We must come to grips with the ghosts, of history, that haunt

us at the conscious and unconscious level.

Johnson 2007, URRICULUM VITA LEIGH M. JOHNSON Assistant Professor of
Philosophy Rhodes College 2000 North Parkway Memphis, TN 38104
johnsonl@rhodes.edu EDUCATION B.A., Philosophy, University of Memphis, 2000
M.A., Philosophy, Villanova University, 2003 Ph.D., Philosophy, The Pennsylvania
State University, 2007 Doctoral Minor, African and African-American Studies ,
The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts
HAUNTED DEMOCRACIES AND THE POLITICS OF POSSIBILITY: A DECONSTRUCTIVE
ANALYSIS OF TRUTH COMMISSIONS A Thesis in Philosophy by Leigh M. Johnson
2007,
Derridas hauntology When Derrida asks, at the outset of Specters of Marx,
what does it mean to live finally?, he is asking not only what is the
impact of ghosts, who have lasted beyond their ownmost finality (in the
Heideggerian sense), on our final understanding of the meaning of life ?but also,
what does it means for the living to live with ghosts? This is, as will be
demonstrated in later chapters, a fundamentally political question: how does one
negotiate both the inter-subjectivity of those present and those who are
neither wholly present nor absent? The dead leave a trace on our lives,
and our indistinct experiences of/with them appear to actively influence
the varying configurations in which we understand extant
intersubjectivity. Ghosts, like Hamlets father, are remnants, remainders
of a past that has not passed and that, in its refusal to either properly
present itself or to retreat into oblivion, both haunts the present and
influences the future. In so doing, ghosts gesture toward our inability to master the
past or the present, not to mention our inability to discern or decide finally between the two. Wendy
Brown, in her Politics Out of History, writes: [Ghosts] figure the necessity
of grasping certain implications of the past for the present only as traces
or effects (rather than as structures, axioms, laws, or lines of
determination) and of grasping even these as protean. Learning to live finally means
learning to live with this unmasterable, uncategorizable, and irreducible
character of the pasts bearing on the present, and hence with the
unmasterable and 125 irreducible character of the present as well.
Learning to live means learning to live without systematization , without
conceits of coherence, without a consistent and complete picture, and without a clear delineation
between past and present.162 The trouble with spirits is that they are
never proactively encountered, that is, never really seen, though the
spectral other no doubt looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by
it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our
part.163 We are haunted by their present-which-is-not-present, that is to
say, also by their absence-which- is-not-absent. Their guarded anonymity, their origin
and their status is never certain. They are fundamentally anachronistic (out of
time)anachrony is the law of the specter. Because, in the specter, we cannot clearly
distinguish the difference between the thing itself and its simulacrumthat opposition does not hold up

Derrida suggests that the specter or ghost forces us to replace

metaphysics/ontology with what he calls a hauntology.164 Like the trace, it is in
the nature of ghosts to appear in those places which, according to Adorno, do not fit
properly into the laws of historical movement.165 That is to say, they

haunt the present, that to which we so desperately attach ourselves

both existentially and intellectually, without ever wholly becoming a part
of that present. They are waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic, and it is
precisely Derridas project in Specters of Marx, in his hauntology, to address what is left 162 Wendy Brown, Politics
Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 146. 163 Specters of Marx, 7. 164 Specters of Marx, 10.

What
transcends the ruling society is not only the potentiality which it develops
but also that which did not fit properly into the laws of historical
movement. Theory must deal with cross-grained, opaque, unassimilated material, which has admittedly from
165 It is in the nature of the defeated to appear, in their impotence, irrelevant, exccentric, derisory.

the start an anachronistic quality, but is not obsolete since it has outwitted the historical dynamic. Theodore
Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E.F. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1996), 151
( emphasis added). 126

unassimilated by metaphysics (and traditional

philosophys) privileging of the present .166 Hauntology replaces ontology

speaks only of what is present or what is
absent; it cannot conceive of what is neither...The linear time of birth, life
and death, of the beginning and the end, has no place in the hauntic,
which the latter alone allows to speak of what persists beyond the end, beyond
death.167 In the same way that the specter of communism reminded
Marx of the distance between 19th century Europes promises and its
practices, so also does the specter of the end of communism (which was
being heralded by Fukuyama and his adherents at the time of Derridas Specters of Marx) remind us of
because, as Warren Montag writes, ontology

the distance between democracys promises and democracys

practices .168

That is to say, the specters that haunted Marx (and Marxs Europe)no doubt traces of the

