Specters (Derrida, King Hamlet, Chris Hani, Marielle Franco)

 Obsession 

In “Marx’s Injunctions,” the first chapter of Jacques Derrida’s emblematic book, “Specters of Marx,” first published in Brazil in 1994 by Relume-Dumará (a year after its original publication in France), there is a passage at the end of the chapter that is quite symptomatic of the subject we want to address, which concerns performative acts. It is when the coroner declares the death: “The constative form tends to reassure. The confirmation is effective. It wants to be, and must be, in effect. It is, in effect, a performative that seeks to certify, but, first and foremost, certifying itself by certifying itself, for nothing is less certain than this, whose death we would wish, is in fact dead” (Derrida, 1994, p. 71). It is about the menacing return of the past in the future that Derrida's two lectures, on April 22nd and 23rd, 1993, at the University of California (Riverside), will address, in a symposium entitled "Whither Marxism?". It is impossible to lose sight of this 1993 context: the global financial crisis and neoliberalism; the controversial socialist government of Mitterrand. Behind a certainty – the death of Marxism and the irreversible past to which it would be condemned – there would be, according to Derrida, a seething of doubts. How to conjure away the threat of its return? It is like the performative act of the coroner declaring death, above all, to reassure himself. It is like saying: "what remained alive, no longer lives and, therefore, is no longer effective in death; you can rest easy."

It was a book fair, around 1998. Perhaps that book was an outtake from a previous edition, but I was still surprised. After all, Derrida wasn't a classical Marxist. It's as if Deleuze had written a book about Marx (it seems that this was in fact his last project). We were in the FHC government. I bought the book, tried to read a few pages and put it aside. But the dead always return. There was Hamlet haunted by the ghostly return of his father; there was Timon of Athens under the sign of perjury. By bringing up these two Shakespearean plays, cited several times by Marx, Derrida ends up highlighting two ambiguous meanings of the word "conjuration": conspiracy and exorcism.

Regarding conspiracy, one swears to stop time and throw it off balance, as described at the beginning of Hamlet. In exorcism, as in the case of the forensic doctor, one contacts death in order to kill (exactly as happened in the mid-90s: one contacted the death of Marxism in order to kill it); or one swears not to fulfill it – a kind of betrayal that in "Timon of Athens" is associated with nature.

The various images of Marx, as well as these two ambiguous meanings of "conspiracy," reveal to us, among other things, the injunctions in Marx and the extent of the disjunction between them, even making them untranslatable into one another. Derrida reminds us that the Marxist Marx shared with the representatives of Power the view of the boundary between reality and specter. On the other hand, the engendered Marxism transposed this boundary through revolution – this picture aptly translates the idea of ​​obsession: Marx was obsessed with transposing the boundary between the real and the specter, a transposition that he tried to reject at all costs. Following the same line of reasoning, the hegemony of old Europe (or the contemporary hegemony of neoliberalism) would always organize the repression of the phantom and, paradoxically, the confirmation of an obsession (hence why neoliberalism cannot rid itself of all of Marx's phantoms). The different meanings of "conjuração" (conjuration) attest to something in common, even though they are ambiguous meanings and even untranslatable into one another. 

The logic of the gift 

It is worth considering "time out of joint," which is associated with the appearance of the ghost in Hamlet: "The ghost of my father—armed! Smell of vile play. Vile deeds will arise though ground hides them from human sight" (Shakespeare, 2015, p. 66). There is a relationship between the ghost and the future, as if the former were announcing it. The appearance of the ghost, in this case, King Hamlet, is a kind of articulation between the past (what is absent) and the future. In this way, the present is prescribed and arranged in the two directions of absence. This disjunction, which Heidegger will show in his translation of Anaximander, exposes the non-contemporaneity of the present time to itself. A disjunction that opens up the infinite asymmetry of the relationship with the other. This perspective of disjunction is important because it establishes the tragic, in contrast to the pessimistic and nihilistic dimension in the face of present injustice, according to which it would be up to law to repair the injustice and restitution of the debt, in accordance with the logic of revenge and law. What Derrida highlights is another logic, that of the gift without restitution, without calculation and without accounting: only disjunction could do justice or render justice to the other as other; leave the other with that agreement with himself that is proper to him and gives him presence; give what he himself does not have; grant or add in supplement, outside of commerce, without exchange.

