, to the question of what the "death of
deconstruction" meant to him, Derrida (in 1993, long after the mourning
over Derrida in the U.S. had ended) responded that the formulation "x is
dead" reveals a desire (a wish of death)--on behalf of the individual who
affirmed the death--that x _be killed_, _that it pass away_ (that a death
sentence be imposed, or be carried out).  So that what passes for
deconstruction--or Marxism, or the "author," or the unified subject--seems
never so much alive as when it is proclaimed dead (this is the crux of one
of the difficulties of "defining," in positive or negative terms, what
deconstruction is).  

(Now it is possible that this impulse compels some Marxists to claim
"crises" at certain moments when Marxism's fate seems particularly
precarious.  The call for a state of emergency is a provocation which
seeks to stimulate movement, conversation, pollination (somewhat, perhaps,
what we have _here_, on line, with Dana's _sprig_).) 

Derrida's operation on the state of Marx's afterlife is prescient (it is not
the first operation, too, but it is certainly the most sustained): The
proclamation of death always signals an oversimplification, a slide, which
covers up, elides, in the name of the new and the improved, while specters
continue to haunt us in forms both old and new (the "new world order," for
example, exists in relation to _what_ old regime?  What death needs to be 
kept warm so that the new retains a purchase upon the _idea_ of the new?). 

It will not do to pass over the death and afterlife of such a narrative as
Marx's (whose themes have thoroughly irrigated Western thought; we live
lives partially fashioned by Marx, regardless of positions taken up). The
death sentence handed down by the collapse of communism and the conclusion
drawn by many that Marx(ism) is dead (a difference, of course, of course)
entails a responsibility to theorize the process of the death and dying. 

Some questions, in Derrida and in Jameson, include: has there been a
dislocation? has Marx(ism) been circumscribed, or repressed? is there
resentment over the death (by whom); is there mourning?  Perhaps most
importantly: has the ghost of Marx been the victim of a false antithesis,
in which it (he) has been made to stand (alone) against a global postmodern
capitalism which itself has mastered the art of death in life
(reinvention, retooling, reinvesting)?  And, Dana, Dana, does this death 
leave any legacies?  Is your thought of them?  (This list has a 
responsibility to face Dana, because Dana's sentiments are now 
wide-spread, deafening.)
 
Derrida's book--along with the essays by Spivak, Wolff, Griffin, et al.,
in the companion volume, _Whither Marxism?: Global Crises in International
Perspective_"--is now, I believe, the touchstone for these questions. 

Jameson captures the question which needs urgently to be engaged: "Marx,
who seemed living, is now dead and buried again, what does it mean to
affirm this?"  I direct your attention to the adverb "again": you do great
violence to yourself to ignore that fact that this is not the first time
Marx has (been) passed away.  Ironically (you might think), I would not
counsel classes in sociology but in history. 

Respectfully,

David Patterson

Program in the Human Sciences
The George Washington University
dkpp-AT-gwis2.circ.gwu.edu


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