by Peggy Kamuf
This Article originally appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review Vol. 23, Iss. 1, 2023, pp. 1-10.
This essay is part of a roundtable on Geoffrey Bennington’s Scatter project. Continue reading with an essay by Simon Glendinning. Check back soon for more.
How to inherit Specters of Marx?[1] How to inherit this work that is all about inheritance as the irreducible condition of any possible relation to a past and also to a future, the future of Marx and Marxism, to be sure, but also to any future whatsoever? How to receive its legacy while acknowledging the ways it complicates this scene and yet without merely folding it back on itself, applying it to itself in an act of repetition that ends up finally inheriting little or nothing? Questions like this are provoked when the pretext for rereading Specters of Marx is to mark an anniversary and take stock of how it has aged. Ten years ago already (or almost), there were similar calls to reflect on the arrival of this work on the horizon of rereading Marx and his legacy, under the guiding question of ‘Whither Marxism?’, as well as on the horizon of Derrida’s own oeuvre.[2] When some rushed to interpret this event as his belated reckoning with Marx, they had to filter out what they read there (presuming they read it at all) of Derrida anticipating just that misapprehension of his own engagement with Marx ever since his earliest days as a student. Which just goes to show that such a work, which appeals to critical reception, raises the standard criteria for what is called ‘reading’.
How, then, to inherit Specters of Marx as a book on reading? I began asking this apparently narrower question in the wake of Geoffrey Bennington’s Scatter 2: Politics in Deconstruction, which describes itself as ‘a book of reading(s) and a book about reading’ (3).[3] Its first words quote a radical affirmation of Specters: ‘“To be … means … to inherit’” (1). This is one of his only quotations from or references to this work (whose title is not indexed), and yet with this initial gesture, Bennington aligns his undertaking with the task of inheritance as analyzed in Specters. As he reads it, the task is to read, and even, as he will put it, ‘just to read’ (3).
Now, one of the places where Derrida as well aligns the heir’s task with reading is in the first chapter, ‘Injunctions of Marx’:
Let us consider first of all the radical and necessary heterogeneity of an inheritance, the difference without opposition that has to mark it, a “disparate” and a quasi-juxtaposition without dialectic (the very plural of what we will later call Marx’s spirits). An inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing. “One must” means one must filter sift, criticize, one must sort several different possibles that inhabit the same injunction. And inhabit it in a contradictory fashion around a secret. If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. We would be affected by it as by a cause – natural or genetic. One always inherits from a secret – which says ‘read me, will you ever be able to do so?’ The critical choice called for by any reaffirmation of the inheritance is also, like memory itself, the condition of finitude. The infinite does not inherit, it does not inherit (from) itself. The injunction itself (it always says ‘choose and decide from among what you inherit’) can only be one by dividing itself, tearing itself apart, differing/deferring itself, by speaking at the same time several times – and in several voices.[4] (SM, 16)
What Derrida names here a radical and necessary heterogeneity calls up what Bennington refers to as ‘scatter’, the irreducible pluralization that destabilizes sovereign politics. Indeed, one could pull on many threads that tie these two works together, Specters and Scatter, with their almost-rhyming titles. Like inheritance as Derrida understands it, scatter ‘is never one with itself’, and like the pluralization of the injunction by several different possibilities, the rule of one decreeing itself preferable to the rule of many has to divide itself, differ and defer itself, without end. This irreducible divisibility of the one is what Bennington tracks, for example, through the repeated quotation of the line from the Iliad, beginning with Aristotle’s Politics, across a very long tradition of political thought, down to Derrida in Rogues (in a reading that Bennington, moreover, takes issue with). As he shows, this famous line, which issues the ostensible injunction to obey only one master (one lord, one king, one leader, one Führer, and so on: ‘The rule of the many is not good; let there be one ruler, one king’, Iliad 2.204), has to end up speaking, as Derrida puts it, ‘the same time, several times – and in several voices’. Finally, however, it is the emphasis the quoted passage places on reading, on a ‘readability’ of the inheritance that is never given or ‘natural’ and, especially, its summing up the injunction to inherit with the imperative ‘read me’, before adding ‘will you ever be able to do so?’ that confirm Bennington’s choice to inherit Specters of Marx as and in a book about reading.