And here, all the importance of deconstruction, as a thought of gift and justice. Deconstruction of the present or of any synthesis or system in favor of the heterogeneity of its condition. It is in this sense that justice is a favor granted under the sign of presence, before synthesis or a system in a totalizing horizon.

The question of inheritance

When Derrida brings in Maurice Blanchot's text, "The Three Speeches of Marx," he ends up highlighting something that Blanchot himself does not emphasize: the political imperative. Blanchot's text is explicit: "the word 'communist' is frequently reinvented in the name of a thought of singularity and relation, which is not exhausted in the political" (Blanchot, 2014, p. 2, NT 4). These would be multiple forms of the written word, which cannot be retranslated into one another, producing an irreducible effect of distortion that would lead to an incessant reorganization on the part of its reader. In this aspect, unlike science, which is always dependent on ideology, the demand or injunction of writing takes charge of all the forms and forces of dissolution, of transformation, which is the very senseless game of writing. But in Derrida there is the question of inheritance, of choice: which image of Marx should be chosen?

The Performative Act

There are various injunctions, demands, and images of Marx. And the one to be inherited will not always have to be exactly like the original. Marx's "example" shows us that the Marxism engendered has little to do with Marx the Marxist. In fact, there is a whole field of work, of the transformation of the phantom, that leads us to Valéry in "The Crisis of the Spirit": "this skull here was Kant's, which begat Hegel, which begat Marx..." (Valéry, 1957, vol. 1, p. 993, apud Derrida, 1994, p. 19). The "example" belongs to the category of the gift: giving what one does not have. But alongside all these forces of transformation, which Blanchot points out thinking about the injunctions of writing, Derrida, in his analysis of Marx, grants privilege to the political gesture: it is the response to demands. In other words, it is the question of inheritance. In this respect, the performative act assumes great importance: the oath, the declaration. A kind of violence that interrupts time, throwing it off balance, and which, in Hamlet, will be associated with the appearance of the King's ghost. But for Derrida, this performativity, linked to the instant, an immediate response to the demands of justice, will be associated in Marx with permanent revolution. It is a here and now under the sign of the future. All the criticism that Derrida undertakes against the University, at least in his lecture in 1993, concerns the process of depoliticization that would be attempted to be applied to Marxist work: following the old concept of reading, treating the work calmly, objectively, without taking sides and respecting the norms of hermeneutical, philological and philosophical exegesis – thus undermining the political imperative, the imminence, the urgency of a response to the demands of an impatient and unconditional justice. What should be mentioned is that in this here and now, established by the performative act, there is an opening of unknowing, generated precisely by heterogeneity: the phantom, as past, repetition of the same; and the phantom as future, imminence, the other – repetition of the different. What seems to me to be the main line of Derrida's argument is the privilege granted to the future: this opening of the present, established by unknowing (after all, we do not know if the death of philosophy, proclaimed since the 19th century, is a desire for resurrection or a desire for the other), is simply the future affirmed. Hence the importance of imminence and the category of the possible associated with it.

Holy Alliance and New World Order

When Derrida addresses the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and compares that era to 1993, when he delivers the lecture that gave rise to the book, he understands that, fundamentally, the specter is the future in both situations. Let us recall the first words of the Manifesto: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy hunt for this spectre: Pope, Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and police.” In 1848, therefore, all the effort undertaken by old Europe, in a kind of conspiracy between nobility and clergy, is aimed at preventing the aforementioned spectre from materializing in the future, at the risk of Europe's very existence. In 1993, the return of the specter of the past must be prevented, must be conjured away, just as a coroner certifies death (this time, through an alliance under the tutelage of the US, the new world order is the new conspiracy). In both situations, the communist specter is the future: a threat to come (in 1848, for the first time; in 1993, as a return from the past). Faced with these threats, there is an investment in a reassuring order of the present (present-past; present-present; present-future) and in the opposition between current reality, understood as the present of the present (effective presence) and absence-non-presence-ineffectiveness-inatality-virtuality-simulacrum.

