Ambivalent Promises—Reproductions of the Subject: A Forum on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part IV

Abstract

Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this fourth group of contributions, Thomas Clément Mercier shows how Derrida’s book, besides questioning reception and influence, yet remains to be read, especially in light of ongoing archival research on Derrida’s engagements with Marx’s writings in seminars from the 1970s; and Paulo Chamon offers a critical assessment of Derrida’s promise of a ‘New International’ by considering how the book spooks itself in such a way as to raise serious questions in regard to sovereignty and subjectivity.