18/03/2026
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx Reading group
A reading group on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx with Allan Dreyer Hansen (Roskilde University) and Lasse Thomassen (Queen Mary University of London).
When?
Thursday 23 April 2-4 pm:
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (Routledge, 1994), ‘Exordium’ and Chapter 1: (‘Injunctions of Marx’) (70 pages).
Friday 1 May 2-4 pm:
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (Routledge, 1994), Chapter 2 (‘Conjuring—Marxism’) (36 pages), Chapter 3 (‘Wears and Tears (Tableau of an ageless world)’) (22 pages), and Chapter 4 (‘In the Name of the Revolution, the Double Barricade [Impure “impure impure history of ghosts”]’) (39 pages).
Tuesday 5 May 2-4 pm:
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (Routledge, 1994), Chapter 5 (‘Apparition of the Inapparent: The phenomenological “conjuring trick”’) (66 pages).
Laclau, Ernesto, ‘The Time Is out of Joint’, Diacritics 25: 2 (1995): 86-96 https://doi.org/10.2307/465146 Also in Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (Verso, 1996) (10 pages).
Where?
Arts One 2.18 (second floor, enter via the side or the back of the building), Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Campus
Further readings:
Critchley, Simon, ’On Derrida’s Specters of Marx’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 21:3 (1995): 1-30.
Derrida, Jacques, ‘Spectres of Marx’, New left Review 205 (May/June 1994): 31-58.
Derrida, Jacques, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford University Press, 2005).
Fritsch, Mathias, ‘Derrida’s democracy to come’, Constellations 9 (2002), 574-97.
Sprinker, Michael, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx (Verso, 1999).
Thomassen, Lasse, Derrida, Deconstruction and Political Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), Chapter 3.
Thomson, Alex, Deconstruction and Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2005).
RSVP and queries: Lasse Thomassen l.thomassen AT qmul.ac.uk
The reading group is made possible through an Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) Visiting Fellowship for Dr Allan Dreyer Hansen. It is organised under the auspices of the IHSS and the TheoryLab.
Ernesto Laclau, "The Time Is out of Joint", Diacritics, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 85-96
