Derrida's Legacy for Comparative Literature

The issue of ‘legacy’ is very important in Derrida’s work – it is indeed explicitly central in Specters of Marx (1993) and in its sequel Marx & Sons (2002). In Specters of Marx, the question that organizes the philosophical development could be formulated as: ‘how, in Marx’s legacy, is philosophy thought of as ontology?’.1 Furthermore, the issue of the ‘legacy’ of a philosophical and political thinker such as Marx is framed in its relation to a literary text: Specters of Marx is indeed placed under the aegis of a literary figure, Hamlet, as the book’s epigraph is Hamlet’s famous line, ‘The time is out of joint’ (Act I, Scene V). Derrida begins his philosophical reading of Marx by developing the issue of the ghost, on the modality of the ghost’s ‘presence’ as revenance in Hamlet, and he explicitly links Marx and Shakespeare, the Communist Manifesto and Hamlet: ‘I cannot hear “since Marx”, since Marx, without hearing, like Marx, “since Shakespeare”.’2 The figure of the spectre in Hamlet is the guiding thread of Derrida’s reading of Marx, and it allows Derrida to think legacy in terms of spectrality. Beyond Specters of Marx the issue of legacy could be traced in Derrida’s work at least back to ‘Fors’, the preface he wrote to Abraham and Torok’s Cryptonymie: le verbier de l’homme aux loups,3 and throughout most of his later essays

Art · Communism · Epigraph · Epistemology · HAMLET (protein complex · Literature · Manifesto · Marxist philosophy · Metaphysics · Politics · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Political theory and Gramsci