exordium
[…]
If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, not presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice. Of justice where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws and rights.
[…] without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question ‘where?’ ‘where tomorrow?’ ‘whither?’
[…]
To be just: beyond the living present in general – and beyond its simple negative reversal. A spectral moment, a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual present: ‘now’, future present). We are questioning in this instant, we are asking ourselves about this instant that is not docile to time, at least to what we call time. Furtive and untimely, that apparition of the specter does not belong to that time, it does not give time, not that one: ‘Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost’ (Hamlet).
i. injunctions of marx
A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism
Exordium or incipit: this first noun opens, then, the first scene of the first act […]. As in Hamlet, the Prince of a rotten State, everything begins by the apparition of a specter. More precisely, by the waiting for this apparition.
The revenant is going to come.
[…]
This thing […] looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there. A spectral asymmetry interrupts here all specularity. It de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony. We will call this the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us.
The present displaced from itself by the non-present – past (memory) + future (anticipation – is this quite right? maybe if it is the structure of anticipation (see below – messianic without messianism) rather than any given content (which for essential reasons cannot be given as such)) – but the content of this non-present (itself not a present in its own time, so not a fully constiutted present ‘other’ but itself displaced by the non-presence of the future/past in it) is radically unknowable. It comes to disrupt the present as an absent without content. But because it it not itself a simple present, it has the effect of virtualising the entire (spatio-temporal) field.
We will probably not speak of this visor effect any more, as least not by that name, but it will be presupposed by everything we advance on the subject of the specter in general, in Marx and elsewhere.
[…]
This spectral someone other looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority (which may be on the order of generation, of more than one generation) and asymmetry, according to an absolutely unmasterable disproportion. Here anachrony makes the law.
To feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross, that is the visor effect on the basis of which we inherit from the law.
[…]
An essentially blind submission to his secret, to the secret of his origin: this is a first obedience to the injunction. It will condition all the others.
[…]
Repetition and first time: this perhaps is the question of the event as question of the ghost. What is a ghost?
Is there there, between the thing itself and its simulacrum, an opposition that holds up?
This logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being (of the ‘to be’, assuming that it is a matter of Being in the ‘to be or not to be’, but nothing is less certain). It would harbour within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves. [10]
[…]
There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts. A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts – nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality. There has never been a scholar who, as such, does not believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being (to be or not to be in the conventional reading), in the opposition between what is present and what is not […].
[…] Marcellus was perhaps anticipating the coming, one day, one night, several centuries later, of another ‘scholar’. The latter would finally be capable, beyond the opposition between presence and non-presence, actuality and inactuality, life and non-life, of thinking the possibility of the specter, the specter as possibility.
Better (or worse) he would know how to address himself to spirits. He would know that such an address is not only possible, but that it will have conditioned, as such, address in general. In any case, here is someone mad enough to hope to unlock the possibility of such an address.
end of history
It is still evening, it is always nightfall along the ‘ramparts’, on the battlements of an old Europe at war. With the other and with itself.
Many young people today (of the type ‘readers-consumers of Fukuyama’ or of the type ‘Fukuyama’ himself) probably no longer sufficiently realise it: the eschatological themes of the ‘end of history’, of the ‘end of Marxism’, of the ‘end of philosophy’, of the ‘ends of man’, of the ‘last man’, and so forth were, in the ’50s, that is, forty years ago, our daily bread. [14]
We had this bread of apocalypse in our mouths naturally, already, just as naturally as that which I nicknamed after the fact, in 1980, the ‘apocalyptic tone in philosophy’.
What was its consistency? What did it taste like?
It was, on the one hand, the reading or analysis of those whom we could nickname the classics of the end. They formed the canon of the modern apocalypse (end of History, end of Man, end of Philosophy, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, with their Kojevian codicil and the codicils of Kojeve himself).
It was, on the other hand and indissociably […] all the socio-economic disasters of Soviet bureaucracy […].
[…]
Such was no doubt the element in which what is called deconstruction developed – and one can understand nothing of this period of reconstruction, notably in France, unless one takes this historical entanglement into account.
[…]
How can one be late to the end of history?
A question for today. It is serious because it obliges one to reflect again, as we have been doing since Hegel, on what happens and deserves the name of event after history; it obliges one to wonder if the end of history is but the end of a certain concept of history.
[…]
To maintain together that which does not hold together, and the disparate itself, the same disparate, all of this can be thought (we will come back to this incessantly as well as to the spectrality of the specter) only in a dis-located time of the present,at the joining of a radically dis-jointed time, without certain conjunction. […] a time without certain joining or determinable conjunction.
‘The time is out of joint’: time is disarticulated, dislocated, dislodged, time is run down, on the run and run down, deranged, both out of order and mad.
Now when does Hamlet name in this way the dis-joining of time, but also of history and of the world, the disjoining of things as they are nowadays, the disadjustment of our time […]?
