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Both Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx and Raymond Williams's Modern Tragedy address the question of how the present is haunted by the persistence of past revolutions. This article constructs a dialogue between Derrida and Williams that foregrounds crucial questions about the two books for critical reflection.
How might the loss of hopes for social transformation be mourned? What is the fate of emancipatory longings confronted with what appears to be infinite deferral? How does the emotion circulating in cultural memory inscribe itself in the present? These are questions that inform both Raymond Williams's Modern Tragedy, a book whose reflections gesture beyond tragic literature to the crisis for the left in the West faced with the 1956 revelations about Stalinism and repression in the Soviet Union; and Jacques Derrida's Specters ofMarx, a book that explores the ghostly returns of Marx and the Marxist tradition after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the apparent triumph of western market-driven economies.1 Both Williams and Derrida, in different ways, and with methodologies drawn from quite radically divergent English and French scholarly traditions, attempt to think through what Matthias Fritsch has described in The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida as "the 'narrow door' of the future to-come that is not determined as a future present" (207). In what follows, I attempt to map out the outlines of a dialogue between these modernist and postmodernist moments.
In 1960, Raymond Williams returned to Cambridge University to take up a position in the English Faculty teaching twentieth-century drama.He had already published Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (later revised as Drama from Ibsen to Brecht) and Drama in Performance, as well as the extraordinarily influential Culture and Society, 1780-1950. One of his first teaching assignments at Cambridge was a series of lectures on "The Nature of Tragedy in Modern Literature," a title that Williams changed the following year to "Modern Tragedy." While such a small change in terminology might seem insignificant,Williams's renaming of the lectures can be read as a condensation of the argument he will advance in Modern Tragedy. Conventional literary accounts of tragedy in the modern period attempt to read and interpret contemporary literatures through models drawn from Greek and Renaissance...