On the penultimate page of Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida describes a “fault” (faute) repeated in the Occidental tradition that “comes at a great price – for humanity,” and this fault is the failure to begin where one ought to have “been able to begin,” namely with haunting.Footnote ¹ He adds: “In order for there to be any sense in asking oneself about the terrible price to pay, in order to watch over the future, everything would have to be begun again.”Footnote ² The last paragraphs of Specters of Marx conclude with the quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet that plays a crucial role throughout the book: “Can one, in order to question it, address oneself to a ghost? To whom? To him? To it, as Marcellus says once again and so prudently? ‘Thou art a Scholler; speake to it Horatio. Question it.’”Footnote ³ Derrida explains:

As the book’s title makes clear, Derrida sets out not to repeat the mistake or fault of Marx, Freud, Heidegger and other predecessors, whose work, nonetheless, as he underlines time and again, is indispensable for his own scholarly path. After dedicating the book to Chris Hani, the popular hero of the resistance against South Africa’s apartheid who had been assassinated twelve days before the original version of Specters of Marx was given as a lecture at a conference in Riverside,Footnote ⁵ Derrida writes in his “exordium”: “If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice.” “No ethics” and “no politics” are “possible and thinkable and just” without the recognition of “those others who are no longer” or those “who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born.”Footnote ⁶ Among those others, Derrida enumerates “victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.”Footnote ⁷ To “live otherwise …, not better, but more justly,” will be possible only “with them”: “to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts … No being-with the other, no socius without this with that makes being-with in general more enigmatic than ever for us. And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.”Footnote ⁸ Justice and any concept of a tomorrow are inextricably linked to “this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present”:

“To be just” and to address oneself to the other require both, and categorically, if this adverb can be used for a deconstructionist approach, the invitation of ghosts. The reason why Shakespeare’s Hamlet plays a decisive role in Derrida’s book is that the play not only begins with the ghost, but Horatio and Hamlet (both “scholars”) are exhorted to speak with the ghost and, what is more, invite the ghost to speak. Otherwise put, they offer to listen to a voice not “presently living.”

According to Derrida, no justice will have any chance to occur if we do not learn from the ghost how to address him or her. There is no pursuit of justice without beginning “everything again” under the auspices of haunting. If, as Derrida asserted in 1989, “deconstruction is justice,”Footnote ¹⁰ and “justice” is the only concept that cannot be deconstructed,Footnote ¹¹ then deconstruction can be described as the practice, the discipline of transposing ontology, ever so slightly, but ever so radically, into a hauntology: the practice and discipline of learning how to address oneself to ghosts, the discipline of learning how to invite ghosts to speak. This is the main reason why, I contend, Derrida defined deconstruction as a “coming-to-terms with literature.”Footnote ¹²

If philosophy and other scholarly discourses are bound in the Western tradition by modalities of time related to “being” and presence, and if they are bound to the coherence of non-contradictory discourse, literature does not know of these limitations: the temporal continuum can be broken, and language may be required to “get out of the way.”Footnote ¹³ And whereas philosophy and other scholarly discourses are obliged to engage in generalization, analysis and explication, literature has the potential of highest historical, political, linguistic, psychological (to name just these) condensation and singularity. Derrida writes:

The potency of literature is linked to its ability to offer a “condensation of history” that is not subject to being “docile to time, at least to what we call time.” Moreover, this “strange institution called literature” is “in the West … linked to an authorization to say everything, and doubtless too to the coming about of the modern idea of democracy. Not that it depends on a democracy in place, but it seems inseparable to me from what calls forth a democracy, in the most open (and doubtless itself to come) sense of democracy.”Footnote ¹⁵ Literature, then, is inseparable from the promise of justice, and of a democracy to come. This is so, because it calls justice to contest, in singularity, each time, every time, one by one, one story, one poem, one novel at a time and the law of the land to respond to the claims of justice (always “impossible” in Derrida’s sense, explained later), each time, every time, one by one, one story, one poem, one novel at a time.