Time: it is le temps, but also l’histoire, and it is le monde, time, history, world. [19]
[…]
If right or law stems from vengeance, as Hamlet seems to complain that it does – before Nietzsche, before Heidegger, before Benjamin – can one not yearn for a justice that one day, a day belonging no longer to history, a quasi-messianic day, would finally be removed from the fatality of vengeance? Better than removed: infinitely foreign, heterogeneous at its source? [21]
And is this day before us, to come, or more ancient than memory itself?
heidegger – the anaximander fragment
This disjointure in the very presence of the present, this sort of non-contemporaneity of the present time with itself (this radical untimeliness or this anachrony on the basis of which we are trying here to think the ghost) is, according to Heidegger, ‘said and not said’ bu the fragment of Anaxiamander. [25]
- To be sure, it says ‘without equivocation’ that the present (das Anwesende), as present, is adikia, that is, As Heidegger translates, deranged, off its hinges, out of joint (aus der Fuge). The present is what passes, the present comes to pass, it lingers in this transitory passage (Weile), in the coming-and-going, between what goes and what comes, in the middle of what leaves and what arrives, at the articulation between what absents itself and what presents itself. This in-between articulates conjointly the double articulation (die Fuge) according to which the two movements are adjoined (gefugt). Presence is enjoined, ordered, distributed in the two directions of absence, at the articulation of what is no longer and what is not yet […]. [cf. above, also JD on Husserl and Mallarme]
- And yet, declaring this ‘without equivocation’, the Spruch also says something else – or it only says this on condition. It would name the disjointure (adikia) or the ‘injustice’ of the present only in order to say that it is necessary didonai diken. […] it is clearly a matter of giving. Of giving Dike. Not of rendering justice, to render it in return by means of punishment, payment, or expiation […]. There is first of all a gift without restitution, without calculation, without accountability.
[…]
The question of justice, the one that always carries beyond the law, is no longer separated, in its necessity or in its aporias, from that of the gift.
Now, Heidegger then specifies, what properly belongs to a present, be it to the present of the other, to the present as the other, is the jointure of its lingering awhile, of its time, of its moment. […] if, as Heidegger does, Dike is thought on the basis of Being as presence, then it would turn out that ‘justice’ is first of all, and finally, and especially properly, the jointure of the accord: the proper jointure to the other given by the one who does not have it.
This is where our question would come in. Has not Heidegger, as he always does, skewed the asymmetry in favour of what he in effect interprets as the possibility of favour itself, of the accorded favour, namely of the accord that gathers or collects while harmonising […]?
Once one has recognised the force and the necessity of thinking justice on the basis of the gift, that is, beyond right, calculation, and commerce, once one has recognised therefore the necessity (without force, precisely, without necessity, perhaps, and without law) of thinking the gift to the other as gift of that which one does not have and which thus, paradoxically, can only come back or belong to the other, is there not a risk of inscribing this whole movement of justice under the sign of presence, be it the presence to meaning of the Anwesen, of the event as coming into presence, of Being as presence joined to itself, of the proper of the other as presence?
Beyond right, and still more beyond juridicism, beyond morality, and still more beyond moralism, does not justice as relation to the other suppose on the contrary the irreducible excess of a disjointure or an anachrony, some Un-Fuge, some ‘out of joint’ dislocation of Being and in time itself, a disjointure that, in always risking the evil, expropriation, and injustice (adikia) against which there is no calculable insurance, would alone be able to do justice or to render justice to the other as other?
[…]
This is where deconstruction would always begin to take shape as the thinking of the gift and of undeconstructable justice […].
Otherwise, it rests on the good conscience of having done one’s duty, it loses the chance of the future, of the promise or the appeal, of the desire also (that is its ‘own’ possibility), of this desert-like messianism (without content and without identifiable messiah) […]
the messianic: the coming of the other, the absolute and unpredictable singularity of the arrivant as justice.
Heidegger […] gives priority, as he always does, to gathering and to the same over the disjunction implied by my address to the other […]
To be ‘out of joint’, whether it be the present Being or present time, can do harm and do evil, it is no doubt the very possibility of evil. BUt without the opening of this possibility, there remains, perhaps beyond good and evil, only the necessity of the worst […]. [29]
blanchot – marx’s three voices
We are still in the process of reading, in a certain way, ‘Marx’s three voices’.
The alliance of a rejoining without conjoined mate, without organisation, without party, without nation, without State, without property (the ‘communism’ that we will later nickname the new International).
What also resonates in ‘Marx’s three voices’ is the appeal or the political injunction, the pledge or the promise (the oath if one prefers: ‘swear!’), the originary performativity that does not conform to preexisting conventions, unlike all the performatives analysed by the theoreticians of speech acts, but whose force of rupture produces the institution or the constitution, the law itself, which is to say also the meaning that appears to, that ought to, or that appears to have to guarantee it in return. [31]
Violence of the law before the law and before meaning, violence that interrupts time, disarticulates it, dislodges it, displaces it out of its natural lodging: ‘out of joint’.