The Return of the Different

When Derrida comments on the meaning of the question that gives the symposium its name, "Whither Marxism?" in 1993, which can be understood as either "where is Marxism going?" or "is Marxism perishing?", he calls the aforementioned question a tedious anachronism. That's because, back in the 50s, their generation was already rebelling against the real communism of the Soviet Union. The fact is that in the 50s there was an apocalyptic tone to the issue, a product of a deconstruction that would become part of the great canon of modern apocalypse: the end of man; the end of history; the end of philosophy. To the tradition of these eschatological themes would be added the totalitarian terror in all Eastern European countries, the socioeconomic disasters of the Soviet bureaucracy, past Stalinism and neo-Stalinism then in progress (from the Moscow processes to the repression in Hungary). "The End of Philosophy," by Maurice Blanchot, published in 1959, aptly conveys the underlying idea of ​​the eschatological theme: "Here is the twilight that has accompanied every thinker ever since (since the 19th century), a strange funeral moment that the philosophical spirit celebrates in an exaltation, often joyful, conducting its slow funeral, during which it truly hopes, in one way or another, to achieve its resurrection."  (Blanchet, 1959, pp. 292-3, apud Derrida, 1994, p. 56). According to Derrida, it is unknown whether waiting prepares for the coming of the future or whether it highlights the repetition of the same, an unknowing that has to do with an openness that preserves heterogeneity, the only opportunity for a future that is affirmed or, rather, reaffirmed – this openness would be the future itself. The same question, however, in 1993, under the influence of Fukuyama's end of history, gives the impression of a generation that is late for the last train of the end, but without appearing breathless, quite the contrary: it swells with the tranquil awareness of capitalism, liberalism, and the virtues of parliamentary democracy (past forms of an electoral system and a parliamentary apparatus). Derrida would call this media anachronism and a clear conscience: the end of Marxism would place it under the sign of non-presence, of ineffectiveness, in opposition to current reality and a reassuring order of the present. From this perspective of a clear conscience, there would be a final end, a telos to all history, making the other, the legacy, and the future impossible. Capitalism would be homogeneity, absolute systematic coherence. In contrast to the scientistic ideology that unifies or purifies Marx's text and creates a boundary separating the real and the phantom, Capital, according to Blanchot, would invest in another mode of theoretical thinking, one that would overturn the classical idea of ​​science. This new mode is precisely the testamentary dimension: Marx's "example" is primarily for others and beyond himself (the one who sets the example is unequal to the example he sets). In other words, Marx's injunctions are untranslatable into one another, which opens up a whole field for what lies beyond, if possible, the ultimate extreme – the future itself. The difference established between the 50s and the 90s, according to Derrida, accounts for a process of closure. And to that end, no effort will be spared to conjure away the return, the surprise, the untimeliness of the last event beyond the telos.

Law and Justice

“Learning to live,” as an irreversible and asymmetrical, therefore violent, aptitude, has a variation rooted in punishment and chastisement (“let this serve as a lesson to you”; “to teach someone a good lesson”), expressing the sadistic nature of teaching in Latin-Christian society and thus perverting the Socratic ideal. There would, however, be another variant: the heterodidactic approach between life and death, which makes the learning of life only happen between life and death. In other words, one would learn to live with ghosts (a more just life, according to the politics of memory, inheritance, and generations). In this aspect, Derrida differentiates law from justice, as in “Force of Law, the mystical foundation of authority” (Derrida, 1992): law as reducible to legislation, and justice as something furtive and untimely, no longer belonging to time and its modalities, such as present-past, now, present-future, nor to the living present in general. A living being would exist beyond its present life, its effective being-present, or its empirical-ontological effectiveness. Its relationship is with the afterlife that disjoins and misaligns the self-identity of the living present. Hence the responsibility towards the dead and towards the unborn – a responsibility beyond all living present (in the case of Brazil, movements such as “Torture Never Again” and CO2 emission reduction policies would, in this case, be linked).

