Spectral Survivals. Reading Specters of Marx on the Tracks of Biodeconstruction

Specters of Marx is the first published text by Jacques Derrida in which the expression "Life-Death [La-vie-la-mort]" reappears, twice (Derrida 1994, 67, 177), more than fifteen years after the seminar at the ENS in Paris entitled La vie la mort [Life Death] (1975–1976), published in French only in 2019, and thirteen years after the publication of La Carte Postale (1980), translated into English as The Post Card (1987), in which the expression "Life-Death" appears numerous times, particularly in the section "Speculate-On Freud," a reworking of the last four sessions of the aforementioned seminar. Not only that, Specters of Marx is also the first published text in which explicit recourse to the "autoimmune" lexicon appears for the first time ever, then first Faith and Knowledge (1998), in which there is the famous note concerning the use of the "autoimmune lexicon."As we shall see, this is no accident, and it is already enough to justify the attempt to frame Specters of Marx in the perspective of "biodeconstruction." This is the hypothesis already advanced in Biodeconstruction:2 Specters of Marx would constitute an important piece of the Derridean deconstruction of the tradition of the philosophy of life with a view to reformulating the question of life (and death) in terms of "sur-vie," "survivance." Better, Specters of Marx would constitute not only the textual hinge between the first phase of this deconstruction, which would culminate with the seminar Life Death and the publication of The Post Card, and the more recent texts in which the question of life (and death) returns to the foreground, but also and above all the conceptual hinge through which the deconstruction of the philosophy of life propagates from biological, "natural" life to "spiritual" life, that is, to the genesis and structure of the ideal formations that configure the cultural habitat of the human animal. This is a good opportunity for verification.