Until the beginning of modernity, the classical philosopher’s image included practicing his profession as a kind of ars moriendi. The conception of philosophy as an art of dying was quite influential in the older European tradition and acknowledged to be self-evident by such contrasting figures as Plato, the founder of philosophy more academico, and Montaigne, the father of the anti-philosophical essay. The early Heidegger still unmistakably belongs to this line when he links resolutely reflective Dasein to an act that he called “running ahead to one’s own death.” Yet “being-toward-death,”1 as he described it under the shadow of two world wars, ended up amounting to nothing more than the bleak acceptance of an ultimate fate. In this regard, classical philosophy can be called an unarmed heroism. The hero, whether heading onto the military battlefield or that of finitude in general, is always someone who has affirmed his end in advance and without reservations.
In contrast, Derrida, whose “sur-vival” [Fortleben], “survival” [Überleben], and “spectral” projections are to be examined here, spoke out at the end of his life against the archetype of a death we have “mastered” or “learned” how to do. He did this quite emphatically in his quasi-testamentary conversation with Jean Birnbaum (in March 2004), which was published later that August in the newspaper Le Monde – two months prior to the philosopher’s death.2 In this interview, the author confessed that, on a personal note, “I have not learned to accept death…. I remain impervious when it comes to knowing how-to-die. I have yet to learn anything about this particular subject.” This is a very striking remark, indeed it is almost terrifying in its implications, precisely because its authenticity cannot be called into question. It could be read as a sign of the fact that, in extremis, Derrida rejected philosophy as such, whether classical or modern, and denied its most existential dimension (excuse my clumsy use of the superlative) – he of all people, who in numerous other contexts never tired of pointing out how much he understood himself, faithfully or unfaithfully, to be an heir of the tradition and how deeply the traces of the philosophical past, from Plato to Hegel and Heidegger, had informed his own existence.
In doubting that death is something we can learn to live with – or that we can accept our own finitude – Derrida is not alone among moderns. For example, we should recall Gilles Deleuze, who, before he jumped from a window to his death on November 4, 1995, emphasized that his gesture did not belong to the tradition of the philosophical death, nor did he think it should be compared to Empedocles’ leap into Mount Etna. Rather, it confirmed that a depleted potential for life actively acknowledge its exhaustion. And we should recall Elias Canetti’s entire body of work, which is permeated by an almost unparalleled protest against the absurdity of death and against the obscenity of the “wisdom” advising us to resign ourselves to finitude.
Derrida’s rejection of wisdom had long been observable in his theoretical activity – particularly in his meta-psychological meditations on the difference between mourning and melancholy. These meditations culminated in the claim that the “work of mourning” – to straightforwardly take up the Freudian term adopted by Derrida – is never finished after the death of someone close to us, because to mourn – if it is supposed to be carried out successfully as psychoanalytical “work” – amounts to a betrayal of the unfathomable otherness of the other. If mourning were carried through to the end, it would reveal the moral scandal of its fungibility in the survivor’s “psychic economy.” With his demand that all mourning become melancholy, Derrida already set the guidelines for how posterity would deal with him – and at the same time provided a theoretical basis for his personal aversion to the idea of one day bidding farewell to himself.
In what follows, I will attempt to do justice to Derrida’s line of thinking here, to the best of my abilities. To this end, I am encouraged not least by his observation (while speaking in the mode of philosophical anthropology) that life [Leben] always structurally signifies survival [Überleben]. Hence it must continually face the dilemma of melancholy. Melancholy today proceeds from the fact that Derrida has already been gone for five years. It retains a special character, since it becomes increasingly clear as the years go by that he was irreplaceable. The only time things lighten up or there is at least some relief is to be found in Derrida’s own emphatic thought that insofar as we are still alive, we can never avoid being survivors who always feel some guilt toward those who went before us.
From the beginning, we have proceeded in a quite somber way, so that we could approach the domain of a philosophical thanatology from a distance, and so an apparently humorous digression would not be out of place here. To this end, I refer to the great ironist Richard Rorty, whose theoretical and existential trajectory crossed with Derrida’s at more than one point. One could even go so far as to say that Rorty (who lived from 1931 to 2007) and Derrida (who lived from 1930 to 2004) led something like philosophical bioi paralleloi, insofar as both were trying to achieve a post-metaphysical position for both contemporary and future thought. Both thinkers developed a personal strategy for acting as curator and guide of the haunted castle of ancient Western logos. Rorty’s life was only a bit longer than that of his French counterpart or rival. In the summer of 2006, the American thinker wrote a letter to a German colleague,3 who later reported that after a few paragraphs of conventional political content – talk of the damage that the Bush administration had wrought in the US and in the world – he suddenly came across an alarming private message: “Alas,” Rorty notified him, “I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida.”4 Rorty is here alluding to the fact that, like Derrida, he had been diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer. He sarcastically added that his daughter had formed the hypothesis that this kind of cancer was caused by reading too much Heidegger.
I can safely assume that Rorty had an idiosyncratic knack for making cryptic jokes about Derrida and himself. This was true in two respects: first, he could exhibit a macabre humor, because, having received the same terminal diagnosis, he found himself subject to a dire twist of fate that was similar to his renowned French colleague’s; second, because, as a reader of Derrida, he had already for some time suggested not taking the latter’s dramatic grappling with the spirits of the metaphysical tradition quite so seriously. With the clear gaze of a diagnostician schooled in Nietzsche, Rorty saw the weak point, or blind spot, in Derrida’s oeuvre: namely, that Derrida had made a heroic choice and deliberately resolved to suffer from the problems for which deconstruction was supposed to be the solution or, better, the perpetual form of non-solution. From Rorty’s perspective, Derrida can be compared to a lodger who chooses a suspicious old house for his residence, one that is rumored to be haunted by ghosts, when he could have easily found a building that was unburdened by a problematic past.
“Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida.” Allow me for a moment to yield to the temptation to speculate on how Derrida would have commented on this fateful statement, were he able to make posthumous notes in the margins. In the first place, he certainly would have expressed doubts about the phrase “the same disease,”5 since it is well known that the “same disease” only exists in medical textbooks, while the spectacle of really existing morbidity has as many diseases as there are patients. Second, he doubtless would have contested the legitimacy of the phrase “that killed Derrida,”6 not merely because he would have pointed out the terrible imposition of the syntagm “to kill Derrida,”7 but also because he probably would have emphasized that his proper name designates a singularity that in essence cannot be killed – which is why one should beware of hastily concluding that a philosopher named “Derrida” can be killed.