It is there that differance, if it remains irreducible, irreducibly required by the spacing of any promise and by the future-to-come that comes to open it, does not only mean (as some people have too often believed so naively) deferral, lateness, delay, postponement. In the incoercible differance the here and now unfurls.
No differance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now. [31]
[…]
Guaranteed translatability, given homogeneity, systematic coherence in their absolute forms, this is surely (certainly, a priori and not probably) what renders the injunction, the inheritance, and the future – in a word the other – impossible. There must be disjunction, interruption, the heterogenous if at least there must be, if there must be a chance given to any ‘there must be’ whatsoever, be it beyond duty.
Blanchot (the end of philosophy): ‘For the last century and a half, with his name [Marx] as with that of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, it is philosophy itself that has been affirming or realising its own end, whether it understands that end as the accomplishment of absolute knowledge, its theoretical suppression linked to its practical realisation, the nihilist movement in which all values are engulfed, or finally by the culmination of metaphysics, precursor sign of another possibility that does not yet have a name. This then is the sunset that from now on accompanies every thinker, a strange funereal moment which the philosophical spirit celebrates in an exaltation that is, moreover, often joyful, leading its slow funeral procession during which it expects, in one way or another, to obtain its resurrection.’
[…]
One does not know if the expectation prepares the coming of the future-to-come or if it recalls the repetition of the same, of the same thing as ghost (‘What, ha’s this thing appear’d againe tonight?). This not knowing is not a lacuna. No progress of knowledge could saturate an opening that must have nothing to do with knowing. Nor therefore with ignorance. The opening must preserve this heterogeneity as the only chance of an affirmed or rather reaffirmed future. It is the future itself, it comes from there. The future is its memory.
[nb. we are coming close here to the thinking of the eternal return – the affirmation of this future in the structure of the present. See also above on the non-content of the specter (the visor effect), radically unknowable – this is the structure of anticipation that JD names the messianic)
In the experience of the end, in its insistent, instant, always imminently eschatological coming, at the extremity of the extreme today, there would thus be announced the future of what comes.
More than ever, for the future-to-come can announce itself as such and in its purity only on the basis of a past end: beyond, if that is possible, the last extremity.
Is there not a messianic extremity, an eskhaton whose ultimate event (immediate rupture, unheard-of interruption, untimeliness of the infinite surprise, heterogeneity without accomplishment) can exceed, at each moment, the final term of a phusis, such as work, the production, and the telos of any history?
[…]
In 1848, the Hegelian discourse on the end of history in absolute knowledge had already resounded throughout Europe and had rung a consonant note with many other knells [glass]. And communism was essentially distinguished from other labour movements by its international character. No organised political movement in the history of humanity had ever yet presented itself as geo-political, thereby inaugurating the space that is now ours and that today is reaching its limits, the limits of the earth and the limits of the political. [38]
Marx thought, to be sure, on his side, from the other side, that the dividing line between the ghost and actuality ought to be crossed, like utopia itself, by a realisation, that is, by a revolution; but he too will have continued to believe, to try to believe in the existence of this dividing line as real limit and conceptual distinction.
[…]
If there is something like spectrality, there are reasons to doubt this reassuring order of presents and, especially, the border between the present, the actual or present reality of the present, and everyting that can be opposed to it: absence, non-presence, non-effectivity, inactuality, virtuality, or even the simulacrum in general, and so forth.
conjuration
In the middle of the last century, an alliance was constituted against this specter, to drive off the evil. […] At twilight, before or after a night of bad dreams, at the presumed end of history, it is a ‘holy hunt against this specter’ […].
If Marx had written his Manifesto in my language, and if he had had some help with it, as a Frenchman can always dream of doing, I am sure he would have played on the word conjuration. […]
The word conjuration has the good fortune to put to work and to produce, without any possible reappropriation, a forever errant surplus value. It capitalises first opf all two orders of semantic value […].
Conjuration signifies on the one hand, ‘conjuration’ (its English homonym) which itself designates two things at once:
a. on the one hand, conspiracy of those who promise solumnly, sometimes secretly, by swearing together an oath to struggle against a superior power […]
b. ‘conjuration’ signifies, on the other hand, the magical incantation destined to evoke, to bring forth with the voice, to convoke a charm or a spirit.
[…]
Marx does not like ghosts any more than his adversaries do. He does not want to believe in them. But he thinks of nothing else. He believes rather in what is supposed to distinguish them from actual reality, living effectivity. He believes he can oppose them, like life to death, like vain appearances of the simulacrum to real presence.
This hostility toward ghosts, a terrified hostility that sometimes finds off terror with a burst of laughter, is perhaps what Marx will always have had in common with his adversaries. He too will have tried to conjure (away) the ghosts
ii. conjuring – marxism
A time of the world, today, in these times, a new ‘world order’ seeks to stablise a new, necessarily new disturbance [dereglement] by installing an onprecedented form of hegemony. It is a matter, then, but as always, of a novel form of war. It at least resembles a great ‘conjuration’ against Marxism […] [50]
hegemony
In its two meanings [conjuring] (conjuration and conjurement), Verschworung and Beschworung), we must take into account another essential meaning: the act that consists in swearing, taking an oath, therefore promising, deciding, taking a responsibility, in short, committing oneself in a performative fashion […]
[…] as well as in a more or less secret fashion, and thus more or less public, there where this frontier between the public and the private is constantly being displaced, remaining less and less assured than ever, as the limit that would permit one to identify the political.
