By Judith Revel
It is moving – and impressive too – to deliver a commentary here in New York on Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in the city where the text was published exactly 173 years ago. As there has already been a session devoted to the same text for this Marx 13/13 series, I will begin by explaining the meaning of my intervention and the direction I would like it to take.
Much has been said about the commentary on the coup d’état of December 2, 1851, and the way in which Marx wrote his text in immediate reaction to the facts, between December 1851 and March 1852. There are generally at least three points that are made: first, regarding the famous opening sentence which, referring to Hegel, splits, or perhaps doubles, any great event into a great tragedy and a miserable farce; second, the way in which the text, extending the analysis proposed in TheClass Struggles in France, reads the very movement of history from a class dynamic, or more exactly from class antagonisms which in particular become the key to understanding the period 1848-1851 but which more generally sets forth a general model for understanding history; third, the way in which the specific analysis of the peasantry, incapable of constituting itself as a class and reduced to being “the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes” (p. 299-300), played into the hands of the bourgeois order.
However, I would like to propose another reading – partial, perhaps even biased. This reading would in fact emphasize the complex conception of history that can be read between the lines in The Eighteenth Brumaire. And since the seminar rule is to rely on a commentary, the reading I have chosen is that of Jacques Derrida, in Specters of Marx, published in 1993.
A word, too, about the choice of this book by Derrida. I am perfectly aware of the discussions and objections that arose after the book was published, discussions and objections to which Derrida himself responded in 2002 in Marx & Sons. These are fascinating debates, but they are not the subject of my talk today. What interests me is something both smaller and more general: how Derrida’s book, and especially its chapter 4 – “In the Name of the Revolution, the Double Barricade (Impure ‘impure impure history of ghosts’)” – deduces from the Marxian text, or perhaps constructs within it a representation of history that is worth considering.
There are without a doubt many elements in this interpretation that resonate with my own research – I am in fact currently working on a mapping of the way in which some contemporary philosophers have thought about history and regimes of historicity. And beyond that: I am trying to understand how these representations of history, which are sometimes so different from one another, determined political thought, and thoughts of the political, which are in turn different, but which make up a certain constellation.
I will, as usual, proceed point by point to be clearer; I will also, as usual, apologize for my English, hoping that it will all remain comprehensible – and then of course a huge thank you to Bernard Harcourt and to Columbia University, and to you who are here tonight, for making this shared discussion and reflection space possible
There will be five points.
1. The first point concerns the philosophical nature of Marx’s political and sociological texts, that is to say, the refusal to oppose sociological texts on the one hand, and philosophical texts on the other. This statement of principle is not a matter of inconsequence, because it is the very condition of possibility of my own reading of The Eighteenth Brumaire. It is also that of Derrida’s reading in chapter 4 of Specters of Marx. One could, of course, put forward other principles of distinction, but I think that Derrida would doubtless refute them in the same way: there is no need to oppose theoretical texts and texts of circumstances, analysis and chronicle, the conceptual Marx and the Marx journalist of his own time. This refusal takes the form of a long note at the bottom of p. 177 of the French edition of Specters of Marx (p. 254 in the English translation). Mentioning the distinction made by Michel Henry between Marx’s philosophical texts and those which, like The Eighteenth Brumaire, would have less philosophical value, Derrida refutes the dividing line. For Michel Henry, the “political texts,” or “historical-political texts” do not in themselves carry the principle of their intelligibility. The Eighteenth Brumaire or The Manifesto of the Communist Party are therefore immediately considered as a kind of extra-philosophical material; and in the particular case of The Eighteenth Brumaire, this quasi-devaluation of the text is further aggravated by the circumstances of its writing – after all, it is a text written for an American journal! But with Derrida, on the contrary, the distinction has no place: The Eighteenth Brumaire also talks about something else, and this “something else” is essential: “One must take another step. One must think the future, that is, life” (p. 162 English translation). It is of course this mention of the future and that of life that interests me here.