Yet, the crucial difference between the two thinkers was expressed by Rorty’s daughter’s sarcastic diagnosis about the dangers of excessive Heidegger reading: at the very point when Rorty resorts to black humor (which already settles the matter for him), it is quite safe to say that Derrida would have displayed a more thoughtful reaction and having begun somewhat playfully would have shown with increasing gravity how a bitter seriousness is to be extracted from the pain. From his perspective, it would be entirely possible that Rorty’s daughter and even Rorty himself, indirectly, were alluding in a satirical manner to a hitherto rarely explored dimension of “intellectual metabolism” (if we are willing to provisionally accept such an unusual term). Indeed, they might even be suggesting in a laconic way that they were engaged in developing a mental toxicology. If this assumption seems at all plausible, we then enter a realm that in pre-psychoanalytic times would have been referred to as magic, while today one speaks of psychosomatics or psychoneuroimmunology. From an ethnological perspective, we here find a modern articulation of the archaic belief that there is no such thing as a natural death. Rather, the end of any life is to be attributed to an evil spirit who arbitrarily cuts a human being’s thread of life. Every death would be the work of something malicious, of a curse, or a poison that is administered – in this case, of a philosophical poison from a suspect German apothecary, from a true devil’s workshop that obtains its lethal ingredients from afar and is associated with the ancient Platonic pharmacy.
There is something to this interpretation, even if it might seem at first sight to be more of a surrealist response than an intellectual one. To its credit, it takes seriously the idea that reading is a kind of metabolism. Philosophical reading, indeed reading in general, would thus be interpreted as an act of assimilation – and we all know that assimilation of what is indigestible can sometimes have dramatic consequences. The risks and side effects of such mental processes are hence emphasized with an unprecedented explicitness. Indeed, the entire organismic and psychosomatic apparatus that since Schelling, Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, and Freud has been called the unconscious would accordingly be depicted as a nervous stomach or a baroque digestive system, in which dangerous transformations occur unbeknown to their subjects. This digestive system forms a crypt full of engrams or neural deposits that are associated with only a small part of the discursive dimension of a person’s memory, but which for the most part remain unable to be represented and yet at the same time have quite an influence on the manifest behavior of human beings. In light of such quasipsychoanalytical or, better, psychotoxicological considerations, intellectual life as a whole turns out to be a subtle metabolic drama. There would thus no longer be any thought process that was not involved in a permanent and relentless struggle between the administration of poisons and antidotes.
I probably do not need to emphasize here that such conjectures are much closer to Derrida’s line of thinking than to Rortyian irony. Before Derrida, no one so consistently advocated the thesis that assimilation is not innocent – and thus also that the reproduction and proliferation of earlier impressions is never innocent. Wherever traces remain embedded in material bearers, whether the latter are alive or dead, made out of stone or nervous systems, written on paper or carved into skin, the unity of poison and its administration is unmistakable. According to Derrida, deconstruction is unavoidably and continually also a praxis of antidotes and counter-administrations, which are reactions to previous poisons and the acts of administering them. Derrida referred to the site where the interaction of poisons and antidotes (as well as the interaction of the administration of poison and antidotes) is documented as the archive, while hinting that he was running for the office of archivist. The significance of this office could justifiably be interpreted as a democratic analogue to the Platonic fantasy of the rule of philosopher-kings.
In what follows, I would like to pursue this psychoanalytic or psychotoxicological line of thought a little further and discuss the question of how Derrida discovered an approach to the psychodynamics (or to the semiodynamics or the somatodynamics, respectively) of the philosophical tradition. For connoisseurs of such things, incidentally, it may be obvious that I am once again taking up, from a contemporary perspective, a question that about twenty years ago was the occasion for a conference in Paris concerning the state of the Freudian project after Lacan’s death: is there such a thing as Derridean psychoanalysis? René Major was then responsible for formulating this question, and as we know, it led to a fierce dispute, because it was suspected of being a rhetorical question that aimed to enthrone Derrida as a guru of the post-Lacanian scene.
My response to this question is no secret, both in the earlier context and today, a few years after the thinker’s death: it is emphatically affirmative. I would go so far as to claim that Viennese psychoanalysis was but a particular instance of something universal, which Derrida thematized as a mostly neglected sphere of psychosemiotic processes where the mechanical and the organic merge into each other. He thus offered a few prescient suggestions for a response to the question of how psychological iteration is to be thought over the course of successive ages and generations. In so doing, he indirectly contributed to the solution of the greatest of all problems of cultural theory: how are we to understand the phenomenon of a civilization that is able to regenerate itself by learning? This problem seems even more difficult when we recognize that the tradition inherited from all dead generations really and quite literally weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living, as Marx put it in 1852 in his great essay on the situation in France after the coup d’état of Napoleon III.8 This famous statement, by the way, shows that we can recognize Marx as an expert in historical nightmares, an early spectrologist, a secularized ghost-seer [Geisterseher] in the Derridean sense.
If that faded myth of the twentieth century that we call Freudianism, is to be successfully passed down to future generations despite its current decline (and indeed not merely in the ossified form of therapeutic organizations, but as a medium of living, inquiring thought that has a role to play in a prospective theory of civilization), then this will be accomplished not least because Derrida opened doors to future psychological knowledge of human beings and cultures with his reflections on a general theory of the trace, i.e. of materialized “spirit” [Geist] and of ghosts [Geister]. These are the same doors or at least ones adjacent to those through which, over the past century, thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Gotthard Günther, Jean Baudrillard, and Niklas Luhmann, as well as contemporary pioneering intellects including Bruno Latour, Peter Galison, Heiner Mühlmann, and Roberto Esposito – to name only a few of many colleagues – have passed and continue to pass. Despite their different approaches, these thinkers are all searching for a complex concept of culture that would overcome the conventional binaries of metaphysical, political, and scientific vocabularies – whether we are dealing with the ancient dichotomy of spirit and matter, or with that of human beings and things, or with that of nature and society, or with other similarly venerable dichotomies.
To proceed a bit further in this direction, I would like to return to some thoughts that I presented in the spring of 2005 at a conference held on the first anniversary of Derrida’s death at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. At that time, I resolved not to speak directly about Derrida’s work and specific passages in his texts, but to employ a method of indirect reflection [Spiegelung] – a way of proceeding that has elsewhere been called “constellation research.”9 In the short essay titled Derrida, an Egyptian, I was concerned with illustrating a few basic figures of deconstructive thought by redeploying them in closer or more distant proximity to analogous intellectual projects – Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, Freudian psychoanalysis, the humanist mythology of Thomas Mann, Franz Borkenau’s cultural theory, the mediology of Régis Debray, Hegel’s theory of signs, and Boris Groys’ theory of the archive and museum. Because circumstances dictated that everything that I said on that occasion would have to be more cursory than rigorous and more suggestive than probing (serving to deepen our understanding), I am glad that in today’s lecture I will be able to go into more detail on at least one matter. I acknowledge, a little apprehensively, that we will now be considering my most speculative remarks in Paris, which wander the furthest from Derrida’s own text.
