THE ELEVEN OF ELEVEN IN A TEN SCALE - DERRIDA AI NA CORRIDA Beyond these two types of war (civil and international) whose dividing line cannot even be distinguished any longer, let us blacken still more the picture of this wearing down beyond wear. Let us name with a single trait that which could risk making the euphoria ofliberal-democrat capitalism resemble the blindest and most delirious of hallucinations, or even an increasingly glaring hypocrisy in its formal or juriditist rhetoric of human rights.11 novembre de 2014 11:27 If one were permitted to name these plagues of the "new world order" in a ten-word telegram, one might perhaps choose the following ten words. 1. Unemployment, that more or less well-calculated deregulation of a new market, new technologies, new worldwide WEARS AND TEARS 101 competitiveness, would no doubt, like labor or production, deserve another name today All the more so in that tele-work inscribes there a new set of givens that perturbs both the methods of traditional calculation and the conceptual opposition between work and non-work, activity, employment, and their contrary. This regubr deregulation is at once mastered, calculated, "socialized" (that is, most often disavowed), and irreducible to prediction-like suffering itself, a suffering that suffers still more, and more obscurely, for having lost its habitual models and language once it no longer recognizes itself in the old word unemployment and in the scene that word named for so long. The function of social inactivity, of non-work or of underemployment is entering into a new era. It calls for another politics. And another concept. The "new unemployment" no more resembles unemployment, in the very forms of its experience and its calculation, than what in France is called the "new poverty" resembles poverty. il 2. The massive exclusion of homeless citizens from any participation in the democratic life of States, the expulsion or deportation of so many exiles, stateless persons, and immigrants from a so-called national territory already herald a new experience of frontiers and identity-whether national or civil. 3. The ruthless economic war among the countries of the European Community themselves, between them and the Eastern European countries, between Europe and the United States, and between Europe, the United States, and Japan. This war controls everything, beginning with the other wars, because it controls the practical interpretation and an inconsistent and unequal application of international law. There have been too many examples in the last decade or more. 4. The inability to master the contradictions in the concept, norms, and reality of the free market (the barriers of a protectionism and the interventionist bidding wars of capitalist States seeking to protect their nationals, or even Westerners ResponElimina or Europeans in general, from cheap labor, which often has no comparable social protection). How is one to save one's own interests in the global market while claiming to protect one's "social advantages" and so forth? 5. The aggravation of the foreign debt and other connected mechanisms are starving or driving to despair a large portion of humanity. They tend thus to exclude it simultaneously from the very market that this logic nevertheless seeks to extend. This type of contradiction works through many geopolitical fluctuations even when they appear to be dictated by the discourse of democratization or human rights. 6. The arms industry and trade (whether it be "conventional" arms or at the cutting edge of tele-technological sophistication) are inscribed in the normal regulation of the scientific research, economy, and socialization of labor in Western democracies. Short of an unimaginable revolution, they cannot be suspended or even cut back without running major risks, beginning with the worsening of the said unemployment. As for arms trafficking, to the (limited) degree that it can still be distinguished from "normal" commerce, it remains the largest in the world, larger than the drug traffic, from which it is not always dissociated. 7 The spread ("dissemination") ofnucleat weapons, maintained by the very countries that say they want to protect themselves from it, is no longer even controllable, as was the case for a long time, by statist structures. It exceeds not only statist control but every declared market. 8. Inter-ethnic wars (have there ever been another kind?) are proliferating, driven by an archaic phantasm and concept, by a primitive conceptual phantasm of community, the nation-State, sovereignty, borders, native soil and blood. Archaism is not a bad thing in itself, it doubtless keeps some irreducible resource. But how can one deny that this conceptual phantasm is, so to speak, made more outdated than ever, in the very ontopology it supposes, by tele-technic dis-location? (By ontopology we meanan axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present ~ being [on] to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general). For having spread in an unheard-of fashion, which is more and more differentiated and more and more accelerated (it is acceleration itself, beyond the norms of speed that have until now informed human culture), the process of dislocation is no less arch-originary, that is, just as "archaic" as the archaism that it has always dislodged. This process is, moreover, the positive condition of the stabilization that it constantly relaunches. All stability in a place being but a stabilization or a sedentarization, it will have to have been necessary that the local difl'erance, the spacing of a displacement gives the movement its start. And gives place and gives rise [donne lieu]. All national rootedness, for example, is rooted first of all in the memory or the anxiety of a displaced-or displaceable-population. It is not only time that is "out of joint," but space in time, spacing. ~ 9. How can one ignore the growing and undelimitable, that is, worldwide power of those super-efficient and properly capitalist phantom-States that are the mafia and the drug cartels on every continent, including in the former so-called socialist States of Eastern Europe? These phantom-States have infiltrated and banalized themselves everywhere, to the point that they can no longer be strictly identified. Nor even sometimes clearly dissociated from the processes of democratization (think-for example -of the schema, telegraphically Simplified here, that would associate them with the history-of-a-Sicilian-mafia-harassedby- the-fascism -of-the-Mussolinian-State-thus-intimately -andsymbiotically -allied -to-the-Allies-in -the-democratic -camp-onboth- sides-of-the-Atlantic-as-well-as-in-the-reconstructionof. the-Italian-Christian-democratic-State-which-has-todayentered- into-a-new-configuration-of-capital, about which the least one can say is that we will understand nothing of what is happening there if we do not take account of its genealogy). All11 novembre de 2014 11:29 these infiltrations are going through a "critical" phase, as one says, which is no doubt what allows us to talk about them or to begin their analysis. These phantom-States invade not only the socio-economic fabric, the general circulation of capital, but also statist or inter-statist institutions. 