As Derek Attridge and others have noted, “there has always been an ethico-political dimension to Derrida’s writing,”Footnote ¹⁶ which, however, has nothing to do with a moralizing agenda:

Literary texts that “make most demands on us” because they “shake the foundation” of discourse within the academy but also possibly in the society in which they intervene can be works like James Joyce’s and Stéphane Mallarmé’s, that is texts that resist, stage and suspend concepts such as “mimesis, reference, form, content, genre, origin, intention, … showing them to be other than the self-consistent, controlling categories they are usually taken to be.”Footnote ¹⁸ According to Attridge, those are the literary texts that attracted Derrida’s interest first and foremost. But there are literary texts whose “demands” on the reader and language (both the discourse of criticism, but also language in general) are differently pressing. Fiction writing, to use a felicitous formulation by George Lipsitz, functions “as a social force, as a repository of memories that are too brutal, too debilitating, and too horrifying to register through direct historical or social science narratives.”Footnote ¹⁹ It is this “demand” and this upheaval of “foundations” on which I focus here; here, like perhaps nowhere else, ghosts are invited to speak.

Derrida was drawn to literature because like no other textual genre its very institution (and literature is an “institution”) is inspired by what could be called a practice of the impossible: to testify to the uniquely singular in necessarily generalizable language (in Attridge’s formulation, the “structural interconnectedness of the absolutely singular and the absolutely general”Footnote ²⁰), to defend the openness and fragility of a “living together” over and against an understanding of community as a symbiotic (naturality, birth, blood, soil, nation) or conventional (state, juridical) cohesiveness or totality,Footnote ²¹ and precisely for that reason, to invite the voiceless, the ghosts, to speak, while also, at the same time, insisting on justice for the (presently) living, that is, performing the labor of a democracy-to-come. This concrete “labor” is underlined by Derrida throughout his oeuvre and throughout his political stances: “justice, however unpresentable it remains, does not wait. It is that which must not wait.”Footnote ²²

To “improve the law,” it will be necessary to get to work. While, as Christoph Menke writes, the “deconstructive unfolding of the tension between justice and law” occurs “in the name of an experience that no political stance can capture,” such an unfolding “nevertheless affects any politics as its border, and therefore as its interruption.”Footnote ²⁴

Derrida was drawn to literature, because it materializes an “unfolding of the tension between law and justice.” Like no other discursive practice, insisting on justice for the living and their ghosts, literature can welcome what Derrida describes as “the law of the phantom, the spectral experience and the memory of the phantom, of that which is neither dead nor living, more than dead and more than living, only surviving, the law of the most commanding memory, even though it is the most effaced and the most effaceable, but for that very reason the most demanding.”Footnote ²⁵

Like no other discursive practice, literature gives voice to the “most effaced and most effaceable” memory, even though and because it is the “most demanding,” even “commanding.” This may also explain why one “striking feature” of Derrida’s responses to literary texts, as Attridge observes, is “their predominantly affirmative mode: they affirm what they take the texts to be doing in their most challenging operations, they bring this quality or movement out into the open (as far as it is possible to do so), they celebrate it, they put it to work, they invite a further response to it. By contrast, the mode of his writing on philosophical texts may seem neutral or even antagonistic.”Footnote ²⁶

In contemporary American literature the “potency” and “economy of literature” understood along Derridean lines is at play and at stake with breath-taking strength and equally powerful tenderness in Toni Morrison’s novels. Even though to my knowledge, Derrida never published a text on Toni Morrison’s oeuvre, her writing, as I show in what follows, corresponds in a singularly germane way to a number of traits that Derrida reflects on in his thinking on “literature.” In Morrison’s novels, “the most effaced and the most effaceable” memory, the multilayered and suppressed memory of slavery, returns as the “most commanding” and “demanding.” A conversation between Derrida’s reflection on literature and Morrison’s writing is thus productive and promising, as, for example, Jeffrey Weinstock has shown.Footnote ²⁷

Morrison states categorically that a certain “living together” and a direct address guide the entirety of her writing:

If the “best art is political” and is “about you,” it is, by definition, concerned with the community, with the question of how to live together well. That means that far from being an idle pastime, literature, fiction, a novel has work to do. According to Morrison, a novel “should be beautiful, and powerful, but it should also work. It should have something in it that enlightens; something in it that opens the door and points the way. Something in it that suggests what the conflicts are, what the problems are. But it need not solve those problems because it is not a case study, it is not a recipe.”Footnote ²⁹ It is neither a sociological study nor a philosophical or moral treatise. It is able to disrupt the present and presence and their (chrono)logical discourse. Morrison’s fiction ventures into such disruption in order to confront the aforementioned “terrible price” and in order to invent other modes of “living together” from which the “needy dead”Footnote ³⁰ would not be banished. The immense challenge is to confront a past so violent that it is “deliberately” suppressed, while also, at the same time (again, one might say, an “impossible” task), “inviting” not only the readers but the author herself.