I am referring to the section of my presentation titled “Thomas Mann and Derrida.” I there suggested that while composing his four-part work “Joseph and his Brothers,” the great novelist had to a certain degree poetically anticipated the phenomenon of Derrida, by portraying the character type of the highly talented outsider in the enchanting figure of the young Joseph. This outsider, owing to his unusual talents, succeeds in advancing from an empire’s periphery to the inner circles of the center of power, so as to make himself indispensable there as a dream interpreter, as an adviser, indeed as the Pharaoh’s own better self. I called this structure, or position, “Josephism” and wanted to thus indicate a volatile and dynamic cultural configuration that has been quite significant in modernity. I argued that we could not possibly understand the dramatic struggles over authoritative interpretation in Western civilization since the late nineteenth century if we ignored this configuration.
The Josephistic position is so compelling because it allows its agents to advance to the “center of the center” and thus to create a novel and eccentric interpretation of centrality. Yet even though such interpretation can be very appealing to the holders of central positions, it often turns out to be subversively dangerous. The procedure that leads to the problematic site that I called the center of the center can only be that of dream interpretation – as is evident from the Biblical story that Thomas Mann expanded upon in a fantastical manner. In other words, dreams in the middle make it clear that the middle can never actually be its own middle. Let me clarify from the outset that we are not here concerned with the interpretation of just anybody’s dreams, but are directly concerned with interpreting the noble lord’s dreams, and even more with the lord of lords, with the exalted Pharaoh’s dreams, which are about the fate of the empire and of the throne, though in a way that is initially obscure.
Thomas Mann presented this situation in a grandiose narrative sequence: the Pharaoh had dreamed the famous dream in which the lean cows devoured the fatted ones, and asked his court oneiromancers what these visions could mean. Unsatisfied with their answers, the Pharaoh eagerly heeded the rumors of a young Jew, who was imprisoned in a jail in the southern part of the empire. This young Jew had been imprisoned because, though a slave, he was suspected of an affair with the wife of a senior official. He was also said to possess the gift of interpreting dreams to a wonderful degree. Pharaoh had a boat sent down the Nile to bring the young man to his court so that he could put his art of dream interpretation to the test – you are probably familiar with the rest of the story. What might be less well known is the fact that many hermeneuticians who interpret great texts have since been haunted by their own dream, one that also requires interpretation. They are constantly dreaming that one day a ship will come from the middle of the empire, or a vehicle with a chauffeur from the capital, from which a messenger will emerge to invite them very politely to the palace where the powerful have unsettling dreams. However, since this second-order dream has yet to be adequately understood, let alone ever fulfilled, later dream-interpreters felt compelled, in the absence of a formal invitation, to head at their own expense from the periphery into big cities, so as to wait for an opportunity there.
I argued in my Paris lecture that the twentieth century was a golden age of Josephism. Dream-interpretation as a career (the structure of which I just outlined) was expressly realized at least three times in this century, as far as I can tell. It happened for the first time before the First World War, when Sigmund Freud, who, although born in a province, had spent his youth in Vienna, set himself the task of interpreting the dreams of his contemporaries. Even if these were not directly the dreams of the Emperor Franz Joseph, under whose rule the bold new hermeneutician lived for several decades, they were still the dreams of your typical late-monotheistic neurotic, all the way to the highest levels of society. It happened for a second time when the young Ernst Bloch, after the First World War and in scandalous synchronicity with the young, still hopeful Russian Revolution, attempted to interpret humanity’s widespread dreams of a better world in terms of their real content, or, better, in terms of their utopian relevance and their anticipatory significance. And it happened for a third time after the Second World War, when Jacques Derrida built up the arsenals of deconstruction, in order to thereby subject the dreams of old European metaphysics to a treatment that was both meticulous and subversive – the word “arsenal” here suggests the image of a shipyard whose dock workers never really know whether the ship they are working on is supposed to be scrapped or made into a new, seaworthy vessel.
Today I would like to slightly amplify the all-too-laconic reference to this threefold twentieth-century dream-hermeneutics and thus to indicate, at least in outline, how the third instance, which I have characterized as Derridean dream interpretation, is distinct from the two preceding models and yet closely linked to them on a few points.
It is immediately evident that the three versions of Josephism that I have just mentioned do not simply converge. On the contrary, each of the three approaches involves a subtle and radical shift of subject matter. With Freud, as with Bloch and Derrida, the concept of the dream itself is always defined in a very idiosyncratic manner, and indeed each author even provides us with a new definition of the oneiric function as such. In summary: Freudian dream interpretation primarily discusses dreams at night, tapping into the deactivation of the sleeper’s consciousness in order to project the traces of a forbidden and impossible infantile desire onto the dream-theater’s screen. In contrast, Blochian dream interpretation foregrounds daydreams, which provide fantasy material for the technological and political improvement of the world. Derridean dream interpretation is ultimately concerned with fragile fabrications through which metaphysical speculation rises above the difference of life and death. To put it much more concisely: Freudian dreams are regressive, Blochian dreams are progressive, and Derridean dreams are spectral. The first are dreamed in beds and written down in journals, or recounted in therapy sessions. The second present themselves in folk tales and utopian novels, as well as in rapturous string quartets and heavenly symphonies, or are translated into party programs and five-year plans. The third are dreamed in the place where writing goes to die, the library, and transformed into contributions to a universal archive.
At this point, I do not wish to speak about the mechanisms of “dream-work” investigated by Freud in his early publication The Interpretation of Dreams (from 1899–1900) – they have been trivialized in twentieth-century culture, mostly indirectly via film. Instead, I would like to point out that there is an attempt at a kind of second dream interpretation in Freud’s late work. Here it is not so much a matter of the psyche’s nocturnal fabrications, but of those dream-analogous figments of the imagination that Freud called illusions, or to put it more clearly, religious ideas. In fact, with the expansion of psychoanalysis into a multinational therapeutic movement, its founder inevitably turned his attention to manifestations of collective consciousness, or cultural phantasms. Freud was aware of which approach he should avoid at all costs, thanks to the work of his dissident colleague Jung, and was thus inclined to adopt another approach to the sources of the religious dream. He could not escape into the psycho-ontological mode of thought that characterized Jung’s problematic doctrine of archetypes, but had to remain faithful to the discrete genetic methods that were distinctive of psychoanalytic procedures in the Viennese School.
