The writing of this essay was prompted by the memory of an anniversary, the anniversary of Jacques Derrida's text Specters of Marx. That text stood at the historical crossroads between the death—or, at least, between a certain “disappearance” of the Marxist tradition and the desire to take up its legacy to entertain oneself with its specters, once again. According to hauntological dictates, we always write to repeat; we write the traces of a disappearance, lingering once more on the place and on the time of a dead body. A dead body that nevertheless survives and still speaks to us, inspiring and reanimating ideas, emotions, deeds, lives.
These days, when I write to evoke Derrida's ghosts, other bodies haunt me through that “sort of funeral pump” (Derrida and Stiegler 2002, 41), namely, tele-technologies. There is the body of Carlo Giuliani, who, 20 years ago, fell lifeless in the street during the...