Ghost of Meaning: Marx est mortuus lingua

     "In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new."  So says Marx as quoted by Derrida.  What then, of one who never knew the "mother tongue", who finds their own tongue does not contort to pronounce the spectral words of a maternal (paternal?) fear? 

    Derrida might channel ghosts of a man, but it is a man who was perhaps apparition even in life.  There are moments of meaningful clarity here ("no Dasein without the uncanniness...of some specter" would seem to bespeak specter as immanent soul distinct from transcendental spirit; "then impossible to discern between the specter and the specter of the specter" can be heard to voice a plane of immanence), but largely Derrida is speaking what, to my ear, is a foreign language, an Orue-Nacirema dialect of magical idiom no doubt freely expressing the fears and terrors of a discourse born of 20th century wars and thrown into ecstatic confusion in that Jericho moment that was 1989.

    An experience of time as "out of joint" (whether we read this through the French idiomatic translations of "time is off its hinges", "time is broken down, unhinged, out of sorts", "the world upside down", or "this age is dishonored", as Derrida explores in chapter 1) is not something this reader is finding within the realm of grokability.  Could we ever say that gravity is off its hinges?  That electromagnetism is broken down, out of sorts?  That space is upside down?  That quantum dynamical processes are dishonored?  Like the rhetoric of the "world will never be the same again" that characterized events in 2001, the end of history hysteria of 1989 simply doesn't (nor did it at the time) resonate (even if only as a strawman for Derrida's critique).  

    Indeed, the chorus to Billy Joel's patter song released the same year (after the mass migration of East Germans via eastern bloc countries had begun, but before protesters in East Berlin has begun to demolish the wall) sums up my sentiment on the issue pretty clearly:  "We didn't start the fire \ It was always burning \ Since the world's been turning."  The "world" (which world? whose world?) is "going badly" only insofar as we human beings are aware of a world, as such.  So it was in 1949 ("Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray..."), so it was in 1989, so it was in 2001, so it is today.  Derrida was right to dismiss the claims to the "end of the problem of social classes", but his laundry list of societal ills is just that, a laundry list.  There will always be dirty laundry.

    

    After that, his text descends into barbar gibberish, at least to this ear.  If Marx speaks contradictory nonsense, Derrida's attempt to channel the ghost(s) of Marx amounts to speaking in tongues.