Maintaining the presence of Marx

Marxism and deconstruction

pp. 149-173

in: Michael Thomas, The reception of Derrida, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

In reply to Houdebine's and Scarpetta's careful questioning in Positions Derrida argued that his encounter with Marx and the "theoretical elaboration" (POS, 62) constantly required of him remained 'still to come" and could not "be immediately given" (POS, 63). In order to understand Derrida's attitude to Marxism, his response must be set in the context of a broader political realignment that took place among postwar intellectuals on the French left. In the decades that followed May 1968 French intellectuals from Lyotard to Debray rejected the main theoretical supports of Marxism. In 1976 the French Communist Party conformed to the trend by renouncing its belief in the dictatorship of the proletariat and committed itself to the democratic road to socialism. The rise of the "New Philosophers' in the late 1970s and the infamous 'silence of the intellectuals' in 1981 added to the demise of the revolutionary left in the French academy.