And if this important frontier is being displaced, it is because the medium in which it is instituted, namely, the medium of the media themselves (news, the press, tele-communications, techno-tele-discursivity, techno-tele-iconicity, that which in general assures and determined the spacing of public space, the very possibility of the res publica and the phenomenality of the political), this element itself is neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it spectralises.
It does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on the Being of beings, or to the essence of life and death. It requires, then, what we will call, to save time and space rather than just to make up a word, hauntology.
No one, it seems to me, can contest the fact that a dogmatic is attempting to install its worldwide hegemony in paradoxical and suspect conditions […]
This dominating discourse often has the manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of mourning work. […] To the rhythm of a cadence march, it proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories and its practices. […]
If this hegemony is attempting to install it dogmatic orchestration in suspect and paradoxical conditions, it is first of all because this triumphant conjuration is striving in truth to disavow, and therefore to hide from, the fact that never, never in history, has the horizon of the thing whose survival is being celebrated (namely, all the old models of the capitalist and liberal world) been as dark, threatening, and threatened.
What are we doing by speaking, with these first words, of a dominant discourse and of an incontestable self-evidence regarding it?
At least two things:
I. We have implicitly referred (particularly so as to speak of what no one, I presume, would dream of contesting) to that which everywhere organises and commands public manifestation or testimony in the public space. In question here is a set constituted by three indissociable places or apparatuses of our culture:
a. There is first of all the culture called more or less properly political […]
b. There is also what is rather confusedly qualified as mass-media culture: ‘communications’ and interpretations, selective and hierarchised production of ‘information’ through channels whose power has grown in an absolutely unheard-of fashion at a rhythm that coincides precisely, no doubt not fortuitously, with that of the fall of regimes on the Marxist model, a fall to which it contributed mightily but – and this is not the least important point – in forms and modes of appropriation, and as a speed that also affect in an essential fashion the very concept of public space in so-called liberal democracies […] the question of media tele-technology, economy, and power, in their irreducible spectral dimension, should cut across all our discussions.
[…] Marx is one of the rare thinkers of the past to have taken seriously, at least in its principle, the originary indiccosiability of technics and language, and thus of tele-technics (for every language is a tele-technics).
c. There is finally scholarly and academic culture […]
These apparatuses are doubtless complex, differential, conflictual, and overdetermined. But whatever may be the conflicts, inequalities, or overdeterminations among them, they communicate and cooperate at every moment toward producing the greatest force with which to assure the hegemony or the imperialism in question.
As it has never done before, either to such a degree or in these forms, the politico-economic hegemony, like the intellectual or discursive domination, passes by way of techno-mediatic power – that is, a power that at the same time, in a differentiated and contradictory fashion, conditions and endangers any democracy. [54]
[…]
That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not.
[…]
One may continue to speak of domination in a field of forces not only while suspending the reference to this ultimate support that would be the identity and the self-identity of a social class, but even while suspending the credit extended to what Marx calls the idea, the determination of the superstructure as idea, ideal or ideological representation, indeed even the discursive form of this representation.
the end of history and the last man – fukuyama
Is not what we have here a new gospel, the noisiest, the most mediatised, the most ‘successful’ one on the subject of the death of Marxism as the end of history?
This work frequently resembles, it is true, the disconcerting and tardy by-product of a ‘footnote’: nota bene for a certain Kojeve who deserved better.
Yet the book is not as bad or as naive as one might be led to think by the frenzied exploitation that exhibits it as the finest ideological showcase of victorious capitalism in a liberal democracy which has finally arrived at the plenitude of its ideal, if not of its reality. [56]
It is by design, of course, that we called it a moment ago a ‘gospel’.
Why a gospel?
This book claims to bring a ‘positive response’ to a question whose formation and formulation are never interrogated in themselves. It is a question of whether a ‘coherent and directional History of mankind’ will eventually lead ‘the greater part of humanity’, as Fukuyama calmly, enigmatically, and in a fashion at once modest and imprudent calls it, toward ‘liberal democracy’.
[…] while answering ‘yes’ to this question in this form, Fukuyama admits […] to an awareness of everything that allows one to have one’s doubts […]
But according to a schema that organises the argumentation of this strange plea from one end to the other, all these cataclysms (terror, oppression, repression, extermination, genocide, and so on), these ‘events’ or these ‘facts’ would belong to empiricity, to the ’empirical flow of events in the second half of the century’, they would remain ’emperical’ phenomena accredited by ’empirical evidence’. Their accumulation would in no way refute the ideal orientation of the greater part of humanity toward liberal democracy. As such, as telos of a progress, this orientation would have the form of an ideal finality.
Everything that appears to contradict it would belong to historical empiricity, however massive and catastrophic and global and multiple and recurrent it might be.
