AUT: Too often Marxists display an epistemological cataract...

["Michael Pugliese" <michael098762001@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://lark.phoblacht.net/ghostly.html
Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Spectres Of Marx
Edited by Michael Sprinker.
reviewed Anthony McIntyre, 29.12.01
> ...The editor Michael Sprinker to his credit set out his stall as early
> as the second page of his introduction when he referred to Marxism and
> 'the crimes committed in its name, the errors in which it indulged, the
> massively undemocratic forms of organisation which it tolerated'.

Too often Marxists display an epistemological cataract when confronted
with such matters. They call all to easily to mind the observation of the
former Marxist Bruce Anderson: 'the ignorance and naïveté of the
20th-century Left: its endless willingness to construct political
fantasies out of mass suffering and bloodshed. These are under-chronicled
subjects.' In this collection Terry Eagleton and Tom Lewis jump out as
analysts with other things on their minds. Eagleton criticises Derrida for
having merely an ethical rather than a materialist response to Stalinism.
The entire Derridean project is summed up as 'a perpetual excited openness
to the Messiah who better not let us down by doing anything as determinate
as coming'. Yet, Eagleton is exceedingly humourous and his wit alone adds
badly needed lubrication to what in many respects is a textual aridity.
Lewis self-assuredly contents himself with the observation that 'for
Marxists there is nothing to mourn'. Incredible, given the failures and
crimes of Marxism throughout the past century. As if the evasive
Trotskyite 'blame it all on Stalinism' mechanism has any appeal left
amongst serious or potential Marxist thinkers trying to claw their way out
of the totalitarian abyss Marxism descended into. In one of the more
engaging essays Aijaz Ahmad takes Derrida to task for having a 'highly
problematic' view of Marxism. Here the writer feels that Derrida occupies
a contradictory position by criticising Althusser for dissociating
'Marxism from any teleology or from any messianic eschatology' and then
going on to create the very problematic he objected to in Althusser by
stating that 'my concern is to distinguish the latter from the former'. A
peculiar Derridean conundrum which sends the philosopher spiralling into
an orbit of slippage making it impossible to grasp the core of his
position. All we can do is remain appreciative of Derrida, despite the
enormous difficulty in understanding him, for having challenged the
ensemble of western rationalist thought, maintaining that it was engaged
in a dishonest pursuit of certainty and detecting a totalitarian arrogance
therein.

For Derrida his usurpation of a totalitarian certainty did not take the
form of maintaining a regime of endless meaning but instead sought to
undermine what Foucault called 'regimes of truth' by introducing an open
framework which could fertilise a plurality of meanings rather than one.
It is not surprising that Derrida finds himself under attack from Ahmad
for shying away from conceptualising 'a unity of a global process' which
would supposedly explain a wide range of events from the fall of
communism, the collapse of West European labour movements and an almost
total diminution of third World radicalisms - all combined with the rise
of fascisms throughout Europe. This 'looking from the outside in' approach
leaves us floundering and trying to square the circle when, as Martin Shaw
elsewhere points out 'local power dynamics remain unexplored'.
<SNIP>

--
Michael Pugliese


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