Jacques Derrida - Spectres of Marx - What is Ideology.pdf - Derrida - MKTK

Jacques Derrida 1994

From Spectres of Marx

What is Ideology?

What is ideology? Can one translate with regard to it the logic of

surviving that we have just glimpsed with regard to the patrimony of

the idol, and what would be the interest of such an operation?

The treatment of the phantomatic in The German Ideology

announces or confirms the absolute privilege that Marx always

grants to religion, to ideology as religion, mysticism, or theology, in

his analysis of ideology in general. If the ghost gives its form, that is

to say, its body, to the ideologem, then it is the essential feature [ le

propre ], so to speak, of the religious, according to Marx, that is

missed when one effaces the semantics or the lexicon of the spectre,

as translations often do, with values deemed to be more or less

equivalent (fantasmagorical, hallucinatory, fantastic, imaginary, and

so on). The mystical character of the fetish, in the mark it leaves on

the experience of the religious, is first of all a ghostly character.

Well beyond a convenient mode of presentation in Marx's rhetoric or

pedagogy, what seems to be at stake is, on the one hand, the

irreducibly specific character of the spectre. The latter cannot be

derived from a psychology of the imagination or from a

psychoanalysis of the imaginary, no more than from an onto- or me-

ontology, even though Marx seems to inscribe it within a

socioeconomic genealogy or a philosophy of labour and production:

all these deductions suppose the possibility of spectral survival. On

the other hand and by the same token, at stake is the irreducibility of

the religious model in the construction of the concept of ideology.

When Marx evokes spectres at the moment he analyses, for example,

the mystical character or the becoming-fetish of the commodity, we

should therefore not see in that only effects of rhetoric, turns of

phrase that are contingent or merely apt to convince by striking the

imagination. If that were the case, moreover, one would still have to

explain their effectiveness in this respect. One would still have to

reckon with the invincible force and the original power of the

“ghost” effect. One would have to say why it frightens or strikes the

imagination, and what fear, imagination, their subject, the life of

their subject, and so forth, are.

Let us situate ourselves for a moment in that place where the

values of value (between use-value and exchange-value), secret,

mystique, enigma, fetish, and the ideological form a chain in Marx's

text, singularly in Capital, and let us try at least to indicate (it will be

only an indicator) the spectral movement of this chain. The

movement is staged there where it is a question, precisely, of

forming the concept of what the stage, any stage, withdraws from

our blind eves at the moment we open them. Now, this concept is

indeed constructed with reference to a certain haunting.

It is a great moment at the beginning of Capital as everyone

recalls: Marx is wondering in effect how to describe the sudden

looming up of the mystical character of the commodity, the

mystification of the thing itself — and of the money-form of which

the commodity's simple form is the “germ.” He wants to analyse the

equivalent whose enigma and mystical character only strike the

bourgeois economist in the finished form of money, gold or silver. It

is the moment in which Marx means to demonstrate that the mystical

character owes nothing to a use-value.

Is it just chance that he illustrates the principle of his explanation

by causing a table to turn? Or rather by recalling the apparition of a

turning table? This table is familiar, too familiar; it is found at the

opening of the chapter on the fetishism of the commodity and its

secret ( Geheimnis ). This table has been worn down, exploited, over-

exploited, or else set aside, no longer in use, in antique shops or

auction rooms. The thing is at once set aside and beside itself.

Beside itself because, as we will soon be surprised to see, the s id

table is a little mad, weird, unsettled, “out of joint.” One no longer

knows, beneath the hermeneutic patina, what this piece of wood,

whose example suddenly looms up, is good for and what it is worth.

Will that which is going to loom up be a mere example? Yes, but

the example of a thing, the table, that seems to loom up of itself and

to stand all at once on its paws. It is the example of an apparition.

