Derrida bro

1NC Labeling the Other

I dont know how it goes Levinas Bad or Levinas Good but look in
\Copy\Chen Wang\Archived Files\Poverty Topic Campfiles

1NC Predictions Bad (Hauntology?)

Politics have to viewed without a sense of time and rely on intuition trying to imagine what the future will bring only fuels violence Reynolds 06 Lecturer at the University of Tasmania, Australia (Jack, Negotiating the Non-negotiable: Rawls, Derrida, and the Intertwining of Political Calculation and 'Ultra-politics' Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v009/9.3reynolds.html) Arguably John Rawls and Jacques Derrida are equally influential in their respective areas of philosophy and yet the media reception of their recent deaths, at least in the anglo-American context, has been drastically different a formal acknowledgement of the pervasiveness and ongoing significance of Rawls, juxtaposed against a lamentation of the polysyllabic obscurity and ethico-political irresponsibility of Derrida. An analysis of the political and institutional context of this is not something I can do here1, but I will examine the relationship that obtains between the work of these two philosophers, not least because of the conviction that Derrida (and post-structuralism more generally) offers certain invaluable things to political thought that analytic political philosophy would do well to take account of, particularly as concerns the relation between time and politics. In Derrida's case, his emphasis on the radical difference of the future, the 'to come', serves as a guardrail against political absolutisms of all sorts. On his view, when the future is thought of as known or susceptible of teleological prediction, this tends to lead to what might be rhetorically called outbreaks of either Fascism or Communism (albeit initially non-organised, non-systematised, and without direct state complicity) in which that future state of affairs can justify the violent means needed to get there. Derrida's many and varied arguments about the way in which the future disrupts the present, and has its impact upon the present, without itself being capable of coming to any kind of definitive presence, precludes this move. His quasi-transcendental emphasis on the importance of time and futurity to any understanding of the political is also useful when employed as a critical tool to examine analytic political philosophy: it highlights that this tradition is often either atemporal in its calculations, or relies upon references to intuition (and 'commonsense') in more or less obvious ways, both tendencies which deserve be subjected to critical scrutiny for their tacit alignment with a conservatism that wants to preserve the status quo. But the argument that I will propose in this paper is not simply that figures like Derrida are able to show us the presuppositions Derrida and Deleuze acknowledge the necessity of political calculation, it is also the case that it is vastly under-thematised in their work. Utilitarianism and liberalism offer two sustained and important attempts at providing such a calculation and it seems to me that a rapprochement of these traditions is required, fleshing out the kinds of political calculations that might better respect the significant moral insight at work in post-structuralism2. In order to point to the need for such a political philosophy, this paper will highlights some problems with Rawls and Derrida's two competing ways of treating the political, juxtaposing Rawls' insistence upon the calculable and narrower understanding of the political against (or, more aptly, in apposition with) the Derridean focus upon the incalculable. Let me try and tease this difference out in a preliminary way. While Derrida was unjustly vilified for the lack of obvious political significance to his thought early on (at least compared to his contemporaries like Foucault and Deleuze), he has more explicitly turned toward such terrain in his recent considerations of Marxism, refugees, hospitality, etc. It is also the case that he has always endorsed the more general post-structuralist conviction that philosophical interventions, even artistic and stylistic innovations, are always also political interventions a style of politics that might, as Gregg Lambert suggests, be called une grande politique. At the same time, it remains the case that many of the questions that Derrida raises are not through and through 'political' in the narrower (and Rawlsian) sense of the term3, and this is so according to

Derrida's own admission. Instead, he tries to inject a certain thought of unconditionality and incalculability, we might say an 'impossible' morality, back in to politics. In his own words, deconstruction can be said to be 'ultra-political', or 'hyper-political' (R 39)4, not in the negative sense that Slavoj Zizek bemoans about an avoidance of the political that afflicts contemporary discourse5, but in the sense of looking at the conditions of (im)possibility for the political. It involves a thinking of the contours and limits of the political. Rawls, on the other hand, moved in a different direction throughout his career. In his most famous book, A Theory of Justice, with which this essay will be primarily concerned6, he not only claimed to have established the distributive principles that must hold for a just society but also to give us clear guidelines as to how they might be implemented in other words, what kinds of calculations should be engaged in. From this early theory of justice, with all of its Kantian moral-universalist trappings, however, his later 'political liberalism' cast aside (purportedly at least) any of his metaphysical suppositions concerning the universal applicability of his theory, as well as the assumption of a particular substantive conception of the self. From a Derridean perspective, Rawls' later work hence seems a particularly ripe target for deconstruction7, but this paper is more interested in trying to illuminate the necessity of a middle way between an emphasis upon the incalculable that undergirds much of Derrida's work (and his resultant very broad conception of the political) and the much narrower emphasis upon the contingent political calculations that we might make in public in a pluralist society which is Rawls' ongoing focus.

An acceptance of the future to-come is not an indifference to what may happen but an affirmation of the possibility of life in general, otherwise no desire, no need and no joy. Chambers (Assistant Professor of Political Science at St. Mary's College of Maryland) 2k (Samuel A., Theory and Event 3:4, Spectral History, Untimely Theory, MUSE) To conceptualize the event as ghostlike means to conceive of the event after the end of history, and therefore to conceptualize history after Hegel without recapitulating a Hegelian philosophy of history. "If we have been insisting so much since the beginning on the logic of the ghost, it is because it points toward a thinking of the event that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic."45 A binary or a dialectical logic must assume that history moves in a timely fashion that involves either a linear progression (or regression), or a dialectical march upward from stage to stage, with
negative moments being subsumed along the way. But what Derrida refers to here as the "logic of the ghost," and what I am calling a spectral notion of history,46 interrupts this timely movement of history because the ghost can never be located, placed, or fixed in time. Since the specter's appearance always turns out to be a reappearance, that very appearance can never be found within a timely conception of history

. The untimeliness of the specter calls for an untimely thinking of history. Derrida gives a name to the thinking that would work through this logic of the ghost. He calls it historicity or hauntology: "it would harbor within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves. It would comprehend them, but incomprehensibly. How to

comprehend in fact the discourse of the end or the discourse about the end?"47 To "comprehend incomprehensibly" means to develop a notion of history after Hegel without trying to exceed (in metaphysical fashion) Hegel's philosophy of history. My previous elaboration on the idea of historicity can throw some light on these claims; historicity incomprehensibly comprehends the discourse on the end because historicity lays the conditions of possibility for a Hegelian philosophy of history without attempting to outdo the Hegelian Aufhebung.48 The question of the ghost (the ghost as event, the event as ghost) supplements this first understanding of historicity by building upon it. Derrida draws two conclusions about spectral history: 1) to think the event

