Impure Beginnings: Arendt and Derrida on the Temporality of Political Action

Abstract

Can political action produce a radical transformation of the present without reproducing structures inherited from the past? This article seeks an answer to this question in Jacques Derrida´s Specters of Marx. By contrasting Derrida´s and Hannah Arendt´s critiques of Marx, I show that the political transformation of the present so as to open a different future is only possible by borrowing images from the past, which appear as "ghosts." This "logic of the ghost" operating in Derrida´s text represents a contrast to Arendt´s confidence that a revolution can produce radical novelty, without relying on the past.