Debate around Specters of Marx with Jacques Derrida, Étienne Balibar, and Patrice Loraux

Balibar: We are here this evening to pose questions to Jacques Derrida about his latest book: Specters of Marx . I think that one of the guiding ideas of the work is what one must do so that the return to Marx proposed in this work not be a return to Marxist doctrine understood as “conception of the world,” or as “system.” When Jacques Derrida explains, at the beginning of his book, that Marx is one of the rare authors in our tradition in whom one finds, in an explicit fashion, the demand for his own correction or his own “deconstruction,” he points there to one of the most immense paradoxes in the history of ideas over the last century. One is indeed tempted to wonder, concerning Marx, by what logic such a thinking was able to supply the material for and a whole part of its terminology to one of the most overbearing and most harmful dogmatic constructions of recent decades. This is a most fundamental point, because it will certainly not take long before we notice that Marx, whose death and obsolescence were announced over and over again a few years ago, is, in a certain way, the most up-to-date of all the thinkers we have inherited. He was the one who furnished, not the most true or complete analysis of the globalization of capitalism and phenomena of social polarization on a global scale, nevertheless, the most incisive analysis or the one that best opens possibilities for our analyses. I will say that I agree completely with Derrida when he asserts that there will never again be a state Marxism or a Marxism of apparatchiks and organizations. I also agree with Derrida when he recalls the radical heterogeneity of the Marxist legacy. And when one says that, it doesn’t mean that there is no “Marxism” in the sense that Marx himself said: “I am not a Marxist.” What I mean is that there is not a philosophy of Marx in the singular. Despite all the attempts or all the starts made by Marx to think his enterprise philosophically, none was finally able to be integrated into a truly unified or unifiable construction. One has to say, with Derrida, that Marx always permanently escapes from himself: he always exceeds his own discourse.