.49 The scholar--the philosopher, the theorist--refuses to seriously consider that ghosts might appear, i.e. reappear. The dismissal of ghosts as falling outside the purview of serious investigation (outside the realm of knowledge) is one of the first steps of "scholarship." There has
after the end of history requires us to consider the event in its ghostlike appearance, in its spectrality, but 2) and most importantly, the "scholar" will always wish to avoid any association with ghosts

never been a scholar who, as such, does not believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being ('to be or not to be,' in the conventional reading), in the opposition between what is present and what is not, for example in the form of objectivity.50 Or, to continue the trope, there has never been a scholar who, as a scholar, did not believe in the fundamental nature of the distinction between "first-order" and "second-order" inquiry, "the concrete, empirical world" and the "metatheoretical level," the "actual political world" and "remote theoretical constructs." I have no desire to accuse Isaac of any sort of nave empiricism, but clearly the conception of political theory as problem solver entrenches itself on this foundering foundation of the actual/inactual distinction. As a scholar, Isaac tells the field to stop playing with ghosts and get down to the serious business of political theory, but one concrete implication of a spectral history may lie precisely in

To take seriously the notion that historical events might retain a certain ghostly or spectral quality requires one to reconsider the role of theory beyond merely its relation to past problems that history has given us to solve. Spectral history demands a theory that considers the ghosts of the past and the specters (and events) to come. In other writings51 Derrida has made a subtle but crucially important distinction between the future as simply future present and the future as the yet-to-come, avenir. The future as future present is nothing more than a point "upstream" in the river of time, a point that will soon arrive and become present; it is the future as thought through a linear or dialectical conception of time. Of course, almost all conceptions of time and of history must contain some notion of the future, but a spectral history eschews the future present for an avenir, a yet-to-come, since ghosts might always return or disappear. One could say that specters are always yet-to-come, but the present tense "are always" would rob the sentence of its sense of avenir. Thus, one might do better to write, specters are always already yet-toilluminating the importance of untimely theory as a "serious" endeavor. come. Conjoining always and already serves to highlight the untimeliness of specters.52 In his discussion of Hamlet Derrida augments this notion by writing l'a-venir, which the translators choose to render in English as the future-to-come. That is, the future to come, the future not in the sense of a future present but in the sense of a yet-to-come. L'a-venir, an untimely future. Derrida goes further to suggest that Marx's writings contain their own sense of untimeliness through a notion of l'a-venir. Marx and Engels call for the very transformation of their theories in the future, in a future that is yet-to-come. Writing in 1994 Derrida cites as one example the case of "Engels' 'preface' to the 1888 re-edition" of the Manifesto,53 and today one can also look to Eric Hobsbawm's reintroduction to the 150th anniversary edition of the Manifesto in 1998. Hobsbawm points out that a number of the theses enumerated in the Manifesto were almost immediately outdated even at the time of their publication. In a sense then, the Manifesto was not timely, as it could not solve the political problems of the day, and Marx and then Engels continued to reprint the Manifesto even though it contained references to practical politics that were no longer valid or meaningful. For example, Hobsbawm writes, "some of it became obsolete almost immediately--for instance, the tactics recommended for Communists in Germany, which were not those in fact applied by them during the 1848 Revolution."54 Nonetheless, Hobsbawm remains convinced that Marx's critique of capitalist society proves even more significant today, in the face of the collapse of Soviet-style communism after the revolutions of 1989, than it did in the mid 19th century. Derrida echoes this sentiment, but he also highlights what is so important about the untimeliness of the Manifesto: I know of few texts in the philosophical tradition, perhaps none, whose lesson seemed more urgent today, provided that one take into account what Marx and Engels themselves say about their own possible aging and their intrinsically irreducible historicity. What other thinker has ever issued similar warning in such an explicit fashion? Who has ever called for the transformation to come of his own theses?"55 In other words,

what makes the Manifesto's message so compelling today--and so important for contemporary politics--is precisely its untimeliness, its ability to wait the return of specters to come. While Marx and Engels
certainly tackled directly the pressing political issues of their own time, they insisted that the "problems" their theories would solve might well be future problems, future in the sense of l'a-venir, a future-to-come witnessed only by their ghosts. One has to inherit the untimely spirit in Marxism, in order to, "keep faith with what has always made Marxism in principle and first of all a radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake its self-critique. This critique wants itself to be in principle and explicitly open to its own transformation, re-evaluation, self-reinterpretation."56

This openness to l'avenir constitutes one of the primary marks of untimely theory; it gives that theory the ability to negotiate and even converse with specters, without trying vainly to silence or eliminate them--or worse, to pretend they are not "there," that is, that they will not return. To believe in the distinction between first-order and second-order inquiry--or, more navely, to think that history could come to an end--one would have to presume that ghosts could be arrested and silenced so that their meanings could once and for all be exhaustively interpreted. Derrida comments at length on this theme in Hamlet,
noting the guards' repeated request for Horatio to call out and question the specter of Hamlet's father: "thou art a scholar, speak to it Horatio." As a scholar himself, Isaac's concern often focuses on denying the spectral quality of history, as he calls on political theorists to get the meanings in history sorted out. Isaac speaks repeatedly of a "reticence to interpret current events" and continually criticizes theorists for not offering up their "interpretation" of the "meanings of 1989."57 For Isaac, theory must remain timely. It must solve the problems that the "actual political world" confronts it with in the present. It must answer

to maintain this timeliness, political theory must ignore the traces of ghosts and assume that time could never be "out of joint." Given the persistence of this theme in his argument, Isaac construes any lack of
these problems at the right time, and in the present. And should be carved and preserved for theory as an untimely endeavor that both opens up a thinking toward the future and calls into question any assured interpretations of the meanings of the past.59

timeliness as tardiness. He assumes that if theory is not on time, it can at best be too early, while at worst, and more often, it will be too late. He writes, for example, "the failure of political theory to address [the revolutions of 1989] represents a missed opportunity."58 Unless it remains attentive to the problems that the political world gives up, Isaac argues that theory loses its significance. And yet, surely a space can and

