Too often Marxists display an epistemological cataract when confronted with such matters. They call all to easily to mind the observation of the former Marxist Bruce Anderson: 'the ignorance and naïveté of the 20th-century Left: its endless willingness to construct political fantasies out of mass suffering and bloodshed. These are under-chronicled subjects.' In this collection Terry Eagleton and Tom Lewis jump out as analysts with other things on their minds. Eagleton criticises Derrida for having merely an ethical rather than a materialist response to Stalinism. The entire Derridean project is summed up as 'a perpetual excited openness to the Messiah who better not let us down by doing anything as determinate as coming'. Yet, Eagleton is exceedingly humourous and his wit alone adds badly needed lubrication to what in many respects is a textual aridity. Lewis self-assuredly contents himself with the observation that 'for Marxists there is nothing to mourn'. Incredible, given the failures and crimes of Marxism throughout the past century. As if the evasive Trotskyite 'blame it all on Stalinism' mechanism has any appeal left amongst serious or potential Marxist thinkers trying to claw their way out of the totalitarian abyss Marxism descended into. In one of the more engaging essays Aijaz Ahmad takes Derrida to task for having a 'highly problematic' view of Marxism. Here the writer feels that Derrida occupies a contradictory position by criticising Althusser for dissociating 'Marxism from any teleology or from any messianic eschatology' and then going on to create the very problematic he objected to in Althusser by stating that 'my concern is to distinguish the latter from the former'. A peculiar Derridean conundrum which sends the philosopher spiralling into an orbit of slippage making it impossible to grasp the core of his position. All we can do is remain appreciative of Derrida, despite the enormous difficulty in understanding him, for having challenged the ensemble of western rationalist thought, maintaining that it was engaged in a dishonest pursuit of certainty and detecting a totalitarian arrogance therein.
For Derrida his usurpation of a totalitarian certainty did not take the form of maintaining a regime of endless meaning but instead sought to undermine what Foucault called 'regimes of truth' by introducing an open framework which could fertilise a plurality of meanings rather than one. It is not surprising that Derrida finds himself under attack from Ahmad for shying away from conceptualising 'a unity of a global process' which would supposedly explain a wide range of events from the fall of communism, the collapse of West European labour movements and an almost total diminution of third World radicalisms - all combined with the rise of fascisms throughout Europe. This 'looking from the outside in' approach leaves us floundering and trying to square the circle when, as Martin Shaw elsewhere points out 'local power dynamics remain unexplored'. <SNIP>
-- Michael Pugliese