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Example research essay topic: Specters Of Marx German Ideology - 2,698 words

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Hauntology in Derrida's Specters of Marx Derrida's discussion of the relevance of Marxism in his book was long awaited. It was the first attempt to discuss Marxist politics from a different prospective. My attempt was to summarize arguments and to give the main idea of thoughts of Derrida. However, it is hard to describe all the beautiful deferred and differed meanings carefully established by Derrida. The author wanted to remind us in a unique playful way about the connections between Marx and Shakespeare.

Derrida's book possessed sense of humor and was pleasure to read, even though the topic was serious and in my opinion, Derrida revealed his understanding of the issue in a unique way, which indeed, made the reader even more interested in the material. If ontology is a pretentious way of referring to what there is, haunt ology is a tongue-in-cheek way of referring to what there is not. Derrida invented the term haunt ology to refer to the logic of the ghost. In French, the word haunt ology sounds identical to the word ontology, which it is part of Derrida's purpose to analyze. Traditional data methodologies have been fairly naive about ontology, and Derrida's coin word provides us with clues for deconstructing these methodologies and the systems that have resulted from them.

Further, the word points to the fact that data frequent organizations, like the traces of past events, data are spectral and imaginary. Derrida's gloomy appraisal of Marxism continued haunting by its own fear of ghosts and its inevitable rush to posit the pure presence of a historically based ontology of materialism leads Derrida to conclude that Marxism is ill suited to grasp and contend with the current configuration of a dislocated, spectral capitalism. However, this analysis, he points out, is derived from Derrida's entanglement in Marxist and non-Marxist metaphysics and very little from a concrete look at and evaluation of present economic and political circumstances. Marx is known to emphasize religion as ideology, German Ideology suggests that Marx believed in the ultimate privilege of the religion, as well as the significance of mysticism, which are both included in his interpretations of the concept of ideology in general. 1 In the case the ghost is given its form, it is considered the inherent characteristic of the religious, which is actually omitted when one effaces semantics or the very lexicon of the specter, with such values as hallucinatory or fantastic. Derrida's reduction of the spirit of Marxism to self-critique and the jettisoning of most everything else in the classical Marxist corpus gives the lie to Derrida's proclamation of mourning Marxism rather than wishing it simply dead.

In Lewis view, Specters of Marx relentlessly drives verbal stakes through the heart of Marxisms claims to provide a viable knowledge of history capable of grounding an adequate practice of social transformation. Nevertheless, it does so, he says, without anywhere demonstrating why such concepts as mode of production or social class no longer provide a critical purchase on reality. Lewis places Derrida's call for a New International within the context of the appearance of post-Marxist new true socialism with striking similarities to the "true socialism" that Marx and Engels excoriated in The German Ideology, ironically a text featured prominently in Specters of Marx. In contrast to Derrida's decision that the time has now passed for Marxisms leading concepts to be anything but spooks in search of their own dissolution, Lewis depicts current global conditions as confirming the continued relevance of classical Marxism and its tradition of revolution from below. The supernatural nature of the concept of fetish itself, in a way that it is able to leave on the knowledge of the religious, is primarily and inherently of a ghostly nature, as Marx suggests.

Quite different from a traditional way of appearance in Marx's own rhetoric, the most important and crucial thing that appears to be at stake here is, from one perspective, the explicit nature of the specter itself. The very concept itself cannot possibly stand out or appear from a psychology of any persons imagination, however sophisticated it can be in some of the instances, or from a psychological analysis and interpretations of the unreal, no more that it can be derived from ontology. Although Marx definitely is able to carve it within a conceptual framework of such thing as socioeconomic genealogy or the theory of labor and production: most of the mentioned above suggest the opportunity for the spectral survival, a term that Marx utilized in some of his works in order to explain various theories and suggestions. 2 However, if we look at that very issue from another perspective, the concept of irreducibility of the religious model is also at stake here due to the definition of the notion of ideology, which is rather hard to put in explicit terms. In a situation, when Marx utilizes his notion of specters, he interprets the paranormal nature or the becoming fetish of any given commodity, or commodity at large. Various analysts that study his works ought to emphasize the consequences of Marx's rhetoric, different phrases and paragraphs, which appear to be dependent or simply able to persuade by influencing the persons imagination and fantasy. 3 Even if that were precisely the situation with Marx, those analysts would still be obliged to interpret and analyze their efficiency in every particular case. They would also have to consider the immense power and the inherent strength of the ghost effect.

