Saturday, 12 March 2011

Reflections on reading Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (30)

The thirtieth night



The dog offers to the audience four thoughts to go away with.


1)
Every word that has been written exposes itself to the reader’s interpretation. It is said that true interpretations are liberating and lead to consciousness and freedom. It is also suggested that false interpretations are to be restricted by law, however the commandments as laid out ensure that all actions are doubled in their meaning, any choice to do something therefore implying that something else was not done. This is a vigilant purgatory for the people of the book, a purgatory that consists of a death in a life of yearning. Yearning for a primitive past life of first causes, yearning for a money free future, whilst watching for the ghosts that are the price the readers pay for their own eternal vigilance.
All texts are defeated by the reader; but there is no glory in these victories, only the whistling of the wind through the pages of closely argued texts. The hermeneutics of inaction trap the revolutionary moment in a reoccurring past. The future will only arrive when these pages are buried, watered, rotted down and turned into the fertiliser for a thin soil that waits for the seeds of a new beginning.

2)
The love of others is the first casualty of Capitalism. The gift of labour that we give our own families is still the most wonderful act and the family of mankind can still receive this gift, but only in the spirit of true socialism. This is the promise that holds the future in check. This naivety is our most powerful political tactic. The love of others is a fading specter but a specter with a powerful past and the promise of a wholesome future. Its echo in a thousand love songs that drift through the airways, hummed to I-pods, sung to loved ones and lodged deep in the sound brain. Its text in the miles of shelves of romantic novels that sigh beneath their weight; its look the look of a million filmed embraces and squeezed hands in the dark. This is a yearned for reality and as we are led to understand, a reality from outside of perception does not of course exist. As all perception is a construct of the embodied mind and this love a phantom of the universe of Christian thought, it is a love that also lives in the limbs and it will lie in wait to stir our actions like some forgotten Valentine card, left between the pages of an out of date software manual.

3)
The specters speak in tongues, but the spirit is more powerful. A pale rider emerges from the shadows; he reins his horse to a halt. “Long live death!” he cries. “Long live death!” the echoing cry from the barricades. The living speak with the tongues of the dead, the dead speak through the living who dream of soil and earth and fallen leaves.

4)
One day the architecture of commerce will crumble in the face of human kindness. The old sublime will reassert itself over the new, solidity over simulacrum. The days of interpretation are numbered and in this future world the people will listen to the narratives of spirits and ghosts will number themselves amongst the living.

The curtain closes. There is no applause.

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