What are the political consequences of a Derridean deconstruction of Marx?

The answer lies partly in Derrida's concept of the Messianic and partly in his reading of Freud (Laclau 86).

In Specters of Marx, Derrida refers to Freud's remarks about the three traumas inflicted on the narcissism of the decentred man: on a psychological level one is traumatized upon discovery that there is an ordinarily inaccessible unconscious. Darwin's evolutionary theories are a blow to human narcissism on a biological level and Copernican astronomical discoveries represent a cosmological blow. To these three, Derrida adds the decentring effect of Marxism which works at technical-scientific, political and theological levels to decentre humanity.

According to Derrida, Marxism also participates in a Messianic eschatology. It generates "a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice - which we distinguish from law or right and even from human rights - and an idea of democracy - which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today (Specters of Marx 59).

For Derrida, politics is the deconstruction of law (Laclau 91). Marxism, justice, democracy, the messianic and the promise are mutually implicated. In each case, the emphasis is not on any concrete promise, but rather on experiencing the impossible. Paradoxically, the basis for the demands for justice usually lie in the kind of teleological eschatology that Derrida constructs. Either the basis for justice is to be found by experiencing the messianic in a very general sense or one must allow that the Messianic experience is indifferent to the details of its content.

It would appear to be an impossible choice but that is, among other things, the meaning of deconstruction.

Peter Basile