Spectrality, Marxism, and the Critique of Value

Abstract

This essay brings Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1993) into critical dialogue with the German-language school of Marxist theory known as Wertkritik. Through an engagement with value-critics such as Robert Kurz and Norbert Trenkle, as well as with figures associated with the neue-Marx Lektüre such as Moishe Postone and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, the essay makes four interrelated arguments: (1) that Derrida privileges the ‘exoteric’ over the ‘esoteric’ Marx through a lack of engagement with Marx’s categorical critique of bourgeois political economy; (2) that Derrida projects aspects of Marx’s early work into his reading of Capital in a way that sets up Marx as a straw dog against which Derrida launches his familiar critique of Western metaphysics; (3) that Derrida trans-historicises the category of labour and shares fundamental assumptions with the same traditional Marxism he sets out to critique; (4) that Derrida misrepresents the categories of use-value and exchange-value, to which he ascribes a teleological process when no such relationship exists. In this way, the essay seeks to contribute to the development of a concept of spectrality as an immanent characteristic of the value-form under capitalism.