Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (7)

Seventh night

Joining the disparate is theory. We seek pattern in everything. Stars become crabs, bears and fish; scholars spend lifetimes pouring over maps and faded manuscripts looking for signs of Vatican conspiracies that hide the proof that Jesus was a sexual adventurer. The deeper question is what lies behind the need for patterning? The urge to do this must be a survival trait, our ancestors would not have survived without it and we now inherit this facility.

Those old patterns, plant growth and animal migration and their link to the seasons; the movement of the heavens that can be used to predict when these seasons will occur; when to plant, when to hunt, when to prepare for winter and a time of famine, all essential planning if the tribe is to survive.

Is theory going to support practice? Can Marx help us plan for survival? Can the old patterns be refreshed by what he had to say?

Justice can be put on hold whilst the question is answered. Complexity is everywhere now and we need to see the patterns beneath the patterns if we are to survive and perhaps Marx can give us a lens with which to look for these.

The problem of knowledge is that on the on hand it tends to be horded and on the other it is hard to know what knowledge is. Sometimes it is simply discourse parading as knowledge. The academic sector has a vested interest in calling all its activities knowledge generating, but sometimes all it is conversation.

The enemy of art and philosophy is style. If Marx is a philosopher let’s hope he has no style and that his interpreters don’t occlude his words with rhetoric. If so the permanent revolution loses its potency as familiarity breeds contempt.

Scientific Marxism claimed a ground that has since been seen to be shifting sand. In the service of Marx we have to be humble, to approach the words as children with a rhyme, a rhyme that will be long remembered for its metre and its words but not its historical gestation.

We need to learn by example, to mimic and to copy, return to an Eastern way that has been sliced out of our Western tradition.

Remember Marx is not a Marxist, his concept of fetishism a true brother of Christ and sister to the Holy Spirit.

The money system casts a giant shadow over all ideology, the canker in the rose of life, the serpent in the garden.

Hegel intuits this but still advances his concept of a desire for absolute knowing, even though he is aware that religion is being destroyed by a belief in usury. The lost shape of the ghost (spirit) the true form of the self. The spirit knows itself as the shape of the spirit, its content being received in the shape of the self. This desire for absolute knowing is itself the shadow cast across Derrida’s interpretations of Marx.

We live in times when bankers still practice their alchemy, sub-prime mortgages transforming straw into gold, as stock brokers melt down our words and labour into gold and silver for investor slugs to feed on, while pinstriped vampires roam the city, with their grimy legal papers, blood dripping from their fountain pens as they sign us all to debt.

One day the blades will be unsheathed, their sharp edges glints of light in the dark of economic gloom before the blood of capital is sold cheaply on the market.