Even if one admitted the simplicity of this summary distinction between empirical reality and ideal finality, one would still not know how this absolute orientation, this anhistoric telos of history gives rise, very precisely in our day, in these days, in our time to an event which Fukuyama speaks of as ‘good news’ and that he dates very explicitly from ‘The most remarkable evolution of the last quarter of the twentieth century.’
[…] he believes he canassert that, as of this date, and this is the good news, a dated news, ‘liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe’. This ‘move toward political freedom around the globe’, according to Fukuyama, would have been everywhere accompanied, ‘sometimes followed, sometimes preceded’, he writes, by ‘a liberal revolution in economic thought.’ The alliance of liberal democracy and of the ‘free market’, there’s the ‘good news’ of this last quarter century.
[…]
such an analysis can no longer avoid granting a determining role to this war of messianic eschatologies in what we will sum up with an ellipsis in the expression ‘appropriation of Jerusalem’.
The war for the ‘appropriation of Jerusalem’ is today the world war.
It is happening everywhere, it is the world, it is today the singular figure of its being ‘out of joint”
[…]
[…] what remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice – which we distinguish from rights and even from human rights – and an idea of democracy – which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today.
[…]
The model of the liberal State to which he explicitly lays claim is not only that of Hegel, the Hegel of the struggle for recognition, it is that of a Hegel who privileges the ‘Christian vision’. If ‘the existence of the State is the coming of God into the world’, as one reads in The Philosophy of Right invoked by Fukuyama, this coming has the sense of a Christian event. The French Revolution would have been ‘the event that took the Christian vision of a free and equal society, and implanted it here on earth.’
This end of History is essentially a Christian eschatology. [60]
[…] It is in the name of a Christian interpretation of the struggle for recognition, and thus of the exemplary European Community, that the author of the End of History and the last man [Christian man] criticises Marx and proposes to ‘correct it’: the latter would be lacking that Hegelaino-Christian ‘pillar’ of recognition or that ‘thymotic’ element of the soul.
[…]
the event
[Fukuyama] credits Kojeve with having ‘identified an important truth when he asserted that postwar America or the members of the European Community constituted the embodiment of Hegel’s state of universal recognition’. [62]
Depending on how it works to his advantage and serves his thesis, Fukuyama defines liberal democracy here as an actual reality and there as a simple ideal. The event is now the realisation, now the heralding of the realisation. […] A thinking of the event is no doubt what is most lacking from such a discourse.
If we have been insisting so much since the beginning on the logic of the ghost, it is because it points toward a thinking of the event that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic, the logic that distinguishes or opposes effectivity or actuality (either present, empirical, living – or not) and ideality (regulating or absolute non-presence). This logic of effectivity or actuality seems to be of limited pertinence.
[…] it seems to be demonstrated today better than ever by the fantastic, ghostly, ‘synthetic’, ‘prosthetic’, virtual happenings in the scientific domain and therefore the domain of the techno-media and therefore the public or political domain. It is also made more manifest by what inscribed the speed of a virtuality irreducible to the opposition of the act and the potential in the space of the event, in the event-ness of the event.
Having neglected to re-elaborate a thinking of the event, Fukuyama oscillates confusedly between two irreconcilable discourses. Even though he believes in its effective realisation (that is the ‘important truth’), Fukuyama does not hesitate all the same to oppose the ideality of this liberal Democratic ideal to all the evidence that bears massive witness to the fact that neither the United States nor the European Community has attained the perfection of the universal State or of liberal democracy, nor have they even come close.
[…]
For the announcement of the de facto ‘good news’, for its effective, phenomenal, historical, and empirically observable event, he substitutes the announcement of an ideal good news, the tele-eschatological good news, which is inadequate to any empiricity.
[…] At stake here is the very concept of democracy as concept of a promise that can only arise in such a diastema (failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjustment, being ‘out of joint’). That is why we propose to speak of a democracy to come, not a future democracy in the future present, not even of a regulating idea, in the Kantian sense, or of a utopia – at least to the extent that their inaccessibility would still remain the temporal form of a future present, of a future modality of the living present. [65]
[…]
[…] the effectivity or actuality of the democratic promise, like that of the communist promise, will always keep within it, and it must do, this absolutely undetermined messianic hope at its heart, this eschatological relation to the to-come of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated. Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return and who or which will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, state, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity), just opening which renounces any right to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event that cannot be awaited as such, or recognised in advance therefore, to the event as foreigner itself, to her or him for whom one must leave an empty place, always, in memory of hope – and this is the very space of spectrality.
It would be easy, too easy, to show that such a hospitality without reserve, which is nevertheless the condition of the event and thus of history (nothing and no one would arrive otherwise, a hypothesis that one can never exclude of course), is the impossible itself, and that this condition of possibility of the event is also its condition of impossibility, like this strange concept of messianism without content, of the messianic without messianism, that guides us here like the blind.
But it would be just as easy to show that without this experience of the impossible, one might as well give up on both justice and the event.