They would have to find an answer to why it scares or influences the persons imagination, what is its very subject, how to better interpret the terms fear and imagination, etc. Definitely, a place exists in which the values of value (and we really have to distinguish here between the use value an the exchange value), clandestine, air of mystery, enigma, obsession, as well as the notion of ideological, construct a chain in Marx's works, and it is actually possible to indicate the spectral movement of this particular chain. The motion is situated in a place in which it is an inquiry, specifically, of creating the idea of what the stage, any stage in that specific case, takes away from peoples blind eyes at the time they open them. This notion is created with regard to a certain haunting, as Derrida tells the readers in his book. 4 Probably every person that has studied Marx and his works extensively can remember the opening moment in one of his most prominent works, Capital, when Marx elaborates on a topic of a supernatural character of the commodity, the incomprehension of the very thing itself as well as of the money-form that the commodity's simple form is the germ.

Marx intends to interpret the correspondence whose mystery and supernatural character only influence the bourgeois economist in the complete form of money, gold, or any other materialistic value one can think of. At the beginning of Capital, Marx illustrates that the supernatural essence has nothing to do with the use-value, as suggested by Derrida. 5 The question is, is it a mere coincidence that Marx shows the principle of his interpretation by causing a table to turn? Alternatively, it can be the act of recalling the ghost of that particular table. For those who studied Marx and his works, that very table is a known concept, it can be located at the beginning of a chapter that discusses fetishism of the commodity and various mysteries associated with it. From the first glance, impossible is made possible; one must observe something that is not usually observed, the invisibility. Definitely, after everything is already observed, the only thing left unexposed is the invisible.

The most fundamental mistake of that first glance is to observe without noticing the invisible. However, if a person does not surrender or let him / her be deceived by that invisibility, the commodity appears to become a very simple thing that is evident to everyone. Thus, in order to make people accustomed to that concept of invisibility, Marx suggests in his works that the commodity is actually not that simple the ghost that he refers to is already starting to take its shape. 6 Marx suggests that commodity is inherently sophisticated; it is something undefined and distant form the comprehension by a regular person, it has something mystical in its characteristics. Everything is so uncertain in that situation with the commodity that one actually has to look at it from the theological prospective in order to gain better understanding.

It is possible to refer to Marx's use-value of the commodity. Probably, it is only destined to be evident for the use-value; the correspondences of those concepts have their evident function: phenomenology as the discourse of use-value so as not to imagine the market or with the prospective of making people blind to the notion of exchange-value that was already discussed above. That is the most obvious reason why the phenomenological good sense of the commodity, or the way people perceive that particular commodity, can actually facilitate enlightenment, since Marx believes that in that situation there is nothing supernatural about the use - value of the commodity. Basically, it is going to appear as a question of one attribute only the question of property. If one refers to the use value of the commodity, those properties are actually rather human. They coincide with the properties of men, since that is one of the most crucial characteristics of any commodity at issue.

There are a couple of ways that Marx illustrates as to how those properties can be associated with men and the needs of men: they either correlate with the mens needs, which is their use value, or appear to become the creation of the mens activity that utilizes them for those needs. 7 Marx is able to come up with a good illustration of the theory mentioned above; he utilizes the example of the wooden table. He suggests that it will always remain nothing else than mere wood, even when it is used to construct a table it is a commonplace, sensuous thing. However, the things change rather quickly once that wooden table becomes a commodity and is sold on the market. Then, according to Marx, the wooden table commodity starts to establish itself as a market value. The woody essence of the commodity is transformed into something mystical, into something that cannot be comprehended from the first glance, but rather needs careful analyses and interpretation.

