Politics of `hauntology'

A new study shows how Jacques Derrida taught the political and theoretical Left to reread Marx.

Liberal Democrats in the West are often surprised at the manifold ethnic, religious and nationalist conflicts that they thought belonged to a bygone age. Instead of the much expected `New World Order', the victory of universal values and the generalisation of `post-conventional' identities, we are witnessing an explosion of particularisms and an increasing challenge to Western universalism. The liberals have blamed this on the `deferred effects of totalitarianism' and predicted that this worldwide disturbance is only, to quote Chantal Mouffe, "a short parenthesis before rationality reimposes its order, or the last desperate cry of the political before it is definitely destroyed by the forces of law and universal reason". In this lies the possibility of the full elimination of the political, most certainly a "devastating consequence for democratic politics".

In his clear-headed study of Jacques Derrida's venture into Marxist political theory, Nissim Mannathukkaren analyses how Derrida taught the political and theoretical Left to reread Marx from a new perspective and showed ways of developing and living a constantly renewable stream of ideas. The cultural and political logic of his notions on liberation and ideology has helped in reconceptualising the nature of power and the conditions of existence in modern societies.

In a world of cut-throat economics, fanaticism, dogmatism, aggressive sectarianism and, most of all, terrorism and violence, our survival depends, as Vaclav Havel puts it, on the "degree to which we accept responsibility for ourselves and the world, and face the seen and unseen threats to our world". Havel warns: "I feel strongly that the reckless, unbridled course of civilisation today, in which almost all of us are, to some extent, involved is one of the contributing causes of violence and oppression. Emptiness and despair take many of us by the scruff, leading to uncalled for violence." It is therefore our responsibility to improve the world, "first of all in the field of the human spirit, of human conscience, of human responsibility... " and thus provide some inspiration for the people of this world.

Mannathukkaren, at the outset, strikes a similar note of regret for the failure of socialism in the 20th century which, more than ever, was the most suitable for equality and freedom. Instead, a new phase of imperialism haunts us. As he rightly points out: "So surprised are we at our own capacity to participate in this hedonist moment of history that the niggling doubts are banished as the `ranting madmen' who love to live in nothing but those dark dungeons." Historical imagination stands emasculated and our illusions and ideals, underpinned by memory, are dead. The spectres of imperialism, and the macabre role of the Christian Right in Western history all point to one thing: liberal democratic capitalism and the bigotry of religious camps are here to stay. We see that a time comes when our intellectual activities are suddenly shaken and the traditional rationales that underpin our daily practices stand discredited.

As maintained by Mannathukkaren, Francis Fukuyama went against the whole notion of an oppositional discourse to liberal democracy though in his new book, America at the Crossroads, he has begun to recant. According to this thesis, communism and Marxism are dead and liberal democracy cannot be improved upon. The end of history thus became synonymous with the suppression of political opposition and the end of the subject. Implicit in this assumption is the apparent supremacy of systems over individuals.

On the other hand, Derrida emphasises the seamless nature of history as a site of ideological conflict between different world systems. His book Specters of Marx has the undercurrent of the `humanities of suspicion' that challenges the establishment legacies of positivism, progress, humanism and rationalism. Marxism, for Derrida, gets locked directly into the structures of technological dominance, military violence and ideological legitimation and its role becomes an act of intervention with an emancipatory potential that is both ethical and political.

Upholding the virtues of such a standpoint, Mannathukkaren takes Derrida's intervention into Marxism as a hopeful sign for its reinvention with the underlying queries: Are we willing to convey any thought in any medium? Are we ready never to regard a point of view as completely false or beneath contempt? Are we ready to fight for truth tenaciously but concede error graciously? Any meaningful answers need to take into consideration the place of Marx and the impetus towards socialist thinking that can reach out to millions. It is imperative to keep this fact of our social and economic history in the forefront in order to come to grips with the need to offer resistance to an increasingly exploitative world. This politics of resistance comes from the Left, as seen in Latin America in recent times, indicating that Marx cannot be edited out of cultural history. He returns like a ghost, and this time, that ghost returns in the resurgence of racial or ethnic or nationalist oppositions to imperialist hegemony. History, thus, becomes a site of ideological conflict between different world systems.

In a scathing attack on liberal democracy, Derrida emphasises its shortcomings: If it is a superior form of governance, why are there problems in implementing it? Is the present world not replete with mass unemployment, homelessness, violence, inequality, famine and economic oppression? How, then, can the conservative Right occupy the moral high ground? In the context of Derrida's philosophy, grand narratives like globalisation stand suspect and progress seems only to be an illusion. Our age, agrees Mannathukkaren, is full of uninterrupted disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. With the victory of free market economics arise conditions which, according to Derrida, are "so critical, fragile, threatened, even in certain regards catastrophic, and in some bereaved". A unilateralism of the school of thought that favoured the triumph of liberal democracy had to be countered by resurrecting the ghost of Marx.

