MARCHE IN MARCH PER MARX ....THE MARX NIHIL COCA-COLA PARADOX OR PARADOXOS OR PARADOXA -When the dogma machine and the "Marxist" ideological apparatuses (States. parties. cells. unions. and other places of doctrinal production) are in the process of disappearing. we no longer have any excuse. only alibis. for turning away from this responsibility There will be no future without this. Not without Marx. no future without Marx. without the memory and the inheritance of Marx: in any case of a certain Marx. of his genius. of at least one of his spirits. For this will be our hypothesis or rather our bias: there is more than one of them. there must be more than one of them. Nevertheless. among all the temptations I will have to resist today. there would be the temptation of memory: to recount what was for me. and for those of my generation who shared it during a whole lifetime. the experience of Marxism. the quaSi-paternal BIG BROTHER WITH MOUSTACHE The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International PHODEMOS PHODEMOS MAS SÓ NA CHINA ...A spectral moment, a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual present: "now," future present). We are questioning in this instant, we are asking ourselves about this instant that is not docile to time, at least to what we call time. Furtive and untimely, the apparition of the specter does not belong to that time, it does not give time, not that one: "Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost" (Hamlet). This resembles an axiom, more precisely an axiom concerning axiomatics itself, namely, concerning some supposedly undemonstrable obvious fact with regard to whatever has worth, valuequality (axia). And even and especially dignity (for example man as example of a finite and reasonable being), that unconditional dignity (Wiirdigkeit) that Kant placed higher, precisely Qustement], than any economy, any compared or comparable value, any market price (Marktpreis). This axiom may be shocking to some. And one does not have to wait for the objection: To whom, finally, would an obligation of justice ever entail a commitment, one will say, and even be it beyond law and beyond the norm, to whom and to what if not to the life of a living being? Is there ever justice, commitment of justice, or responsibility in general which has to answer for itself (for the living self) before anything other, in the last resort, than the life of a living being, whether one means by that natural life or the life of the spirit? If a discourse of the Fukuyama type plays to good effect the role of channel-jamming and doubly bereaved disavowal expected of it, it is because, cleverly for some, crudely for others, it performs a sleight-of-hand trick: with the one hand, it accredits a logic of the empirical event which it needs whenever it is a question of certifying the finally final defeat of the so-called Marxist States and of everything that bars access to the Promised Land of economic and politicalliberalisms; but with the other hand, in the name of the trans-historic and natural ideal, it discredits this same logic of the so-called empirical event, it has to suspend it to avoid chalking up to the account of this ideal and its concept precisely whatever contradicts them in such a cruel fashion: in a word, all the evil, all that is not going well in the capitalist States

and
in liberalism, in a world dominated by other forces whose
hegemony is linked to this supposedly trans-historical or natural
(let us say rather naturalized) ideal. We will say a few words later
about the major outlines of what is going so badly in the world
today. As for the sleight-of-hand trick between history and
nature, between historical empiricity and teleological transcendentality,
between the supposed empirical reality of the event
and the absolute ideality of the liberal telos, it can only be undone
on the basis of a new thinking or a new experience of the event,

and of another logic of its relation to the phantomatic.


the reading or analysis of those whom we could nickname
the classics of the end. They formed the canon of the modern
apocalypse (end of History, end of Man, end of Philosophy,
Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, with their Kojevian codicil
and the codicils of Kojeve himself). It was, on the other hand and
indissociably, what we had known or what some of us for quite
some time no longer hid from concerning totalitarian terror
in all the Eastern countries, all the socio-economic disasters of
Soviet bureaucracy, the Stalinism of the past and the neoStalinism
in process (roughly speaking, from the Moscow trials
to the repression in Hungary, to take only these minimal indices).
Such was no doubt the element in which what is called deconstruction
developed-and one can understand nothing of this
period of deconstruction, notably in France, unless one takes
this historical entanglement into account. Thus, for those with
whom I shared this Singular period, this double and unique