From these threads that draw together Specters and Scatter, I want to follow a little further the thread of the plural injunctions. One place in Scatter 2 where such a pluralization of enjoining voices is explicitly invoked comes in chapter 8 in the course of a tenacious reading of Hobbes, especially of Hobbes on reading. At one point, the key articulation is the difference Hobbes wants to find or to make among several different injunctive, imperative ‘speech acts’, which he calls command, counsel, and exhortation. Here’s the first passage Bennington quotes from chapter 25 of Leviathan, ‘Of Counsell’:
How fallacious it is to judge of the nature of things, by the ordinary and inconstant use of words, appeareth in nothing more, than in the confusion of Counsels, and Commands, arising from the imperative manner of speaking in them both [my italics, PK] and in many other occasions besides. For the words Doe this, are the words not onely of him that Commandeth; but also of him that giveth Counsell; and of him that Exhorteth. (qtd. 227)
It’s tempting to connect these three modes of the imperative to, for example, the plural injunctions that Derrida, in the wake of Blanchot, hears as ‘the three voices of Marx’, or even to the ghost’s address to Hamlet: is it commanding, counseling, or exhorting? It’s also tempting to draw a line – of inheritance, perhaps – from Hobbes’s ‘Doe this’ to Austin’s How To Do Things with Words. But let’s set those temptations aside and continue following Bennington as he shows that, for Hobbes, a key to avoiding the confusion of these imperative modes is a certain self-reading that can take the measure of another’s thoughts and passions by reading one’s own. Having read oneself one will be able to read and know another, or so at least Hobbes wants to believe. Therefore ‘Read thy self’, Hobbes counsels or exhorts, if not commands:
Nosce teipsum, Read thy self: was meant … to Teach us, that for the similitude of the thoughts, and Passions of one man, to the thoughts, and Passions of another, whosoever looketh into himself … shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts and Passions of all other men, upon the like occasions … (qtd. 238)
This is sovereign reading not only because it is a model that Hobbes prescribes for ‘He that is to govern a whole Nation’ and who ‘must read in himself, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind’ (qtd. 239), but first of all because it supposes the rule of the One, who is every other one, without dissension (one man = all other men). Furthermore, it is sovereign insofar as it would exercise control and surveillance, as Bennington puts it, over ‘reading in general in any normal sense’, which is to say, over this most unruly, suspect, and seditious exercise when it is not brought under the purview of the One (239). When it is, in other words, the terrain of scatter, where, to invoke Derrida’s unforgettable, untranslatable phrase, ‘tout autre est tout autre’, ‘every other (one) is every (bit) other’,[5] and where the imperative demand or command is not ‘Read thy self’ so as to know ‘the thoughts and passions of all other men’, which is Hobbes’s prescription for sovereign reading, but ‘Read me’, read my several voices that counsel, command, or exhort (but also plead, question, supplicate, demand, declare, describe, etc.) without clear distinction: you must decide and choose which you will hear. Thus, read a ‘me’ who/that is irreducibly other than you, sovereign reader of ‘thy self’.
In the attention it pays to the non-unitary forces at work in a text whose meanings diverge, contradict or dissent from one another, Bennington’s reading of Hobbes is ‘resolutely nonsovereign’, as he puts it (240). But it is especially so in its inheritance of Hobbes as a thinker of democracy, at least of an irreducible and irrepressible protodemocracy. I quote the conclusion of this chapter:
between what Hobbes declares and what he describes (more or less in spite of himself), or between what he says he means and what he actually does in his writing, there emerges for us the possibility of what I would tentatively claim to be a democratic reading of Hobbes, one that runs counter to his own dream of sovereign, noninterpretative reading (which would have to be performed by the tendentially monarchic sovereign himself) and in so doing tries to bring out the ways in which sovereignty is, as always, failing from the start. (249)
‘The possibility … of a democratic reading’, emphasis on ‘reading’: this possibility of inheriting Hobbes’s text otherwise emerges from a difference in reading between what ‘Hobbes declares and what he describes’. It is a difference that protrudes, as it were, a fold into the text, a doubled surface of meaning that complicates or multiplies reading’s task because the two surfaces do not lay down flat upon each other even though there is no literal difference between them. In this fold, then, Bennington finds the possibility of ‘a democratic reading’. But the phrase ‘democratic reading’ itself admits of an at least double reading: it would be both a reading that, as here, retrieves an irrepressible democratic strain from political thought, thus a democratic reading by metonymy, if you will, with its aim or its theme. But might it not also be one that reads democratically? And what could that mean? By what marks or traits could one recognize a democratic reading in this sense?
