MEMORY-ESSAY #1
This ESSAY has FIVE parts. Click here for the FIRST part, “CROCODILE PHILOSOPHY”. CLICK HERE FOR THE THIRD PART, “SILENCED”. CLICK HERE FOR THE FOURTH PART, “WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES”. CLICK HERE FOR THE FIFTH PART, “ETHOPOEIA”.
6. See Jacques Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Antonio Negri and others, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx” , ed. Michael Sprinker (1999; London: Verso, 2008).
7. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (1993; London: Routledge, 1994), p. xi.
8. Ibid., p. 14.
9. Ibid, p. 15.
10. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Alresford, Hampshire: Zero Books, 2014), p. 181.
II
THEN AND NOW
THEN AND NOW
Jacques Derrida, who was then at the height of his academic fame, responded quickly to The End of History and the Last Man in Specters of Marx, sparking a further vigorous sub-debate among professors about the Marxian legacy.6 I was coming to the end of my graduate studies when I read the English translation of Derrida’s book soon after it appeared in 1994. I read it with great interest, understood it as far as I could, which wasn’t far enough, and certainly I took it seriously. Coming back to the book thirty years later, its parochialism and self-importance annoy me, beginning with the preface. Specters of Marx and its companion volume of conference proceedings, the editors wrote, “explore the effects that the global crises engendered by the collapse of communism has had on avant-garde scholars, many of whom have lived through and often participated in these transitions themselves”.7 This barricades mythology was academic self-glorification in fine style.
Derrida was haughtily dissatisfied with Fukuyama and his audience. “Many young people today (of the type ‘readers–consumers of Fukuyama’ or of the type ‘Fukuyama’ himself) probably no longer sufficiently realize” that before Fukuyama popularised the subject of the end of history it had been explored at depth by the thinkers Derrida specialised in interpreting, who made up “the canon of the modern apocalypse” (as well as the main group of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger, Derrida discussed a secondary canon of old favourites: Benjamin, Blanchot, Freud, Lévinas).8 True to the romance of the avant-garde professor, Derrida insisted on his unimpeachable Leftist pedigree as well as his philosophical mastery, referring to:
what we had known or what some of us for quite some time no longer hid from concerning totalitarian terror in all the Eastern countries, all the socio-economic disasters of Soviet bureaucracy, the Stalinism of the past and the neo-Stalinism in process (roughly speaking, from the Moscow trials to the repression in Hungary, to take only these minimal indices). Such was no doubt the element in which what is called deconstruction developed—and one can understand nothing of this period of deconstruction, notably in France, unless one takes this historical entanglement into account. Thus, for those with whom I shared this singular period, this double and unique experience (both philosophical and political), for us, I venture to say, the media parade of current discourse on the end of history and the last man looks most often like a tiresome anachronism.9
All these years later, I can’t take Derrida’s long-winded and boastful writing seriously any more. I can only read Specters of Marx with great impatience. It used to impress me, now I only value it for the indirect reason that it coined the term hauntology, which became central to Mark Fisher’s work.
Fisher took Derrida’s concept away from its original elitist circle. It is true that Fisher was himself an academically trained philosopher who referred extensively to the European canon, but he always combined formal philosophising with a focus on pop culture as well as a strand of often poignant autobiography. For Fisher, hauntology was an obscure subgenre of electronic music, created notably by the artist Burial, as well as a philosophical concept. There are many occasions in Fisher’s books—and, just as importantly, his articles in music publications and blogposts—when the reader can easily picture the writer-to-be in his formative phase as a clever Eighties student who saw the melancholic and unsatisfied songs of the time as vernacular, minor-chord analyses in miniature of an increasingly demoralised society. And those moments had none of the tiresome self-congratulation of professors insisting on their own radical credentials; instead they conveyed love of the material, enthusiasm to communicate to as wide an audience as possible, and above all a longing to move beyond the kind of lingering unhappiness which he heard in the songs and which he revealed he himself suffered from. He cited authorities respectfully, but Fisher never fully belonged to the academic world. His work was something else: a suburban, bedsit philosophy of resistance against an ideological tide which threatened to cut off all outsider hope—such as used to be the staple of pop music—for a fulfilling life in community.
He saw that the technocratic society Fukuyama promised would be peaceful and well-managed had quickly turned out to be more like a wasteland. What made the present so desolate, Fisher argued, was the ideology he called capitalist realism, which insisted that a world beyond capitalism could never come into being once the communist alternative had collapsed. There was a constant tension in Fisher’s engagement with this orthodoxy between the pain of the loss of hope for a better future, and a determination not to despair (see topic: HOPE AND ITS DISCONTENTS). It was surely this tension that made the experience of reading his work often so moving, but in his last books sometimes the courageous and unselfish fight for viable hope was eclipsed by the frightening idea of sadness which is no longer just an emotion, but has become a whole haunted–haunting environment of stolen futures and timeless losses: “The sadness ceases to be something we feel, and instead consists in our temporal predicament itself.”10
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