2. If historical-sociological analysis has philosophical dignity, then my second point relates specifically to the constitution of the present as a philosophical object. Here, I must confess, what resonates with my own reflection – I, a reader of Derrida, himself, a reader of Marx – is a kind of echo phenomenon that is both foreign to Marx and Derrida, but which drives my interest. This echo is the way in which Foucault, at the very end of his life, seems to distinguish the present, on the one hand, and what he names actuality, on the other. The present seems to be understood as the set of present determinations that make the world what it is, that is to say, at the same time the sedimented set of present conditions of our historical experience and the way in which this sedimentation seems to trace in advance the field of our possible experience. The present is the effective state of the world at a given moment insofar as it is historically determined. Actuality, on the contrary, is something else. With this word, actuality, Foucault sometimes seems to want to designate what breaks, or overflows, or exceeds the system of determinations that shape the world as we know it: actuality is rooted in the present, but it represents at the same time its denial. Actuality introduces something as a difference into it – what Foucault calls “a possible difference.” And while it is not irrelevant that Foucauldian reflection is based on Kantian texts, and while the importance of “What is Enlightenment?” for Foucauldian reflection in the very last years of his work has rightly been emphasized, it should be remembered, however, that in at least one of Foucault’s commentaries, the reference to Kant is so to speak split, or redoubled. There is not only one text (“What is Enlightenment?”), but actually two – and the system that these two texts form is fascinating in itself. This second text is The Conflict of the Faculties. If I insist on this point, it is because it seems to me that the splitting of the Kantian reference literally mimics the distinction proposed by Foucault between the present and what he calls actuality. Between 1784, the date of the first text, and 1798, the date of the second, something did in fact happen. And that “something” was the French Revolution. The Revolution – rooted in a present that gave it the opportunity to emerge, that gave it its form, that nourished its aspirations. And yet: the Revolution – overflowing on all sides the realm of the imaginable or the prefigured, in favor of an opening up of history, of a novelty, of the establishment of a possible difference. If I recall this, it is not only for the pure pleasure of quoting Foucault, but because the question seems to me to be exactly the one that lies at the heart of Marx’s reflection in The Eighteenth Brumaire; or at least it is this question that Derrida identifies as central in the reading he proposes of the text.
Let us draw the consequences of this. If we want to assert that the present is a philosophical object, we are inextricably bound to a dual level of analysis, which is both totally complementary and radically divergent: a mapping of present determinations on the one hand, and a tracing of possible differences on the other. To put it even more briefly: history as a system of determinations, and history as an opening up to what it doesn’t contain. What is fascinating is that Marx does not propose (and neither does Derrida in his commentary) an opposition between history, understood as a place of determinations, and an outside to which it would be a question of giving the features of an exteriority to history, of a total strangeness – a thought of utopia, for example.
Here, it is in history, conceived as a milieu, that we must situate ourselves. The game is played in history. But this double register of analysis, with the violence of the contradictions and conflicts to which it gives rise, corresponds in reality to a double regime of description. This double regime will be explained by means of a double (and very divergent) reference to spectrality. The parodic, heavy, paralyzing spectrality of a past that keeps coming back to haunt our aspiration for change and our desire for revolution, on the one hand; and then the revolutionary spectrality that is the opening up of history to what it does not contain and that points to the future, on the other. Specters of Marx, in the plural: we have two of them, and I can tell you right now that there will be a third.
3. Third point of commentary. Let us focus on the first of the two possible faces of spectrality – the regime of deadly, toxic, spectrality, that of parodic reprise, that of parodic revival, when events and characters are repeated and return in a caricatured and degraded form. This is the well-known opening of the text: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But the greatness of Marx’s analysis is that it does not assign this parodic reiteration to the only logic of power. The deadly spectrality is not only the way in which December 2, 1851, reenacts November 9, 1799 – that is, the 18th Brumaire of Year VIII ; the way in which the coup d’état of “Napoleon the Little,” since he violated the Constitution of the Second Republic of which he had nevertheless been elected President, re-proposed in his own way the overthrow of the Directory which had turned the Republic into the Empire more than half a century earlier. Marx’s greatness lies in considering that this deadly spectrality could also affect revolutionary events themselves. Revolutions, like all events, sediment and accumulate, and form a history, a liability, a weight, a heaviness, which keeps coming back. Marx, from chapter 1 of The Eighteenth Brumaire, is perfectly explicit in this respect: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” The tone of this statement, almost “Nietzschean by anticipation,” has the merit of formulating the great difficulty that lies at the heart of any revolutionary process. Of course, a revolution, because it always arises at a certain point in history, must come to terms with a series of determinations that have represented at the same time its conditions of possibility and its limitations, its causes and its obstacles, the deepest roots and that against which it stands. A revolution breaks away from, it stands up against. But it must also deal with the stratification of revolutions and events that preceded it, and which constitute, even more than an imaginary, the already effective and always limiting identification of the field of possible experiences. This is exactly what I have proposed to call “the present”: the whole of present historical determinations, including past revolutionary experiences, which constantly shape in advance what would like, on the contrary, to present itself as actuality of the revolution. It is therefore a question of freeing oneself from this weight, because, as Marx writes, if “ Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95,” the actuality of the revolution – the revolution as actuality – supposes that it succeeds precisely in overflowing, in exceeding the historical sedimentation which nevertheless forms its basis – which forms its basis because it has already taken place. When Marx says that “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future,” it is this tension that he identifies. Of course, he immediately understands that the temptation to “borrowing from them (that is: the figures of the past) names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language” – that this temptation is all the greater when one finds oneself in a moment of crisis – and that the crisis, that is to say, etymologically, the possible bifurcation, is precisely the possibility of the revolutionary event itself. Marx comments: “And just as they (the revolutionaries) seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service.”
