Marx, Volée
Armin Beverungen, University of Leicester
““Why are you lying to me?” one character exclaims exasperatedly, “Yes, why are you lying to me by saying you’re going to Cracow in order to make me believe you’re going to Lemberg, when in reality you are going to Cracow?”” (Lacan, 2006: 13)
“It will be remembered here how Derrida opened up Lacan’s still essentially semiotic and centred reading of Poe: a letter never arrives at its destination … a letter always arrives at its destination … Perhaps we need something similar here: Marx’s purloined letter: a whole new programme in itself surely, a wandering signifier capable of keeping any number of conspirational futures alive” (Jameson, 1999: 65)
This paper involves a reading of Lacan and Derrida, of Poe and Marx. It will deal in particular with the question of destination, of both the letter and of the spectral. Lacan’s joke above suggests that the destination of a message, its truth, is never simply given, and that one might wonder endlessly whether the message has arrived or not (Is he or she going to Cracow or not?). Later in the same text, Lacan asserts that “a letter always arrives at its destination” (2006: 30), which leaves us wondering: what letter? The question of arrival, of destination will be approached through readings of Poe’s story ‘The Purloined Letter’, Lacan’s ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’, and Derrida’s ‘Le Facteur de la Vérité’.
After addressing the question of destination, we will concern ourselves specifically with the letter of Marx. Jameson’s quote above suggests that Derrida’s work on Marx in Specters of Marx (1994) deals exactly with the question of destination. Derrida proposes that in dealing with Marx we are dealing with a plurality of spectres, and that the question of inheriting Marx leads us to an engagement with spectrality. When it comes to our work, then, we might ask: what is the message of Marx’s letter? What is its destination? Where are we going, if not Lemberg or Cracow? Derrida suggests that there “will be no future” without reading Marx, “no future without Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx” (1994: 13). We will consider Jameson’s challenge of keeping alive conspirational futures through Marx’s purloined letter(s).
References
Derrida, Jacques (1994) Specters of Marx, trans. P. Kamuf. New York and London : Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques (1987) ‘Le Facteur de la Vérité’ in The Post Card : From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. A. Bass. Chicago and London : University of Chicago Press. Pp. 413-496.
Jameson, Fredric (1999) ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’ in M. Sprinker (ed.) Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. London and New York: Verso. Pp. 26-67.
Lacan, Jacques (2006) ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’ in Ecrits, trans. B. Fink. New York and London: W. W. Norton. Pp. 11-48.