It is testimony to the sublime impartiality of the later Freud that, in his attempt at a second interpretation of dreams (I will use this term for the time being), he did not adhere rigidly to the parameters of his earlier theorizing, but made a fresh start so that he could do justice to the phenomena before his eyes. While most theoreticians are hypnotized by their own ideas and thus satisfy the preconditions for self-repetition, which the contemporary world construes as their “system” or trademark, Freud was wide awake, enough to occasionally see through the veil of his own conceptual terminology. This allowed him to approach and reformulate phenomena that had not been treated adequately with his earlier concepts. In terms of the dynamic of the religious formation of illusions, we might say that he put his own libido-dogma to one side for the moment and developed a proposal for the interpretation of religious matters with a completely different orientation that was to some degree extrapsychoanalytic. In The Future of an Illusion from 1927, we find his hypothesis that “religious ideas have arisen from the same need as have all the other achievements of civilization: from the necessity of defending oneself against the crushingly superior force of nature.”10 Just after this we read of “the urge to rectify the shortcomings of civilization that made themselves painfully felt.”11 We thus see how effortlessly Freud transitions from a theory of desire to a theory of compensation – the famous transformation of the human being into a kind of prosthetic god is to be found here, something more reminiscent of Herder, Adler, and Gehlen than of his earlier writings. In my view, this maneuver indicates that Freud was on his way to an early form of general immunology. As I tried to show in my Spheres project (and in a few other works), immunology allows us to reformulate the entire field of metaphysics, religious studies, cultural theory, and therapeutics in a compellingly intercultural and progressively civilizing way.
If it is indeed true that all achievements of civilization including religions stem from motivations to protect and resist, as Freud puts it in the passage cited above (or, in my terminology: that they primarily arise from the immunitary imperative), then a new page has been turned in the book of psychoanalytic cultural theory. To be sure, Freud stuck with his approach in interpreting phenomena genetically, from out of infantilism, yet we are no longer dealing with the precedence of the child’s libido, which formed the indelible seal of classical psychoanalysis. Rather, the pressing demand for a power that can protect against unbearable risks to existence now becomes prominent. Accordingly, Freud here finally attempts to establish the validity of his system’s core by emphasizing that the libido prefers to attach itself – in the “mode of anaclisis” [Anlehnungsmodus] – to objects that provide us with “narcissistic” gratification, thus initially to the mother, and later to the father, so as then to remain forever attached to the latter. Yet, in the final analysis, it is evident that this “choice of an object” [Objektwahl] is not primarily based on a libidinal cathexis, but rather expresses the frightened individual’s attempts to form an immunitary alliance with a power that is able to protect it. Nevertheless, the link between the need for protection and love is not to be taken lightly – this is confirmed whenever we regard the genesis of the dependence between children and parents. At the same time, libidinal desire and the striving for immunitary alliances and envelopments are two psychodynamical categories that should be strictly distinguished from each other.
What we have here called Freud’s second dream interpretation, that is, his later theory of illusion, thus begins with the bold thesis that every adolescent sooner or later recognizes that in a certain sense he or she is condemned to remain a child forever. The adolescent somehow becomes aware that he or she will never be able to do without protection against superior extrinsic forces. The psyche then creates its gods, especially male divinities, from this “recognition” – Freud also calls it an “impulse.” This creation of gods from the need for protection reaches all the way back to the God of monotheism, the father of fathers. Freud may have devoted particular attention to this form of divinity because he knew he could rely on the household god of Western and ancient Near Eastern civilization as the main evidence for his thesis. In the midst of his reflections, reaching ahead into uncharted territory, he could not resist returning to his earlier theoretical accounts. Thus in a later passage he claimed, rather abruptly and without arguing for it sufficiently, that religious infantilism is a “universal obsessional neurosis of humanity” that arises from the Oedipal complex.12 It benefits individuals by allowing them to find shelter in the system of collective delusion, so that they do not need to form a “personal neurosis.” Freud hereby touches on a fruitful distinction between neurotic constructs and symbolic immune systems, yet is unable to explain this distinction clearly enough without a developed immunological logic.
The second Freudian interpretation of dreams would remain incomplete, inconsequential, and speculative in the bad sense of the term, had it not exhibited an at least rudimentarily practical and therapeutic perspective. In this regard, the older Freud to some extent broke new ground by discreetly intimating that when we are faced with perpetual infantilism, becoming an adult is ultimately all that can help us – yet, at bottom, the will to become an adult is more a matter of individual morality than of following medical directions. Hence one can probably understand why he called the religious illusion a “sweet poison”13 – we suddenly find ourselves in the realm of drug phenomena and their corresponding processes of withdrawal. Yet we are faced with a “bitter-sweet poison” – this is not too different from the Marxist dictum regarding the “opium of the masses”: its agreeable side includes the promise of suggestive infantile indulgences, but its bitter flip side entails the subject’s fixation in a system of psychical servitude. The cost of religious symbolic immunity has never been expressed so harshly and clearly, in my view. Freud explicitly makes it clear that this price is unacceptably high – regardless of whether we are concerned with the price of monotheism in particular or with the price of illusion in general. At another point, the psychoanalyst is unable to adequately explain, with his conceptual apparatus, why human beings should ever develop the wish to become adults. By focusing his attention on Homo libidinosus, the human being as a desiring creature, or in any case a creature motivated by fear, he remains unable to explain why that same human being sometimes straightens up, develops a firm sense of pride, and opposes its fate, regardless of whether this manifests itself in everyday acts of courage or in great moments of amor fati.
In brief, classical psychoanalysis lacks the conceptual resources to grasp the thymotic dimension of psychical life, owing to its systematic tendencies. At the same time, Freud had always recognized this, having made no secret of his affinity to Stoicism, which in its diminished bourgeois form amounts to a heroic conception of life. He thus paid indirect tribute to the equality of thymos and eros. The consequences of this hardly need to be explicitly spelled out: psychoanalysis is only apparently a medical procedure or one of the healing arts – in reality, it offers a way to develop adults [Erwachsenenbildung]. Yet a belated development of adults, in the stricter sense of the term, can only make headway where the striving to one day belong among the “greats” is reinforced. Adulthood per se is a thymotic dimension. The way this tendency functions is not very well understood by the members of contemporary, excessively eroticized, and thus appetite-driven Western civilization, if they do not simply ignore or dismiss it. For this reason, we should not be surprised to observe a progressive infantilization in the present-day world that is accompanied by pervasive eroticization, a one-sided thought that thinks merely in terms of the libido, an invasive therapeutism, a widespread cult of consumption, and an ever-increasing incapacity to understand thymotic phenomena.
