The destruction was a deliberate plan to do violence to the scopic drive. The image is an empty, ghost-like post-vandalism as one gazes at the destruction, recalling the recent numerous times MLK is invoked in the media, and the black African genome's well-known tendency to overspiritualize the socius. Spooky. Derrida:
'If one follows the letter of the text, the critique of the ghost or of spirits would thus be the critique of a subjective representation and an abstraction, of what happens (in the head [italics]), of what comes only out of the head, that is, of what stays in there, in the head, even as it has come out of there, out of the head, and survives (outside the head [it.]). But nothing would be possible, beginning with the critique, without surviving, without the possible survival of this autonomy and this automatism outside the head. One may say that this is where the spirit of the Marxist critique situates itself, not the spirit that one would oppose to its letter, but the one which supposes the very movement of its letter. Like the ghost, it is neither in the head nor outside the head. Marx knows this, but he proceeds as if he did not want to know it. In the German Ideology, the following chapter will be devoted to this obsession that made Stirner say: 'Mensch, es spukt in deinem Kopfe!" commonly translated as 'Man, there are specters in your head!' Marx thinks it is enough to turn the apostrophe back against Saint Max.
Es spukt. Difficult to translate, as we have been saying. It is a question of ghost and haunting, to be sure, but what else? The German idiom seems to name the ghostly return but it names it in verbal form. The latter does not say that there is some (revenant [it.]), specter, or ghost; it does not say that there is some apparition, (der Spukt [it.]), nor even that it appears, but that 'it ghosts,' it apparitions.' (It is a matter [it.] [Ils s'agit], in the neutrality of this altogether impersonal verbal form, of something or someone, neither someone nor something, of a 'one' that does not act. (It is a matter[it.]) rather of the passive movement of an apprehension, of an apprehensive movement ready to welcome, but where? In the head? What is the head before this apprehension that it cannot even contain?
(Derrida, Specters of Marx)
Interesting how Derrida focuses on the concept of 'mattering.'
excerpt to be continued
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