Once untimeliness is thought--along the lines I have been suggesting--outside the terms of a linear or dialectical conception of history, it can no longer be so easily dismissed as merely arriving on the scene too late. Untimely political theory calls our attention to political problems that we never foresaw; it stays attentive to l'a-venir, aware that the specter, as a revenant, might always return. So even the problems that seem "solved" may still contain lurking ghosts. Isaac's framework has no patience for these
games with ghosts; it seeks, if not to eliminate untimely theory altogether, then at least to relegate it to "second-order" status. However, the "problem" with being sure that one can simply interpret the events of 1989 (or any other events in history) and explain their meaning lies in the way this approach leads one to rest one's position, along with that of other "scholars," upon the actual/inactual distinction--implying along the way at least a weak version of the end of history thesis. Derrida suggests that this discourse on the end of history, re-invigorated by the events of 1989 and Francis Fukuyama's interpretation of them, seems itself to have come a bit late (they themselves lack timeliness given the proclamations of the "ends of man," "end of Marxism," "end of history," and "last man" as far back as the 50's).60 Derrida frames this phenomenon as follows: As for those who abandon themselves to that discourse [on the end of history] with the jubilation of youthful enthusiasm, they look like latecomers, a little as if it were possible to take still the last train after the last train--and yet be late to the end of history. How can one be late to the end of history? A question for today. It is serious because it obliges one to reflect again, as we have been doing since Hegel, on what happens and deserves the name event, after history; it obliges one to wonder if the end of history is but the end of a certain concept of history.61 Derrida's ironic reference to being "late to the end of history" serves to highlight the connections, which have been present throughout this discussion, between historicity and untimeliness. Only by focusing on untimeliness not as "missing the train" but in the sense of Hamlet's lament that "the time is out of joint" does one begin to glimpse historicity as the possibility of history itself. On a linear or dialectical model of time, the end of history would have to be just that: the end point on the line or the culmination of the dialectic. But if history continues to go on--and given the popularity of Fukuyama's work, continues to end--then one can only understand how it does so by turning to a different thinking of time. How can one be late to the end of history? If the time is out of joint, then maybe one will always already be late to the end of history. If the time is out of joint, how could one ever arrive at the end of history on time? A spectral thinking of the historical event tends to strengthen the point I only hinted at above: namely, that Isaac's conception of theory and history in the particular

, if the path has been blocked for theorists to think history differently, then we are faced with the totally debilitating choice of endorsing a Hegelian conception of history or loudly announcing its utter demise (which amounts to the same thing, since to propose the
relation he articulates cuts off the very possibility of proposing a different concept of history after Hegel. And suggestions for possible directions, and most importantly he insists that historicity makes possible a future history--possibly even a "post-history"--full of its own specters.

end of history also means to accept a Hegelian history, a point exemplified by Fukuyama who does both explicitly). Derridean historicity provides political theorists with an alternative way to approach history--and therefore a less constrictive way of considering what "theory is and should be." However, Derrida's "alternative" proves neither programmatic nor explicit. Historicity gives us a way to conceptualize and understand history after Hegel (and in his wake); it gets us out of Isaac's confining binarisms, but where we go from there remains an important choice, a deciding gesture (partage). Derrida gives some

Whatever may be its indetermination, be it that of 'there must be the future-to-come' ['il faut l'a-venir'], there is some future and some history, there is perhaps even the beginning of historicity for post-historical Man, beyond
man and beyond history such as they have been represented up until now. We must insist on this specific point precisely because it points to an essential lack of specificity, an indetermination that remains the ultimate mark of the future: whatever may be the case concerning the modality or the content of this duty, this necessity, this prescription or this injunction, this pledge, this task, also therefore this promise, this necessary promise, this 'it is necessary' is necessary, and that is the law.

This indifference to content here is not an indifference, it is not an attitude of indifference, on the contrary. Marking an opening to the event and to the future as such, it therefore conditions the interest in and not the indifference to anything whatsoever, to all content in general. Without it, there would be neither intention, nor need, nor desire, and so on.62

Ethics must never cede to a demand for timeliness only our FW can find solution to the problems of the Affirmative Chambers (Assistant Professor of Political Science at St. Mary's College of Maryland) 2k (Samuel A., Theory and Event 3:4, Spectral History, Untimely Theory, MUSE)
From Isaac's point of view this would make Derrida's political gesture an untimely one--in the sense of being too little too late--because it provides no direct answers to the pressing political problems faced by the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Derrida's reading--as Isaac might emphasize it--of Hamlet and Marx would thereby constitute a second-order form of inquiry, and therefore

an untimely theory of politics--in the sense that time is "out of joint"-provides an entirely new lens for viewing Derrida's position here: to characterize Derrida's political gesture as an
yet another "missed opportunity." Maybe so. But

untimely one should not lead one to conclude (as Isaac might want to conclude) that his argument can thereby be relegated to the sphere of the non- or a-political. The untimeliness of Derrida's claims and contentions prevents one from

listing their specific political content, but precisely this openness to an unspecifiable (and ghostly) future, coupled with a putting into question of the past, prevents one from foreclosing the political domain in Derrida's writings. Indeed, it is exactly the untimely openness, an openness to l'a-venir, that expands the political implications of those writings. For Derrida, the events
of 1989 will always return to haunt not only contemporary political theorists but also current political events--the very locus of concern for Isaac, and his respondents. This perpetual recurrence makes Isaac's attempt to arrest the

events, to speak to them, and to "interpret the[ir] meaning" ineffective and ill-advised. The

constraints applied to the political theorist by the distinction between first-order and second-order inquiry prove too restrictive for the field. Isaac's desire to respond to the events of 1989 is an admirable one, but turning political theory into a

problem-solving activity that confronts the "real world" will not serve to achieve Isaac's goals of changing that world. History must be taken as something much more than simply a scarce resource for solving problems; political theorists must consider seriously its spectral effects.

This implies that theory must be able to look to these spectral effects of historicity, to communicate with ghosts without trying to arrest them. By thinking carefully and critically through a non-Hegelian approach to history political theorists can relieve themselves of the burden imposed by Isaac's recapitulation of a Hegelian conception and begin to consider the possibilities offered by a politics of untimeliness. Only then maybe, finally, can theorists begin to examine or possibly solve certain problems in the world. More importantly, only then, can political theory break free both from the disciplinary confinements that Isaac criticizes and the problem-solving matrix that he tries to impose. Only then can political theorists start to render problematic that which in the present does not even appear as a problem.