experience (both philosophical and political), for us, I venture to say, the media parade of current discourse on the end of
history and tHe last man looks most often like a tiresome
anachronism. At least up to a certain point that will have to be
specified later on. Something of this tiresomeness, moreover comes across in the body of today's most phenomenal culture: what
one hears, reads, and sees, what is most mediatized in Western
capitals. As for those who abandon themselves to that discourse
with the jubilation of youthful enthusiasm, they look like latecomers,
a little as ifit were possible to take still the last train after
the last train-and yet be late to an end of history
How can one be late to the end of history? A question for
today. It is serious because it obliges one to reflect again, as we
have been doing since Hegel, on what happens and deserves the
name of event, after history; it obliges one to wonder if the end of
history is but the end of a certain concept of history Here is
perhaps one of the questions that should be asked of those who
are not content just to arrive late to the apocalypse and to the last
train of the end, if I can put it like that, without being out of
breath, but who find the means to puff out their chests with the
good conscience of capitalism, liberalism, and the virtues of
parliamentary democracy-a term with which we designate not parliamentarism and political representation in general, but the
present, which is to say in fact, past forms of the electoral and
parliamentary apparatus.
We are going to have to complicate this outline in a moment.
We will have to put forward another reading of the media's
anachronism and of good conscience. But so that one might
better appreciate the discouraging impression of deja vu, which
risks causing us to drop all this literature on the end of history
and other similar diagnoses, I will quote only (from among so
many other possible examples) an essay from 1959 whose
author also published a fiction already entitled, in 1957, The Last
Man. About thirty-five years ago, then, Maurice Blanchot devoted
an article, "The End of Philosophy," to a good half-dozen
books from the '5 Os.

I would like to learn
to live IN MARX DA COSTA finally.
Finally but why?
To learn to live: a strange watchword. Who would learn? WE From
whom? FROM THE NEW GANDHI DA COSTA 
To teach to live, but to whom? Will we ever know? Will
we ever know how to live and first of all what "to learn to live"
means? And why "finally"
By itself, out of context-but a context, always, remains open,
thus fallible and insufficient-this watchword forms an almost
unintelligible syntagm. Just how far can its idiom be translated
moreover? I
A magisterial locution, all the same--or for that very reason.
For from the lips of a master this watch word would always say
something about violence. It vibrates like an arrow in the course

of an irreversible and asymmetrical address
But to learn to live, to learn it from oneself and by oneself, all alone,
to teach oneself to live ("I would like to learn to live finally"), is
that not impossible for a living being? Is it not what logic itself
forbids? To live, by definition, is not something one learns.
Not from oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only
from the other and by death. In any case from the other at the
edge of life. At the internal border or the external border, it is a
heterodidactics between life and death.
And yet nothing is more necessary than this wisdom. It is
ethics itself: to learn to live-alone, from oneself, by oneself Life
does not know how to live otherwise. And does one ever do
anything else but learn to live, alone, from oneself, by oneself?

This is, therefore, a strange commitment, both impossible AND necessary, for a living being supposed to be alive: "WE would liVE
to learn to live." It has no sense and cannot he just unless it comes
to terms with death.2 Mine as (well as) that of the other. Between
life and death, then, this is indeed the place of a sententious
injunction that always feigns to speak like the just.
What follows advances like an essay in the night-into the
unknown of that which must remain to come-a simple
attempt, therefore, to analyze with some consistency such an
exordium: "I would like to learn to live. Finally" Finally what.
If it-learning to live-remains to be done, it can happen only

between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone.
Derrida's Specters
of Marx and its companion volume Whitller Marxism? (1) The
proper names "Marx" and/or Marxism have always already been
plural nouns, despite their grammatical form, and despite the
fact that they have been understood as if they were rigid designators;
(2) "communism" (in its own pluralities) is not the same
as "Marxism"· (3) both communism and Marxism are historically
sited, situated, inflected, mediated by particular traditions
and histories; (4) the proper name "Marx" is-in a certain
sense-entirely uncircumventable.
The purpose of these two volumes, Specters of Marx and Whither
Marxism? is to begin to address questions about the connection
between the death of communism and the fate of Marxism