ABSTRACT
Let me begin with two observations:2 one derived from pedagogy, the other from academic travel. Firstly, it is more than ten years since Jacques Derrida delivered the plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective’ organised by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg at the University of California, Riverside’s Centre for Ideas and Society.3 Every year since I began teaching my seminar on deconstruction in 1997 I have taught this lecture in its published and augmented English form, Spectres of Marx.4 It was only this year in 2004 as I was glossing the historical context of the opening dedication of that book, to the South African communist Chris Hani, that I realized to the students in the class, who would still have been in primary school at the time, 1994 constituted the remote historic past. I do not think that this is a consequence of a unique failure on the part of these students, in retrospect it had been becoming a problem for several years and only now, with the distance of a decade, was the diffi culty clear to me. The student who is twenty-one in 2004 was eleven years old in 1994 and only fi ve years old in 1988 when the Berlin Wall came down. It is a diffi culty since the seminar takes as its aim the reading of the contemporary political moment through and with deconstruction, and this ‘historic’ understanding, on the part of the students, of the situation addressed by Spectres of Marx rendered the work of the seminar problematic even if it suggested new productive lines of inquiry. Of course I teach in a School of Art History where we take seriously the injunction to historicize, as well as the necessity to problematise history, and the students were ultimately unfazed by the seminar’s diversion into cultural archaeology. On the other hand, I have not quite come to terms with the self-knowledge that I have become another ageing liberal, trapped in the academy, revisiting year after year my own ‘dated’ concerns (‘dated’ in the sense of historically marked rather than irrelevant). Although a clear historical path exists from the deliberations of Francis Fukuyama to the present neoconservatism at large in Washington.