The second Josephistic phenomenon on a grand scale was to be observed in the early twentieth century, when the young Ernst Bloch, born in 1885 as the son of petit-bourgeois Jewish parents in the southwestern province of Germany, conceived the outlines of his sprawling philosophical oeuvre while in exile in Switzerland during the First World War. The author later remarked that his early work The Spirit of Utopia (from 1918, revised in 1923) had been a test, a mere probing of its content – it represented a work of anticipation and a piece of “revolutionary gnosis,” that is, a sign that the most radical knowledge of the soul goes hand in hand with the most radical dissatisfaction with the world hitherto. Bloch’s interpretation of dreams goes far beyond that of psychoanalysis, because it is not content to interpret the nocturnal psychological fabrications of bourgeois wives and senior civil servants. Bloch’s Josephistic operation begins by immediately marching to the political, indeed to the cosmic center. His ambition is nothing less than to interpret humanity’s (this means Jewish–Christian civilization first of all) millennia-long dream from the vantage point of an authentic we-experience in a non-alienated collective. As a Schellingian Marxist, Bloch believed the human spirit to be a cosmic site in which fettered and bound nature is freed from its bonds, and opens its eyes to behold itself and the universe. For this reason, a humanist interpretation of dreams is of no interest to him: dream-functioning does not merely involve the addition of the human nervous system to lifeless matter, but is rather living, fermenting matter itself, full of tendencies and teleologies, which dreams in and through us and is propelled per homines. In a passage from The Spirit of Utopia that is as famous as it is obscure, we read: “But we walk in the forest and we feel we are or could be what the forest dreams.”14 With an enthusiasm that would be worthy of one of the prophets, Bloch – proceeding from such intuitions – cleared a path from Jakob Böhme to Karl Marx. Driven by a ruthless apostolic energy, he drew a line from Christ to Lenin – hence his famous expression ubi Lenin ibi patria,15 for which Jacob Taubes never forgave the author of The Principle of Hope. Bloch was uninterested in the regressive dynamic of the imagination and in the psyche’s fixations in childhood. Rather, he understood childhood to be a manifestation of the capacity for anticipation that runs through all of nature, but which comes into its own with the human being and culminates in the Homo sapiens child. Orbiting the logic of the not-yet his whole life long, Bloch was in this sense the metaphysician of youth – and it is no accident that, after leaving the DDR following the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, he became one of the figureheads of the last youth movement in West Germany and a sympathetic mentor for the student protests in the 1960s.
The innumerable day-dream images that Bloch compiled with encyclopedic thoroughness in his magnum opus The Principle of Hope have one stark feature in common, which concerns their temporo-logical status. They are all “ahead of their time.” They signify neither the haunting memories of older, better conditions nor deferred reproductions of inhibited infantile wishes, but are supposed to be deciphered as harbingers of a better world in the future – and where there is a harbinger, the thing-to-come itself seems intent on demonstrating the possibility of its own realization. If a marked attention to various kinds of haunting phenomena can be observed in Bloch, it is obvious that he is less interested in what haunts us afterwards than he is in what haunts us in advance. Bloch encapsulates such phenomena with the term Vor-Schein [Tr. – “preappearance”]. This term brings to light an unusual, even paradoxical concept of the trace: things in the future have the ability to symbolically manifest themselves in advance – as though that which has not yet existed could already leave behind footprints in the present. The better world is already here right now, as advent and friendly ghost. Bloch had to devote great energy to create a novel futuristic philosophy of nature so that he could lend plausibility to such seemingly outlandish claims. The author’s posthumous papers on the Logos der Materie [Logos of Matter], which are devoted to the question of “bringing out” [Herausbringen], provide compelling evidence of this devotion.16 In these papers, Bloch demonstrates the manner in which the not-yet can latently be at work in the already-now, and indeed in the mode of an active latency that can cast its “shadows” or, better, its fore-light ahead. Ever since, philosophy has been foresight in the fore-light.
At the same time, Bloch eschewed his earlier conception of preappearance in favor of a multidimensional concept of haunting: on the one hand, this can refer to the prosaic daytime world’s proximity to a world beyond that is full of spirits – the young socialist Bloch had no problem in speaking of metempsychosis, since he already understood, early on, that the spirit of utopia can only be vindicated if there is a principle that allows mortals to circumvent death, which is the absolute anti-utopian authority for non-believers. For him, as for Hegel, haunting also signifies the subject’s vain attempt to revolve within its own interiority to stabilize itself in itself – it thereby experiences its own emptiness and continually slips away from itself, just as a ghost suddenly vanishes as soon as daylight reaches it. Lastly, Bloch recognizes a third shading of the ghostly, viz., as repercussion of capitalist abstraction and the fetishism of money – on this point, his reflections are not all that different from Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s speculations on what the latter called real abstraction, which became prominent a few decades ago due to their influence on Adorno’s work, only to fall back into present-day oblivion.
The effusive crudeness of Bloch’s political ontology was always evident to his readers. On the one hand, it evoked a Gothic Empire and on the other hand had no problem defending the Stalinist regime of terror, its show trials and the absurd theater of lies supposedly necessarily “realize” the great thoughts of communism. This enthusiastic grobianism is without doubt the direct result of a Josephism inclined toward revolution, which the new interpreter of dreams wanted to use to directly intervene in the global political center of meaning in his time, the program of the Russian Revolution. If Freud hesitated to interpret the dreams of the aging lord of Schönbrunn Palace, even though he knew something of them, Bloch was resolutely determined not only to interpret the thoughts of Lenin and Stalin (something that other communist intellectuals such as Lukács and Kojève likewise wanted to do) – he first wished to teach the revolution itself and its leaders the right way to dream. He provided a spiritual superstructure for the crude implementation of the Red Terror by arguing that vulgar materialist Marxism needed to be enhanced with a metaphysical dimension, something that sounded plausible at the time. Hence he was an interpreter of dreams who also wished instantly to become a dream-teacher – something we can see at work in each twentieth-century praxis of dream interpretation. Evidently, the psyches of clients who are ready for treatment easily pick up on the categories of their therapists and in a short time begin to dream in the style of their respective school. While Bloch championed the daydream of a better world, he simultaneously turned into a bold advocate of illusion – by claiming that a kernel of truth could be extracted from even the most aberrant visions of a better world. This kernel of truth could be called “utopian” in the good sense of the term, while the regressive remainder of such aberrant visions would have to be strictly eliminated.
