...Wastepaper

All the critiques of Edward Said's Orientalism, even Ahmad's (which is generally justified), miss the main point, which is that Orientalism is not about only, or even mainly, defining, controlling and dominating the explicit object, "the Oriental". It is the implicit - elusive, allusive, and thus ideologically effective and invunerable - production of the West, of Yerup, of Yerup and the Yerupeen as subject, as subjectivity itself, as subjectivity understood in the form of capitalist private proprietorship, created by the relation to the Oriental object that is the primary object of Said's attention. The inability of readers and critics to grasp this, to see Orientalism and Yerup as an object, rather than a subject to be criticised as a subject - indeed many of the critiques express a sense of affront, that it is offensive to the individuality and liberty of the intellects of European Orientalist scholars to even contemplate treating their product collectively as something irreducible to individual personal authorial gifts, erudition and intentions only the "flaws", "limitations" and "errors" of which can be attributed to extra-authorial context and historical and discursive pressures, and as an object in any way analogous to the object they address and produce - seems to prove Said's principal point better than any element of the book's argument. Of course the specific character of the Oriental created by Orientalism is of great interest, but it is understood to alter historically; the criticisms of this book which point to some neglected German scholarship fail - amazingly really - to note that this scholarship, producing perhaps a slightly different Oriental, slightly more complex, which if (illegitimately) removed from the historical context of Orientalist ideology and European imperialism, and examined very superficially, might seem even "untainted" by its themes, motifs, and assumptions, nonetheless produces the very same Yerup as subject and subjectivity, the Ego and His Own, as do the grosser or more typical French and British products Said chooses for explication. This conjuration of Yerup, Yerup created through the practise and production of Orientalism but on the sly, as an apparent side-effect, achieves what would be impossible to carry off in a more straightforward undertaking, that is, were the European to be objectified (catalogued, explained) as the Oriental is in the Orientalist tradition. The peculiarly flexible quality of the European (gentleman, scholar, proprietor, it's always assumed) - because it is capital, capitalism, liberalism and bourgeois individualism, with all the contradictions this constellation involves, that are naturalised through Orientalism - immune to objectfication, to commodification (Yerup is the subject who objectifies and commodifies) could be produced in no less indirect a manner. I comes into being and takes (protean) shape through the construction of Mine. The contrast is key. In Orientalism we have not to do with rivals, Occident and Orient, two objects describable by parallel lists of attributes. We have to do with the asymmetry of proprietor and property, capital and labour; it is Yerup in it's evidently natural state as Capital, eternally and essentially, beyond scrutiny, going without saying, requiring no investigation or explanation, which the practise and production of ideological Orientalism (not alone of course) principally conjures and sustains.

Yerupitude

Championed by and embodied in its protagonist, the Ego and His Own à la Stirner, I and Mine, indissoluble, agent-proprietor free of all historical and social determinations, the spiritual Yerup is made fantastically elastic and indestructible. Privé - the spectral Figure can in a single word complain of everything "the Other" withholds and simultaneously claim to house "the Other" within himself, as proper to himself. His patria the spiritual Yerup can expand to swallow continents and oceans and the next minute shrink to fit into the watch pocket of a philosophe in a Paris salon, as its reputation and security require. The efforts, then, of cultural workers to expose, indict, halt and repair this spectre's despoilation of history, its acts of cultural and intellectual plunder, proceed always at risk. Among the most serious hazards faced by such intellectual workers is the possibility that the re-expropriation of history, culture and intellectual product in the name of humanity or some portion thereof can be digested by and nourish the monster's other-commodification enterprise, described by Said in Orientalism re: "the Semite" but more widely applicable, an early form of which in Stirner came under Marx' attack, which transforms creative humanity into expressions of eternal essences, exemplars of a brand, transhistorical spirits the reptitive manifestations of which are collected in curio cabinets and catalogues, deprived of agency or individuality which then become the defining characterstics of the Yerupeen, Collector, Stirner's Caucasian Caucasian.

Haiti's "image problem" is thus more than a matter of some bad press and psyops which a good publicist with an adequate budget could solve. It is a particularly acute case of the image problem of Yerup.

