Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (4)

The forth night

Indentured academics inherit the tradition of reason, falling between the stools of impoverished logic and numerical discourse, while the poet communes with the ghosts of the dead and rhymes their conversations for the living.
Oppositions dissolve as you approach atomic or universal scale but only in song can their harmony be truly satisfied. Learning will never replace morning worship, a time when hymns can penetrate the membrane as a question. This is why young boys are never taught to think.
The conjuring of ghosts a Victorian parlour game, fake ectoplasm smearing the polished table; the spectre now glimpsed in the mirror of a waxy sheen, as it glides towards the wings of the stage. It exits left.
A manifesto for the dead was written by the dead and taken up as a flag of liberty for the living. A future proof text that at its core asks why it is we mine our fellow workers ‘til their skin falls into sunken chests and hollow cheeks, their empty stomachs sounding out the deepest ruptures of the Earth.
The law is now no longer Bible told, it shapes itself through ownership and use, the ideology of faith is walking off the stage. The audience are booing and the comic turn is here. He’s just as bad and even worse he tries to win them over. Jokes of sex and racist tales are nineteen eighties fare. They want blood and stamp their feet and off the stage he goes and out comes Marx disguised as Prospero. He offers up a magic gift, a gift to hold and cherish, its shape a loving cup, two handled made in red. Like the audience, its nature runs through our culture as letters through a seaside stick of rock. The audience forgive him his sins and he blesses them.
Only in Cuba did it seem as if the world's words were not corrupted. Stalin, monarch drawn, his urge for power a greater law than economic rights.
But these are old battlefields, looking out from the high castle over Europe, we now turn our eyes to the East. The iron curtain has parted; the scene and the actors have changed, the play within a play now staged for the benefit of Mister Right. Fukuyama, Mister Wrong, is writing for the press, a hungry press that seeks for confirmation it is right. CAPITALISM HAS NOW WON, the headline in his news, the bankers’ pockets bulge with pride, the underclass arise and gorge themselves on cake. The Bay of Pigs a turning point, a sixties pivot for a world of future Ragnoraks.
The Phenomenology of Spirit (10) teaches us that it is always the end of history, but tomorrow is a new day, a day when once again parliamentary democracy will shoot itself in the foot, but hobble on regardless.
“READ ME!”, pleads the text, if not it wont exist. Reading between the lines is what Marx taught us to do, but we sat in the library while a train of stinking overcrowded wagons rode the fast track to capital.

At the end of the line the three voices of Marx announce themselves; Marx the Father, Marx the Son and Marx the Holy Ghost.

The dog pricks up its right ear, it is listening for the future.

10 Hegel, G.W.F. (1979) The Phenomenology of Spirit Oxford: OUP