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Ian Delairre
12.14.2013

Derrida and Agamben: Spectrality, Contemporaneity, and the Role of Intellectuals

What authorizes a comparative analysis of Agambens Nudities and Derridas Specters of
Marx besides the meagre fact the two theorists and their respective books concern themselves
with ghosts? The two books are intertextual by way of their mutual object of analysis
(spectrality) and their opposed theoretical position with regards to the status of the end of
history: Specters of Marx rejects the premise of historys closure while Nudities implies that the
recognition of historys completion is necessary for a way of life that is contemporary to the
present. The two books present competing paradigms of justice and conceptualizations of the
present and its exigencies. The quality of being out of joint unifies both works and decisively,
albeit in dramatically different ways, orients each theorist to the present. The texts are separated
by nearly two decades but a certain reading of Agambens Nudities cannot fail to recognize the
sense of urgency it manifests in addressing what appear to be the major claims of Derridas
Specters of Marx. This belated response, assuming it is a response, neatly implies that the time
of the two texts is already collapsed or out of joint. However, if Agamben is truly in dialogue
with Derrida, if there is a goal to his urgent reconceptualization of the specter, than it is to
oppose Derridas anti-Fukuyamian gesture of refusing historys closure. It is a repost
accomplished by the subversion, reversal and appropriation of Derridas theoretical apparatus in
the service of certain not-necessarily-disinterested partisans attesting to historys completion.
However, while there are various reasons one should be suspicious of the ideological motivations
behind Agambens project, we should note the vast theoretical leeway and authority Derrida
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rewards himself with so that he may speak for the oppressed multitudes in the name of justice.
His late arrival to and tenuous dance with a political discourse designed to militarily and
politically mobilize the proletariat precariously re-imagines Walter Benjamins somewhat
obscure Messianism in the name of a discourse notorious for its authoritarianism and violent
pretentions to seize power in the name of equality.
Anyone who bore witness to the horrors of the 20
th
century ought to be rightfully
suspicious of a discourse attempting to build a political religiosity that offers no strict limits on
the use of violence in the name of justice. Thus one of our primary tasks is to question if Derrida
is, in a sense, theoretically reconstructing the Iron Curtain with his semi-nostalgic hauntology
(a theory which notably and ironically has found some currency with artists and architects).
Derridas hauntology claims to decisively refuse historys closure by propping it open with the
problem of unreconciled injustice. Thus, we must evaluate if he is doing as he says, i.e.,
recognizing a ubiquitous theoretical debt to Marx and spiritual inheritance of Marxism which, he
claims, bids all intellectuals to attest to the contemporary state of injustice, thereby, in turn,
obliging them to engage in the profoundly ethical task of speaking to/for the specters of history,
then evaluate if this is the right thing to do. However, in light of this latter question, we will be
bid to ask of Agamben why he airs on the side of the neoliberal ideology he typically critiques,
why he is perhaps content to silence the victims of 20
th
century violence for the sake of
contemporaneity, and ask whether his notion of life adequate to the present is, in a word,
adequate to the present.
To begin, we must simply pose the question what is spectrality? is before we can
establish it as a contested term in a somewhat bizarre theoretical battlefield. For Derrida,
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spectrality does away with the notion of a homogeneous present. It challenges the notion of time
as a linear or continuous progression of moments:

If there is something like spectrality, there are reasons to doubt this reassuring
order of presents and, especially, the border between the present, the actual or
present reality of the present, and everything that can be opposed to absence, non-
presence, non-effectivity, inactuality, virtuality, or even the simulacrum in
general, and so forth. There is first of all the doubtful contemporaneity of the
present to itself. Before knowing whether one can differentiate between the
specter of the past and the specter of the future, of the past present and the future
present, one must perhaps ask oneself whether the spectrality effect does not
consist in undoing this opposition, or even this dialectic, between actual, effective
presence and its other. (SM 48)
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As Sami Khatib notes, spectrality concerns the very distinction between oppositions such as
past and present, present and future, actuality and potentiality, I would only add that it undoes
or collapses these oppositions entirely.
2
However, the quality or conditions of spectrality are
somewhat distinct from the specter whose genesis is somewhat complicated. It is clear that the
specter manifests from a performative utterance that functions as a conjuration, it is a
statement made at a determinate date and timea statement which no doubt had something to do
with producing the specter but which displaces the specters historical-temporal origin across

