"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.

Variations on the Promise











"Promises are shit...
...there was nothing left when broken."
- Fugazi (1988)

"There would be [no] promise without this disjunction."
- Jacques Derrida (1993)

Rationale

I am beginning this blog in the hopes that it will motivate and inspire movement in my own thought. I have recently conceived of what will be "my project" in the coming years - as I undertake to complete a PhD in Religion at the University of Toronto. I have provisionally called this project "New Political Futures." The particularities involved therein will become apparent (hopefully) as I post.

The movement that I hope to accomplish with this blog will take the form of - sometimes random - pathmarks. Even if the thoughts to be recorded here will not always be complete or even coherent, at least their electronic inscription and their quasi-emperical externality will provide an exit from the often circular route my thinking tends to follow if it is not given form beyond cognitive reflection. In order to disrupt the circularity of solitary thought - and, no doubt, in an effort to satisfy the immemorial desire for recognition - I will periodically update this site with quotations, reflections, questions, etc..