The Law of Obsession

Obsession and its logic, obsidiology proper, is what, according to Derrida, will mark the history of the West: the hunt for the ghost, the origin of the question "where is Marxism going?". It is no coincidence that the story of Hamlet begins with the expectation of the ghost's reappearance, who had already appeared twice to Bernardo and Marcello. The beginning lies in waiting for the event to happen, in the imminence of a reappearance. Just as the Communist Manifesto begins with: "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism." This legend of the ghost is countered by the Manifesto itself, whose analysis of the Industrial Revolution sets forth its demands: the achievement of a reduction in the daily working hours – from 12 to 10 hours; and universal suffrage (for men only). But forming part of the deep structure of Europe would be the specter, whose main characteristic would be precisely expressed by the verb "to walk" or "to roam": to inhabit without residing, without confining oneself to space; to frequent; to obsess; to besiege; to harass. In contrast to an ontology (thoughts of being), to be or not to be, governed by opposition and anchored in substance, existence, essence, and permanence (presence itself). The logic of obsession is supported by demands (injunctions), which opens up a whole field of possibilities. In fact, the specter is the foreign element that inhabits Europe without residing there, and produces its inner self (without the specter there is no inner self). It's impossible to have it in hand. Derrida draws attention to some aspects of the ghost of King Hamlet: he sees us (the effect of the open visor) without us being able to see him (the effect of the helmet is not suspended when the visor is raised); we are delivered to his commanding voice, from which we inherit the law; a body of our own without flesh, but always someone like someone else, the origin of exchange value (money, for example, is always the ghost of something, a transfiguring idealization, a kind of spectropoetics producing the metamorphosis of commodities – hence why the ghost is not confused with the icon, nor with the image, nor with the simulacrum, the ghost is always another); the ghost is a carnal and phenomenal form of the spirit, the very becoming-body (when it appears, the spirit disappears); the ghost is linked to the event and, therefore, to repetition – a kind of staging for the end of the story, each time totally different. These are some elements that give spectrology a paradoxical character, more in line with the logic of obsession. It's like the translations for "The time is out of joint": the work inhabits the numerous versions without confining itself there; like a ghost, it besieges the numerous translations that disperse in a breathtaking diversity; at the specter's disparate demands, the words of the translation become disorganized – "the time" is sometimes the temporality of time, sometimes history (the present day), sometimes the present (the world today). The relationship with the spectrum, therefore, obeys this law of obsession, which has more to do with "maybe" than with "being," more linked to injunctions than to presence.

The Tragedy of the Prince

The tragedy in Hamlet lies in the question of the tragic and how far this aspect deviates from an aesthetic or psychological explanation. In other words, the prince curses the fate that leads him to carry out revenge and punishment. His tragedy resides in the pre-original and spectral anteriority of another's crime, and it falls to him to be born to right it. All his delay, all his hesitation in avenging, all his deliberation, all his unnaturalness and non-automatic calculation, all his neurosis, in short, stems from a logic different from revenge. It is a kind of sigh, according to Derrida, for a justice that one day would no longer belong to history and would be subtracted from the fatality of revenge. It is against the intolerable perversion in the order of his destiny that the prince turns. Referring to Heidegger, regarding Anaximander, the circular fatality, within the perspective of right and duty, does not allow for an understanding of neurosis, which was so much sought to be explained. Instead of repairing the injustice of the present (an aesthetic-psychoanalytic trait), Anaximander, via Heidegger, would rearticulate the disjunction of present time, understood as a transitory state: the passage of present time comes from the future, to go in the direction of the past. Anaximander speaks of disjunction, time off-axis, the injustice of the present, as a condition for justice, for the gift without restitution, without calculation and without accounting. Not through reparation, but through the rearticulation of disjunction (rearticulation without synthesis).

The Neoliberal Disguise

And once again we are talking about inheritance and, even more so, about the choice present in the act of inheriting. But Hamlet's revolt was stifled; his sigh for another justice, interrupted. In the end, repression prevails, as in Oedipus. Without forgetting, however, Valéry and his important observation that implicitly reveals a whole spectrological work: “this skull here was Kant's, which begat Hegel, which begat Marx...” (Valéry, 1957, vol. 1, p. 993, apud Derrida, 1994, p. 19). Later, curiously, in his book *The Politics of the Spirit*, Valéry repeats the phrase and omits Marx's name. “Whither Marxism?” This obsession has been present since Hamlet, and not even neoliberal hegemony can disguise it. In its victory speeches, the spectral shadow of Marxism always appears, and the unknown form it may take in the future.