Mannathukkaren emphasises a socialist framework that can "contend with the present, the twofold mystification unleashed by market and religion". Most revolutionary ideas concerning major issues such as human rights, world peace and economic upliftment have to be wrenched out of the hands of "impostors who masquerade as liberators". Contestation and radical doubt about the sincerity of political programmers, the working of free market economy and the notions of freedom and human rights all stand questioned here.

Derridian techniques of reading or what we call deconstruction, argues Mannathukkaren, become ultimately a political practice, an exercise in bringing down the so-called logic behind systems of thought and social institutions. Such a theory is particularly conducive to the post-Marxist forms of radicalism, though Mannathukkaren regards it more as a "non-deterministic Marxism". With this framework, it is difficult to conceive of a history without a historical consciousness. Arthur Marwick is of the opinion that "imagination boggles, because it is only through knowledge of its history that a society can have knowledge of itself". A society without its knowledge of history therefore will be a society `adrift'. The question of the `end of history' syndrome, which arose with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, is far-fetched as Marx will be relevant wherever there is a need for political and economic reorganisation. Marxism, Derrida holds, is not a unified singular concept, but inherently plural as seen by its application in varied situations. This, however, would be provocative to classical Marxists, who can never agree with this `multifariouness' of their ideology or with Derrida's view that there exists "a Marxism of the Right and a Marxism of the Left".

The tensions between internationalism and nationalism, between globalism and parochialist ethnocentrism, between universalism and class privileges, are very real issues in Derrida's view of history. Derrida's writings are a legitimate reaction to the "monotony of universal modernisms", a vision of the world which is positivistic and identifies with the fantasy of a linear history and absolute truth. Countering the euphoria of Fukuyama's theory, Derrida proclaimed that the elegy to socialism was a premature gesture that overlooked the lurking ghost of Marx. The defeat of national dignity by hunger and war, the unrelenting siege of many developing nations by bankers and by the "commercial masters of the world", in the words of Eduardo Galeano, are some of the factors that prompted Derrida to condemn the systems that debunked socialism.

Derrida entered into this debate with his reading of Marx's `spectropoetics' - his obsession with ghosts, spectres and spirits. History, according to him, is full of beginnings and ends, replete with moments of hopefulness and forward-looking expectation as well as an obsession with a haunting past. Into the welter of problems and views concerning the future of Marxism, and the uncertainty of the attendant points of view, Derrida intervened with his politics of memory, of inheritance and legacies, believing all along that a philosophical perspective would help to deepen our understanding and to inform our actions.

In these days of global acceleration on the one hand and the intensifying local nationalisms on the other, how should we be thinking of Marx and Marxism? Drawing interesting parallels with the repeated entry and exit of the ghost in Hamlet, Derrida waited for an apparition of the spectre of Marx. Like an intellectual Hamlet, Derrida meditated on the life and death of truths and the spectres that haunt memory. He explained the `end of history syndrome' by arguing that each time there is an event, it seems to be the last time. This `hauntology' is behind the whole question of "to be or not to be". It is all a question of repetition, runs Derrida's argument, like the ghosts who have the habit of returning again and again.

His thesis, therefore, assumes that "there is more than one of Marx, there must be more than one of them". One does not know if it is living or dead, but it concerns all of us and "comes to defy semantics as much as ontology, psychology and philosophy". And like the ghost in Hamlet, "this thing looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there". It is a paradoxical phenomenality, a type of ungraspable visibility of the invisible. Derrida is here arguing that the idea of a spectre involves mourning, which is an attempt "to ontologise remains, to make them present, by identifying the bodily remains and by localising the dead" or, like Hamlet, by trying to give a tongue to the skull. The question of `Whither Marxism?' therefore follows the ghost to find out what is wrong with "the state of Denmark". And does this not mean also that we are followed in turn by the ghost? What seems to be the future "comes back in advance from the past, from the back".

Derrida is of the view that unlike any other philosophical tradition, the Marxian makes an allowance for restructuring and reinventing in view of the unpredictability of knowledge and the ever-changing politics of globalisation. Thus, reading and re-reading, revisions and re-revisions of Marx become imperative. He is clear in his mind that "there will be no future without Marx, without the memory and inheritance of Marx". We live in times when it is impossible to ignore the impact of Marxist thought, may it be tangible or invisible. Mannathukkaren gives timely advice to the Marxists to engage creatively with Derrida, Benjamin and Bloch with the "desire to reinstate the `romantic' Marx into the Marxist oeuvre". Otherwise, he warns, "the ghosts of Derrida and others shall come to haunt Marxists".