Derrida's misreading of Marx

[jolly]

>From Derrida's "Spectres of Marx": 
 
"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"
 
Derrida has been criticized severely by leftists and  marxists (and environmentalists as well) for his tendencies towards idealism and hegelianism, and this excerpt clearly displays his anti-materialist, quasi-mystical  rhetoric and method.  Though Derrida and the thousands of sycophantic aesthetes that worship him continually overlook it, Marx and Engels routinely asserted that their project was in the tradition of Hobbesian materialism: "Body, being, and substance are but different terms for the same reality." "It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks"....."Only material things being perceptible to us we cannot know anything about the existence of God." "Man is subject to the same laws of nature."  (from "Die Heilige Familie") .    
 
Though the supernatural or mystical may be au courant in Lit. departments (and more so now that Pere Derrida has given it support) such po-mo escapism is an obvious reversal and denial of any rational or empirical method or criticism.   Hopefully  a few remaining social activists, greens, marxists, and empirically minded postivists can see what sort of threat this sort of parisian hegelianism presents to their cause.  Given Pynchon's implied admiration for some leftist themes ( the positive portrayal of anarchist themes in V and COL 49) a  Derridean approach is likely to overlook a great deal of TP's political and economic implications, though that is probably not so disconcerting to the priest-aesthetes of post-modernisn, certainly not to tenured ones......
 
 

		
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