In her “Foreword” to Beloved, Morrison explains:

The encounter with the ghost: an impossible undertaking that fiction can nonetheless create in the aporia (a figure Derrida explored over and over again), elsewhere impossible, of an invitation to a kidnapping. Morrison elaborates with the help of further aporias: “In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietude of everyday life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way.”Footnote ³²

Language must get out of the way to create the language ferociously committed “not to lie” about slavery: “I consider that my single gravest responsibility … is not to lie.”Footnote ³³ At the same time, “language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.”Footnote ³⁴

Before returning to the “reach toward the ineffable,” let us consider Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). In her foreword to a 2007 edition of the book, Morrison captures in nuce the aporetic tension between singularity and generality. The novel, Morrison writes, explores “a unique situation, not a representative one.”Footnote ³⁵ To explore such uniqueness, however, a language is needed that on one hand answers to and bears responsibility for the unique, the singular, while at the same time being recognizable, which in the end is necessarily in some ways generalizable: “Singular” as the main character Pecola’s life was, Morrison writes, “I believed some aspects of her woundability were lodged in all young girls.”Footnote ³⁶ The singular, unique situation does not preclude relating to it. The devastating woundability of a black girl living in the “unique situation” of utter neglect, poverty and, to paraphrase Kafka, a condemnation that precedes all guilt, this unique woundability of which the text bears witness, has traits that are “lodged in all young girls.” The task of the literary text is to endure the aporetic tension between uniqueness and relatability and to bring it to expression in such a way that the reader is not “touched,” but “moved.” This is one of the “impossible” demands the literary text addresses to the reader.

Morrison cautions that “centering the weight of the novel’s inquiry on so delicate and vulnerable a character could smash her and lead readers into the comfort of pitying” the violated girl “rather than into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing.”Footnote ³⁷ She considers her solution of this problem in The Bluest Eye (“break the narrative into parts that had to be reassembled by the reader”) a failure: “it didn’t work: many readers remain touched but not moved.”Footnote ³⁸ Again, the notion appears that a novel has work to do. The task, the work of the novel, is not just to “touch” the readers, but “move” them, which, along the lines of Morrison’s argument that the best art is political, would include moving them to a different commitment for the community in which they live.

What is at stake is to move readers, which is similar to Gayatri Spivak’s description of what “education in the Humanities attempts to be,” namely “an uncoercive rearrangement of desires.”Footnote ³⁹ Such a rearrangement is all but guaranteed. It is more improbable than likely. It is “impossible” in the sense Derrida uses this word: highly questionable, impracticable, unpredictable, incalculable. Seen from what already “is” and what is considered “possible,” it is not. Literature, however, is a privileged place for the impossible to happen because its labor lies in conjuring a “rearranged” desire into occurrence through the invention of language. For Derrida, the promise of literature lies in the fact that in the process of allowing language to “get out of the way,” it may not only change language, but also, “in changing language, change more than language”:

Literature, then, is the form of discourse that performs something “impossible”: to provoke an “uncoercive rearrangement of desires” through “kidnapping” the reader into extremely “inhospitable terrain” such as the vast “terrain” of slavery and its legacy.

Derrida’s “hauntology” has potentially far-reaching consequences for a political theory and practice. His reflection on the “final solution” can be justly invoked for the immense question of what Avery Gordon has called the “lingering inheritance of racial slavery,” in Jeffrey Weinstock’s words, a “social trauma that lives on in American culture”Footnote ⁴¹:

Morrison’s fiction makes “demands” on the reader by “kidnapping” him and her, throwing him or her “ruthlessly into an alien environment” that is hospitable to the “chaos of the needy dead,”Footnote ⁴³ and thus to the ghosts that haunt our present, but also the ghosts that haunt the ghost herself.

“Beloved” is, in Morrison’s novel, the name on the tombstone of a dead girl, of whom the reader never learns the living name. As Caroline Rody succinctly writes, the term “expresses at once the greatest anonymity and the dearest specificity”Footnote ⁴⁴ (a feature Derrida explores repeatedly in his reflections on the proper name). The violence of Beloved’s death and the brutality of slavery that caused it make her haunt the lives of her mother, her brothers, and of all their relations. It is of her, the returned and disappeared ghost, but also of the ghost that haunts the ghost, that Morrison writes: “Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name?”Footnote ⁴⁵

Beloved’s memory is, indeed, “the most effaced and effaceable,” and, as Morrison’s book powerfully shows, “the most demanding.” So unbearably demanding that, in the end, her apparition is chased back into invisibility: “It was not a story to pass on.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The challenge that Derrida’s thought and Morrison’s fiction address to us is to realize the need to “learn,” from the other, from the nameless, from the phantom, how to address ourselves to her; how to learn her name with the keen awareness that looking for that name and learning it bears in itself the risk of “losing,” forgetting, betraying it in its singularity.