Hegelianism he was attempting to exorciseare of the same order that haunt those attempting to turn Marxism on
its head. Those who, at the end of the 1980s, triumphed the arrival of democracy just in time (like Fukuyama)
neglected to reckon with the ghosts of that which it claims to have overcome, the way in which it is constrained,

To recontextualize the figure of the specter in concrete democratic practices,

we should recall that the men and women of history who have actually
circumscribed and inscribed by the past; the way in which it is haunted before we make and enter it.169

waited upon democracys deferral (like the Algerians Derrida

or the South

Africans

to which I will soon turn, not to mention innumerable

so often

cites,

groups within the

category of American ) often have done so without horizon of the wait, awaiting
166 Ibid. 167 Warren Montag, Spirits Armed and Unarmed: Derridas Specters of Marx in

deceptively general

what
Ghostly Demarcations, 71. 168 Brendese, Remembering Democratic Temporality, 12. 169 Brown, Politics Out of

no one ever inherits

democracy without being haunted by the ghosts who have invested in its
promise, even when that promise has failed. Those that wait on
History, 151. 127 [one] does not expect yet or any longer.170 That is to say,

democracy are haunted not only by its own spectrality (in the as-yet
unfulfilled promises of democracy) but also by the specters of those
whom it has failed. The ghosts of democracy are more than simply the
ghosts of our forefatherspatriots and heroesbut also the ghosts of
murdered protesters, starving picketers, weary marchers, beaten and
bruised dissenters , democrats and voyous of all sorts. In Force of Law, Derrida
argued that there is no state, no law, which is not inaugurated in some
violence. The political present is thus always an heir to some bottomless
wound, irreparable tragedy, the indefinite malediction that marks the
history of the law and history as law.171 The figure of the ghost,

somewhere between presence and absence and excessive of our

capacities for metaphysical thinking, helps Derrida open up traces of new
and different political questions with stakes we could never calculate.
Wendy Brown writes, What we inherit is not what really happened to the
dead but what lives on from that happening, what is conjured form it, how
past generations and events occupy the force fields of the present, how
they claim us, and how they haunt, plague and inspire our imaginations
and visions for the future . 172 The questions that the ghosts of democracy
raise about the inadequacies of democratic practices, and democracys
failed promises, work to reinforce our vigilance in the present to closing
the gap between democracys hopes and achievements. If democracy is always 170
Specters of Marx, 65. 171 Specters of Marx, 21. 172 Brown, Politics Out of History, 150-151. 128 that which
has not yet come to full presenceand, hence, is itself a kind of specter
then our relationship with the ghosts of democracy keep alive in our
memories images of both what might have been and what still has yet to
come. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the world witnessed the
emergence of a novel democratic practice designed to reckon not only
with the specter(s) of democracy, but with its autoimmunity and aporias as well
the truth commission. Although not all truth commissions took place in regimes that we would recognize as
democratic, the practice of commissioning the truth of a body politic per se, I contend, is democratic. Many of

the deconstructive practices elaborated in this chapter can be seen more

concretely in the context of the work of truth commissions, especially the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Here, we will see at work the collective labor
of undoing political failures and refiguring political possibilitieswhat
Derrida would call the simultaneous and irreducible processes of
depoliticization and repoliticization . At stake in these processes are
simultaneously a politics of memory and a politics of possibility, both of
which are but variations on a political hauntology.