So how can radical and dissident intellectuals and artists a) re-expropriate world history from the insatiable spirit of Yerup, universal proprietor, creator and owner of all value, without affirming the categories of its fables and reinforcing its imposition of the gallery of Figures fixed (flexibly) by the regime of the image and b)liberate the living from Yerup's pantomime prison? The complexity and delicacy of this undertaking came sharply into focus for perhaps the first time in the négritude movement, which encompassed a range of strategies from the revolutionary work of Aimé Césaire to the client or comprador version of racist formulas typified by Senghor ("l'émotion est nègre, comme la raison est hellène", 1937) which proceded with a mechanical effort simply to valorise whatever cultural, historical, symbolic properties and events Yerupitude had marked as obsolete, inferior, degraded and assigned to its others....

Image Problem

It's not insecurity that makes people not come and invest in Haiti. There is an inordinate amount of kidnappings, if not more, in other countries whose names I won't mention. The problem in Haiti is a lack of political security ... Once you can guarantee that there is political stability, that another government is not going to come and change the game, there will be investments... It's a problem of the image of Haiti.

- President Rene Preval, Miami Herald, 2006

Mais le plus terrible sont les Noirs qui, entendant que la cocarde est pour la liberté et l'égalité ont voulu se soulever. On en a conduit plusieurs à l'échafaud dans les grands quartiers. Cela a tout apaisé. Grands dieux! Faut-il que notre intérêt nous force à soutenir la mauvaise cause et à applaudir aux actes d'inhumanité exercés envers ces malheureux.

- Francis Raimond in Saint Domingue to Julien Raimond in Paris, 1 October 1789

If These Were Postcards

Envois, Invoice

THE age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.
- Ezra Pound

The Materiality Of The Letter. Dissemination. Différance. "Envoy: love me love my umbrella." And presently - ombre, elle.



Derrida:

Here we are touching upon the point of greatest obscurity, on the very enigma of différance, on precisely that which divides its very concept by means of a strange cleavage. We must not hasten to decide. How are we to think simultaneously, on the one hand, différance as the economic detour which, in the element of the same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure or the presence that have been deferred by (conscious or unconscious) calculation, and, on the other hand, différance as the relation to an impossible presence, as expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death instinct, and as the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy? It is evident - and this is the evident itself - that the economical and the noneconomical, the same and the entirely other, etc., cannot be thought together. If différance is unthinkable in this way, perhaps we should not hasten to make it evident, in the philosophical element of evidentiality which would make short work of dissipating the mirage and illogicality of différance and would do so with the infallibility of calculations that we are well acquainted with, having precisely recognized their place, necessity, and function in the structure of différance. Elsewhere, in a reading of Bataille, I have attempted to indicate what might come of a rigorous and, in a new sense, "scientific" relating of the "restricted economy" that takes no part in expenditure without reserve, death, opening itself to nonmeaning, etc., to a general economy that takes into account the nonreserve, that keeps in reserve the nonreserve, if it can be put thus. I am speaking of a relationship between a différance that can make a profit on its investment and a différance that misses its profit, the investiture of a presence that is pure and without loss here being confused with absolute loss, with death.

Silvio Gesell:

The human mind is baffled by the abstract, and money hitherto has been wholly abstract. There was nothing with which to compare it. There were, indeed, various kinds of money, metal and paper; but as regards the most important aspect of money, namely the forces regulating its circulation, these different varieties were identical, and this brought the mind of the monetary theorist to a standstill. Equal things are not comparable, and, offering no hold for the intellect, inhibit the act of conception. The theory of money stood before a blank wall, utterly unable to move on. In no country was there, or is there, a legally sanctioned theory of money upon which the administration of money could be based. Everywhere the monetary administration is guided by purely empirical rules for which nevertheless, it claims absolute authority. Yet money is the foundation of economic life and public finance; it is a tangible object, the practical importance of which fires the imagination as does scarcely any other; an object, moreover, that has been known to, and indeed artificially produced by mankind for 3000 years. Consider what this means: In one of the most momentous of public and private interests we have for 3000 years acted blindly, unconsciously, ignorantly. If further proof were needed of the hopelessness of so-called abstract thinking, it is here.