1
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New
York: Routledge, 1994. Cited parenthetically as SM followed by the page number.
2
Khatib, Sami. Derrida & Sons: Marx, Benjamin, and the Specter of the Messianic, Anthropological Materialism,
<http://anthropologicalmaterialism.hypotheses.org/1810>
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multiple registers. So when[ce] does it come? Both from the future and the past while there is
every indication it has been there all along.
3
Thus, the specters indeterminate grounding in a
specific time means that it is imbricated across not just multiple tenses but also multiple
ontological categories. However, Derridas performative utterance must have a very specific
content in order to be rendered spectral: it must prophesize, predict, declare a state-of-affairs
(e.g., time is out of joint or there is a specter haunting Europe) to create a condition of
irresolution or unfulfillment, or attempt to exorcise or conjure away another spectral
statement so that the thing the statement attests to is negativized: present as a non-presence, i.e.,
present in the capacity of its placeholder so that it is signified as absent (SM 58).
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If we look at Derridas critique of Fukuyama we can begin to understand what the effects
of this conjuration are. What is the most superficial reading of Derridas critique of Fukuyama?
It is that the declaration of the advent of post-history is stricken with an event-ness that, upon
deconstruction, is found to contain an emancipatory promise and revolutionary inheritance that
outstrips its proscribed limits of formal political recognition and implies a political project yet
more egalitarian, more just, more democratic, etc. What Fukuyama is unable to think is the
event-ness of the event or the way in which the event coincides with its virtualization or
historicization and the way this virtualization produces unintentional spectral or signifying
effects (SM 87). But by what sense does Derrida mean virtualization? While Derrida believes
that events are indeed material and produce ruptures, the rupture that the event effectuates occurs

3
Note: [A] specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming
back (SM 11).
4
This performative delocalization of the subjects statement from the merely subjective to the objective dignity of
messianic prophecy that creates a messianic opening is the moment of a decisive split between Derrida and
Benjamin. Derrida states: [the] messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event that cannot be awaited as
such, or recognized in advance therefore, to the event as the foreigner itself, to her or to him for whom one must
leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hopeand this is the very place of spectrality (SM 82). In other
words, the messianic opening is not a space for a coming messianic event; it is a negative contentless space that
emerges when time is thrown out of joint and is instantiated by the possibility of a utopian moment of justice in the
face of actual injustice. It cannot be awaited, it is not an event, it must be comported towards.
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by the events supplementation with a virtual content via languagenot merely through the
material effects of its violence alone. As a purely actual event it is non-presently present, it
has not been evoked and therefore has no ontological consistency. Thus, there is parallelism
between the criture that evokes the eventness of the event and the event itself because this
criture is the event of the event. While this rather felicitously mirrors a Hegelian discursive
conception of time as history, things become far more strange when Derrida introduces the law:
if criture manifests the event par la lettre or aprs la lettre, which for Derrida, is already-
already the letter of the law, the laws demand (which is also the specters demand), than the
irresolution of that demand produces a future-to-come by its potential fulfillment that throws
time out of joint (SM 92-3).
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So much more than registering the present and attenuating us to
time, criture writes the future and the present, it issues forth a demand as history that subverts
time by producing a future-conditional.
But what of the specter? For Derrida, the specter gains its body or in-corporeality in the
world via the insistence or return of forgotten or alternative histories, unfulfilled debts,
unresolved crimes, unreconciled sinners, failed utopian political dreams, refuted horizons of
transcendence, and unsatisfied demands for justicethat is to say a myriad of wrongdoings
that reveal that time out of joint. For Derrida, there is no fulfillment of prophecy, only the
disjointed reality that results from its never coming to pass which attests to a state of injustice;
justice, for Derrida, is justice of the other or justice that pertains to the demand or law of the