In sum, we can clearly identify a series of motifs in Bloch’s work that recur in Derrida in an entirely different register and with different tendencies, under completely different auspices when viewed on the whole: the theme of the trace, the figure of the haunting specter, the logic of deferral, the concept of a messianism within or beyond Judaism, the thought of a fullness of self-possession perpetually to come or even impossible, and so forth. In the case of this last motif, we would have to show how Bloch’s approach is diametrically opposed to his later colleague and closely akin for precisely this reason. In a typical, or perhaps telltale, passage, Bloch notes: “The final will is that to be truly present…. Man wants at last to enter into the Here and Now as himself, wants to enter his full life without postponement and distance.”17 If “Man” wants such a thing, then it is precisely because he is always already pervaded by the precedence of deferral, of distance, of the not-here and the not-now. It is obvious that Derrida would have disagreed with the author of such a statement. On his view, indeed, the metaphysics of presence was always merely a sublime fiction. But the law of deferral also applies for Bloch, because the world-process as such is not yet ripe – the world’s maturation as a whole remains something that for the time being is merely to be posited and helped along with technological resources, political measures, and not least with philosophical explanations and evocations. Bloch would emphasize that virtually all human reflection is determined by the postponement of the “authentic.” Indeed, in this regard, the misery of the conditio humana – as St. Paul already articulated and that Rilke still lamented in the Duino Elegies – has always shown us that we are not capable of presence, neither by thinking nor by living, neither in the sense that we would fully exist in being, nor in the sense that being would fully exist in us. For now, full presence is no real option for mortal beings. Moreover, Bloch would also define life [Leben] as survival [Überleben]. In a dramatic passage from The Spirit of Utopia he asks: “who or what lives life as a whole life, as the broad, historical life granted to humanity as a whole?”18 According to Bloch, reference to the archive does not provide a convincing response, since actual traditions are easily broken and after a little while end up completely incomprehensible. Bloch chooses a quite drastic example: the score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony will one day be as lifeless and incomprehensible to a later culture “as the Inca’s knotted script[.]”19 The guarantee of survival can only be found in the principle of hope and its bearer, “forward-moving matter,”20 not in an archive, however extensive it may be. The contrast between Bloch’s and Derrida’s temperaments is informative, because it allows us to bring to light an aspect of philosophical psychodynamics that has rarely been explicitly noticed, one that is at the same time significant for the philosophical analysis of typological questions. If Bloch and Derrida shared a common interest in quite a number of motifs and elaborated these motifs in idiosyncratic ways, the enthusiast Bloch and the melancholic Derrida have irreconcilably antithetical basic outlooks. I do not know if Derrida ever read the letters of the young Bloch, or indeed if he was closely acquainted with the work of his antipode at all – it would be fascinating to imagine the deconstructionist’s commentary on a passage from one of Bloch’s letters to the latter’s young friend Georg Lukács in 1912: “I am the paraclete, and the people to whom I am sent will experience and understand the God who returns home in themselves.”21 Comparison with Bloch’s robust messianic mania clarifies a rather significant moment in Derrida’s later work, one of the most remarkable and at the same time most poignant: how he worked his way from a fundamentally melancholic position to one that offered an approach to messianism.
In closing, I would like to offer a few remarks on what I called the third Josephistic offensive of the twentieth century. I am suggesting that we understand Derridean deconstruction as a kind of dream interpretation, and only time will tell whether it suffers the same fate as its predecessors: trivialization in the case of Freud, becoming obsolete in Bloch’s case. Even the most recent version of Josephism inevitably results in a political interpretation of dreams – to put it more precisely, it results in a skeptical distance from every political ontology, or in other words: it results in a dream analysis of the kinds of dreams that imperial powers are used to dreaming about themselves. Derrida goes beyond Bloch’s dream-hermeneutical approach, by sublating the dichotomy between nocturnal dreams and daydreams into a higher-order conception of the dream. This mainly occurs through his suspension of the boundaries between thinking and dreaming, or through his postulation of a reciprocal porousness between the two mental activities. Recent scholarly literature has particularly profited from this move by making a virtue of the removal of strict boundaries between thinking and dreaming, or in general from that between argument and fiction, in order to blur the genre boundaries between philosophy and literature.
At first glance, it might appear as though Derrida is initially merely concerned with a version of what in France was called the “return to Freud” – which as a rule meant the license to transform the Viennese master’s ideas until they were unrecognizable. In reality, Derrida thought through the assumptions on which classical psychoanalysis rested – none of which he would endorse any longer, as he remarked in a conversation near the end of his life with Elisabeth Roudinesco – and furthered them, translating them into a philosophical (or semiodynamic) register.
What I am here calling “semiodynamics” is a concept that helps to translate the worn-out idea of “tradition” into more precise, more dramatic, and – why not? – into “more uncanny” [unheimlichere] categories. With this concept, we can show how everything hinges on phenomena that play a role in the formation of so-called “cultures.” These “phenomena” perpetually concern the assimilation of an intellectual “heritage,” they always involve the (more or less phallo-dynamic) adoption of prefabricated roles and positions in the cultural field, they deal with new materializations of messages, mandates, privileges, deliveries, and missions, with the unavoidable connection to existing languages, institutions, and disciplines, and with the openness of everything just mentioned to things not yet said, to relations not yet institutionalized, and to precepts yet to be put into practice, as well as arts yet to be plied.
With his contributions to the reformulation of psychoanalysis and his proposals for a general theory of the archive, Derrida belongs to a broader movement within recent and contemporary philosophy, which I characterize as the “mediumistic turn of the theory of the subject.” As Hegel demanded that substance develop as subject, so Derrida – less expressis verbis than by his entire intellectual conduct – invites the subject to develop as medium. This is the only way fully to understand his talk of “specters,” which many do not take seriously. It would be a gross misunderstanding to assume that terms such as hantologie (in layman’s terms: a science of haunting) are merely metaphorical or parapsychological shenanigans. From Derrida’s metapsychological perspective, subjectivity per se is only to be understood by recognizing that human beings have always been “inhabited” by texts. Thus the history of cultures and of the human being’s formation must be understood as an event that could be called metemtextosis, a transmigration of texts, on analogy with metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. Here we are concerned with pure this-worldly processes that engender the formation of “persons,” or “psychical systems.” Such processes require a logic of invasive communications – or, perhaps we could say that such processes require a theory of assimilations, of psychosomatic engrams and symbolic metabolism. Needless to say, this is all quite manifestly at work in Derrida’s writings, although not as a positive theory, but mainly on a performative level and embedded in the modus operandi of his various inquiries, which have occasionally and justifiably been viewed as a kind of exercise [Exerzitium].