Marx therefore gives this first side of spectrality a very specific identity. The first side of spectrality is backward-looking fetishism, it is the set of great narratives of revolutionary hagiography, it is heritage and tradition, filiation and continuity. And Derrida, in his commentary, calls therefore for the exact opposite: the virtues of anachronism – one must recall the haunting reprise, in Derrida’s text, of Shakespeare’s Hamlet quotation: “Time is out of joint.” More: the disruption, the maladjustment, or what Derrida calls “the revolution within the revolution” (p. 143). “No, no more revolutionary memory, down with the monument, bring down the curtain on the shadow theater and funerary eloquence, destroy the mausoleum for popular crowds, shatter the death masks beneath the glass caskets. All of that is the revolution of the past” (p. 142).
However, it would be wrong to imagine that simply breaking the revolutionary idols, being aware of the great narratives of a revolutionary counter-history that has itself become monumental history – in short: making a clean sweep of that past too – is enough. In any case, the solution is not the rejection of history, it is not the choice of ahistoricity, because an event is never outside history; because what I have proposed to call, as Foucault at the end of his life did, actuality, is never done without a certain relationship to the present. Because there can be no difference without a careful survey of the effective determinations of our own historical situation, and these are only the very latest layer of a stratification to which we give the very name of history. With Marx, there is no way out of this split historicity constituted by the tension between the present and actuality, and it must therefore be confronted as such. When, for example, in the 1869 “Preface to the second edition” Marx refers back-to-back to Victor Hugo and Proudhon, it is because, in both their analyses, and despite the difference of their respective texts – Napoleon the Little and Le Coup d’État – the understanding of what happened has, so to speak, shifted: they both moved from the register of history to that of the historical “character.” In Hugo’s case, it is not the historical event that is confronted, because, as Marx remarks, “He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual.” In Proudhon, the apparent attention to history is not real either – “his historical construction of the coup d’etat becomes a historical apologia for its hero.”
With Derrida, the ambiguity is greater than with Marx. “What does not happen in this anachrony!” he himself notes in the first chapter of Specters of Marx (p. 26). But he adds immediately: “Perhaps “the time” (in English in the French text), time itself, precisely” (p. 26). Yet history and time are not the same thing – and we will not be surprised to see, in the next few pages, the name and the shadow of Heidegger reappearing.
4. This brings me to the fourth point of my reading. How can we think of the revolutionary event in a way other than a parody? And yet to remain, with Marx, within history? The whole challenge of the other possible side of spectrality will consist precisely in determining a form of relationship to history (and prior to that: a representation of history itself) that at the same time allows for the recognition of present determinations, on the one hand, and what Marx calls the “poetry” of the revolution, its poietic power, its constituent power, on the other. At the same time, because it is not a question of playing the former against the possibility of the latter, but of thinking about their articulation. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, the linguistic metaphorization of this difficulty allows Marx to be particularly clear: “In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue” (emphasis added). In short, if there is the possibility of revolution, it is not so much because we have learned the words and know how to curse (I am thinking here of Caliban in The Tempest: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t. Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you. For learning me your language!” (I, 2, 137). It is that we have both learned and been able to forget, to free the newness of the revolutionary event. “Let the dead bury their dead”, says Marx, so that the social revolution of the nineteenth century can finally achieve its own content. And yet: this novelty would not be possible without what it precisely exceeds and overflows, denies and disarticulates: the present with which it breaks. This is a point that Derrida sees perfectly: “For what one must forget will have been indispensable” (p. 137). If we do not forget enough, we are doomed to parodic repetition. But if we forget too much, if we do not remember the spirit of the revolution, then “the result is bourgeois platitude” (p. 137). This is the ridge line along which we must forge a path.