Let us take the chance, then, after so many glosses, of an

ingenuous reading. Let us try to see what happens. But is this not

right away impossible? Marx warns us with the first words. The

point is right away to go bey rid, in one fell swoop, the first glance

and thus to see there where this glance is blind, to open one's eyes

wide there where one does not see what one sees. One must see, at

first sight, what does not let itself be seen. And this is invisibility

itself. For what first sight misses is the invisible. The flaw,, the error

of first sight is to see, and not to notice the invisible. If one does not

give oneself up to this invisibility, then the table-commodity,

immediately perceived, remains what it is not, a simple thing

deemed to be trivial and too obvious. This trivial thing seems to

comprehend itself ( ein selbst verständliches, triviales Ding ): the

thing itself in the phenomenality, of its phenomenon, a quite simple

wooden table. So as to prepare us to see this invisibility, to see

without seeing, thus to think the body without body of this invisible

visibility — the ghost is already taking shape — Marx declares that

the thing in question, namely, the commodity, is not so simple (a

warning that will elicit snickers from all the imbeciles, until the end

of time, who never believe anything, of course, because they are so

sure that they see what is seen, everything that is seen, only what is

seen). The commodity is even very complicated; it is blurred,

tangled, paralysing, aporetic, perhaps undecidable ( ein sehr

vertracktes Ding ). It is so disconcerting, this commodity-thing, that

one has to approach it with “metaphysical” subtlety and

“theological” niceties. Precisely in order to analyse the metaphysical

and the theological that constructed the phenomenological good

sense of the thing itself, of the immediately visible commodity, in

flesh and blood: as what it is “at first sight” ( auf den ersten Blick ).

This phenomenological good sense may perhaps be valid for use-

value. It is perhaps even meant to be valid only for use-value, as if

the correlation of these concepts answered to this function:

phenomenology as the discourse of use-value so as not to think the

market or in view of making oneself blind to exchange-value.

Perhaps. And it is for this reason that phenomenological good sense

or phenomenology of perception (also at work in Marx when he

believes he can speak of a pure and simple use-value) can claim to

foster Enlightenment since use-value has nothing at all “mysterious”

about it ( nicht Mysteriöses an ihr ). If one keeps to use-value, the

properties ( Eigenschaften ) of the thing (and it is going to be a

question of property) are always very human, at bottom, reassuring

for this very reason. They always relate to what is proper to man, to

the properties of man: either they respond to men's needs, and that is

precisely their use-value, or else they are the product of a human

activity that seems to intend them for those needs.

For example — and here is where the table comes on stage — the

wood remains wooden when it is made into a table: it is then “an

ordinary, sensuous thing [ ein ordindäres, sinnliches Ding ]". It is

quite different when it becomes a commodity, when the curtain goes

up on the market and the table plays actor and character at the same

time, when the commodity-table, says Marx, comes on stage

( auftritt ), begins to walk around and to put itself forward as a market

value. Coup de theatre: the ordinary, sensuous thing is transfigured

( verwandelt sich ), it becomes someone, it assumes a figure. This

woody and headstrong denseness is metamorphosed into a

supernatural thing, a sensuous non-sensuous thing, sensuous but

non-sensuous, sensuously supersensible ( verwandelt er sich in ein

sinnlich übersinnliches Ding ). The ghostly schema now appears

indispensable. The commodity is a “thing” without phenomenon, a

thing in flight that surpasses the senses (it is invisible, intangible,

inaudible, and odourless); but this transcendence is not altogether

spiritual, it retains that bodiless body which we have recognised as

making the difference between spectre and spirit. What surpasses the

senses still passes before us in the silhouette of the sensuous body

that it nevertheless lacks or that remains inaccessible to us. Marx

does not say sensuous and non-sensuous, or sensuous but non-

sensuous.' he says: sensuous non-sensuous, sensuously

supersensible. Transcendence, the movement of super-, the step

beyond ( über, epekeina ), is made sensuous in that very excess. It

renders the non-sensuous sensuous. One touches there on what one

does not touch, one feels there where one does not feel, one even

suffers there where suffering does not take place, when at least it

does not take place where one suffers (which is also, let us not

forget, what is said about phantom limbs, that phenomenon marked

with an X for any phenomenology of perception). The commodity

thus haunts the thing, its spectre is at work in use-value. This

haunting displaces itself like an anonymous silhouette or the figure

of an extra [ figurante ] who might be the principal or capital

character. It changes places, one no longer knows exactly where it is,

it turns, it invades the stage with its moves: there is a step there [ il ya

là un pas ] and its allure belongs only to this mutant. Marx must have

recourse to theatrical language and must describe the apparition of

the commodity as a stage entrance ( auftritt ). And he must describe

the table become commodity as a table that turns, to be sure, during

a spiritualist séance, but also as a ghostly silhouette, the figuration of

an actor or a dancer. Theo-anthropological figure of indeterminate

sex ( Tisch, table, is a masculine noun), the table has feet, the tab e

has a head, its body comes alive, it erects its whole self like an

institution, it stands up and addresses itself to others, first of all to

other commodities, its fellow beings in phantomality, it faces them

or opposes them, For the spectre is social, it is even engaged in

competition or in a war as soon as it makes its first apparition.

Jacques Derrida - Spectres of Marx - What is Ideology.pdf

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