At a few points in Derrida’s works, we can observe how he applied his mediumistic understanding of subjectivity to himself. Thus at the beginning of his speech in Frankfurt when he was awarded the Adorno prize in 2001, he said: “For decades I have heard voices in my dreams. Sometimes the voices have been friendly, sometimes they have not been. There are voices in me …” At one point, Derrida notes that the voices he hears invite him to acknowledge publicly the kinship between his own work and Adorno’s. I consider this anecdote most likely to be an ad hoc device and do not believe that Derrida actually thought that he “owed” Adorno anything. Yet what he said is characteristic of his mode of thought. His allusion to the topos of the Socratic daimonion is unmistakable, a theme that inaugurated a tradition of philosophical mediumism in the days of the ancient Academy – though this tradition was silenced by the modern “subject-philosophy” ideology of self-determination, self-justification, and self-fabrication – only returning to the intellectual stage via the “philosophies of dialogue,” the better media theories of the twentieth century, and the philosophical reflections of psychoanalysis.22
At first sight, Derridean dream interpretation seems to involve a rapprochement with the positions of the early Freud, since thinking the “trace” essentially entails understanding “dreamwork” from its tendency toward repetition. Thus haunting, again, seems to necessarily be a haunting-afterwards. Yet it does not merely signify the return of the repressed. Rather, it indicates the return of what has been left undone and incomplete, in the broadest sense of the term. This is hardly an innocuous thesis, because haunting and spectral beings that are bound to the past can also signify the return of illusion in the bad sense of the term. In concrete terms, they indicate an ongoing reluctance on the part of some to draw the necessary conclusions from the experiences of history, the implosion of the communist sphere in particular. Not for nothing did Derrida point out the dangers that arise from intractable “Marxist identities,” in one of his most important political texts, Specters of Marx (1993), as well as in his response to the critics of this book, which was published under the ironic title Marx & Sons. To recapitulate this thought in a psycho-“spectrological” register: Derrida’s specters, like the specters of postcommunism on the whole, are essentially loser-ghosts. They mostly manifest themselves in a melancholy way – they have lost sight of their utopian mission and yet stare further in the direction where just yesterday hope was still on the horizon. In their case, melancholy means nothing more than utopia minus aggression. But there remain furiously manic ghosts among them who cannot do without Marxism as a matrix of revenge fantasies.
As we have already noted, in his later work Freud extended the psychoanalytical paradigm and shifted from a theory of desire to a theory of compensation, with infantile needs for protection becoming increasingly prominent. In a comparable way, Derrida ultimately came to regard the philosophical dream of a knowledge fully present to itself as a compensatory phenomenon, although it initially seemed as if deconstruction wished to reveal the actual or merely supposed dream of metaphysics, of an ultimate closure in complete self-presence of mind, to be a case of intellectualized narcissism and thus wished to classify it as a libidinal phenomenon or autoeroticism. Derrida in fact shows that the dreams of metaphysics are uneasy fabrications that do not actually evince the self-enjoyment of knowledge or power, but are manifestations of an overarching self-concern and of a concern for the structures of the world and of knowledge – in a word, they represent compensatory phenomena that defend us against the dangers of ignorance and confusion. I consider this to be an indication that Derrida, as an interpreter of metaphysical dreams, had become increasingly convinced that such fabrications were inevitable and insurmountable – just as I am convinced that such compensatory phenomena are never fully able to believe in themselves. As I would put it, we need to discuss how the immunitary imperative becomes explicit, how each culture compels the creation and reform of, as well as instruction in, symbolic immune systems. We should note that Derrida’s therapeutic approach did not aim to dissolve these phenomena (not for nothing did he emphasize the ethically significant difference between the cautiousness of deconstruction and the destructivity of “critique”), but to warn metaphysical dreamers of the dangers of hyper-immunization. Human beings lose reference to reality in the excessive clôture of imaginary self-presence and, under the pretext of self-preservation, end up in a vortex of self-destruction – echoing a leitmotif of the older Critical Theory in a foreign context. In psychological terms, this means that manias are far more dangerous than depressions. In this respect, deconstruction is always also a prophylactic against the dangers of mania.
Derrida’s Josephistic offensive would hardly have been able to succeed had it ended by retrospectively engaging with the metaphysical thinker’s logically shrouded dream activity at the center of the creation of power and meaning. Indeed, the aspiring dream interpreter not only wants to look down into the wells of the past and submerge himself in archetypes, he would just as much like to gaze into the future, to shape it with lucid anticipations. Just as the biblical Joseph read Pharaoh’s dreams as cryptic prophetic signs, in which the future of the empire was at stake, so Derrida, the Joseph of the post-communist world, wants to integrate Marxism’s haunting remainder into a new legitimate dream function. In short, even here the dream interpreter has to admit that he is a teacher of right dreaming. On this point, Derrida is unwittingly close to Bloch, even if he was never familiar with the latter’s conception of the utopian function nor with the concept of utopia in general. For the later Derrida, responsible dreaming for oneself and the world involves adopting a rationally filtered relation to things that have been impossible until now. In Bloch’s system, this was precisely the function of the progressive daydream.
At this point, our author’s final intellectual adventure can be elucidated – the connection of his rational dream-doctrine to the messianic tradition. As Derrida explained in the already mentioned Adorno-prize speech, “The possibility of the impossible can only be dreamed, it cannot exist as something that has been dreamed …” He adds that his own thought is perhaps closer to dreaming the impossible than to philosophy as such (insofar as philosophy, ontology in particular, exhausts what can be said about reality). At the same time, he claims that “The im-possible is the figure of reality itself.” For Derrida, the mechanism that opens a window into the future is a paradoxical modal logic: the impossible determines the reality of the real. In plain talk: only the messianic event would reveal what can “really” happen in the world. The messianic dimension of the “event” that could come must be emphatically maintained, because, as a burnt child of the twentieth century, Derrida knows that a “revolution” that is merely resumed without allowance for the impossible would once again be nothing but another catastrophe – a monstrous bastard of the possible and the actual. “The point is to not become tired of watching over this dream, while waking up” (il faudrait, tout en se réveillant, continuer de veiller sur le rêve). Dreaming here means a new alignment of the relation between the actual, the possible, and the impossible.