In Derrida’s commentary, this ridge line takes on a specific form. The “unleashed overflowing” (p. 144 – the French expression is powerful: “ce déferlement par-dessus bord”) is indeed what embodies the excess of novelty, this “proper content” of the social revolution that Marx longs for. But there is also the condition in which we find ourselves, caught between the two regimes of spectrality that I have tried to describe. “One does not know if the expectation prepares the coming of the future-to-come or if it recalls the repetition of the same, of the same thing as ghost (p. 44-45)”, Derrida remarks. But he immediately adds: “This not-knowing is not a lacuna. No progress of knowledge could saturate an opening that must have nothing to do with knowing. Nor therefore with ignorance” (p. 45). In reality, Derrida’s position, defined by reference to the reading of Marx, is interesting because it outlines in its own way a thought of what we called “the possible difference” in historical context. With at least three characteristics: 1) Revolution is a horizon of expectation marked by uncertainty. If “horizon of expectation” sounds too Koselleckian, we can no doubt understand the insistent proposal, in Specters of Marx, of a “messianism without messiah” as that expectation. 2) We cannot reduce and claim to manage this expectation through the sole dimension of knowledge. History should not only be known, it should be made, acted. 3) What we inherit (our history) must not be able to impose that the parodic spectrality saturate the field of possibilities. For that reason, we must remember not only the bad ghosts, but also the good ones, those who remind us that “Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task” (p. 67). The task escapes, as indeterminacy, as openness, a kind of knowledge by anticipation that would settle in the register of prediction (we could just as well say: a discourse that would belong to the exclusive mode of logical determination, to the naïve belief in simple causality, and which would be nothing more than the scientific dressing up of the old practice of prophecy). And yet, this exceedance nevertheless has to do with something that has happened. This something that has happened can be a date (for example 1848), a phenomenon (for example the history of capitalism, or the history of liberalism at the turn of the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries, or that of neoliberalism, in its contemporary reformulations and adaptations); it can also be a name. For us: the name of Marx, of course – but also, perhaps, the name of Derrida today. Now this something that has happened, is, Derrida tells us about Marx, a legacy that paradoxically demands, as a pledge of extreme fidelity, to be thought of not as a given but as a task. Like a discrepancy, a shift, between the spontaneous idea that we have of the specter as a revenant – something that returns from the past to haunt our own present and determine the contours of our future – and another, completely different idea, according to which the specter is the result of a process of transformation, of transfiguration, which means that what returns, in reality, does not return, because it cannot be the same: it has just been made.
The idea of this discrepancy, of this shift, emerges as a surprise in Derrida’s own reflection, and seems to burst in almost by force, in his analysis. At least that’s what Derrida himself says: “When, in 1847–48, Marx names the specter of communism, he inscribes it in an historical perspective that is exactly the reverse of the one I was initially thinking of in proposing a title such as “the specters of Marx.” Where I was tempted to name thereby the persistence of a present past, the return of the dead which the worldwide work of mourning cannot get rid of, whose return it runs away from, which it chases (excludes, banishes, and at the same time pursues), Marx, for his part, announces and calls for a presence to come” (p. 126). Marx also considers the specter as a vector of the future.
5. This brings me to the final point of my commentary. One hundred and seventy-three years separate us from Marx’s text. Thirty-two years separate us from Derrida’s text. The world has changed; it is no longer Marx’s world, nor probably not completely Derrida’s. However, there is a third regime of spectrality to be added to the two that emerge from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which I have just briefly outlined. This third regime of spectrality is precisely that of Marx himself.
Because what we are fighting against is a spectral return of Marx frozen in the successive parodies of which his name has been the mask; or stuck in a dehistoricization that we would subject his thought to, under the guise of fidelity. Thoughts of the Party, thought of the State-form, thought of a certain reality of labor, of a certain theory of value, of a certain class: what do we put in place of all that for today? I insist: for today? It is probably necessary to ensure that, as Derrida himself notes, “‘If “since Marx” names a future-to-come as much as a past, the past of a proper name, it is because the proper of a proper name will always remain to come. And secret” (p. 19, emphasis added).
Here, perhaps, we are entitled to discuss. Secret, or Marx’s extraordinary ability to foresee the necessity of his own future historicization? To put it more simply: a figure forever missing in the carpet and yet always proven with each reaffirmation of the heritage? An insistence, from the very depths of the heterogeneity of what is constantly changing, and the reaffirmation of a strange invariant emerging from the spectrality of the specter? Or, on the contrary, the idea that the opening up of history is an ever-present virtuality, an ever-possible bifurcation? Which means that it has, of course, to do with the stratifications of what we call reality, which is at once an effect of present determinations and past stratifications; but that it also points out the work of difference from within its very meshes? Therefore, necessarily, our need to promote Marx beyond Marx, with the specters of Marx returning to haunt our own time, and demanding of us precisely something like a task, in order to allow us access to the legacy? All this requires us to make a new diagnosis of our present, a new critique, using new categories, and with new leverage points. Deconstruction, from this point of view, is not a thing, nor a method: it is, like Marx’s thought itself (since they finally have that in common): an infinite task – a practice ceaselessly taking up its own movement and working it like dough, like the material of an endless elaboration.
