Saying ?Yes? to Africa: Jacques Derrida'sSpecters of Marx

• DOI: 10.2979/ral.2002.33.4.124
• Publication Date: 2007-03-16T18:17:33Z
• Authors: Christopher Wise
• Keywords: 0602 languages and literature; 06 humanities and the arts

may be traced to Derrida's orientation to Marxism as a uniquely African theorist of Sephardic, Maghrebian, and Judaic experience. Unless the reader of Specters of Marx is willing to entertain this possibility, especially by suspending the agendas of race politics as they are defined in the African (but also Judeo-African) diaspora in the US, France, and elsewhere, the edge of Derrida's critique of the latent metaphysics operative within Marxist theory will be blunted, when not altogether misunderstood. In a broader sense, deconstruction may be compatible with political and cultural agendas that are more commonly acknowledged as traditional "African" concerns, including the European stigmatization of illiteracy, the iconoclasticism of Judeo-Muslim hermeneutics, and the orality-aurality of