The 1ac is a hauntology prefiguring of ethics. Our

unconditional hospitality takes responsibility for the pasts
prefiguring of present and attempts a deconstructive strategy
against them.
Abbinett 2006, Ross, Journal for Cultural Research Volume 10 Number 1 (January
2006), Spectres of Class: Marxism, Deconstruction and the Politics of Affiliation,
http://www3.amherst.edu/~pmachala/endnotelibs/Endnote
%20Bibliography/MarxSeminar/Marx%20for%2007%20students/Marxcourse-generalarchive.Data/PDF/Abbinnett,%20Specters%20of%20Class%20-%20Marxism,
%20Deconstrunction%20and%20-1351316992/ABBINN~1.PDF
In the introduction I identified three themes through which the encounter between Marxism and deconstruction has
been played out: the ethical significance of Derridas critique of metaphysics ; the
complicity of deconstruction with the ideological and technological regimes of liberal capitalism; and the political
SPECTRES OF CLASS 7 ineffectiveness of Derridas account of international socialism. Let me begin with an
examination of the first of these themes. The fundamental claim of Tom Lewiss essay

The politics of

hauntology that deconstruction has abandoned all commitment to the

concepts of social class and mode of productionis directly

concerned with the Derridas reconfiguration of Marxism around the

ethical demand of hospitality (Lewis in Sprinker 1999, p. 139). He argues, quite rightly, that The
German Ideology was deter- mined to put an end to the endless ghosting of humanity into the egological forms
which Stirner opposed to Hegelian idealism. What Marx demanded, in other words, was a recognition that Stirners
categories were themselves expressions of the abstract social relations through which capital frustrates the
creativity of real individuals. Now, for Lewis, Derridas attempt to expose Marxs exorcism of Stirner to the
disturbing affects of general economy instigates a dangerous descent into political indeterminism. His particular

Derridas attempt to transform Marxism into a messianic

responsibility which simply registers the catastrophic mutations of global
capitalism without intervening. For in so far as Derrida understands the
fundamental structures of Marxs politics as having arisen from a reaction of
panic ridden fear before the ghost in general (Derrida 1994, pp. 1045), he can only
conceive of actual socialist movements and regimes in terms of their
struggles to conquer the spectres of difference/alterity which haunt them .
concern is with

Lewis therefore maintains that Derrida maps the analytical strategies of Marxism (immanent critique, structural
analy- sis, negative phenomenology) directly onto his critique of the metaphysics of being; and in so doing,
inscribes the Stalinist/totalitarian fear of difference at the centre of Marxist theory and politics (Lewis in Sprinker
1999, p. 145). Aijaz Ahmads essay Reconciling Derrida pursues a similar argument. Ahmad contends that there is
a complicity between deconstruction and the liberal democratic hegemony whose geopolitical contours emerged
after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Derridas determination to pursue the ethical questions which arise from the
techno-scientific reorganization of capitalism, in other words, betrays a fundamental lack of historical imagination:
for had he bothered to consider the historical circumstances which have allowed this reorganization to take place
(that is, the failure of working class organizations in liberal democra- cies to resist the functionalizing, consumerist
tendencies of late-capitalism), he would have recognized that such questions can only detract from the strategic
imperatives of class struggle (Ahmad in Sprinker 1999, p. 97). Ahmad therefore contends that SM simply follows the
depoliticizing effects of media technological capitalism without reference to the immanent power of class solidarity
either as it should have been constituted during the political upheavals of 1989 or as it ought to be solicited,

the relationship
between political agency, class solidarity and the historical
transformations of capitalism requires slightly more exposition. In his essay Crisis and class struggle in
channelled and constituted in our immediate historical present. Callinicoss account of