With Free-Money, as described in this book, the situation is radically altered. Money has ceased to be abstract. Free-Money for the first time supplies the point of comparison for an examination of money. Money has found a background; it has become an object with colour tones and limiting surfaces. Give me a fulcrum, said Archimedes, and I can move the world from its axis. Given a point of comparison, man can solve any problem.

Free-Money supplies the plumb-line for the construction of the theory of money, a plumb-line by which all departures from the vertical immediately become apparent.

Simmel:

All economic transactions rest upon the fact that I want something that someone else owns, and that he will transfer it to me if I give him something I own that he wants. It is obvious that the final link in this two-sided process will not always be present when the first link appears; on many occasions I want the object a which A possesses, but the object or service b which I am willing to give in return does not interest A; or else the goods offered are acceptable to both parties but no agreement can be reached bout the respective quantities. This, it is of great value in the attainment of our purposes that an intermediate link should be introduced into the chain of purposes; something into which I can change b at any time and which can itself be changed into a – in much the same way as any form of power, from water, wind, etc., can be transformed into another form of power by means of a dynamo. Just as my thoughts must take the form of a universally understood language so that I can attain my practical ends in this roundabout way, so must my activities and possessions take the form of money value in order to serve my more remote purposes. Money is the purest form of the tool, in the category mentioned above; it is an institution through which the individual concentrates his activity and possessions in order to attain goals that he could not attain directly. The fact that everyone works with it makes its characters as a tool more evident than was the case in the examples given earlier. The nature and effectiveness of money is not to be found simply in the coin that I hold in my hand; its qualities are invested in the social organisations and the supra-subjective norms that make this coin a tool of endlessly diverse and extensive uses despite its material limitations, its insignificance and rigidity. It is characteristic of the State and of religious rites that, since that are constituted entirely by mental powers and do not have to compromise with any independent material objects, they can express their purpose fully in themselves. Yet they are so close to their specific purposes, indeed almost identical with them, that we often hesitate to recognise that they are tools (which would make them instruments without value in themselves, brought to life only by the will behind them) and regard them as ultimate moral values. In the case of money, its character as an instrument is very rarely obscured.

Stirner:

