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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 117

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

Derrida, 1984; Derrida, 1987; Derrida, 1992; Derrida, 1994;
Derrida, 1996; Derrida, 1997; Derrida, 1998; Derrida, 1999). The
argument develops not by way of theoretical refinement, but by
a succession of shifts in textual focus, so elaborated as to become
themselves theoretical refinements. In Specters of Marx, for
example, the focus is on Marx and the ‘anti-Marxist conjuration’
of Fukayama and others during the early to mid-1990s. Taking
as its occasion the first noun of The Communist Manifesto—‘A
spectre’—and Marx’s own love of Shakespeare, whose most
famous ghost had haunted Hamlet’s Elsinore, Derrida explores
the logics of ‘spectrality’, showing how Marx ‘scares himself’
with ghosts, spectres and Geist, but also how anti-Marxism seeks
to exorcise Marx, pronouncing him dead so as to make him so
(Derrida, 1994). In Archive Fever, the focus is on the concept of
the archive, the name of which derives from the Greek word for
town hall, and how it is at once both public and private, the site
of origin and perpetuity, preservation and discovery (Derrida,
1996). In Resistances of Psychoanalysis, the focus moves to
psychoanalysis and its own resistances to itself, its lack of sus-
ceptibility to its own methods, in Freud, Lacan and Foucault
(Derrida, 1998).
The deeper affinities between Foucault and Derrida, despite
their apparent mutual animosity, reside around this persistent
scepticism vis-à-vis discourse, a scepticism that seeks to identify
the possibilities within discourse, which discourse itself seeks to
repress. Both thereby adopted an adversarial stance towards
dominant discourse, a stance that is the hallmark of a peculiarly
post-structuralist politics of demystification. But there can be
no positive content to any such politics. Thus even in his most
expressly political work, Derrida characterises his would-be
‘new international’ only as a negativity—not as what it will
be, but as what it will not: ‘without status, without title, and
without name,... without contract,... without coordination,
without party, without country, without national commu-
nity... without co-citizenship, without common belonging to
a class’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 85). The central achievement and
aspiration in Derrida is the discovery not so much of hidden
truths as of marginalised inconsistencies.

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