Europe today he argues that as western European governments came under increasing pressure to ensure that 8
ABBINNETT the big corporations were provided with the most favourable conditions for their operations, so working
class organizations came into violent conflict with moves to reduce wages, extend working hours, crack down on
industrial action, and reduce public spending on welfare programmes (Callinicos 1994, p. 20). This conflict wasand
indeed continues to beparticularly acute in Germany. For the longevity of the contract between labour and capital
in the post-war German economy meant that attempts to roll back the system of welfare benefits and processes of
consultation which had been essential to the success of Rhine capi- talism, served mainly to intensify the conflict
between the trade unions, the state, and the major industrial corporations (Callinicos 1994, p. 18). It is in the
context of this dislocation of state and civil society that the political dimensions of the German crisis should be
understood. On the one hand the popularity of neo-fascist parties showed the disillusionment of alienated,
privatized workers with trade union bureaucracies, while on the other, the monetarist retrench- ment that was
triggered by the recession opens the possibility of new forms of spontaneous working class resistance (Callinicos
1994, p. 21). This unstable vacil- lation between socialism and right-wing populism has, for Callinicos, become
symptomatic of a general malaise in European democracy; the fact that the electoral success of the National Front
in France and of the pro-fascist National Alliance in Italy occurred simultaneously with an up-turn in working class
activ- ism in both countries, points to an evolving crisis whose ultimate trajectory remains to be determined
(Callinicos 1994, p. 23). In the final section of his article Callinicos argues that the historical conjunc- ture which
produced the fascist dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolinia deep- seated economic crisis, a ruling class offensive
against workers organizations, the rise of overtly fascist political groupsis, with certain qualifications, being
replayed across the major democracies of the EU. Thus while he is careful to point out the countervailing factors
which have slowed down the drift to the right (failure of neo-fascist parties to become mass political movements,
continued support for working class organizations, the durability of liberal democratic insti- tutions, the cumulative
rather than catastrophic temporality of the depression), his analysis returns to the threat of an old political
barbarism which, if unop- posed by a self-consciously militant working class, could sweep through the democracies
of an economically weakened Europe (Callinicos 1994, p. 24). There is a homology among Lewis, Ahmad and
Callinicoss arguments concern- ing the historical effectiveness of class which requires some unpacking. In Lewiss
article the emphasis is placed on showing that the collapse of the October Revo- lution into Stalinism can be
accounted for by a Marxist analysis of the position of the Soviet economy in the geopolitical order of early twentieth
century Europe. The mechanisms of state capitalist totalitarianism, in other words, were constituted not through
an obsession with the ghosts of metaphysical alterity, but by the economic and technological backwardness which
was inherited by the newly formed socialist regime. Leaving aside the crudity of Lewiss exposition of the method
of deconstruction, the structure of this argument entails a found- ing moment of prohibition which is similar to the
one that Derrida identified in SPECTRES OF CLASS 9 Batailles reading of Hegel. For what Lewis maintains is that if
the empirical conditions which prevented the realization of a genuinely socialist society had been different (that is,

if the historical dialectics of class solidarity had not been disrupted by the general economy of effects produced by
the state of the world market), then it is possible that the conditions of socialized production could have been
realized. What is at work in both Lewis and Ahmads objections to Derridas critique of Marxist science therefore is
a logic of immanence which draws the contingency of historical events back into the dialectical strictures of
universal suffering and collective agency. For in so far as they both maintain that the constitutive power of class is
always reinscribed in the general economy of capital, their critiques of SM begin by positing the referents of a transhistorical identity which Derridas concepts (hauntology, spectralization, the arrivant) have called into question
(Derrida 1994, p. 11). A slightly different version of this argument is deployed in Callinicoss article. As we have
seen he is at pains to point out that the struggle between left and right which has been precipitated by the
economic crisis in Europe is not subject to a strong historical determinism. It may well be, he argues, that the liberal
democratic order will survive through its ability to integrate disparate elements of left and right-wing populism, or
that there will be a steady drift to the right which is precipitated by the electoral success of neo-fascist parties. Yet
to conclude matters here would hardly be true to the principles of Marxist critique; and so Callinicos attempts to
reconfigure the dialectics of class solidarity through the whiff of Weimar which has returned to the political arena
of Europe. The spectre of fascism as a mass political movement, in other words, is introduced in an attempt to
radicalize the present, and to galvanize the working classes of all European democracies into rejuvenating socialist

This apparently messianic appeal to the

crises and opportunities of the day however retains the structure of
dialectical iterability that is present in Ahmad and Lewiss responses to SM.
and communist alliances (Callinicos 1994, p. 27).