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The law qua letter and the demand of the specter are equi-primordial: the specter establishes the law but the law
pre-existed the specter since its having been transgressed produces the specter itself by creating a situation of
injustice; this shows the connective disjuncture between the demand that invokes the law and the law that issues
demands. The former demand functions as point of origin but, by its appeal to the Law, retroactively inscribes the
Law as having always-already been so that it dually functions as the latter. We must make a fine point and
differentiate this law, which is spectral law or the law of the specter, from juridical law. It is this law that Hamlet
must uphold for the sake of fulfilling his fathers demand for revenge which Derrida interprets as a demand for
justice (SM 7). Thus, the law for Derrida thus strikes a similar chord to the psychoanalytic law that is inscribed by
the name-of-the-father or the demand of the other or, again, the obscene law of the superego which exceeds the
actual law.
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other: If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations of
ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living it is in the
name of justice. Of justice where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us
understand where where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law,
reducible to laws or rights (SM xviii). In summary, it is critical to note that the specter strikes
from the real via an unfulfilled demand or prophecy that implies an unrealized historicity
(utopian future or revolutionary past) that in-consists relative to the actually existing order of
things revealing them to be, again, out of joint in the sense that they are not as they should be.
Agamben asserts that specters are a form of life that emerge after everything has been
finished (N 39).
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He uses a number of linguistic allegories ascribing to specters a signature
and drawing a parallelism between dead language, the city of Venice and specters. Specters have
a signature that marks their time, a time that is more or less indicated by a [expiration] date: a
specter always carries with it a date wherever it goes it is an intimately historical entity (N
38). The specter as a speaking entity only emerges contingently by subjects orientation to
spectral language: an unintelligible form of speaking that emerges when one encounters the
specter in its latent form as a mark or signature. What is the nature of this language? It is
unintelligible in two capacities: by being a dead language that whispers, quivers and
hums so that we can eventually understand and decipher it (N 40); and in the sense that the
specters signature functions as a proper name: it signifies more than its traits, gestures, and
words could ever express (N 38).
At this point a critical juncture opens up revealing two conditions of spectrality defined
by ones orientation to spectral language: completed (good) or larval (bad). A larval specter

6
Agamben, Giorgio, David Kishik, and Stefan Pedatella. Nudities. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010. Cited
parenthetically as N followed by the page number.
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does not know that it is dead. It obstinately seeks out and haunts the people who generated
them in bad conscience (those who do not recognize that the specter is completed), inhabiting
them with nightmares that mov[e] their lifeless members with strings made of lies (N 40). It is
formed via two irreverent relations to spectral language: Firstly by refurbishing a spectral
signature. This commits a dual crime: it erases its signature by sugarcoating it for consumerist
ends that falsely homogenize it with the contemporary landscape and it fails to recognize that the
specter has completed itself relative to the purpose ascribed to it in its epoch. And, secondly, by
attempting to make spectral language intelligible.

To whom does the specter of language turn? Not to us, certainly, but not even to
its addressees from another time, of whom it no longer has any recollection. And
yet, precisely for this reason, it is as if only now, for the first time, that this
language speaks, a language the philosopher refers to (through without realizing
that he has thus bestowed it with a spectral consistency) by saying that it speaks
not we. (N 40-1)

The act of deciphering spectral language commits violence against the specter; one ends up
speaking for iterasing its original meaning and intention. One confronts the dual problem of
being unable to assume the position of an I in this language (N 40) (we can more or less follow
Lacan here and say that the I of spectral language or any language fails to equate the subject of
the signifier with the subject of enunciation) and the fact that the I penetrates and negates the
I of the specter. Simultaneously decentered and domineering, the I of the philosopher makes
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it impossible to render the specters speech intelligible: we speak not it. The failure to do this
reduces one to a larval condition of living amongst specters.
Following Kierkegaard, Agamben asserts that specters make no demands except that we
love them by revering them, i.e., by accepting and recognizing their death (N 39). No need to
morbidly dwell amongst old ghosts trying to make sense out of their unintelligible babble unless
one is willing to pay the consequences. Thus, we can either live amongst specters in a larval
capacity: the insane infinite task of trying to reopen histories breach, failing to recognize that
the dead are dead, fixated on recording and reciting discarnate words (N 42); or we can
respectfully give the dead our love, recognize their having passed away and live ethically
amongst specters by consigning them to their appropriate spaces and only occasionally crossing
into their realm.
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Agamben implies that concerning oneself with the past in a larval manner is a sort of
nostalgic fetishism that runs all manner of risks. What is the opposite of spectral possession? It is
heavily implied that the figure of the contemporary is opposed to the spectral theorist. So our
question ought to be what does it mean to be contemporary? since it is ultimately this figure
that is truly opposed to anyone who rejects Fukuyamas claim that history has ended (Derrida

