"To learn to live with ghosts": Hamlet vs. Red Dawn

Derrida's Specters of Marx is about ghosts as much as it is about Marx: Marx's ghost(s) and Marx as ghost(s). It is the latter that I am concerned with here.

Derrida speaks of his gernation's experience of the specter of Marx, it's "paternal" character (p.13). Derrida's generation - the memory of 1789, the legacy of French Marxism, May '68 -conjures a certain type of ghost. This is perhaps why one of the subtexts of Derrida's reading of the Marxian injunction/promise is Hamlet. A call for justice, out of the past, into the future, issues from this specter of Marx. This is a rather different ghost of Marx, however, than the one that haunts the experience of a suburban American kid growing up in the 1980s. This would not be Hamlet's dilema of a disjointed time.

But there is no doubt that the figure of Marx haunts my generation as well. However, this was a much less ambiguous type of haunting. Marx was less an elusive ghost and more of an overtly menacing Frankenstein figure. I was haunted by "Marx" as the monstrous hybrid: Stalinist-Leninist-Titoist-Moaist-Sandinistan threats all rolled into one. This united communist force was construed less as a political and ideological bloc and more as a dangerous aberration of nature. This monster, moreover, could parachute onto American soil at any moment. As a young boy, the outrageous senario of the film Red Dawn was at once the scariest and the most exciting prospect I could have imagined. Facing the red menace with with other armed young militants was a recurring fantasy for me. The ghost of Marx called out - in Russian and Spanish - for World War III.

A specter is haunting this project.