Three decades after the publication of Specters of Marx, another death knell is sounding. Three decades after Derrida bemoaned the “manic, jubilatory, and incantatory” neoliberal rhetoric heralding the death of Marx and of communism, the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a renewed mania on the left to declare the end of neoliberalism. And yet three decades after Derrida's most public corps-à-corps with Marx, his analysis remains disturbingly timely and hence out-of-joint. Not only does its litany of ways in which “the world goes badly” in the chapter “Usures” still paint a strikingly familiar picture of our own times—of the ravages and global inequality wrought by market liberalism, the protectionist backlash it has sparked, the ills of homelessness, the arms trade, nativist reaction, geopolitical conflict, and oppression of peoples in the Global South through the cruelty of debt. Moreover, the mania with which neoliberalism announces its triumph over...
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