The messianic without Marxism: Derrida's Marx and the question of justice

Cultural Values 2 (1):51-69 (1998)
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Abstract

This paper considers the traditional debate about Marx and justice in light of Jacques Derrida's recent text, Spectres of Marx Specifically, I treat Derrida's consideration of the Marxist notion of justice in terms of the problematic of time. Following Derrida, I suggest that while much of the history of Marxism relies on a teleological and Hegelian understanding of time‐becoming‐history, the Marxist critique of justice is actually made possible by what Derrida calls a ‘messianic’ notion of time; one wherein history does not come to an inevitable and predictable end, but rather breaks away to begin a whole new history. I conclude that the outcome of Derrida's analysis is that our responsibility as Marx's heirs is to resist the dogmatism inherent in the former logic, and to heed the normative call of the latter.

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References found in this work

Of grammatology.Jacques Derrida - 1976 - Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Edited by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Writing and difference.Jacques Derrida - 1978 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Negative dialectics.Theodor W. Adorno - 1973 - New York: Continuum.
Phenomenology of Spirit.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - 1977 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by Arnold V. Miller & J. N. Findlay.
Margins of philosophy.Jacques Derrida - 1982 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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