10. For above all, above all, one would have to analyze the present state of international law and of its institutions. Despite a fortunate perfectibility, despite an undeniable progress, these international institutions suffer from at least two limits. The first and most radical of the two stems from the fact that their norms, their charter, the definition of their mission depend on a certain historical culture. They cannot be dissociated from certain European philosophical concepts, and notably from a concept of State or national sovereignty whose genealogical closure is more and more evident, not only in a theoreticojuridical or speculative fashion, but concretely, practically, and practically quotidian. Another limit is strictly linked to the first: This supposedly universal international law remains, in its application, largely dominated by particular nation-States. Almost always their techno-economic and military power prepares and applies, in other words, carries the decision. As one says in English, it makes the decision. Countless examples, "recent or not so recent, would amply demonstrate this, whether it is a question of deliberations and resolutions of the United Nations or of the putting into practice or the "enforcement" of these decisions: the incoherence, discontinuity, inequality of States before the law, the hegemony of certain States over military power in the service of international law, this is what, year after year, day after day, we are forced to acknowledge.4 These facts do not suffice to disqualify international institutions. Justice demands, on the contrary, that one pay tribute to certain of those who are working within them in the direction of the perfectibility and emancipation of institutions that must never be renounced. However insufficient, confused, or equivocal such signs may still be, we should salute what is heralded today in the reflection on the right of interference or intervention in the name of what is obscurely and sometimes hypocritically called the humanitarian, thereby limiting the sovereignty of the State in certain conditions. Let us salute such signs even as one remains vigilantly on guard against the manipulations or appropriations to which these novelties can be subjected.

Marxist "spirit" to criticize the presumed autonomy of the
juridical and to denounce endlessly the de facto take-over of
international authorities by powerful Nation-States, by concentrations
of techno-scientific capital, symbolic capital, and financial
capital, of State capital and private capital. A "new international"
is being sought through these crises of international
law; it already denounces the limits of a discourse on human
rights that will remain inadequate, sometimes hypocritical, and
in any case formalistic and inconsistent with itself as long as the
law of the market, the "foreign debt," the inequality of technoscientific,
military, and economic development maintain an
effective inequality as monstrous as that which prevails today, to
a greater extent than ever in the history of humanity. For it must
be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neoevangelize
in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that
has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never
have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic
oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the
earth and humanity Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of
liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of
the end of history, instead of celebrating the "end of ideologies"
and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never
neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable
singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to
ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many
men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or
exterminated on the earth. (And proviSionally, but with regret,
we must leave aside here the nevertheless indissociable question
of what is becoming of so-called "animal" life, the life and
existence of "animals" in this history. This question has always
been a serious one, but it will become massively unavoidable.)
The "New International" is not only that which is seeking
a new international law through these crimes. It is a link of
affinity, suffering, and hope, a still discreet, almost secret link,
as it was around 1848, but more and more visible, we have
more than one sign of it. It is an untimely link, without status, without tide OR TIDAL FORCES OR OMO OR AJAX ...OR MÊME TITLE , and without name, barely public even
if it is not clandestine, without contract, "out of joint," without
coordination, without party, without country, without
national community (International before, across, and beyond
any national determination), without co-citizenship, without
common belonging to a class. The name of new International is
given here to what calls to the friendship of an alliance without
institution among those who, even if they no longer believe or
never believed in the socialist-Marxist International, in the dictatorship
of the proletariat, in the messiano-eschatological role of
the universal union of the proletarians of all lands, continue to
be inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx or of Marxism
(they now know that there is more than one) and in order to ally
themselves, in a new, concrete, and real way, even if this alliance
no longer takes the form of a party or of a workers' international,
but rather of a kind of counter-conjuration, in the
(theoretical and practical) critique of the state of internationali
law, the concepts of State and nation, and so forth: in order to
renew this critique, and especially to radicalize it.
There are at least two ways to interpret what we have just called
the "black-board picture," the ten plagues, the mourning and
promise it announces while pretending to expose or to count.
Between these two interpretations, which are at once in competition
and incompatible, how is one to choose? Why can we
not choose? Why must we not choose? In both cases, it is a
matter of fidelity to a certain spirit of Marxism: one, this one,
and not the other.