Chris Hani and Marielle

"Specters of Marx" is dedicated to the memory of Chris Hani, a hero of the resistance against apartheid in South Africa. Assassinated on April 10, 1993, the same year the book was published in France, Hani, while launching bombs against various police stations during the harsh times of apartheid, was also known as a charismatic intellectual who promoted passionate discussions in bookstores about the future of Africa, who spoke Latin and loved Hamlet. Chief of Staff of Umkhontowe Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of Mandela's African National Congress (ANC), Hani organized the armed struggle for liberation from Zambia. From guerrilla fighter to general secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1991, he ended up becoming the prince of peace in early 1993, adopting a conciliatory attitude. It was precisely during this period that his assassination would occur, with the clear intention of sabotaging the ongoing democratization process. On the orders of MP Clive Derby-Lewis, of the Conservative Party, a far-right Polish immigrant, Janus Walusz, fired several shots at Hani, triggering violence in South Africa. The fact is that the effect of the attack, surprisingly and against all expectations of the white minority fighting against democracy, gave impetus to moderates on both sides, allowing for a peaceful transition of the country with Mandela's victory a year after the attack.

At this moment, in 2020, almost 27 years after the assassination of Chris Hani, Brazil finds itself stunned by a crime that occurred on March 14, 2018, and remains unsolved. A city councilwoman, Black, like Chris Hani, was brutally murdered, with all indications pointing to a political motive. Moments before the attack, Marielle was participating in a meeting called "Young Black Women Moving the Structures." Unlike what happened in South Africa, with the swift resolution of the case and the arrest of those responsible, Brazil suffers international embarrassment over a crime that continues to reverberate precisely because it remains unsolved. Despite all the movements in solidarity with Marielle, there was no violence in the streets, as there was in South Africa, even though in Brazil a strong political polarization offered all the conditions for such conflicts. Who killed Marielle? At the end of the fateful year of 2018, the electoral victory of conservative forces explained the lack of an explosion of violence and the little interest of the judicial system in clarifying the crime. We are still under this state of affairs, and communists are viewed amidst an obsession bordering on delirium: "communists are infiltrated in the institutions."

I'm watching a documentary about Marielle on social media ("Marielle Franco's Two Tragedies"). There's no mention of her literary tastes. There's no indication that she liked Hamlet, but her mother shows several photos of her as a child, always surrounded by books – it was a requirement of Marielle's. In that same documentary, Marielle looks directly at the camera and says: "I am because we are; I am a defender of human rights because we are life." This phrase, which sounds like an enigma, promotes a shift from the self to the other. I return to Derrida: “'An example' always leads beyond itself; it opens, in this way, a testamentary dimension. The 'example' is primarily for others and beyond oneself. Sometimes, perhaps always, the one who gives the 'example' is unequal to the 'example' he gives (he is an imperfect example of the 'example' he gives). Let him give, giving then what he does not have and even what he is not” (Derrida, 1994, p. 54). The life of a living being is beyond its self-identity, hence its relationship with the multiple. The skull... that generated Chris Hani, that generated Marielle,...

                                                BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCE

BLANCHOT, Maurice. Marx's Three Speeches. Marxist Circles – Session 1; Left Bloc – Porto. Available at: https://circulosmarxistas.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/01-as-trecc82s-palavras-de-marx_mb.pdf

DERRIDA, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International; translated by Anamaria Skinner. Rio de Janeiro: Relume-Dumará, 1994.

______________. Force of Law, 'The mystical foundation of authority'. In: Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, TR. M. Quaintance, Ed. D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, D. G. Carlson; Routledge, New York, London, 1992

SHAKESPEARE, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; translated, introduced and annotated by Lawrence Flores Pereira; 1st ed. – São Paulo: Penguin Classics Companhia das Letras, 2015

Valery, Paul. La Crise de l'esprit; Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, Gallimard, 1957

Documentary “The Two Tragedies of Marielle Franco”, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEyl3KR-m3s