We must refuse to define or predict the future Rose (University of Hull) 7 (Mitch, 8 May, The problem of power and the politics of landscape, Trans Inst Br Geog) he is suspicious of those who attempt to predict, calculate or determine a horizon for our being, a limit from which I pre-comprehend the future (Derrida and Ferraris 2001, 20). Derrida often identifies this inclination to pre-comprehend and thus deny the future as a form of messianism, a desire to identify what is to come with a particular doctrine or message: the distinguishing feature of any messianism is that it determines the figure of the Messiah, gives the Messiah a determinate characterization and specific configuration (Caputo 1997, 161). In response, Derrida proposes the
Derrida also has reservations about such bad players. Similarly,
image of the messianic, not a person or even a doctrine, but an impossible figure whose coming must always be awaited: the messianic is nothing other than a relation to the future so despoiled and indeterminate

As soon as a determinate outline is given to the future, to the promise, even to the Messiah, the messianic loses its purity. (Derrida and Ferraris 2001, 21) The idea of a purely undetermined future to come which must be
that it leaves being to come, i.e. undetermined. awaited for patiently, openly and generously (without determination or pre-conception) works its way through a lot of Derridas thinking on friendship (1997), democracy (Derrida et al. 1994) and reason (2005) and, at first glance, it effectively reiterates Deleuzes thinking on the eternal return, the dice throw and the fate of eternal destruction it binds us in. Yet, there is an important difference. In Derrida

orientation towards the future that the Messianic represents is one that is never fulfilled. The Messiah can never arrive, she is never actualised and, thus, is an impossible figure. And yet we should wait. Thus, unlike Deleuze, Derridas future is not something we rush towards affirmatively, but rather something we wait for generously, openly, hospitably if we can but its arrival would be disastrous. The future for Derrida is an anxiety we wait for something we would not like to wait for (Caputo 1997, 162). Thus, the point of waiting, of being open and generous towards the coming of the future, is not a love of chance but is an ethical political gesture to be open to the disruptive power of otherness that haunts and infests every event. This distinction between Derridas and Deleuzes orientation towards the future can, to some extent, be explained by their differing understandings of the event. In Deleuze, the engine for an event is
another event we throw the dice, a combination happens (posing problems and questions), we throw again. While the event is infused with new possibilities emerging from the charged chaos of the game, the game itself is sequential an event happens, and then new problems emerge and then we throw again.

, the

An events opening is precipitated by the previous events completion, each unfolding moment relying on what came before, each evolution having its own timely order. In Derrida, however, the engine for the event is the other, or the wholly other, the unexpected and the impossible that perhaps might be possible. In Derrida, we throw again because we are not convinced. The throw is never completed, it is always haunted by the possibility of something else, something more, something coming, that arrives suddenly and at any time. For Deleuze (like Nietzsche), the dice throw is positive and affirmative and negativity only enters the game through the bad player and

resentful machines that attempt to manage it. In Derrida, however, there is a present non-presence beyond the game, an unnerving possibility of something wholly unexpected, an unknowable future, a silent perhaps whispering in the players ear and it is this anxiety that characterises and possibilitates every throw: There is no future and no relation to the coming of the event without experience of the perhaps . . . the event belongs to a perhaps that is in keeping not with the possible but with the impossible. And its force is therefore irreducible to the force or the power of a performative event if it gives to the performative itself, to what is called the force of the performative, its chance and its effectiveness. (Derrida 2002, 235) The perhaps (the impossible possibility) gives to the dice throw (the performative event ) its chance and effectiveness. Each throw inherits what has been made possible by the previous throw, but it also inherits the perhaps the possibility of what comes. And it is the latter of these that makes us throw. For Derrida, we are all bad players. We throw the dice not only to actualise possibilities but to create them. To engender possibilities that can be actualised in the face of what cannot be seen. It is not that we do not love fate or resent the future. It is rather that we are anxious. We hear the call of an irruptive other who cannot be met (positively, affirmatively) but must be awaited. This is the problem of the future for Derrida: not simply a problem of the possible (what might and could be possible) but the impossible. A future that is unpredictable yes, but also mute, dark and utterly unnerving, as Levinas suggests: the future is not buried in the bowels of a pre-existent eternity where we would come to lay hold of it. It is absolutely other and new. And it is thus that one can understand the very reality of time, the absolute impossibility of finding in the present the equivalent of the future, the lack of any hold upon the future. (Levinas 1987, 80) The future described here does not belong to a temporal order. It is a future that can come at us at any time in the past (in terms of what was thought to be laid to rest) or in the future (in terms of what is anticipated or expected). It is a future that is not strictly speaking of our time. It arrives at us from nowhere, fundamentally opening the present and destroying any sense of sequentialism or order.

It is not a future to be but a future (perhaps) to come a future that can come, that might come. Unlike the noisy static of Deleuzes surface of being which is chaotic and unpredictable but also, in its own way, sequential and orderly the future I am describing can only be reckoned with as a silence, an impenetrable stillness that stares and beckons us to call out (nervously) what comes? No response. We throw the dice and
wait.

Derridas new international calls for us to condemn injustice that exists in our world now. Benjamin And Change 2006, Fullbright Scholar/Journalist And Professor Of English And Media
Studies At Vassar College Respectively.[Benjamin And Heesok Jaques Derrida, The Last European Substance] Specters of Marx In his political and philosophical meditations on the meaning of Europe, Derrida remains mindful of Europe's ghosts. Any rethinking of the European heritage must heed the specters of the past, particularly the victims of the last century's unprecedented atrocities. In looking to the future of Europe, Derrida opposes the urge to fend off the restless dead haunting the European legacy. Abolishing the past, he warns, can easily obliterate the possibility of a different future simply by enabling the self-aggrandizement of the present. Throughout the final decade of his work, he resists the vision of the rebirth of Europe as a bright new [End Page 150] day in which all of the nightmares of the past will have been dispelled, all ghosts banished and silenced. Derrida's most forceful argument against the negation of phantoms, the provocative Specters of Marx, takes aim at the idea of a present that has triumphantly exorcized all of its ghosts, a crucial underpinning of political dogma that annihilates the future as much as the past. Specters of Marx proceeds along several vectors at once: it is
a case for a critical resurrection of Marx's legacy; a treatise on the ethical and political significance of ghosts; a reading of Hamlet; a critique of post-1989 neoliberal triumphalism; a break with the traditional presuppositions of metaphysics and ontology; a reorientation of

1NC International Good

deconstruction as a politics of emancipation, democracy, and justice; an affirmation of messianic thought; a reclamation of the promise of the Enlightenment; a deliberation on the worldwide transformations wrought by new media, information, and communications technologies on politics, economics, the state, citizenship, democracy, public space, and social relations; a contemplation of the meaning of inheritance; a condemnation of the grave injustices of free market capitalism; and a call for a "New International" to oppose the new "Holy Alliance" at the close of the twentieth century. This diverse set of interventions is coordinated around the question of the temporal orientation of the West that also underlies
the reflections of The Other Heading. Specters of Marx may be seen as a multi-tiered challenge to our assumptions about the universal sovereignty of "today."