1. The nrst interpretation, the most classical and paradoxical at
the same time, would still remain within the idealist logic of
Fukuyama. But so as to draw other consequences. Let us accept
provisionally the hypothesis that all that is going badly in the
world today is but a measure of the gap between an empirical
reality and a regulating ideal, whether the latter is defined as
Fukuyama does or whether one refines and transforms the
concept. The value and the obviousness of the ideal would not
be compromised, intrinsically, by the historical inadequation of
empirical realities. Well, even within this idealist hypothesis, the
recourse to a certain spirit of the Marxist critique remains urgent
and will have to remain indefinitely necessary in order to
denounce and reduce the gap as much as possible, in order to adjust
"reality" to the "ideal" in the course of a necessarily infinite
process. This Marxist critique can still be fruitful if one knows
how to adapt it to new conditions, whether it is a matter of new
modes of production, of the appropriation of economic and
techno-scientific powers and knowledge, of juridical formality
in the discourse and the practices of national or international
law, of new problems of citizenship and nationality, and so forth.
2. The second interpretation of the blackboard picture would obey
another logiC. Beyond the "facts," beyond the supposed "empirical
evidence, beyond all that is inadequate to the ideal, it
would be a question of putting into question again, in certain of
its essential predicates, the very concept of the said ideal. This
would extend, for example, to the economic analysis of the market,
the laws of capital, of types of capital (financial or symbolic,
therefore spectral), liberal parliamentary democracy, modes of
representation and suffrage, the determining content of human
rights, women's and children's rights,6 the current concepts of
equality, liberty, especially fraternity (the most problematic of
all), dignity, the relations between man and citizen. It would also
extend, in the quasi-totality of these concepts, to the concept
of the human (therefore of the divine and the animal) and to
a determined concept of the democratic that supposes it (let us
not say of all democracy or, precisely Dustement], of democracy
to come). Now, even in this last hypothesis, fidelity to the
inheritance of a certain Marxist spirit would remain a duty.
Here are two different reasons to be faithful to a spirit of
Marxism. They must not be added together but intertwined.
They must be implicated with each other in the course of a
WEARSANDTEARS 109
complex and constantly re-evaluated strategy. There will be no
re-politicization, there will be no politics otherwise. Without
this strategy, each of the two reasons could lead back to the
worst, to worse than the bad, if one can put it that way, namely
to a sort of fatalist idealism or abstract and dogmatic eschatology
in the face of the world's evil.
Which Marxist spirit, then? It is easy to imagine why we will
not please the Marxists, and still less all the others, by insisting in
this way on the spirit of Marxism, especially if we let it be understood
that we intend to understand spirits in the plural and in the
sense of specters, of untimely specters that one must not chase
away but sort out, critique, keep close by, and allow to come
back. And of course, we must never hide from the fact that the
principle of selectivity which will have to gUide and hierarchize
among the "spirits" will fatally exclude in its turn. It will even
annhilate, by watching (over) its ancestors rather than (over) fi>
certain others. 7 At this moment rather than at some other
moment. By forgetfulness (guilty or innocent, it little matters
here), by foreclosure or murder, this watch itself will engender
new ghosts. It will do so by chOOSing already among the
ghosts, its own from among its own, thus by killing the dead:
law of finitude, law of decision and responsibility for finite
existences, the only living-mortals for whom a decision, a
choice, a responsibility has meaning and a meaning that will
have to pass through the ordeal of the undecidable. Which is
why what we are saying here will not please anyone. But who
ever said that someone ever had to speak, think, or write in order
to please someone else? And if one interprets the gesture we are
risking here as a belated-rallying-to-Marxism, then one would
have to have misunderstood quite badly. It is true, however, that I
would be today, here, now, less insensitive than ever to the
appeal of the contretemps or of being out-of-step, as well as to
the style of an untimeliness that is more manifest and more
urgent than ever. Already I hear people saying: "you picked a good time to salute Marx!" 
Or else: "It's about time!"
 "Why QUANTUM OF SOLACE so late?" I believe in the political virtue of the contretemps. And if a
contretemps does not have the good luck, a more or less calculated
luck, to come just in time, then the inopportuneness of a
strategy (political or other) may still bear witness, precisely Dustement],
to justice, bear witness, at least, to the justice which is
demanded and about which we were saying a moment ago that
it must be disadjusted, irreducible to exactness Dustesse] and to
law. But that is not the decisive motivation here and we need
finally to break with the simplism of these slogans. What is
certain is that I am not a Marxist, as someone said a long time
ago, let us recall, in a witticism reported by Engels. Must we still
cite Marx as an authority in order to say "I am not a Marxist"?
What is the distinguishing trait of a Marxist statement? And who
can still say "I am a Marxist"?
To continue to take inspiration from a certain spirit of Marxism
would be to keep faith with what has always made of Marxism in
principle and first of all a radical critique, namely a procedure
ready to undertake its self-critique. This critique wants itself to
be in principle and explicitly open to its own transformation,

re-evaluation, self-reinterpretation.