Specters of Marx
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Jacques Derrida |
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| Original title | Spectres de Marx: l'état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale |
| Translator | Peggy Kamuf |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Subject | Karl Marx |
| Published |
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| Media type | |
| Pages | 198 (Routledge edition) |
| ISBN | |
Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international (French: Spectres de Marx: l'état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale) is a 1993 book by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It was first presented as a series of lectures during “Whither Marxism?”, a conference on the future of Marxism held at the University of California, Riverside in 1993.
The title Spectres of Marx is an allusion to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' statement at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto that a "spectre [is] haunting Europe." For Derrida, the spirit of Marx is even more relevant now since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of communism. With its death the spectre of communism begins to make visits on the Earth. Derrida seeks to do the work of inheriting from Marx, that is, not communism, but of the philosophy of responsibility, and of Marx's spirit of radical critique. Derrida first notes that, in the wake of the fall of communism, many in the west had become triumphalist, as is evidenced in the formation of a Neo-con grouping and the displacement of the left in third way political formations. At the intellectual level, it is apparent in Francis Fukuyama's proclamation of the end of ideology. Derrida commented on the reasons for that spectre of Marx:
Derrida went on, in his talks on this topic, to list 10 plagues of the capital or global system. And then to an account of the claim the creation of a new grouping of activism, called the "New International".
Derrida's ten plagues are:
On the New International, Derrida has this to say:
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