According to Callinicos the return of the spectre of fascism is determined by the deterritorializing power of global
capital; for the lack of stability which has come to characterize the European economy has solic- ited dangerous old
appeals to divine election, racial purity and national culture. None of this would provoke any dissent from Derrida
(Derrida 1994, pp. 8184). And yet there are important questions concerning the possibility of historical repetition
which arise at this point. In Callinicoss account of the crisis of European politics, the conditions of the appearance
of the spectre of fascism are given little attention; indeed the images, mythologies and psychological cathe- xes

This unwillingness to
address the conditions under which the spectre of fascism reappears (that is,
the transformation of public space through new media and informatic
technologies, the rise of biopolitical regimes of production, and the
emergence of new forms of aesthetic distraction etc), is significant because Callinicos
deploys the threat of its return as rejuvenating the politics of class struggle. Derridas hauntological
which he invokes seem to spring unmodified from their place in European history.

reading of Marx however is concerned

10 ABBINNETT

precisely with the

possibility of this logic of reinscription (Derrida 1994, p. 10). What the term
hauntology names is an infinitely mutable play of effects (distrac- tion,
supplementation, dispersal, erasure, silencing ) which defer the operation of the
signifiers through which class solidarity is recuperated. And so while it is
true that the return of unquiet ghosts to the present belongs to the
originary responsibility of Marxism, it is neither ethically nor strategically
judicious to re- gather them into the conventional oppositions of class
struggle. In the end we must take responsibility for the unforeseeable
effects which their manifestations produce in the temporal economy of
the present.5

The inauthentic ethic of their K negates the ethical potential

for deconstruction. Performative contradictions negate the
spirit of justice that the Affirmatives ethical performance
creates.
Spivak 2005, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University, Modern Language
Association, MLA, Forum: The Legacy of Jacques Derrida,
www.yale.edu/polisci/sbenhabib/papers/The%20Legacy%20of%20Jacques%20Derrida.pdf

O TELL. AND THE IDEA OF LEGACY IS too tied to reproductive heteronormativity. When "heir" is extended to include
impersonal bodies such as charities, the norm goes from literal to metaphoric. Even the most literal notion of heir
is, however, metaphoric, insofar as a legacy is what in heteronormativity promises an imaginary continuity for an
individual, succession, immortality, transcendence. We have a thousand words, so I will put it bluntly, and will be
misunderstood (Sharp and expanded arguments are also, and necessarily, misunderstood. That is what it is to be

"Freud's Legacy," dating from the late

situates efforts to pass on a movement with a name within
performative contradiction. The last sentence of the passage below catches the starkness of a
belief in one's legacy: "One ... gives oneself one's own movement, o ne inherits
from oneself for all time, the provisions are sufficient so that the ghost at
least can always step up to the cashier. He will only have to pronounce a
name guaranteeing a signature. One thinks" (305). Derrida is careful, in this
understood. Never mind.): women may inherit differently.
seventies,

piece, not to make the choice of deconstruction, sign it with his own name (304, 308, 317, 327). The caution is

in Of Grammatology: "Thought is here for us a

perfectly neutral name, a textual blank, a necessarily indeterminate index
of an epoch of differance to come." (93; trans, modified). In "Freud's Legacy" he
writes of the silent Sophie, the daughter who dies at 26, that "the battle for the 'exclusive possession' of [this]
carried over from the earlier pronouncement

dead daughter (mother) rage[d] on all sides" (330). This is matched by his word on mothers: "the face without
face, name without name, of the mother returns, in the end.... The mother buries all her own" (333). This thought

critically in Glas, Ear of the Other, "Circumfession," accompanied by

criticism of a heritage he is obliged to perform. Women may not inherit at all. The
on mothers is carried through

notion of "hauntology" in Specters allows for a more direct "performative

interpretation" as a kind of ghostly legacy

(55).

There is another spin on

legacy in his mourning piece on Foucault (" 'To Do Justice' "). ?tre juste

avec?

being fair to, doing justice to?a predecessor with whom one has a deep yet ambivalent
relationship. Foucault could not have written without Freud. He should have been juste
with him. I believe this is the duty Derrida performed toward Heidegger in Of
Spirit.1 Derrida cared that followers should not find in deconstruction the
ultimate political correctness. I often quote two exemplary passages: "decenter the
subject... is easily said. [It] denies the [prior] axiomatics en bloc and keeps it going as a survivor, with minor
adjustments de rigueur and daily compromises lacking in rigor. So coping, so operating at top speed,
one accounts and becomes accountable for nothing" ("Mochlos" 11). And the warning
against "a community of well-meaning deconstructionists, reassured and reconciled with the world in ethical
certainty, good conscience, satisfaction of services rendered,

accomplished (or more heroically

and the consciousness of duty

still, yet to be accomplished)" ("Passions" 15). My own feeling

of setting deconstruction to work I put at the end of an appendix: [T]he scholarship on