With that question I am trying to connect this sense of reading democratically to Derrida’s assertion that one always inherits from a secret, that is, from a certain unknowability and incalculability, which also govern any relation to the future. A democratic reading would have to be one that welcomes the unknowable, future event of some other, some not-one, some plus d’un, in the phrase that recurs many times in Specters. As Derrida’s translators often point out, the ordinary sense of the phrase is ‘more than one’, but it can also be heard to say ‘no more of one’. It has an obvious place in Bennington’s analysis, approaching as it does to a watchword for democracy: (the government of) more than one, no more of (just) one. One may also be reminded of the elliptical ‘definition’ of deconstruction that Derrida gave on more than one occasion, which was plus d’une langue, where the phrase likewise doubles its possible readings: more than one language, no more of (just) one language.[6] That deconstruction and democracy should each unfold under the sign of the plus d’un(e) is, of course, anything but a coincidence, at least not if you endorse, as Bennington doubtless would, the mutual conditionality of the one and the other, which Derrida once again stamped into what sounds like a slogan, motto, or watchword: ‘no deconstruction without democracy, no democracy without deconstruction’.[7] Elsewhere still, he has added at least one more variation on this syntax: ‘No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy’.[8] Once again, I wager Bennington would second the claim, or more precisely that he could make it his own, in his own terms.
In reflecting about the plural injunctions of the inheritance, I was led to wonder about Scatter 2’s own deployment of imperatives, if indeed there are any. I have not systematically combed the text for moments that might correspond, syntactically or semantically, to what Hobbes distills into the ‘Doe this’ that commander, counselor, and exhorter might all be heard to utter. My suspicion or my wager, once again, is that, in his own name at least, Bennington rarely, if ever, resorts to the imperative mode. I surmise this in part from his repeated dismissal of what he calls ‘moralism’ in political philosophy. All the same, I did find one imperative, albeit a rather paradoxical one. It comes in the introduction to the book, at a point where the author is claiming a ‘militant dimension’ for his performance of ‘simply – reading’ and doing so with what he describes as ‘a kind of (willed and therefore not completely naïve) “naivety”’. Here’s the passage:
This claim to ‘naivety’ itself has a political and even militant dimension: it wants to say that these texts, however difficult, however overwritten by the tradition(s) of reading we also inherit, are nonetheless still, at least minimally, freshly readable for us, in principle for anyone, here today: feel free just to read, I say, in the face of all the complex machineries of scholarship and disciplinarity that can certainly inform reading but that also police it, and sometimes function as an obstacle to it. (3; italics added)
‘Feel free just to read, I say’: the mood is unmistakably imperative, and moreover it remarks its own performative with an ‘I say’, which adds to its impulsion as a speech act in the imperative mode. And yet, with the same stroke, it also cancels or suspends the imperative force by freeing the addressees, that is, ‘anyone, here today’, freeing them ‘just to read’. But what is that, just reading? In the passage just quoted, Bennington suggests that it is what the ‘machineries of scholarship and disciplinarity’ can censure, block, or disable, even as they also enable it as more informed, less naïve (naïvely naïve) reading. These machineries, especially insofar as they generate and sustain the scholarship of a textual and historical tradition, cannot simply be excluded from ‘just reading’ not if it is to be just in the other sense of doing justice, here, to a text or a work, not if one is just to read it justly as what is ‘freshly readable for us’, in other words, freshly inherited from that tradition. But the same phrase could also seem to imply some distillation of reading down to its essential act, called ‘just reading’, in which case it poses a paradox no less suspensive or suspended than the ‘feel free’ of the imperative. For just reading is perhaps, for we who must inherit, what suspends the reader in a relation where, in order to remain ‘freshly readable … in principle for anyone’, the inheritance exposes itself to being each time, every time different and not one. And with that, just reading risks scattering among its folds – and its specters.