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What to make of these competing formulations of spectrality? Already, it is notable that Agamben seems to be in
dialogue with Derrida as a silent partner, making implicit critiques, reversals, and extractions from Derridas
Specters of Marx: for instance, as we shall see, being out of joint is now a quality of the contemporary individual not
a quality of time that is revealed by the specter; for Agamben, the poet wields the back bone of the epoche-beast
while for Derrida the beast is the barricade at St. Antione, described by Victor Hugo as a huge furious beast whose
back emits furious crackling and thunderingit is the spirit of the revolution; but for Abamben the epoch-beast has
a broken vertebrae, it cannot turn around and face its own tracks (N 13) like the newborn century can; for Derrida
the scholar is bid to speak to the specteran impossible taskthe scholar as merely a spectator a play on words
that implies that to spectate is to be possessed by the specter, thus for Derrida it speaks; but for Agamben this is the
philosophers mistake: the philosopher refers to a dead language which quivers and hums but does not speak and
claims that it speaksnot we, thereby endowing it with spectral consistency (N 41), in other words, the
philosopher, by speaking for the specter, claims the specter itself is speaking; perhaps more obvious is Agambens
implicit relegation of Derridas specter to a mere larval specter, a specter that emerges when one does not realize
that a thing is dead, has completed itself and passed away. Agamben, through this subtle exchange which is really a
one way conversation, seems to be chastising Derrida, saying forget Marx, hes dead. You can revere him by
leaving him alone not by dragging him out of the crypt and dressing him up.
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included). It is also this figure (as we shall see) that usurps Derridas specter and much of its
functionality. Agambens contemporary is initially characterized by being out of joint, a
characteristic exemplified by Nietzsche but refined by Agamben into a proper definition:

Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with ones own time, which
adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is
that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an
anachronism. Those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are
perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they
do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it. (N 11)

In short, to be contemporary is to be disjoined from ones time, unconcerned with relevance, and
able to stand apart from ones time as an anachronismone who makes untimely meditations.
It is also related to some sort of gift, an ability to see in the dark, that makes the contemporary
darkness intelligible due to some divine or poetic insight (N 13).
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The most schematic definition
of this subject who-manages-to-be-contemporary is an ability to delineate: to make a speculative
judgment that identifies an element of the present that marks it as such. This figure is the
philosopher who inherits the role of the prophet (a Benjamin or Foucault) that finds the unary
trait of the present that renders it readable and accomplishes an appropriate exegesis of the

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Agambens example of an artisan of the contemporarya person who evokes the contemporary and whom we call
contemporaryis the fashion designer (N 15) who treads the line between a not yet and a no more (N 16).
More schematically, the fashion designer is in a certain orientation of time that also establishes a peculiar
relationship with these other timescertainly with the past and perhaps also with the future. Fashion can therefore
cite, and in this way make relevant again, any moment from the past It can therefore tie together that which it
has inexorably dividedrecall, re-evoke, and revitalize that which it had declared dead (N 16-7). However, for
Agamben, to be contemporary is also to be archaic (in the sense of being concerned with origins), an ability he
awards to historians of literature: only those who perceive the indices and signatures of the archaic in the most
modern and recent can be contemporary Both this distancing and nearness, which define contemporariness, have
their foundation in this proximity to the origin that nowhere pulses with more force than in the present. (N17).
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present by putting it in relation to the past: the contemporary is also the one who, dividing and
interpolating time, is capable of transforming it and putting it in relation with other times. He is
able to read history in unforeseen ways, to cite it according to a necessity that does not arise in
any way from his will but from an exigency to which he cannot not respond (N 18).
We can see that what separates Derrida from Agamben is that Agamben attempts to
disalienate himself from the specter and let our contemporaries speak. Derrida meanwhile wants
the reverse:

If he loves justice at least, the scholar of the future, the intellectual of
tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning
not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her,
how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in
the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do
not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. (SM 221)

Clearly, justice concerns Agamben, but only as it pertains to the jurisprudence of a certain bio-
political regime and its contingent instantiation of the law (the law in its operativity).
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Agambens argument in Homo Sacer is that justice is awarded to certain bodiescitoyens not
exceptional or criminalized bodies (homo sacer). While in State of Exception, Agamben situates
the law as pure jurisprudence and effectively opposes it to the force-of-law, the latter being the