Derrida's ethical

turn and his relationship to Heidegger as well as on postcolonialism and

deconstruction, when in the rare case it risks setting itself to work by
breaking its frame , is still not identical with the setting to work of
deconstruction altogether outside the formalizing calculus of the
academic institution. (Critique 431) This last is hardly a legacy. It is rather "finding proof
in unlikely places," proof where the idea of proving is absurd: teleo poiesis?
addressing the distant other: "generation by a joint and simultaneous
grafting, without a proper body, of the performative and the
constative."2 The obvi ous connection is to Nietzsche, looking always for his companions, philosophers of

the future.3 But there is also Kant, writing from within the constraints of a theologically hamstrung acad emy, who

enlightened subject as "a scholar ... addressing the world of

readers" (60 61). From Glas on, Derrida made this address part of the
thought of the

performance of his texts .

In Voyous, his last published book, Derrida pronounced himself "on the

rack," being "bro ken by the wheel" of two preliminary questions he would not pronounce until 105 pages into the
book.4 Being what he was, he noted that each turn of the wheel put him in a position contrary to the previous.
That too was part of the torture. If he ut tered the questions, he would not be able to write his book. The first

"to speak democratically of democracy would be on the subject of

democracy, to be speaking in an intelligible, univocal, and sensible
fashion of democracy, to make oneself understood by whoever can
understand the word or the phrases that one makes with the word." (105)5
Not just frustrated academics but, literally, just anyone. Plato had put the archons above the
law, Aristotle had not solved the merit-versus numbers problem , Kant had
built cosmopolitheia on war, and the United States . .. Women . and
question:

rogues were never let in.

The second question "resembles the remorse of having used and abused

the expression 'democracy to come'" (107). He starts to read himself, explaining himself, directing the after comer,

he brings out, once again, the

performative constative imperative, tying knowing and doing again, in a
double bind. We can either only say "democracy is this," as carefully as possible?
constative? or, "I believe in it, I make a promise, ... I act, I endure at any rate, you do it too"
(132)? performative promise. He ties the knot with his earlier work ? the "a" of
"differanee" is the "a" of "a-venir," to come (154). In 1968, the year "Differance" was published,
ending, "Greetings, democracy to come!" (161).6 And

everything was seen as identifiable only insofar as it was different from what it was not, and hence differing
(differance) was the (non)name of things; in 2003,

democracy is different from itself seen

as itself? hence it is always to come . Constative (this is the way things are)
grafted to performative ( gotta keep working, for democracy is always not
yet there). Too soon to tell. As we have seen, this possibility is already there in Grammatology. Derrida
speaks there of a " differance to come ." If this is a legacy, it asks us to
face forward. But who can bear to inherit such torture? Plato avoided it with the archons, Aristotle with the
merit numbers debate, Kant with war. As Lacan told us, the hero leaves no legacy (277). Let us turn to literature,

Derrida's interview on literature in Derek Attridge's book

comments on literature as a double-edged sword: "the freedom to say
every thing is a very powerful political weapon, but one which might
immediately let itself be neutralized as a fiction" (Acts 38). And then he comments on
how literature is "suspended" from reference: "Suspended means suspense, but also
dependence, condition, conditionally" (48). We are back again in the double
bind: we do not have to be verifiable but we depend on reference. Work that
one out. Perhaps that will have been Derrida's legacy: take infinite care to see both
sides, and then take a risk, depending on what truth ? It's too soon to tell. Gayatri
less heroic, thank god, than philosophy.

Chakravorty Spivak Columbia University Notes 11 have offered this reading in "Responsibilities." 2 Derrida, Politics
32; trans, modified. 3 See Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 4 25-39 and passim. Translations from Voyous are mine. 51
cannot here read the quotation marks and their function in the text. 6 English cannot render the complexity of the
French salut, which Derrida has connected to the problematics of democracy.

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