Jernej Habjan

Introduction: Academia and the Production of Unemployment

In communism, Marx and Engels wrote in 1845–1846, everyone is able ‘to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, […] without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic’ (Marx and Engels 1976, p. 47). Now, is this not how everyday life of today’s academics looks like? Are they not also teaching in the morning, serving coffee in the afternoon, proofreading in the evening, and grading after dinner, without ever becoming teachers, waiters, proofreaders, or PhD supervisors? Indeed, the world of academic workers appears as what Marx and Engels described as communism. But then again, the wealth of nations also ‘appears as an “immense collection of commodities”’, to quote a later Marx book (1976, p. 125), the one devoted, according to Fredric Jameson at least, to the question of unemployment (see Jameson 2001, pp. 2–3). And this is precisely the difference between the prefigured communism of the ‘early’ Marx and the criticised capitalism of the ‘mature’ Marx, namely, the difference between the undoing of employment and, quite simply, unemployment. Academics today appear as communists insofar as they are in effect unemployed.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida never wrote on Karl Marx. Jacques Derrida held a few public talks on Karl Marx that were immediately published as books, despite the fact that in these talks he deliberately defended a certain spirit of Marx against the ruling ideology of anticommunism. As he admits himself, ‘for reasons that remain to be analysed, and compared to most of my other books, this one [Spectres de Marx] was, let’s put it this way, distributed, bought and translated a lot faster and more widely. I didn’t say “read”’ (‘pour des raisons qui restent a analyser, et par comparaison avec la plupart de mes autres livres, celui-ci a ete plus vite et plus largement, disons, diffuse, achete et traduit. Je ne dis pas “lu”’; Derrida, 1997, 54). Apparently, the only ideology more effective than anticommunism in the academia of the 1990s was de constructionism. So Derrida’s speeches on Marx were always already writing — writing not only in the quasi-transcendental sense so dear to deconstructionists but also in the institutional sense, no less dear to certain Marxisms, of two books: Spectres de Marx, which almost immediately reappeared as Specters of Marx, and, a few years later, Marx en jeu, an edited volume that included Derrida’s talks on Spectres de Marx and on Jean-Pierre Vincent’s theatre piece based on that book. Thus, this writing was the only possible fulfilment of a ‘desire’ to do the ‘impossible’, to which Derrida (1993a, p. 201) admitted in 1989: ‘[T]oday, when in France any reference to Marx has become forbidden, impossible, immediately catalogued, I have a real desire to speak about Marx, to teach Marx — and I will if I can.’