[…]
One would do better to ask oneself why this book, with the ‘good news’ it claims to bring, has become such a media gadget, and why it is all the rage in the ideological supermarkets of a worried West […]
[…] If a discourse of the Fukuyama type plays to good effect the role of channel-jamming and doubly bereaved disavowal expected of it, it is because, cleverly for some, crudely for others, it performs a sleight-of-hand trick: with the one hand, it accredits a logic of the empirical event which it needs whenever it is a question of certifying the finally final defeat of the so-called Marxist States and of everything that bars access to the Promised Land of economic and political liberalisms; but with the other, in the name pf the trans-historic and natural ideal, it discredits this same logic of the so-called empirical event, it has to suspend it to avoid chalking up to the account of this ideal and its concept precisely whatever contradicts them in such a cruel fashion […]
[…]
end of history 2
If all these themes of the end (end of history, end of man, figure of the ‘last man’, entry into a certain post-Marxism, and so forth) were, already in the ’60s, part of the elementary culture of the philosophers of my generation, we are not stuck today in their simple and static repetition.
[…]
This neo-liberal rhetoric, both jubilant and worried, manic and berieved, often obscene in its euphoria, obliges us, then, to interrogate an event-ness inscribed in the gap between the moment in which the ineluctable of a certain end was heralded and the actual collapse of the totalitarian States or societies that gave themselves the figure of Marxism.
[…]
A set of transformations of all sorts (in particular, techno-scientifico-economico-media) exceeds both the traditional givens of Marxist discourse and those of the liberal discourse opposed to it.
[…] we must first recognise that these mutations perurb toe onto-theological schemas or the philosophies of technics as such. They disturb political philosophies and the common concepts of democracy, they oblige us to reconsider all; relations between State and nation, man and citizen, the private and the public, and so forth.
This is where another thinking of historicity calls us beyond the metaphysical concept of history and the end of history, whether it be derived from Hegel or Marx.
[…]
Upon returning from this visit [to Japan] which he made as an important public official of the European Community, Kojeve concluded that ‘post-historical’ Japanese civilisation had set out on a path diametrically opposed to the ‘American path’, and this because of what he then names, in that profoundly offhand, nutty, and pataphysician manner which is, to be sure, his genius but which is also his entire responsibility, ‘the Snobism in the pure state’ of the cultural formalism of Japanese society. But he nevertheless maintains what is most important in his view, namely his previous diagnosis concerning properly American post-history. It’s just that he will have to revise something in an incredible and indecent tableau: the United States as the ‘final stage of Marxist ‘communism”.
The only thing Kojeve now puts in question is the idea that this American end represents, if one may say so, the ultimate figure of the ultimate, namely of the ‘Hegelian-Marxist end of History’ as present and not as future.
Revising and contesting his first hypothesis, Kojeve comes around to thinking that there is an even more final end of history, an even more eschatological end than the American (and even Californian, as he says somewhere) ‘happy end’, and it is the more than extreme Japanese extremity […]
[…] there is something even more chic, ‘snobbier’, there is a nec plus ultra in the end of history that is Japanese post-historicity.
Why and how was Kojeve able to think that the United States had already reached the ‘final stage’ of ‘Marxist ‘communism”? What did he think he perceived there, what did he want to perceive there?
Answer: the appropriation, in abundance, of everything that can respond to the need or desire, the cancelation of the gap between desire and need suspends any excess, any disadjustment, in particular in work.
It is not at all surprising that this end of the disadjustment (of the being ‘out of joint’) ‘prefigures [an] eternal present’. [72]
[…]
WHo could deny that the neo-Marxist and para-Heideggerian reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit by Kojeve is interesting? It played a formative and not negligible role […] for a certain generation of French intellectuals […].
[…] if one wants to read with some seriousness that which is not altogether serious, then one must still underscore at least a few points.
First of all, the last and also most enigmatic sentence of this note […] remains a prescriptive utterance.
Who has ever read it? It is perhaps the most irresistible opening in this ‘Postscript’. It defines a task nand a duty for the future of post-historical man, once what Kojeve calls the ‘Japanisation’ of the West (including the Russians) will have been realised.
Post historical man doit…
[…] even if it calls for eternities of interpretation, there is an ‘it is necessary’ for the future […] there is some future and some history, there is perhaps the beginning of historicity for post-historical Man, beyond man and beyond history such as they have been represented up until now.
This indifference to the content here is not an indifference, it is not an attitude of indifference, on the contrary. Marking any opening to the event and to the future as such, it therefore conditions the interest in and not the indifference to anything whatsoever, to all content in general.
Apparently ‘formalist’, this indifference to the content has perhaps the value of giving one to think the necessarily pure and purely necessary form of the future as such, in its being-necessarily-promised, prescribed, assigned, enjoined, in the necessarily formal necessity of its possibility – in short, in its law.
It is this law that dislodged any present out of its contemporaneity with itself. Whether the promise promises this or that, whether it be fulfilled or not, or whether it be unfulfillable, there is necessarily some promise and therefore some historicity as future-to-come. It is what we are nicknaming the messianic without messianism.