As Avery Gordon and others have shown, in the novel Beloved, “Beloved the ghost’s double voice speaks not only of Sethe’s dead child but also of an unnamed African girl lost at sea, not yet become an African-American. (The book’s memorial dedication reads simply ‘Sixty Million and more.’) However, neither Sethe nor the others can perceive that the ghost that is haunting them is haunted herself.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Jeffrey Weinstock succinctly summarizes the task, linking it to Derrida’s Specters of Marx:

There is absence, and there is the ineffable, there is silence. But for Morrison, the writer’s responsibility is to “shape a silence while breaking it.”Footnote ⁴⁹ There is silence by the millions – as Beloved reminds the reader even before the first page, “sixty million and more” – one by one. For them, the destruction is absolute. To a certain degree, the “shaping” of such silence is a betrayal of the victim, because it runs the risk of soothing and thus undermining the absoluteness of the destruction. Literature, then, witnesses to that betrayal too. There is no room here for the “comfort of pity.” But the silence stemming from Pecola’s “psychological murder” whose damage is “total”Footnote ⁵⁰ is shaped in order not to lose them and her to utter oblivion.

While The Bluest Eye chronicles Pecola’s “journey to destruction” (“Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed.”) and stepping “into madness,” leaving her at the end of the novel “searching the garbage,”Footnote ⁵¹ Beloved starts after the sealed destruction, the murder of a child, chronicling the surviving of “memories that are too brutal, too debilitating, and too horrifying to register through direct historical or social science narratives,” in both senses of who or what survives and who or what is survived.

The novel, again, has some work to do. As Beloved shows with powerful and heart-breaking tenderness, to use a formulation by Derrida, “even if one wanted to, one could not let the dead bury the dead.”Footnote ⁵² Beloved cannot bury herself as the murder victim, and she cannot bury the dead by whom she herself is haunted: the nameless and uncounted “sixty million and more.”

To quote Beloved’s narrator, “somebody had to be saved, but unless Denver [Beloved’s surviving teenage sister] got work, there would be no one to save, no one to come home to, and no Denver either. It was a new thought, having a self to look out for and preserve.”Footnote ⁵³ Something, then, needs to be done. In the case of Beloved, most importantly two things need to be done, as Avery Gordon elaborates:

In Morrison’s book, it is the community of women who exorcises the ghost. It remains open how successful the exorcism may be for Sethe, her lover Paul D and her daughter Denver. As Derrida writes in Specters of Marx, exorcism would need to occur “not in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right, if it means making them come back alive, as revenants who would no longer be revenants, but as other arrivants to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome – without certainty, ever, that they present themselves as such. Not in order to grant them the right in this sense but out of a concern for justice.”Footnote ⁵⁵

US history post-Reconstruction and into the twenty-first century shows blatantly that the exorcism as described by Derrida has not yet successfully occurred in American society and politics. Again, Gordon’s succinct analysis is helpful:

What Gordon calls the “utopian dimension of haunting” and Derrida the desire to “learn to live finally” materialize as “our responsibility to recognize just where we are in this story, even if we do not want to be there.”Footnote ⁵⁷ When Beloved’s narrator identifies the legacy of slavery not as “the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place,” but “the jungle whitefolks planted in them,” when the “secret spread of this new kind of whitefolks’ jungle” is described as “hidden, silent, except once in a while when you could hear its mumbling in places like 124,”Footnote ⁵⁸ she challenges the reader to recognize the “secret, that whites have already been touched and invaded as if from the outside by a world of their own making,” and that they are in this story, that “we are in this story, even now.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Even now: the “untimeliness and disadjustment of the contemporary”Footnote ⁶⁰ are blatant now, without doubt, today. At the condition of such “reckoning” and recognition, the revenant, as Derrida writes, “may already mark the return of the specter of a promised living [le retour du spectre d’un vivant promis].”Footnote ⁶¹ A promised living and a promised living-together – Toni Morrison’s fiction is the medium for the specter of a future.