In opposition to the preeminence of the present, Derrida advocates a politics of responsibility to past and future. Justice, he claims, is due not only to the living, but also to the dead whom he identifies with the victims of war, violence, extermination,

oppression, imperialism, and totali-tarianism and to the not-yet born. The motif of justice, which lies at the heart of Derrida's ethical ruminations, is therefore linked to the idea of the specter as whatever cannot be encompassed by the "living present." For Derrida, specters are both revenants, spirits that come back, and arrivants, spirits that are to come. The present is unsettled no less by the return of the past than by the imminence of the future. Both temporal dimensions are essential to "spectrality," Derrida's name for what is no longer or not yet living, what is not simply present. As mentioned earlier, he defines spectrality as the "noncontemporaneity with itself of the living present" (xix). Insofar as every instant of time bears traces of a lingering past and hovers in suspense of an unforeseeable future, the cohesiveness of the present unravels. Time, Derrida argues, is never free of vestiges of the past and stirrings of the future, but rather constantly [End Page 151] filtered through the structures of memory and anticipation. The present is consequently never homogeneous, undivided and identical to itself, but always already spectral, intersected by other temporal modes that cannot be subsumed by it. Derrida's argument for the contemporary urgency of Marx's thought revolves around this uncanny figure of the specter. He highlights key moments in Marx's writings that summon the power of ghosts: the famous image of the specter of communism haunting Europe in the preface to the Communist Manifesto; the passage from the Eighteenth Brumaire on history as repetition and resurrection of the dead; the debate with Max Stirner in The German Ideology on the spectral essence of the human being; and the analysis in Capital of commodity fetishism as a ghostly return of the relations between human beings in the relations between things. To the extent that Marx's writings, in their intense preoccupation with the spectral, open up the possibility of a politics of ghosts and haunting, Derrida wants to safeguard Marx's heritage. However, he is also wary of Marx's impulse to reject phantoms, for instance in the Eighteenth Brumaire's critique of the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 for their expressive mimicry of past revolutions, their failure to cast off borrowed words and garments. In opposition to these anachronistic events, Marx calls for a revolution that would no longer derive its "poetry" and inspiration from the past: "let the dead bury their dead" (qtd. in Derrida, Specters 114). Insofar as Marx wants the specter of communism to substantialize itself through the revolution, to be done once and for all with mournful recollections, he sanctions a final exorcism of the dead. Derrida opposes this presentist mode of thinking by holding to the moment of haunting and its mourning work. When Marx attempts to expel ghosts from his political thought, he has, Derrida points out, something in common with the legions of intellectuals today who declare the Marxian legacy itself dead. Specters of Marx appears just a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a moment when Marx and Marxism were declared dead and neo-liberals trumpeted the "end of history" under the banner of free-market capitalism. In Specters, Derrida insists that Marx cannot be decisively exorcized from

politics indeed, that he haunts the very sense of finality and inevitability that shores up contemporary capitalist societies. Derrida wants to resurrect Marx's legacy in order to summon precisely those moments that call into question the self-congratulatory view of the
present as the highest stage of history. Indeed, his rethinking of Marx sets out to oppose the very idea of history unfolding in stages, the [End Page 152] assumption that history can be reduced to a series of discrete segments of time, the latest "today" always the most advanced. For Derrida, the belief

that each of these increments is homogeneous and self-contained reveals what is at the root of the division of history into progressive phases: it can only grasp time as present-time and history as a chain of presents.6 That is, it leaves no room for spectrality for the ways that memory of the past and anticipation of the future are integral, at every instant, to the experience of time. According to Derrida, the belief in the impermeable solidity of the present order is vital to totalitarian thinking. Every

the barbarity from which it sprang. Such regimes fear ghosts. To reassure and perpetuate themselves, they efface any spectral traces that threaten to disturb the self-enclosure of the present. This is what is deeply troubling for Derrida about the new "Holy Alliance" among contemporary capitalist societies that sing the triumphs of the free-market. These end-of-history apologists would have it that the cataclysms of the twentieth-century were just bumps on the road to the liberal democratic ideal. Moreover, they must turn their backs on and keep at bay the global specter of massive injustices that grow by the day. Derrida lists ten plagues: unemployment; the exclusion of the homeless, exiles, stateless persons, and immigrants from political participation; economic wars; the free market; the foreign debt and its consequences of starvation and despair; the dependence of scientific research, the economy, and the socialization of labor on the arms industry; nuclear proliferation; inter-ethnic wars; the growing power of the mafia and drug cartels; the current state of international law and its
authoritarian regime wants to eternalize its present in order to rule out the possibility of its future disintegration and to erase

institutions (Specters 81-83). To speak of the end of history is to suggest that all accounts have been settled, that the books have been closed on the crimes and atrocities of the past, and that the question of a fundamental change of conditions in the future is moot: the day of the perpetual present has dawned. In opposition to end-of-history triumphalism, Derrida sketches out an ethico-political engagement with a present
not: it is by nature unheimlich, strangely there and yet not there, neither fully present nor entirely absent. The ghost therefore does not belong to ontology. To delineate the indeterminate space of the phantom, Derrida proposes the term "hauntology." He plays on the neologism's homonymy with "ontology" in French, drawing [End Page 153] attention to the ghostly presence of the silent h. By letting ontology continue to echo in the term for a spectral logic that cannot be reduced to it, Derrida neatly circumvents the accusation that he simply wants to get rid of ontology, which would depart from the logic of haunting itself. Hauntology is not the opposite or the final overcoming of ontology, but its spectral trace.

that is not ontologically fixated on "what is" the actual. Ontology is inhospitable to the specter, for the specter both is and is