After the chalice of so-called absolute monarchy had been drained down to the dregs, in the eighteenth century people became aware that their drink did not taste human -- too clearly aware not to begin to crave a different cup. Since our fathers were "human beings" after all, they at last desired also to be regarded as such.
Whoever sees in us something else than human beings, in him we likewise will not see a human being, but an inhuman being, and will meet him as an unhuman being; on the other hand, whoever recognizes us as human beings and protects us against the danger of being treated inhumanly, him we will honor as our true protector and guardian.
Let us then hold together and protect the man in each other; then we find the necessary protection in our holding together, and in ourselves, those who hold together, a fellowship of those who know their human dignity and hold together as "human beings." Our holding together is the State; we who hold together are the nation.
In our being together as nation or State we are only human beings. How we deport ourselves in other respects as individuals, and what self-seeking impulses we may there succumb to, belongs solely to our private life; our public or State life is a purely human one. Everything un-human or "egoistic" that clings to us is degraded to a "private matter" and we distinguish the State definitely from "civil society," which is the sphere of "egoism's" activity.
The true man is the nation, but the individual is always an egoist. Therefore strip off your individuality or isolation wherein dwells discord and egoistic inequality, and consecrate yourselves wholly to the true man -- the nation or the State. Then you will rank as men, and have all that is man's; the State, the true man, will entitle you to what belongs to it, and give you the "rights of man"; Man gives you his rights!
So runs the speech of the commonalty.
The commonalty is nothing else than the thought that the State is all in all, the true man, and that the individual's human value consists in being a citizen of the State. In being a good citizen he seeks his highest honor; beyond that he knows nothing higher than at most the antiquated -- "being a good Christian."
The commonalty developed itself in the struggle against the privileged classes, by whom it was cavalierly treated as "third estate" and confounded with the canaille. In other words, up to this time the State had recognized caste. The son of a nobleman was selected for posts to which the most distinguished commoners aspired in vain. The civic feeling revolted against this. No more distinction, no giving preference to persons, no difference of classes! Let all be alike! No separate interest is to be pursued longer, but the general interest of all. The State is
to be a fellowship of free and equal men, and every one is to devote himself to the "welfare of the whole," to be dissolved in the State, to make the State his end and ideal. State! State! so ran the general cry, and thenceforth people sought for the "right form of State," the best constitution, and so the State in its best conception. The thought of the State passed into all hearts and awakened enthusiasm; to serve it, this mundane god, became the new divine service and worship. The properly political epoch had dawned. To serve the State or the nation became the highest ideal, the State's interest the highest interest, State service (for which one does not by any means need to be an official) the highest honor.
So then the separate interests and personalities had been scared away, and sacrifice for the State had become the shibboleth. One must give up himself, and live only for the State. One must act "disinterestedly," not want to benefit himself, but the State. Hereby the latter has become the true person. before whom the individual personality vanishes; not I live, but it lives in me. Therefore, in comparison with the former self-seeking, this was unselfishness and impersonality itself. Before this god -- State -- all egoism vanished, and before it all were equal; they were without any other distinction -- men, nothing but men.
The Revolution took fire from the inflammable material of property. The government needed money. Now it must prove the proposition that it is absolute, and so master of all property, sole proprietor; it must take to itself its money, which was only in the possession of the subjects, not their property. Instead of this, it calls States-general, to have this money granted to it. The shrinking from strictly logical action destroyed the illusion of an absolute government; he who must have something "granted" to him cannot be regarded as absolute. The subjects recognized that they were real proprietors, and that it was their money that was demanded. Those who had hitherto been subjects attained the consciousness that they were proprietors. Bailly depicts this in a few words: "If you cannot dispose of my property without my assent, how much less can you of my person, of all that concerns my mental and social position? All this is my property, like the piece of land that I till; and I have a right, an interest, to make the laws myself." Bailly's words sound, certainly, as if every one was a proprietor now. However, instead of the government, instead of the prince, the -- nation now became proprietor and master. From this time on the ideal is spoken of as -- "popular liberty" -- "a free people," etc.
As early as July 8, 1789, the declaration of the bishop of Autun and Barrere took away all semblance of the importance of each and every individual in legislation; it showed the complete powerlessness of the constituents; the majority of the representatives has become master. When on July 9 the plan for division of the work on the constitution is proposed, Mirabeau remarks that "the government has only power, no rights; only in the people is the source of all right to be found." On July 16 this same Mirabeau exclaims: "Is not the people the source of all power?" The source, therefore, of all right, and the source of all -- power! By the way, here the substance of "right" becomes visible; it is -- power. "He who has power has right."
The commonalty is the heir of the privileged classes. In fact, the rights of the barons, which were taken from them as "usurpations," only passed over to the commonalty. For the commonalty was now called the "nation." "Into the hands of the nation" all prerogatives were given back. Thereby they ceased to be "prerogatives": they became "rights." From this time on the nation demands tithes, compulsory services; it has inherited the lord's court, the rights of vert and venison, the -- serfs. The night of August 4 was the death-night of privileges or "prerogatives" (cities, communes, boards of magistrates, were also privileged, furnished with prerogatives and seigniorial rights), and ended with the new morning of "right," the "rights of the State," the "rights of the nation."
The monarch in the person of the "royal master" had been a paltry monarch compared with this new monarch, the "sovereign nation." This monarchy was a thousand times severer, stricter, and more consistent. Against the new monarch there was no longer any right, any privilege at all; how limited the "absolute king" of the ancien regime looks in comparison! The Revolution effected the transformation of limited monarchy into absolute monarchy. From this time on every right that is not conferred by this monarch is an "assumption"; but every prerogative that he bestows, a "right." The times demanded absolute royalty, absolute monarchy; therefore down fell that so-called absolute royalty which had so little understood how to become absolute that it remained limited by a thousand little lords.
What was longed for and striven for through thousands of years -- to wit, to find that absolute lord beside whom no other lords and lordlings any longer exist to clip his power -- the bourgeoisie has brought to pass. It has revealed the Lord who alone confers "rightful titles," and without whose warrant nothing is justified. "So now we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no other god save the one."
Against right one can no longer, as against a right, come forward with the assertion that it is "a wrong." One can say now only that it is a piece of nonsense, an illusion. If one called it wrong, one would have to set up another right in opposition to it, and measure it by this. If, on the contrary, one rejects right as such, right in and of itself, altogether, then one also rejects the concept of wrong, and dissolves the whole concept of right (to which the concept of wrong belongs).