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We should note that this is diametrically opposed to Derrida: justice is beyond right, and still more beyond
juridicism, beyond morality, and still more beyond moralism, does not justice as relation to the other suppose on the
contrary the irreducible excess of a disjointure or an anarchrony, some Un-Fuge, some out of joint dislocation in
Being and in time itself, a disjointure that, in always risking the evil, expropriation, and injustice (adika) against
which there is no calculable insurance, would alone be able to do justice or to render justice to the other as other?
(SM 32). See above (footnote 5).
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laws posthumous life in a state of exception that sheds any relation to the law but attempts to re-
establish it through its suspension (civil war or revolutionary violence) (SE 60).
10
The force-of-
law, the law in its spectral life that persists beyond its formal suspension, bears a certain
resemblance to capital L-law as it is understood psychoanalytically or in Derridean-
deconstructive paradigm: the law established through a violent rupture (the murder of the father
or a declaration). It is safe to say that the law in its spectral capacity is something Agamben is
deeply skeptical of and he outright refuses the above position. Agambens implicit critique of
Derrida would thus say that biopower speaks to and for the specter of the law all the time. The
danger of speaking for a specter and attempting to resolve an injustice is that it throws things into
a state of exception and creates a zone of anomie: a state of a lack of norms or normlessness
and this is the real danger because it is the creation of this exceptional zone that potentially
incites violence.
This opposition crystalizes further when we confront the issue of historys completeness:
Agamben, for some reason, sides with Fukuyama. If history is over, it leaves much to be desired.
But before we ask, for whom has history ended? which would invariably draw out how
differently striated the truth of this claim is across various identities, we must note that Agamben
outlines alternative conditions for liberation-salvation. This clever strategy blocks Derrida from
his revolutionary inheritance and instead charts a different genealogy of inheritance. The
philosopher-critic must perform the function of an angel or a prophet: they must uncover the
messianic content of time by creating new conditions for salvation: The crying angel turns into
a prophet, while the lament of the poet for creation comes critical prophecy, that is to say,
philosophy. But precisely nowwhen the work of salvation seems to gather within itself as

10
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005. Cited parenthetically as SE
followed by the page number.
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unforgettable everything that is immemorialeven this work is transformed. It remains, of
course, because, as opposed to creation, the work of redemption is eternal (N 9). The dramatis
personae of the angel and the poet are unified in the philosopher and the philosopher inherits the
work of salvation. The promise of the philosopher was never emancipation but is instead of
salvation or redemptiontheir work is merely redemptive.
To conclude, we can see that Derrida implicitly succumbs to Agambens critique in
several ways:
invoking a state of exception by his appeal for spectral justice
fixating his gaze on the past rather than the present
consigns himself to a larval existence by refusing to admit historys closure
unethically tarrying with specters and bygone or completed ideas
surpassing his role as an intellectual by taking up a revolutionary rather than religious
inheritance
In other words, Derrida in strictly Agambenian terms is not our contemporary. He is privative
and even totalitarian in his invocation of justice beyond jurisprudence. However, what about
Agamben? If we close out Agambens line of reasoning in State of Exception we find some
idiosyncracies: the divestment of spectral law from the law as pure jurisprudence allows one to
study and deactivate it, to play with it which creates an opening for justice. Thus, justice
emerges not relative to the law but by the laws deactivation and inactivity. He states,

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects,
not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for
good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that
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precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been
contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the
task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to
arrive at that justice that one of Benjamins posthumous fragments defines as a
state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be
appropriated or made juridical. (SE 64)

So, while Agambens State of Exception and Homo Sacer are wonderfully critical fusillades to
the War on Terror and the wider criminalization of the worlds population, the above quotation
about a prophecy of liberation by play cannot help but ring a little false. There is every reason
to be dissatisfied with this merely redemptive solution not simply because one is disinclined to
believe it but more because it is a symptomatic mythology to which one might respond well, if
that works for you. It is irrelevant to certain pressing matters at hand, namely a world
consistently wracked by crisis. Agambens intellectual is not haunted by crisis or the exigencies
of their time since their function as a contemporary is to define or create their own. Derridas,
meanwhile, is not only obliged to confront these exigencies but is lent his or her power and
authorization to theorize precisely because of them. In other words, we are obliged to ask: has
Agamben demystified Derrida, liberating us from his anarchic world where everything is
permitted and specters can live freely amongst men? Has he truly offered us a way of ethically
comporting us towards the specter so that things dont get out of hand? Or by fixing his eyes on
the present is it Agamben and not Derrida who is actually aloof and obscure by ignoring critical
problems that he consigns to the past as completed?
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This somewhat hysterical line of

11
Is poverty, for instance, a specter?a done deal that just is and if live in it or try to address it we are we
consigned to a larval existence?guilty of dressing up a finished mode of life in new clothes?
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questioning (hysterical in the sense of unsatisfiable since there is no way to make Agamben the
intellectual we want him to be nor should we demand that he write more satisfying theory
since this would almost reduce him to a writer of theoretical fiction) seems to imply that there
are perhaps greater ethical demands upon intellectuals then that they be our contemporary and
greater requirements for justice than play. Indeed there is a spectral quality to Marxs eleventh
thesis on Feuerbach thatfor all of Agambens clever maneuveringhe and all intellectuals
cannot fail to inherit.