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When the Arrivant Presents Itself

 

The Book Bloc, London, 2010. Chasing the Specters of Marx (Jacques Derrida, 1994). Image taken from: http://signsofrevolt.net/book-bloc-bites-back/.

The effectivity or actuality of the democratic promise, like that of the communist promise, will always keep within it, and it must do so, this absolutely undetermined messianic hope at its heart, this eschatological relation to the to-come of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated.

–Jacques Derrida, 19931

A visual trace from a "book bloc",2 the mode of street action in which protesters marched wearing mock books as shields in the streets of Rome, London, and other cities in 2010, in defence of public universities and libraries, epitomises the spirit, or the spectre, of our time: a policeman raises his baton against a protester who carries a book sign of Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. The list of the books that have been seen in the affective alliances of the book bloc include: Theodor W. Adorno's Negative Dialectics, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, and many other titles denoting a long chain of critical literatures and epistemologies. In the book blocs, people have taken to the streets to fight for critical thinking and public education, turning books into banners and shields against educational cuts and neoliberal regimes of university governance. But that uncanny image of the armed policeman chasing both the unarmed "spectres of Marx" and their concomitant literatures (i.e., social sciences and humanities) emerged to remind us that those recurring and floating (hence re-signifiable and reclaimed) spectres still haunt capitalism and its epistemes.