ABSTRACT
The New International, the subtitle of Derridas text gestures to two other themes as well. One of these themes, announced by State of the Debt, refers to our contemporary status as heirs to certain spirit of Marx, a spirit of theory that would be radical, critical. As Derrida insists, the spirits of Marx are plural, heterogeneous. This chapter emphasizes aspect of Derridas writing on Marx: his analysis of hauntology-ontology connection in Marx; his exploration of the ways in which Marx's spectral logic works to bend his critical, emancipatory labors to the tasks of a totalizing, statist politics. International relations, as a cultural field, might be marked off as site of estrangement, of violent excess, of the ordeal of power beyond the sway of a sovereign-authored truth. In the experience of otherness, we are as competent as any practitioner of realist spectro-poetics, for we are, we can only be, and our capacities for critical, rational thought depend on our being haunted.
