Derrida Marxist?

[Charles Miller]

I understand the aesthetic value. But to limit the value of the work to
this aspect, intended as it is to denigrate the work's "serious" value,
I wonder what the serious aspect is that you find missing from it. Is it
the apparent untidiness of the work? Or is it that seeming
_disassemblage_ state in which the work seems to leave the subject? In
some ways, I see the work analogous to a Duchamp painting.

The work's lack of programmatic assertions also might disenchant those
looking for such pronouncements. But it is exactly this type of
certainty-filled pronouncements that Derrida wants to undermine. No
doubt, he sees these types of statements as indicative of Marxism's
failure in its spectral manifestation in various totalitarian guises.

Ultimately, Derrida is trying to deconstruct Marx in terms of a
Levinasian alter-ego dialectic, where neither is subjugated and consumed
by the other. I think this is where he's headed with his concentration
on Marx's attack on St. Max In German Ideology_. There he shows the
correspondences between Max and Marx, but also the terrible ferocity
with which Marx wants to destroy his enemy--a mirror reflection, Derrida
suggests.

chuck miller

Carrol Cox <cbcox at mail.ilstu.edu> wrote:

"Pluralism" is like mom and apple pie, it can mean anything a writer
wants
it to mean and therefore communicates nothing at all. As to *Spectres*,
it
was an absolutely beautiful book I hope to reread someday just for the
pure
kicks of it, but its politics were rotten with elitism and contempt for
the
mass of the human species. His proposed new International was just
another
fantasy ascribed to the ghost of Hamlet's father. Ghostly and ghastly,
but
still beautiful.

Carrol