Marx (to Cluss):

As regards Proudhon, you are both right. Massol’s delusions were due to the fact that Proudhon, with his usual industrial quackery, adopted as his ‘latest discoveries’ some of my ideas, e.g., that there is no such thing as absolute knowledge, that everything is explicable in terms of material conditions, etc., etc. In his book on Louis Bonaparte he openly admits what I had to deduce for myself first from his Philosophie de la Misère, namely, that his ideal is the petit bourgeois. France, he says, consists of 3 classes: 1. Bourgeoisie; 2. Middle class (petit bourgeois); 3. Proletariat. Now the purpose of history, and of revolution in particular, is to dissolve classes 1 and 3, the extremes, in class 2, the happy mean, this being effected by Proudhonian credit transactions, the final result of which is the abolition of interest in its various forms.

His Master's Voice

...also at stake, indissociably, is the different deployment of tekhne, of techno-science or tele-technology. It obliges us more than ever to think the virtualization of space and time, the possibility of virtual events whose movement and speed prohibit us more than ever (more and otherwise than ever, for this is not absolutely and throughly new) from opposing presence to its representation, ‘real time’ to ‘deferred time’, effectivity to its simulacrum, the living to the non-living, in short, the living to the living-dead of its ghosts. It obliges us to think, from there, another space for democracy. For democracy-to-come and thus for justice. We have suggested that the event we are prowling around here hesitates between the singular ‘who’ of the ghost and the general ‘what’ of the simulacrum. In the virtual space of all the tele-technosciences, in the general dislocation to which our time is destined—as are from now on the places of lovers, families, nations—the messianic trembles on the edge of this event itself. It is this hesitation, it has no other vibration, it does not ‘live’ otherwise, but it would no longer be messianic if it stopped hesitating.

- Derrida, Spectres of Marx

A Thing Of Nothing

How much does ideology count? Say not much. But still.

The ugly echoes of the authentic and all that aside, all this play with the cynics and the naïfs stages Derrida, alchemist, experimenting with various compositions of scepticism. One could frame it as a series of Hogarthian tableaux featuring different arrangements of Emperor, Courtiers, Tailors and Child, offering the spectacle of the "scientific" pursuit of the perfect con.

There is no pure confidence! Confidence is always already suspicion. At least this is the case in the fairytale world which this is finally, Versailles before the arrival of the mob from Paris, rehearsing itself as pantomime for that mob as audience.

The spotlight picks out Derrida as the cunning naïf, a child truly unfit, after all, for childhood, insubordinate but also lacking imagination as well as social graces. But this scene stealing distracts us so we don't notice Derrida playing all the parts simultaneously, hamming up the Emperor's shame and the Tailors' undoing (so the Courtiers emerge triumphant.)

Heaven On Earth

For about three minutes of screen time, in the middle of the 18th century, a wild optimism errupted in certain picturesque locales, a certainty that the secular world all made a certain sense accessible to Reason and was perfectible into an earthly paradise for all. The illusionment was short lived but the disillusionment, a ceaseless orbit of that illusion, has been interminably prolonged because the current property relations received their justification and rationale during that short scene and a suitable replacement has never been found.

All pronouncements on property, the proper, appropriation, expropriation, of course are simultaneously implicit discussions of propertylessness, dispossession, precarity. Derrida was not the only one to naturalise, romanticise and idealise dispossession and precarity. Rightist libertarian individualism stages always two characters but only one protagonist, only one subject of property. But there is always the Other, implied. The Other, without property, improper, inappropriate, exhilirating, alluring, mobile: employable.

