Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (23)

The Twenty-third night

A Good Friday agreement is made for the resurrection of the dead; proof that miracles do happen. A precise location is required; one that is in sympathy with local lay lines and that can channel the earth’s energy at its maximum potential. The area is marked out and cut off from the rest of the territory. It resembles a seventeenth century hunt tableau as provided for the kings of France when in their pomp, when deer and boar were herded into fenced off areas, so that their majesties could not fail to slaughter creatures at their will. Marx can see the parallels and believes in the eating of ghosts as a type of spiritual nourishment. He has though yet to determine the site’s exact location.

Marx is unfolding a large map, as he opens it out, we begin to realize it is huge, its scale 1:1, each page opening out onto the world until eventually an exact correspondence is made. He is going to use this map to plot the route for the hunt, but as he opens its pages he is becoming enmeshed in brambles and tree branches, soaked in the waters of streams and up to his knees in muddy riverbanks. He is lost in his map, trapped within a useless topographical depiction, a man who has no backwoods knowledge and no survival skills.

The stalking and the shooting and the snaring will go on without him. The hunt is for the word made flesh, the hunters looking for that other, that in turn will mimic them. That other with a clever camouflage that apes the huntsman’s gait and stalks the stalker with his shadow; mimesis and alterity, the two sides of his game.

Marx is still trying to unfold the map. He believes in its veracity, even though he is very aware that all truths are simply narratives of conviction. Each more detailed sheet of the map reveals another layer of the world, and eventually atoms are seen; gradually as Marx peers into freshly unfolded pages he sees their quantum split and watches the waves of the positronic field that holds him in his space. Dimensions unfold as he opens the map, energy replaces matter and dark spaces unfold into dark matters, each fold of the map opening new universes and more dimensions of time and space. Minutes become hours and hours days, each unfolding now taking weeks and months for each page to unfurl its mysteries. Finally, in the dark recesses of space-time, Marx now has a vision of the specters and ghosts that haunt his dreams. He sees their form and knows their shape. He recognizes the old patterns from the dreams of his youth, he sees his death and stares at his own soul as it escapes his dead body shifting and morphing into new forms ready for the hunt.

Marx realises he was stalking himself. Setting traps for his own words, words that are rising in value by the minute as his stock begins to soar and his shadow overshadows all the ends of histories.