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Since its inception, much has been made of deconstruction's relation (or lack thereof) to contemporary Marxist thought. Indeed, the title of this essay, "Politicizing Deconstruction," is borrowed from a formulation by Nancy Fraser precisely in order to evoke this history. Over fifteen years ago, while overviewing the positions developed at a 1980 conference dedicated to Derrida's work, Fraser accused the so-called French Derrideans of replacing "the project of politicizing deconstruction with the project of deconstructing the political" (1984, 137). At that time, Fraser charged that theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe were afraid to dirty their hands by entering into a dialogic arena of political contest; instead, she said, they tended to retreat into the relative invulnerability of "meta-political philosophical reflection" (148f).
What is most instructive about Fraser's text, however, is not merely that she has done an admirable job of surveying a series of complicated debates about Marxism, deconstruction, and the philosophical interrogation of politics. I Rather, what is most interesting is that Fraser has mistakenly framed the issue of deconstruction and politics in terms of a choice between what she calls a "transcendental safehouse" (154) of philosophical discourse on the one hand (i.e., deconstruction) and a normative, empirical, ethico-political engagement on the other (i.e., political contestation). Of course, given this choice, Fraser does not hesitate to position herself on the side of politics, in direct opposition to what she has posed as an ethos of deconstructive disengagement (142).
And now Derrida has published his long-awaited Specters of Marx, which his more politically minded readers, at least, had expected to mark the end of an ostensibly "strategic" silenCe2 on the question of Marxism, and which was to propel Derrida onto the hitherto unknown terrain of actual political engagement. As anyone who is familiar with the book will undoubtedly agree, this expectation is largely destined for disappointment. For although Derrida's focus is here, finally, on Marx rather than on Freud or Uvi-Strauss or Blanchot or Levinas, and although Derrida has here, more than ever before, "given priority to the political gesture" (a most decided position-taking) at "the expense of philosophical exegesis" (Derrida 1994, 32),3 he has nonetheless also continued-it should come as no surprise-to do what he does best. Once again Derrida has...