[ ] Derridas new international transcends the idea of nation-state violence, and challenges the idea of citizen ship. Derrida 1994, Studies At The Ecole Des Hautes Etudes En Sciences Sociales In Paris, 1994
[Jacques, "Nietzsche And The Machine" In Negotiations: Interventions And Interviews 19712001 By Jacquesderrida, Pg.237-241]
In the passage you quote, I call these responsibilities unprecedented [indites]. What does this term mean? In your terms, what is their time? Rather than

we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. After recent eventswhether one gives them the name of Nietzsche, of Heidegger, of the Second World War, of the Holocaust, of the destructibility of hu-manity by its own technical resourcesit is clear that we find ourselves in an absolutely unprecedented space.
implying a heroic pathos of originality, the term testifies to the fact that hubris. It simply acknowledges where we are. We

For this space one needs equally unprecedented reflections on responsibility, on the problematics of decision and action. To say this is not a piece of speculative

need the unprecedented otherwise there will be nothing, pure repetition. . . . The unprecedented is, of course, highly dangerous. Once on these paths of thought, one is liable to get shot at by people who are in a hurry

to interpret texts, who call you a neo-Nazi, a nihilist, a relativist, a mysticist, or whatever. But if one does not take such risks, then one does nothing, and nothing happens. What I am saying is very modest: without risk, there is nothing. R.B.: Why did you write "absolutely unprecedented"? J.D.: It was just a form of emphasis. Of course, the unprecedented is never possible without repetition, there is never something absolutely unprecedented, totally original or new; or rather, the new can only be new, radically new, to the extent that something new is produced, that is, where there is memory and repetition. The new cannot be invented without memory or repetition. So, two things: first, there can be no break, no experience of the break that does not presuppose a non-break, that does not presuppose memory. Second, contamination follows from this iterability that is constitutive of the unprecedented. Contamination happens because iterability inhabits from the very first what is not yet thought. One has to confront this paradoxical logic to be able to think the unthought. R.B.: Let me take an example related to what you have just been saying about repetition. You have mentioned Specters of Marx several times in what you have been saying, so an example taken from this work is more than appropriate. In this combative, ironically "timely" text, you speak about our responsibility before the unprecedented. One particularly interesting aspect of the book concerns what you call a new International. I will not gather together all the threads that determine the conceptual strategy of this term in the book. Suffice it to say that Specters of Marx remains faithful to a notion of internationality in Marx that, you argue, Marx himself betrayed by ontologizing, among other things, the temporally indefinite structure of revolution and the "supplementary" re-lationship between humanity and its productions. This new International is a configuration of bonds [liens] that are in the process of being formed, which go and citizenship, the nation-state, and national sovereignty, but which are neither working towards nor anticipating a cosmopolitan superstate. This notion of a new International forms part of the book's strategy to prepare the ground for a new sociopolitical critique of contemporary political discourses. . . . With Specters of Marx in mind, how would you respond to the following? Before the inadequate structures of international law, we are at present witnessing two repetitions. The first is that of the nation-states of Europe, which find themselves confronted once more by regional and ethnic determinations of a people's identity. Like all repetitions, however, there is a difference: today's nationalisms and fascisms are produced in, and constitute themselves within, a world that is technologically different from that of the 1920s and 1930s, a world that is much smaller and more "international" due to the accelerated processes of technicization. The difference has ambivalent implications for any form of nationalism: the repetition of nationalisms is certainly dated, and yet it is all the more dangerous and singular for being dated. The other repetition is that of the nation-states that, as nation-states, are constitutively unable to think, and practice, a notion of international law. For international law remains determined by the concept of national sovereignty, a principle that is stopping, for example, the United Nations from acting effectively beyond the wishes of one or other of its permanent members. These two repetition , although of a different nature, are tending to paralyze inventive moves. How, then, do you conceive the relation

The "International" I am interested in would indeed exceed the concepts of nation, of state, and of nation-state that determine the concept of international. I believe that we are at present involved in a process that demands an accelerated transformation of international law. Every event
between this emerging new International and the present sluggishness of institutions of international law? J.D.: in the contemporary world shows international institutions to be powerless, dependent, as they are, for their means of enforcement on the decisions of particular, powerful nation-states that curtail the general will of such institutions. The reason for this is clear: the very concepts upon which the missions of international institutions are builtI especially have in mind the United Nationsneed to be rethought, deconstructed. All

these concepts belong to a Western tradition of the Political that implies the police, the sovereignty of the state, modern concept of the nation-state. The notion of the political is being completely underminedtechnically, economically, and politically. International law, international institutions need to be rethought and thereby improved. The process is infinite and interminable, but it is absolutely necessary. In this respect I have nothing against international institutions. I believe one must accept their history, agree to their perfectibility, and so on. That said, we are at the same time witnessing something like an aspiration towardI do not dare to use the word solidarity or community because these words have too much of a particular resonancea bond [lien] (the term is only suitable given its high level of abstraction), a bond betweenhere, again, I do not want to use a term like citizens of the world since it is a concept excessively marked by a tradition of the cosmopolitan, not political subjects, nor even human beingslet us say, then, singularities, a bond between singularities. There is today an aspiration toward a bond between singularities all over the world. This bond not only extends beyond nations and states, such as they are composed today or such as they are in the process or decomposition, but
ex-tends beyond the very concepts of nation or state. For example, if I feel, in solidarity today with this particular Algerian who is caught between the F.I.S. and the Algerian state, or this particular Croat, Serbian-, or Bosnian, or this particular South African, this particular Russian or Ukrainian, or whoeverit is not a feeling of one citizen toward another, it is not a feeling peculiar to a citizen of the world, as if we are all potential or imaginary citizens of a great state. No,

what binds me to these people is something different than membership in a world na-tion-state or in an international community extending indefinitely the limits of what one still calls today the nation-state. What binds me to themand

this is the point; there is a bond, but this bond cannot be contained within the traditional conceits of community, obligation, or responsibilityis

a protest against citizenship, a protest against membership in a political configuration as such. The bond is, for example, a form of political
solidarity opposed, to the political qua a politics tied to the nation-state. "The democracy to come" is a democracy whose bonds are no longer those that can be deduced from the concept of democracy, such as this concept has emerged and developed in the history of the West.

