Derrida's specters

futurity, finitude, forgetting

Joanna Hodge

pp. 127-137

in: Julia Jansen (ed), Critical communities and aesthetic practices, Berlin, Springer, 2012

Abstract

Derrida's text, Specters of Marx (1994) carries a triple sub-title, the structure of which is worthy of more attention than so far has been given to it. The sub-title invokes the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. The intent of these remarks is to open out a discussion of these both as distinct elements, and as a single structure. The intent of this paper is to relocate the discussion of Marx and his New International back into the analyses of temporality invoked in the notions of debt and mourning, of the gift and the transmission of identity across actual deaths in the continuity, the "survivre', the survival or living on, which is constituted in the rituals of mourning. The remarks in this paper are designed to re-situate Derrida's analysis of futurity, of an "a-venir', of the "to-come', as a modification of and challenge both to Heidegger's insistence on the priority of the future, over past and present, and to Levinas' dedication of what there is to his god, in an "a-dieu', in relation to an emphasis on finitude and on forgetting.

Cited authors

Heidegger Martin

Derrida Jacques

Levinas Emmanuel