Abstract

Vincent Houillon, The Forward Movement of Thingking : Marx Read by Derrida. The starting-point of the article is an examination of the Marxian heritage in the thinking of Derrida, beginning with a certain “retreat” of Marx in Derrida's writing, and moving to a certain disclosure of Marx in Spectres de Marx. Houillon seeks to demonstrate how deconstruction is an heir to Marx, the “deconstructibility” of whose text it soon acknowledged, distancing itself from any dogmatic or ontological conception of Marxism, while at the same time claiming its place in a constellation of critical readings capable of sustaining a political perspective. The onset of deconstruction is to be situated in a certain interruptive relation to a Marxist ontology, the plurality of whose meanings the article tries to address. The future of Marx, it is argued, is the issue at the heart of the deconstructive reading of Marx, insofar as the latter is an attempt to think a new the “old name” of communism.