The concept of democracy has always been tied to the city, to the state, to the polis as topos, and in modern times to the nation-state; democracies have always been conceived and conceptualized as a phenomenon of he "nation-state," and this is where the problem lies. Where democracy is necessarily related to the old concept of politeia, to the topos of the polis, it is challenged by the de-localizing resources of present and future technics and media. What I am calling a new International both signals the need to radicalize the critique of law, of the state and the nation, and bears witness to an international which carries the promise of itself, which is hearing the promise of a "democracy to come," linking singularities beyond the structures of the nation-state. This democracy is not an abstract utopia. I believe this solidarity, this bond to be what is provoking the gradual and necessary transformation of international law; it renders account of the
dissatisfaction we all have toward present events in the world. If no one is happy with the present state of the world, it is because nothing is satisfactory: neither the state, nor the nation-state, nor international law, nor the world "order"; and because this dissatisfaction derives in the last instance from a "bond" that demands thought and negotiation. Since this into a community; the

bond between singularities, as well as the promise it carries, is what I call spectral, it cannot be made promise of the bond forms neither a national, linguistic, or cultural community, nor does it anticipate a cosmopolitan constitution. It exceeds all cultures, all languages, it even exceeds the concept of humanity. A final point: our
dissatisfaction requires, at the same time, in the same gesture of thought, rethinking the limits between the human and the animal, the human and the natural, the human and the technical. For the question of animality, that of the earth, of what we may mean by "life" in general also makes up the promise of this bond.

] New international would solve unchecked hegemony.

DERRIDA 1994, Director Of Studies At The Ecole Des Hautes Etudes En Sciences Sociales,
[Jacques, Specters Ofmarx Pg. 50-55 today, in these times, a new "world order" seeks to stabilize a new, necessarily new disturbance [dereglement] by installing an unprecedented form of hegemony. It is a matter, then, but as always, of a novel form of war. It at least resembles a great "conjuration" against Marxism, a "conjurement" of Marxism: once again, another attempt, a new, always new mobilization to struggle against it, against that which and those whom it rep-resents and will continue to represent (the idea of a new International), and to combat an International by exorcising it. Very novel and so ancient, the
A time of the world, conjuration appears both powerful and, as always, worried, fragile, anxious. The enemy to be conjured away, for those sworn to the conjuration, is, to be sure, called Marxism. But people are now afraid that they will no longer recognize it. They quake at the hypothesis that, by virtue of one of those metamorphoses that Marx talked about so much ("metamorphosis" was one of his favorite words throughout his life), a new "Marxism" will no longer have the face by which one was accustomed to identify it and put it down. Perhaps people are no longer afraid of Marxists, but they are still afraid of certain nonMarxists who have not renounced Marx's inheritance, crypto-Marxists, pseudo- or para-"Marxists" who would be standing by to change the guard, but behind features or quotation marks that the anxious experts of anti-communism are not trained to unmask.Besides the reasons just given, we will privilege this figure of conjuration for still other reasons. They have already begun to make their appearance. In its two concepts (conjuration and conjurement, Vaschwdrung and Beschwiirung), we must take into account another essential meaning: the act that consists in swearing, taking an oath, therefore promising, deciding, taking a responsibility, in

short, committing oneself in a performative fashionas well as in a more or less secret fashion, and thus more or less public, there where this frontier between the public and the private is constantly being displaced, remaining less assured than ever, as the limit that would permit one to identify the political. And if this important frontier is

being displaced, it is because the medium in which it is instituted, namely, the medium of the media themselves (news, the press, telecommunications, technotelediscursivity, techno-tele-iconicity, that which in general assures and determines the spacing of public space, the very possibility of the res publics and the phenomenality of the political), this element itself is neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it spectralizes. It does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on

It requires, then, what we call, to save time and space rather than just to make up a word, hauntology. We will take this category to be irreducible, and first of all to everything it makes possible: ontology, theology, positive or
the Being of beings, or to the essence of life or death. negative onto-theology. This dimension of performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets, will play an indispensable role in what I would like to say this evening. "An interpretation that transforms what it interprets" is a definition of the performative as unorthodox with regard to speech act theory as it is with regard to the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach ("The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, how-ever, is to change it [Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es alma aber drauf an, sie zu verdndern]").

If I take the floor at the opening of such an impressive, ambitious, necessary or risky, others might say historic colloquium; if, after

hesitating for a long time and despite the obvious limits of my competence, I nevertheless accepted the invitation with which Bernd Magnus has honored me, it is not in the first place in order to propose a scholarly, philosophical discourse. It is first of all so as not to flee from a responsibility. More precisely, it is in order to submit for your discussion several hypotheses on the nature of such a responsibility. "What is ours? In what way is it historical? And what does it have to do with so many specters? No one, it seems to me, can contest the fact that a dogmatics

paradoxical and suspect conditions. There is today in the world a dominant discourse, or rather one that is on the way to becoming dominant, on

is attempting to install its worldwide hegemony in

the subject of Marx's work and thought, on the subject of Marxism (which is perhaps not the same thing), on the subject of the socialist International and the universal revolution, on the subject of the more or less slow destruction of the revolutionary model in its Marxist inspiration, on the subject of the rapid, precipitous, recent collapse of societies that attempted to put it into effect at least in what we will call for the moment, citing once again the Manifesto, "old Europe," and so forth. This dominating discourse Often has the manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form that Freud assigned

to the so-called triumphant phase of mourning work. The incantation repeats and ritualizes itself, it holds forth and holds to formulas, like any animistic magic. To the rhythm of a cadenced march, it proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It says: long live capitalism, long lives the market, here's to the survival of economic and political liberalism! If this hegemony is attempting