Thoughts Pay No Duty

Somewhere in the Post Card, (my copy has - honestly - gone astray*), Derrida expresses a wish to send himself "completely privatised", or something, an echo of those poets of self, Stirner, Nietzsche, Barrès...then he's in Zurich, walking around a cemetery with J. Hillis Miller. They visit Joyce's monument ("he read us all, and plundered us, that one"), and the tomb of one Something Zoller, inventor of some early telecom device, whose sepulchral sculpture, representing his invention, gives them a giggle. The sojourn has a mood of annoyance, but the only real complaint, apart from the refrain about the absence of the addressee, has to do with one of the talks given at the unnamed gathering which has brought him to Switzerland. Responding to Le Facteur de la vérité, someone has claimed that, in the end, Lacan and Derrida have "reversed positions", with Lacan's "destination" being nothing other than its own dissemination, and Derrida's "dissemination" "erecting itself" as a "last word". They love me, Derrida admits to the absent beloved, but they hate me; they can't stand it that I might say something they cannot "reverse" when convenient. And then he mocks the overused evasive locution "what's at stake here".

The identity of the speaker is not given; but we know from the sole quoted remark that she (I think we know she is she) doesn't belong to the field of philosophy; probably literary criticism. While Derrida would be right to mock the judgement as he does within philosophy, in literary criticism, which takes a distinct object, it's a legitimate (if pointless) observation. A different function for the implied inverted commas isolating "destination" and "dissemination" is at work, a different deployment within the general array of capabilities of parergon. It would be a simple thing to show that "destination" undergoes volatilization in Lacan's commentary, while "dissemination" petrifies in Derrida's, and so forth.

One is left wondering, however, what the speaker thought "was at stake" in that dispute which took these fragments of a Poe story as pretext or heuristic gadget for the demonstration of cases fixed before the story was ever encountered.



*Ah: here is it. And it says, too: 24 September 1977....and I think about those great cynics: they abuse their public credit in order to pass off, by the route of the press, on a publishng circuit, "personal messages." The radio transmits, people buy, no one understands anything, but finally it's interesting [profitable -lcc], there is always the investment of something. And this is not the exception, from Socrates to Freud, they have all done it.

Alterity

(Derrida often confessed his desire to write in a "purely naïve" way.)

In Spectres of Marx, Derrida uses the word "naïve" so many times to describe Fukuyama's thesis, work, attitude, that it becomes a marker of Derrida's own cynicism. It is deployed with a wink, as euphemism - for "cynicism" of course - necessitated by the cynicism of academia, by "collegiality" which is the cynical travesty of cameraderie. To comply with the requirements of this cynicism Derrida must perform respect for Fukuyama with an air of naïveté.

Here is the final apparition, which as we see involves the writhing commencement of a metamorphosis, mask melting to reveal monster, like the transformation of the young beauty, who has been merely a deceptive guise of the ghastly devil, at the end of Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux:

[Fukuyama] credits Kojève with having "identified an important truth when he asserted that postwar America or the members of the European Community constituted the embodiment of Hegel's state of universal recognition."

Let us underscore the words "important truth". They give a pretty good translation of the sophisticated naïveté or the crude sophism that impels the movement of such a book and sets its tone. They also deprive it of any credibility.

After establishing this word as the code for cynicism, his own and Fukuyama's, and clinging to it even in such a moment of indignation, Derrida's decorum finally cracks, and he bursts out of his histrionically onerous humility into an apparent frankness:

One might have been shocked by the Kojèvian picture of the state of the world and the state of the United States after the war. The optimism of the picture was tainted by cynicism. It was already insolent to say then that "all the members of a classless society can appropriate there as of now whatever they like, without having for all that to work any more than they wish to." But what is one to think today of the imperturbable thoughtlessness that consists in singing the triumph of capitalism or of economic and political liberalism "the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the endpoint of human government," the "end of the problem of social classes"? What cynicism of good conscience, what manic disavowal could cause someone to write, if not believe, that "everything that stood in the way of the reciprocal recognition of human dignity, always and everywhere, has been refuted and buried by history"?

What indeed.