In taking up this guard duty, Derrida again shifts his position. He sometimes feels obliged to be the dreamer himself, whose dreams were the point. The logic of the Josephistic offensive compels him to embody the Pharaoh in his own person, or better: to present a quasi-pharaonically extended self that dreams for the imperium and beyond the imperium, fully knowing that the fates of empires are decided on their peripheries and by their discontented classes. As Josephistic Pharaoh or pharaonic Joseph, he is tasked with dreaming and interpreting the great forward-looking dream, and he must do this fully aware of the danger that results from the poison of overambitious visions. Richard Rorty called attention to these kind of complications, when he insightfully noted in an essay on Derrida that “philosophy as a genre is closely associated with the quest for such greatness.”23 Yet such a quest is morally imperative here. It manifests itself as a function of disillusioned dreaming, which wants to be a messianism without messianism. “We are dreaming of another concept, of another set of rights for the city, of another politics of the city,”24 as Derrida put it in a talk given in 1996 with the coquettish title (which brings to mind the Marquis de Sade) Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! It is obvious that the later Derrida left the sphere of deconstruction behind here and moved into the unfamiliar territory of affirmation, judgment, decision, confession, and “positive thinking.” Future readers will have to judge whether he finally sought harbor in naivety and became a useless goodwillthinker.25 Rorty is probably right, when in his already-mentioned essay he suggests an alternative to Derrida’s endless and arduous deconstruction of metaphysics – but he is wrong when he claims that this alternative consists in “circumventing” metaphysics and simply doing something else, such as writing literature and engaging in union activity. A choice between deconstruction and circumvention (as Rorty puts it) is not really possible.26 Deconstruction remains quite important because it responds to the immunitary imperative, with an elevated seriousness – traditional metaphysical constructs have been a brilliant, if often misunderstood, expression of this imperative. Metaphysics is a response to openness to the world [Weltoffenheit] – such openness can only be made livable by spherical safeguards. Safeguards, for their part, must always be oriented to openness de novo.
In conclusion, I would like to offer a prognosis on whether Derrida’s philosophy will continue to return and haunt us. I thus proceed from the observation that, in the final analysis, the great Josephists of the twentieth century owe their partly abiding and yet partly temporary success to their interventions in the basic vocabulary of Western civilization. In this regard, Freud was unquestionably the most successful. He succeeded in associating the hypercultural primal word “soul” – “psyche” in its psychoanalytical translation – with the half-metaphysical, half-scientific concept of the unconscious. This association has probably become irreversible, regardless of whether a revival of Freudianism in the neuroscientific era succeeds or not.
The results of Bloch’s messianic-utopian initiative are much more difficult to assess. His attempt to meld the technical-political term “utopia,” frowned upon by the bourgeoisie, with the Christianhumanist term “hope” was only successful for a while and only within a certain domain. In contrast, it becomes evident with time that this linguistic-political offensive could not compete against the gravity of everyday anti-utopianism. Utopianism, on the whole, has regained its former bad reputation. The one hundred million dead from the Marx-inspired experiments in Eastern Europe and Asia testify to this. As is to be feared, this apparently minor semantic nuance will be the only remaining trace that bears witness to a holocaust in the name of utopia and the human lives annihilated in it. However, a telling reluctance to erect monuments to the victims of revolutionary ideology can be observed in Eastern and Western Europe. This is symptomatic, since the “Specters of Marx” are quite obviously engaged in preventing the erection of monuments to those murdered under Communism.
With that said, I can now also inquire into the likely fate of Derrida’s fundamental politico-semantic operation. He also tried to associate a modern and idiosyncratic term with an ancient and deeply rooted primal term, in order to thus leave behind a trace in humanity’s vocabulary. His main goal was to fuse the neologism “deconstruction” with the basic term “justice” – a concept drawn from the basic vocabulary of civilizations, without which both the advanced religions of the East or West and modern democracies are unthinkable. It seems obvious to me that this maneuver could be effective for one or two generations, at most, because it was encumbered in advance by its strong implausibility. What Bloch failed to achieve, Derrida too could not achieve in the end – a hopelessly affirmative formulation such as “deconstruction is justice” changes nothing. Thus in Derrida’s case it would be realistic to brace ourselves for a narrowing of the domain of haunting. While the Freudian association of the concepts “soul” and “unconscious” is holding steady, the Derridean association of the concepts “deconstruction” and “justice” has virtually collapsed and will not be convincing to anyone outside of a specialized niche.
This means that the Derridean power of haunting will remain strictly confined to the actual circle of influence he had in his lifetime. As a young man arriving in France, he already had the gift of considering academia to be the entire world. He was inclined to believe falsely that his academic success would mean success in the world or for the world. He never corrected this pleasant category mistake, in my opinion. This explains why, in Specters (from 1993), he could make eyes at an academic Marxism in the USA and Europe that had been humiliated by the events in Russia in 1990 – yet the current managers of the firm Marx & Sons did not thank him: to be sure, they wanted to believe, with him, in a new international to come, but they wanted to shield such a belief from the impact of deconstruction’s cautious melancholy. After the debacle of 1990, they would have much more preferred to hear that Marx will be resurrected – not that spectral remnants of Marxism will be preserved. With subtle irony, Derrida here touched on the difference between specter and resurrection, which Jews and Christians were supposed to sort out more clearly in the future. In resurrection, as with specters, something cannot die because it has unfinished business and for this reason does not depart from the world. In this sense, all those who would rather not hear that there is unfinished business in the world are unbelievers. Perhaps messianism is a title given to the feeling that unfinished business demands to be taken up again – no matter how extensive such business is. This kind of feeling particularly thrives in a highly refined culture, such as Jewish culture, which is based on the belief that God cannot possibly be satisfied with the human state of affairs – but perhaps one day the messiah will take care of unfinished business. In a roundabout way, Christianity has become the moral a priori of the West. Such observations can no longer be understood merely philosophically. Derrida’s late interest in “religious” problems, as well as his turn to fundamental juridical questions such as problems with the death penalty, the right to asylum, or the prevention of cruelty to animals, lead us to believe that he recognized that it was necessary for philosophy to form new alliances with what is not philosophy.
In my opinion, we must proceed even further in this direction today. Academia will undoubtedly remain the haunted castle that Derrida’s ghosts are fond of roaming. We should not hesitate to think beyond the limits of academic disciplines, thanks to his inspiration. The wide-ranging global crisis of our time should prompt philosophers who remain hidden in the bosom of universities to leave their hiding place behind. We must again take to the streets and plazas, to the pages littéraires and screens, to schools and popular festivals, if we are to make our craft, the most cheerful and melancholy craft in the world, relevant once more. When our craft is well-practiced, it remains relevant, even in non-academic life. Countless people will then no longer ask so urgently what they have been asking for a long time: what exactly is a good life, an examined life? If anyone thinks that they have an answer, or if anyone wants to pose a counterquestion, they should now step forward and speak.