Jacques Bidet a Stathis Kouvelakis

Derrida • 633
me, the importance of Specters of Marx in this history as well. Not only because
this text should no longer be understood as a belated – two decades, and not
until the end of the ‘really existing’ Marxism of the Communist International –
and disappointing rallying to the ‘cause’ of Marxism. To the contrary, it would
be just as easy to read this text, as Derrida invites us to do at many points, as
open break with the entire history of Marxism as such. In this text we read that
the ‘spirit’ of Marxism that Derrida is evoking or conjuring up in Specters is to
radically distinguished or demarcated from
the body of Marxist doctrine, to its supposed systematic, metaphysical,
or ontological totality (notably to its ‘dialectical method’ or to ‘dialectical
materialism’), to its fundamental concepts of labor, mode of production, social
class, and consequently to the whole history of its apparatuses (projected
or real: the Internationals of the labor movement, the dictatorship of
the proletariat, the single party, the State, and finally the totalitarian
monstrosity). 12
What is most remarkable about Specters of Marx is, in fact, its articulation
of the problem of justice in its relation – suspensive and con� ictual, but not
destructive – to law. But, for this very reason, Specters of Marx might best be
read less as a performative intervention in the Marxist tradition and its ‘fundamental
concepts’ than as a continuation of one of Derrida’s most important
texts, his 1989 essay ‘Force de la loi’, on Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’:
the � rst moment in Derrida’s text when the ‘contamination’ between
justice and law will be laid out. 13 This con� ict will be at the heart of Derrida’s
work over the last � fteen years of his life, and will orient the vast majority of
his conceptual work, be it on hospitality, cosmopolitanism, or ‘democracy to
come’. Rather than choosing to elaborate post-deconstructive mutations of
those concepts belonging to what is called ‘dialectical materialism’ – labour,
mode of production, the state, the party – Derrida brackets the entire system
of Marxist categories in order to inscribe Marx’s text itself into a problematic
of justice that is never articulated in any satisfactory way in the language of
Marx himself.
12 Derrida 1993a, pp. 145–6, my emphasis.
13 Derrida 1994. ‘Force of Law’ was originally presented, in a different form, at a
colloquium at Cardozo Law School in October 1989, and was initially published in
English in 1992.