The ghostly scheme then becomes vital. The commodity, thus, is inherently thing without observable fact, something that is able to surpass the senses; however, that transformation is not exactly of a spiritual nature, it helps Marx to distinguish between specter and spirit and to convey that differentiation to his readers. Something that is able to surpass the senses still exists in a body that it also somehow lacks, since it is definitely inaccessible to men. The notion of haunting analyzed and elaborated upon by Derrida is at work when we try to understand that example. The commodity actually is able to haunt the thing, since its specter is working in the use value that we have talked about before. This haunting displaces itself like an anonymous silhouette or the figure of an extra who might be the principal or capital character.

It changes places, one no longer knows exactly where it is, it turns, and it invades the stage with its moves. 8 Marx suggests that the commodity enters the stage and transforms into something supersensible, into something that is able to react and adapt to the environment, into something with mystical and supernatural characteristics that are not always evident. It is actually able to interact with all the other commodities, it is something that is becoming rather hard to determine. Indeed, what words should be deployed in order to better describe that commodity: Life, Thing, Beast, Object, Commodity, Automaton in a word, specter. It is no longer a simple thing, however it also lacks the attributes that are present in all the Life objects, it represents the wide array of the creature that remains not comprehended by humanity at large, such mystical and supernatural creatures as whims, chimeras, etc. When we discuss and try to analyze that commodity, that wooden table at issue, the most obvious thing is the physical matter of which it has been originally composed, constructed or created, whatever word suits the best in the given situation. The first matter is wood.

This appearance of immateriality of matter, which was discussed above, seems to take no time at all; it is a momentous transformation yet to be comprehended by the representatives of the humankind. There is a temptation to describe that transformation as animism and spiritism, since the material object wood seems to become alive and crowded with various spirits. Challenge or invitation, support, seduction, countering seduction, need or war, affection or hatred, aggravation of other ghosts: Marx insists on this a lot since there is a magnitude of that sociality (there is always more than only one commodity, more than only one spirit, and even more specters). The number belongs to the motion itself, to the non-complete and rather hard to define process of specialization. If this supernatural characteristic or this spectral impact of the commodity (wooden table in our example) cannot possibly be produced by the use then the value discussed above, is simultaneously reflective and external in its nature.

Besides, it is simply because the very essence of the impact is created out of a relation, out of something referred to as double social bond by Marx. 9 The primary function of that double social bond is to bind people to each other. Marx suggests that in all the countries all over the globe, and at all the possible historical periods, people are always interested in time, in the time associated with the duration of labor. Thus, that double social bond at issue binds people, who are able to experience and comprehend the significance of time, since the lack of that relation with time would prove it impossible to survive and return for most of the people. The same situation would occur when being out of joint that shifts the self-presence and establishes the relation with another object. That very chain of relation based on the double social bond can actually be applied to commodities, Marx suggests. 10 People cannot recognize the social nature of their own toil, of something that they have created on their own. It seems like they are becoming ghosts themselves, and Marx elaborates on that fact since it is rather interesting to suggest such an idea and correlation.

The proper characteristic of specters, something like vampires, is that they are deprived of a spectral image, of the true and the only right image. Marx questions, how is one able to determine a ghost? The most obvious answer that he is able to come up with is because a person is not able to recognize himself in a mirror. That is precisely the situation with the trade and interaction between the commodities. The ghosts that are regarded as commodities themselves are able to transform people that work on them and help to create and improve them into ghosts. This somewhat create s a vicious circle, the whole process sets off the effect of a baffling mirror: if the latter does not return the right reflection, if, then, it phantomalizes, this is first because it naturalizes.

The strangeness of the commodity-form as supposed reflection of the social form is the incredible nature in which this mirror reflects the image when one thinks it is reflecting for people the image of the social characteristics of men's hard everyday toil. 11 Here Marx introduces his audience to the notion of socio natural properties of the commodities that are actually the reflections of the characteristics of the products of peoples everyday toil. The trade in the society created by the commodities creates the mirror reflection of the structure of the society; the wooden tables become the autonomous objects that are inspired by the spectral chain. It appears to be the spectral at the entrance of this objectifying naturalization: it...


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Research essay sample on Specters Of Marx German Ideology

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