to install its dogmatic orchestration in suspect and paradoxical conditions, it isfirst of all because . And never more "historic," by which we mean inscribed in an absolutely novel moment of a process that is nonetheless subject to a law of iterability. What are we doing by speaking, with these first words, of a dominant discourse andof an incontestable self-evidence regarding it? At least two things. We are obviously having recourse to received concepts: (1) that of hegemony ("dominant discourse") and (2) that of testimony ("incontestable self -evidence"). We will have to account for these and justify them. 1. We have implicitly referred (particularly so as to speak of what no one, I presume, would dream of contesting) to that which everywhere organizes and commands public manifestation or testimony in the public space. In question here is a set constituted by three indissociable places or apparatuses of our culture: a. There is first of all the culture called more or less properly -political-(the official discourses of parties and politicians in power in the world, virtually everywhere Western models prevail, the speech or the rhetoric of what in France is called the "classe politique"). b. There is also what is rather confusedly qualified as mass-media culture: "communications" and interpretations, selective and hierarchized production of "information" through channels whose power has grown in an absolutely unheardof fashion at a rhythm that coincides precisely, no doubt not fortuitously, with that of the fall of regimes on the Marxist model, a fall to which it contributed mightily butand this is not the least important pointin forms and modes of appropriation, and at a speed that also affect in an essential fashion the very concept of public space in so-called liberal democracies; and at the center of this colloquium the question of media tele-technology, economy, and power, in their irreducibly spectral dimension, should cut across all our discussions. What can one do with the Marxist schemas in order to deal with this todaytheoretically and practicallyand thus in order to change it? To put it in a word that would sum up the position I am going to defend (and what I am putting forward here, pardon me for saying this again, corresponds more to a position-taking than to the work such a position calls for, presupposes, or prefigures), these schemas appear both indispensable and insufficient in their present form. Marx is one of the rare thinkers of the past to have taken seriously, at least in its principle, the originary

indissociability of technics and language, and thus of tele-technics (for every language is a tele-technics). But it is not at all to denigrate him, it is even to speak in what we will still dare to call the spirit of Marx, it is almost to quote word for word his own predictions, it is to register [prendre acte] and to confirm to say: as regards tele-technics, and thus also as regards science, he could not accede to the experience and to the anticipations on this subject that are ours today. c. There is finally scholarly or academic culture, notably that of historians, sociologists and politologists, theoreticians of literature, anthropologists, philosophers, in particular political philosophers, whose discourse is itself relayed by the academic and commercial press, but also by the media in general. For no one will havefailed to notice that the three places, forms, and powers of culture that I have just identified (the expressly political discourse of the "political class," media discourse, and intellectual, scholarly, or academic discourse) are more than ever welded together by the same apparatuses or -by ones that are iridissocidble from them. These apparatuses are doubtless complex, differential, conflictual, and over determined. But whatever may be the conflicts, inequalities, or over determinations among them,they

communicate and cooperate at every moment toward producing the greatest force with which to assure the hegemony or the imperialism in question. They do so thanks to the mediation of what is called precisely the media in

the broadest, most mobile, and, considering the acceleration of technical advances, most technologically invasive sense of this term. As it has never done before, either to such a degree or in these forms, the politico-economic hegemony, like the intellectual or discursive domination, passes by way of techno-mediatic powerthat is, by a power that at the same time, in a differentiated and contradictory fashion, conditions and endangers any democracy. Now, this power, this differentiated set of powers cannot be analyzed or potentially combat-ted, supported here, attacked there, without taking into account so many spectral effects, the new speed of apparition (we understand this word in its ghostly sense) of the simulacrum, the synthetic or prosthetic image, and the virtual event, cyberspace and surveillance, the control, appropriations, and speculations that today deploy unheard-of powers. Have Marx and his heirs helped us to think and to treat this phenomenon? If we say that the answer to this question is at once yes and no, yes in one respect, no in another, and that one must filter, select, differentiate, restructure the questions, it is only in order to announce, in too preliminary a fashion, the tone and the general form of our conclusions: namely, that one must assume the inheritance of Marxism, assume its most "living" part, which is to say, paradoxically, that which continues to put back on the drawing board the question of life, spirit, or the spectral, of life-death beyond the opposition between life and death. This inheritance must be reaffirmed by transforming it as radically as will be necessary Such a reaffirmation would be both faithful to something that resonates in Marx's appeal-let us say once again in the spirit of his injunction-and in conformity with the concept of inheritance in general. Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task. It remains before us just as unquestionably as we are heirs of Marxism, even before wanting or refusing to be, and, like all inheritors, we are in mourning. In mourning in particular for what is called

To be, this word in which we earlier saw the word of the spirit, means, for the same reason, to inherit All the questions on the subject of being or of what is to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance. There is no backwardlooking fervor in this reminder, no traditionalist fiavoi Reaction, reactionary, or reactive are but interpretations of the structure of inheritance. That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not. And that, as Hlderlin said so well, we can only bear witness to it. To bear witness would be to
Marxism. bear witness to what we are insofar as we inherit, and that-here is the circle, here is the chance, or the finitude-we inherit the very thing that allows us to bear witness to it. As for Hlderlin, he calls this language, "the most dangerous of goods," given to man "so that he bears witness to having inherited/ what he is [damiterzeuge was ersei/ geerbt zu haben 2. When we advance at least the hypothesis that the dogma on the subject of the end of Marxism and of Marxist societies is today, tendentially, a "dominant discourse," we are still speaking, of course, in the Marxist code. We must not deny or dissimulate the problematic character of this gesture. Those who would accuse it of being circular or begging the question would not be altogether wrong. At least provisionally, we are placing our trust, in fact, in this form of critical analysis we have inherited from Marxism: In a given situation, provided that it is determinable and determined as being that of a socio-political antagonism, a hegemonic force always seems to be represented by a dominant rhetoric and ideology, whatever may be the conflicts between forces, the principal contradiction or the secondary contradictions, the over -determinations and the relays that may later complicate this schemaand therefore lead us to be suspicious of the simple opposition of dominant and dominated, or even of the final determination of the forces in conflict, or even, more radically, of the idea that force is always stronger than weakness (Nietzsche and Benjamin have encouraged us to have doubts

on this score, each in his own way, and especially the latter when he associated "historical materialism" with the inheritance, precisely, of some "weak messianic force"2). Critical inheritance: one may thus, for example, speak of a dominant discourse or of dominant

representations and ideas, and refer in this way to a hierarchized and conflictual field without necessarily subscribing to the concept of social class by means of which Marx so often determined, particularly in The German Ideology, the forces that are fighting for control of the hegemony. And even quite simply of the State. When, for example, in evoking the history of ideas, the Manifesto declares that the "ruling ideas [die herrschenden Ideen] of each age have ever been the-ideasof its ruling class [der herrschenden Klasse]" (p. 26), it is not out of the question for a selective critique to filter the inheritance of this utterance so as to keep this rather than that. One may continue to speak of domination in a field of forces not only while suspending the reference to this ultimate support that would be the identity and the self-identity of a social class, but even while suspending the credit extended to what Marx calls the idea, the determination of the superstructure as idea, ideal or ideological representation, indeed even the discursive form of this representation. All the more so since the concept of idea implies this irreducible genesis of the spectral that we are planning to re-examine here.