ABSTRACT
At the beginning of his essay Specters of Marx, published in 1993, Jacques Derrida recalls how the existential imperative to live also implies an imperative to address death (Derrida 1994: xvii). Learning to live is learning to exist between life and death, in the existential stretch constituted by one’s own life span, from not yet being born to no longer existing. But it is also to learn to live in relation to those no longer there. In order to describe this situation, this existential in-between, Derrida here suggests that we think about it in terms of ‘the phantom’ (le fantôme). It is a category connected to ghosts, spectres and spirits and the different forms of beings that occupy this ontological threshold. To learn to live would then partly amount to learning to live with and among spectres, as also – as he writes – a ‘politics of memory, of inheritance and of generations’ (ibid. xviii). It is a politics, but perhaps even more an ethics, since it concerns how we comport ourselves in relation to those who are no longer there. There is a peculiar kind of responsibility for and toward the deceased, which marks and constitutes the living in their self-understanding. Or perhaps we should speak of it as responsiveness, rather than responsibility, since the latter could be taken to imply that we already know what our obligations are. The point here is precisely that there is no certainty on this ground. We do not know what we owe the dead – nor what they owe us.
