Jerry Levy

The idea I remember the most immediately from Specters of Marx is, almost present in the title as compellingly as a specter can be to those who would accept specters, is the idea of Marx as the Specter to bourgeois society. I think that's quite a powerful image--beyond the analytical details about Capital (which I don't recall off-hand). But Derrida's meaning for (and contribution to) Marx/ism, I think, goes beyond this evocation of an "image" and is invested with the full force of his philosophical approach--which I believe we will live as a legacy. I think that Derrida may indeed be the philosopher of Marx of our times, and not the destroyer of Marx/ism that many critics of deconstruction fear. In my view, Derrida's contribution was to develop the instincts and practices of reading out of "system." All of the interventions of his that I have read ask the reader to see that which lives outside of systems as they are given: to see that which system would silence, to give scope to a vision of a life (of ideas, philosophically, but of life in general) moved by prerogatives other than those of a given system, to enable the experience (philosophical and, thence, political) of a different system, with different priorities, values, energies, agents, urges, etc. etc. This is Marx: or this is the development of a philosophical approach that matches Marx's critical urges and that covers and comforts the whole point and structure of Capital.

Traditional philosophers (who like systems) did not much like Derrida. He jabbed their totalitarian confidences. They wanted to defend "meaning" as it is/has-been constituted. He wanted to create the philosophical space (and capabilities) to create 'different' meanings, and in the process to liberate that which had been oppressed within the existing. He wanted to do this as a general philosophical point: not to create one other system. one other meaning, but as an affirmation of the idea that life is about creating, continuously and forever, not an abiding of that which has already been created. Marx too wanted nothing other than a way of organizing life (and hence also ideas) in a way that "freed" humans from the tyranny of the given. Marx and Derrida are brothers in deconstruction (there is quite a bit of deconstruction in Marx's reading of the works of political economists): keepers of the "trace" of human freedom.