Which means that even while he speaks from now on in an adequate fashion of all that he has been given, post-historical Man must/should [doit] [we underscore this doit that doubtless takes us back to the common condition of possibility of the two forms of the necessary, must and should] continue to detach [underscored by Kojeve] ‘forms’ from their ‘contents’, doing this not in order to trans-form the latter actively, but in order to oppose himself [underlined by Kojeve] as a pure ‘form’ to himself and to others, taken as whatever sorts of ‘contents’.
The ‘logic’ of the proposition just quoted might indeed correspond to a law, the law of the law. This law would signify the following to us: in the same place, on the same limit, where history is finished, there where a certain determined cncept of history comes to an end, precisely there the historicity of history begins, there finally it has the chance of heralding itself – of promising itself.
[…]
(Permit me to recall very briefly that a certain deconstructive procedure, at least the one in which I thought I had to engage, consisted from the outset in putting into question the onto-theo- but also archeo-teleological concept of history – in Hegel, Marx, or even the epochal thinking of Heidegger.
Not in order to oppose it with an end of history or an anhistoricity, but, on the contrary, in order to show that this onto-theo-archeo-teleology locks up, neutralises, an finally cancels history. It was then a matter of thinking another historicity – not a new history or still less a ‘new historicism’, but another opening of event-ness as historicity that permitted one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise: as promise and not as onto-theological or teleo-eschatological program or design.
[…] this is the c0nditioon of a re-politicisation, perhaps of another concept of the political.
To put it into a few words, deconstructive thinking of the trace, of iterability, of prosthetic synthesis, of supplementarity, and so forth, goes beyond this opposition, beyond the ontology it presumes. Inscribing the possibility of the reference to the other, and thus of radical alterity and heterogeneity, of differance, of technicity, and of ideality in the very event of presence, in the presence of the present that it dis-joins a priorin order to make it possible [thus impossible in its identity or its contemporaneity with itself], it does not deprive itself of the means with which to take into account, or to render an account of, the effects of ghosts, of simulacra, of ‘synthetic images’, or even, to put it in terms of the Marxist code, of ideologems, even if these take the novel forms to which modern technology will have given rise. […] )
iii. wears and tears (tableau of an ageless world)
The time is out of joint
Neither maturation, nor crisis, nor even agony.
Something else. What is happening is happening to age itself, it strikes a blow at the teleological order of history. What is coming, in which the untimely appears, is happening to time but it doesn’t happen in time.
[…]
This wearing in expansion, in growth itself, which is to say in the becoming worldwide [mondialisation] of the world, is not the unfolding of a normal, normative, or normed process […].
[…]
One might already have been shocked by the Kojevian picture of the state of the world and the state of the United States after the war. […] It was already insolent to say then that ‘all members of a ‘classless society’ can appropriate there as of now whatever they like, without having for all that to work any more than they wish to’. [78]
What cynicism of good conscience, what manic disavowal could cause someone [Fukuyama] to write, if not believe, that ‘everything that stood in the way of the reciprocal recognition of human dignity, always and everywhere, has been refuted and buried by history’?
[…]
Electoral representativity or parliamentary life […] is exercised with more and more difficulty in a public space profoundly upset by techno-tele-media apparatuses and by new rhythms of information and communication […] by the new structure of the event and of its spectrality that they produce […]
This transformation does not affect only facts but the concept of such ‘facts’.
The very concept of the event
Let us recall the technical, scientific, and economic transformations that, in Europe, after the First World War, already upset the topological structure of the res publica, of public space, and of public opinion.
They affected not only this topological structure, they also began to make problematic the very presumption of the topographical, the presumption that there was a place, and thus an identifiable and stablaizable body for public speech, the public thing, or the public cause, throwing liberal, parliamentary, and capitalistic democracy into crisis, as is often said, and opening thereby the way for three forms of totalitarianism which then allied, fought, or combined with each other in countless ways.
Now, these transformations are being amplified beyond all measure today.
[…]
However competent they may personally be, professional politicians who conform to the old model tend today to become structurally incompetent.
They were thought to be actors of politics, they now risk, as everyone knows, being no more than TV actors.
[…]
8. Inter-ethnic wars […] are proliferating, driven by an archaic phantasm and concept, by a primitive conceptual phantasm of community, the nation-State, sovereignty, borders, native soil and blood.
Archaism is not a bad thing in itself, it doubtless keeps some irreducible resource. But how can one deny that this conceptual phantasm is, so to speak, made more outdated than ever, in the very ontopology it supposes, by tele-technic dis-location? (By ontopology we mean an axiomatic linking indissociably the ontological value of present-being [on] to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general).
[…]
10. Above all, one would have to analyse the present state of international law and of its institutions.
2 limits:
- […] stems from the fact that their norms, their character, the definition of their mission depend on a certain historical culture. They cannot be dissociated from certain European philosophical concepts, and notably from a concept of State or national sovereignty whose genealogical closure is more and more evident
- Another limit is strictly linked to the first: This supposedly universal international law remains, in its application, largely dominated by particular nation-States.
the new international
My subtitle, ‘the New International’, refers to a profound transformation, projected over a long term, of international law, of its concepts, and its field of intervention.
