Derrida's Ghosts: The State of Our Debt (Jacques Derrida) (Essay‪)‬

WHAT ROMANTIC STUDIES OWES TO THE WORK OF JACQUES DERRIDA IS not to be imagined as open to simple calculation but will surely remain subject to an interest-beating account for the forseeable future. Nothing has changed since Paul de Man proposed that "Derrida's work is one of the places where the future possibility of literary criticism is being decided." (1) Derrida had given much to this project when de Man wrote over twenty years ago. Not only has there been since then much more from Derrida that is still to be assimilated; those same early works read by de Man have themselves by no means settled into the inertia of received positions. Derrida's readings (of Rousseau, Hegel and many others) and ways of reading (which are themselves the emanations of a certain Romanticism according to which all philosophy must become literature) continue to exceed the interpretations that would contain them and will remain urgent and incomplete as long as there is some articulate opposition to those authorities purporting to administer the litmus-test for deciding what is poison and what is cure. Those who deny or ignore the debt will only add to the amount of interest coming due in a transaction that is still perhaps best imagined as the monstrosity projected in Of Grammatology--that "for which there is as yet no exergue," the as yet unthinkable shape signifying the end of logocentrism and of the logic of filiation that includes within it the patristic figure of capital itself, the parent sum. (2) After the end of the Soviet empire in 1989 Derrida responded to the near-hysterical victory songs of many in the neoliberal West with another reminder of monstrosities still to come. Many reservations have now been lodged and circulated about Derrida's long-awaited encounter with Marx (adumbrated in Positions to be sure but still declared there as yet to happen). We should not forget Derrida's reinvention of a familiar wheel in subsuming use value into an always already established exchange value; his un-Marxian conflation of the specific formations of industrial capitalism at the turn of the 19th century with the general money form in place since classical Greece; his overexcited proof that Marx himself was fully prey to the specters he was claiming to exorcize, fully enthused with the methods of the same Ludwig Feuerbach he was proposing to critique. We know too that the spellbinding quality of Derrida's reading of Marx is distinctly enabled by his avoidance of any close engagement with a long and complex tradition of elaboration, comment and critique of Marx and Marxism. (3)