Theme Of Ghost In Specters Of Marx

2. The Idea Of Ghost in Specters of Marx.

It is difficult to put into words the ideas of ghosts that Derrida develops in his book Specters of Marx. If we were to make a definition of what a ghost is, we could say that the ghost is a thing, an entity which status in the one of neither being nor not being. A ghost is not a substance, the idea of the ghost involves those who are no longer present or those who haven't been born yet. Those who are not presently living.

Derrida does not talk about the ghost as the only phantasmagoric entity, he also develops the idea of the specter. As Cristina de Peretti estates
“ It is not always easy to differentiate between spirit and specter, and the same happens when trying to acknowledge the things they have in common. This is this way 'not caused by ignorance, Derrida affirms, but because the non-object, this non-present

An inheritance that has to be embraced by the living in a responsible and conscious manner. The inheritances are the memories and the facts from the past, those unsolved pasts thsat the ghost represents. These inheritances are the root of the out-of-jointness of our times. Derrida affirms , following Shakespeare and his work Hamlet, that "The time is out of joint": time is disarticulated, dislocated, dislodged, time is run down, on the run and run down [traque et detraque], deranged, both out of order and mad. Time is off its hinges, time is off course, beside itself, disadjusted. Says Hamlet” (Derrida, 1993:20) But this dis-adjustment does not only affect time, it's not only time that is out of joint,”it is Ie temps, but also l'histoire, and it is Ie monde, time, history, world.” (Derrida, 1993:21). This out-of-jointness is a result of pasts injustices that have not been rendered justice still. The absence of a just past makes it improbable to achieve a just present society, in which the wounds from past times still characterizes the present