Just as the concept of human rights has slowly been determined over the cause of centuries through many socio-political upheavals […] likewise international law should extend and diversify its field to include, if at least it is to be consistent with the idea of democracy and of human rights it proclaims, the worldwide economic and social field, beyond the sovereignty of States […]. [84]
[…]
[…] it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity.
[…]
The ‘New International’ is not only that which is seeking a new international law through these crimes. It is a link of affinity, suffering, and hope, a still discreet, almost secret link, as it was around 1848, but more and more visible, we have more than one sign of it.
It is an untimely link, without status, without title, and without name, barely public even if it is not clandestine, without contract, ‘out of joint’, without coordination, without party, without country, without national community (International; before, across, and beyond any national determination), without co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class.
The name of New International is given here to what calls to the friendship of an alliance without institution among those who, even if they no longer believe or never believed in the socialist-Marxist International, in the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the messiano-eschatological role of the universal union of the proletarians of all lands, continue to be inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx or of Marxism […]
[…]
the spirit of marxism
To continue to take inspiration from a certain spirit of Marxism would be to keep faith with what has always made of Marxism in principle and first of all a radial critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake its self-critique.
This critique wants itself to be in principle and explicitly open to its own transformation, re-evaluation, self-reinterpretation.
[…] We would distinguish this spirit from other spirits of Marxism, those that rivit it to the body of Marxist doctrine, to its supposed systemic, metaphysical, or ontological totality […] to its fundamental concepts of labour, mode of production, social class, and consequently to the whole history of its apparatuses […].
[…]
[…] our guiding thread this evening will be precisely the question of the ghost. How did Marx himself treat the ghost, the concept of the ghost, the spectre or revanant?
Now if there is a spirit of Marxism that I will never be ready to renounce, it is not only the critical idea or the questioning stance (a consistent deconstruction must insist on them even as it also learns that this is not the last or first word). It is even more a certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise that one can try to liberate from any dogmatics and even from any metaphysico-religious determination, from any messianism.
[…]
A deconstructive thinking, the one that matters to me here, has always pointed out the irreducibility of affirmation and therefore of the promise, as well as the undeconstructablility of a certain idea of justice (dissociated here from law).
Such a thinking cannot operate without justifying the principle of a radical cand interminable, infinite (both theoretical and practical, as one used to say) critique.
This critique belongs to the movement of an experience open to the absolute future of what is coming, that is to say, a necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other and for the event.
In its pure formality, in the determination that it requires, one may find yet another essential affinity between it and a certain messianic spirit.
What we have said here or elsewhere about exappropriation (the radical contradiction of all ‘capital’, of all property or appropriation, as well as all the concepts that depend on it, beginning with that of free subjectivity, thus of emancipation as ordered by these concepts) does not justify any bondage. It is, if we may say so, exactly the opposite. Servitude binds (itself) to appropriation.
[…]
Barely deserving the name community, the new International belongs only to anonymity.
Whether they wish it or know it or not, all men and women, all over the earth, are today to a certain extent the heirs of Marx and Marxism.
[…]
There is no precedent whatsoever for such an event. In the whole history of humanity, in the whole history of the world and of the earth, in all that to which one can give the name of history in general, such an event (let us repeat, the event of a discourse in the philosophico-scientific form claiming to break with myth, religion, and the nationalist ‘mystique’) has been bound, for the first time and inseparably, to worldwide forms of social organisation (a party with universal vocation, a labour movement, a Confederation of states, and so forth).
A messianic promise, even if it was not fulfilled, at least in the form in which it was uttered, even if it rushed headlong toward an ontological content, will have imprinted an inaugural and unique mark in history.
And whether we like it or not, whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be its heirs. [91]
There is no inheritance without a call to responsibility. An inheritance is always the reaffirmation of a debt, but a critical, selective, and filtering reaffirmation, which is why we distinguish several spirits.
[…]
Let us limit ourselves, for lack of time, to certain traits […] of what is called deconstruction, in the figure that it initially took over the course of these last decades, namely the reconstruction of the metaphysics of the ‘proper’, of logocentricim, linguisticism, phonologism, the demystification or the de-sedimentation of the autnomic hegemony of language (a deconstruction in the course of which is elaborated another concept of the text or the trace, of their originary technization, of iterability, of the prosthetic supplement, but also of the proper and of what was given in the name exappropriation). Such a deconstruction would have been impossible and unthinkable in a pre-Marxist space.
Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalisation, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.
If this attempt has been prudent and sparing in its references to Marx, it is because the Marxist ontology, the appelation Marx, the legitimation by way of Marx had been in a way to solidly taken over. They appeared to be welded to an orthodoxy, to apparatuses and strategies, whose least fault was not only that they were, as such, deprived of a future, deprived of the future itself.