To this rhetorical question, which seems to appeal to and thus imply a reasonableness binding an audience, Derrida will trouble himself to offer, however, an answer, or rather, a reprimand to the unspoken answer freighted in the question, as rhetorical questions will usually have their answers, which function as obviousness-confirming and create a social bond, on board. The observation which Derrida makes - about cynicism, and naïveté - in this traditionally indirect way is quickly retracted, its overt naïveté (what could possibly...?) inverted into cynicism, and the audience whom it called to produce an affirmation silently by the rhetorical question is reproached and schooled for its vulgar reflexes. Derrida's lesson in spiritualisation of Marxism (following the plan of the rectorship address) continues, taking the form of an authoritative divagation in which Derrida directly, in soliloquoy, assures us, one last time, insistently, of Fukuyama's thoroughgoing naïveté (though the keyword can no longer be used), stating in his priestly sermonising way, that while this product of Fukuyama may be called a "dominant discourse", to signal its ubiquity, its mediatised success, that is not to say, no emphatically not to say, it has any connection to the interests of a dominant class. Such an inference - which no doubt some members of the audience were guilty of producing immediately - must be firmly rejected. Derrida will refer elsewhere to three discourses enjoying dominance and securing domination - of politicians, of media professionals, and of academics - coordinated to assure "the hegemony or imperialism in question", but this "hegemony or imperialism" is that of the times, the age, tele-technics, modernity, of the discourses themselves and the telecom infrastructure which disseminates them. These threaten (futilely) a 'democracy' invulnerable to threats, a spectral democracy, always haunting and always to come.

Some time later, when he is done with his recycling of the traditional anti-communist, anti-totalitarian narrative, (stopping a half a dozen times to assure the reader he is not a "reactionary" engaged in "revisionism"; he doesn't mean it that way; you must take his word for it) and is well into his version of the liberal/neoliberal dogma regarding the eternal market organisation of the universe, cynicism returns to centre stage, and another naïve beauty, the "openness to the Other", begins to expose the hideous visage lurking behind its lovely and alluring disguise:

Since any use-value is marked by this possibility of being used by the other or being used another time, this alterity or iterability projects it a priori onto the market of equivalences (which are always equivalences between non-equivalents, of course, and which suppose the double socius we were talking about above). In its originary iterability, a use-value is in advance promised, promised to exchange and beyond exchange. It is in advance thrown onto the market of equivalences. This is not simply a bad thing, even if the use-value is always at risk of losing its soul in the commodity. The commodity is a born "cynic" because it effaces differences, but although it is congenitally levelling, although it is "a born leveller and cynic" (Geborner Leveller und Zyniker), this original cynicism was already being prepared in use-value, in the wooden head of that dog standing, like a table, on its four paws. One can say of the table what Marx says of the commodity. Like the commodity that it will become, that it is in advance, the cynic already prostitutes itself, "it is always ready to exchange not only soul, but body, with each and every other commodity, be it more repulsive than Maritornes herself." It is in thinking of this original prostitution that, as we recall, Marx liked to cite Timon of Athens and his prophetic imprecation. But one must say that if the commodity corrupts (art, philosophy, religion, morality, law, when their works become market values), it is because the becoming-commodity already attested to the value it puts in danger. For example, if a work of art can become a commodity, and if this process seems fated to occur, it is also because the commodity began by putting to work, in one way or another, the principle of an art.

This is the real conclusion of Derrida's text, though it is followed by a kind of epilogue which consists of a torrent of his characteristic hesitations, as if to make up for the imprudent clarity of the foregoing; lengthy passages assure the listener/reader that none of this has really meant anything, at least not what you might be misled to suppose by the words on the page or their order. Derrida confides that he knows Capital is not a work of philosophy really and concedes that the commodification of labour may indeed be regrettable, though it poses no impediment to the solemn work of the new International as doorstop for Elijah's portal. Finally, we are reminded that it is to Heidegger we must turn for a more satisfyingly radical doorstop attitude, as it must be evident by now to all that thinking like Heidegger results in something whose desireability is so obvious it simply requires no explanation. In conclusion, as the most humourless of declarations of vocation and self-celebration, Derrida quotes the naïve spear carrier on the ramparts of Elsinore giving voice to Shakespeare's witty cynicism: "Thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio. Question it."

Marcellus has been to the theatre before.