Which returns us to Specters of Marx. In a parenthesis there, Derrida extends what I’ve just been suggesting in Bennington’s wake about ‘just reading’ to just thinking, just acting, and just writing. Derrida is here in the midst of reading The German Ideology while hunting down Marx’s hunting down of Stirner’s ghosts. But he calls off the dogs for a moment to ask: why this acharnement, this relentlessness? before going on to add: ‘I have my own feeling on this subject’. This apparent confession of a feeling is what prompts the parenthesis:
(I insist that it is a feeling, my feeling and I have no reason to deny that it projects itself necessarily into the scene I am interpreting: my ‘thesis’, my hypothesis, or my hypostasis, precisely, is that it is never possible to avoid this precipitation [my italics, PK], since everyone reads, thinks, acts, writes with his or her ghosts, even when one goes after the ghosts of the other.) (SM, 139)
Reading with one’s own ghosts: the figure is spectral in more than one sense perhaps, for it figures reading taking place on a screen for the feeling that ‘projects itself necessarily into the scene I am reading’. To be sure, the figure is called up by the particular scene of Marx chasing his own specters while he reads Stirner, who is chasing his own specters. But its extension to reading and readers in general is to be understood not least because it is posed, however ironically, as a hypostasis, an underlying ground, to wit, that ‘everyone reads, thinks, acts, writes with his or her ghosts’, just like Marx and Stirner, no less than Derrida who is here ‘owning’ in a way his feeling as a reader and heir of this haunted legacy. What is thereby generalized as a condition of anyone reading anything is a relation without relation, as Blanchot might have said, with ‘the thing which is not’, call it ghost, phantom, specter, which relation is suspended each time from a singular feeling, ‘my feeling’.
This spectral figure projects or protrudes itself in a parenthesis, a remark set aside, as if to keep the action (or passion) of reading-with-your-own-ghosts within some bounds. For this is also the figure of a certain precipitation, a headlong fall into the ruin of reading, which is what Derrida is intent to show about Marx reading Stirner. And yet, if it is ‘never possible to avoid this precipitation’, as he also remarks, then reading always courts this ruin in the scattering that happens when everyone reads with their own ghosts.
Coda
Rereading Specters of Marx is always a somewhat haunted experience for me, at least when it’s in my own translation. Over the years, I’ve discovered a number of faults there of one sort or another. Elsewhere I’ve recounted – perhaps it was for another anniversary – just how precipitous was the experience of drafting a translation of Derrida’s text for the two lectures at UC Riverside. I admitted then that ‘when I reread this book today, I continue to find many signs of this hastiness’.[9] Most recently, my friend Nicholas Royle wrote with regard to the very parenthesis we’ve been musing over above. The translation had omitted the word ‘thinks’ in Derrida’s phrase ‘everyone reads, thinks, acts, writes with their own ghosts’. I couldn’t deny it. And why would I deny it? For I have come to think of these faults as the ghostly traces of what is there but not there, and to recognize such ruinous precipitation as the fall-out, so to speak, of reading with ghosts.
University of Southern California
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Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York, Routledge, 1994). Hereafter SM. ↑
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Peggy Kamuf, ‘The Time of Marx: Derrida’s Perestroika’, Los Angeles Review of Books (2013), https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-time-of-marx-derridas-perestroika/. ↑
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Geoffrey Bennington, Scatter 2: Politics in Deconstruction, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021). Hereafter cited in-text. ↑
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For a similar reading of this same passage, see Haddad, Samir, Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2013), 24 ff. ↑
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Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7. ↑
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Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, rev. ed., translated by Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf (New York, Columbia University Press, 1989), 15. ↑
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Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, translated by George Collins (London, Verso, 1997), 105. ↑
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Jacques Derrida, On the Name, edited by Thomas Dutoit, translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1995), 28. ↑
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Peggy Kamuf and Martin McQuillan, ;Translating Specters: An Interview with Peggy Kamuf’, Parallax 7, no. 3 (2001), 43-50, 45. ↑
