Seeing is Believing: Marx's Manifesto, Derrida's Apparition

Abstract

Marx's spectre does not hark back to anything that came before it. It doesn't come from beyond the grave to plague or torment us. It is not a reminder of some past or primordial existence. It is meant to point forwards, projectively and prospectively, not backwards and retroactively. And this is to say that there is, quite simply, nothing uncanny or unheimlich about it at all, whatever Derrida and others may think. Quite to the contrary, Marx's spectre sets us the task of finding it a home or making it a home in the world. It is not dreadful save to those who have prior cause to dread its advent. To the rest of us it is a tocsin, a call to action. As Frederic Jameson has pointed out, the Hamlet Marx's spectre suggested to Derrida was itself 'not a ghost story'; 'it did not merely tell about some grisly hold of the past on the present...but rather showed the apparition of the past in the act of provoking future action and calling for retribution by the living'. The deeper question begged by all this is, of course, whether an emergent social phenomenon's lack of visibility is 'a sign of its inescapable spectrality' (as Derrida seems to think, but which seems preposterous) or, instead, in Malcolm Bull's words 'a historically significant indication of the nature and location of positive values in contemporary society'.