Jacques Derrida, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Marx's specters cannot be exorcised. The announcement of the "death of Marxism" by the triumphalist 1990s (Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, 1992) is itself haunted by what it disavows. Hauntology names a structural feature of any inheritance: the specter is neither presence nor absence, neither living nor dead, neither past nor future.
The messianic without messianism is a structural condition of justice — justice as à-venir, the to-come, the not-yet-here that precedes and exceeds any historical messianism, religious or political. The "New International" is the unformed solidarity-to-come of those who refuse the triumphalist closure. The position is not idealist messianism replacing materialist analysis; it is the structural naming of the temporal-ethical condition that any analysis (materialist or otherwise) of inheritance, justice, or revolution presupposes.12345
The question is indeed "whither?" Not only whence comes the ghost but first of all is it going to come back? Is it not already beginning to arrive and where is it going? What of the future? The future can only be for ghosts. And the past.Specters of Marx, pp. 45–46
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.Specters of Marx, pp. 106–107
On this score at least, paradoxically and despite the fact that it necessarily participates in them, it cannot be simply classified among the ideologems or theologems whose critique or > conjuring—marxism > 73 demystification it calls for. In saying that, we will not claim that this messianic eschatology common both to the religions it criticizes and to the Marxist critique must be simply deconstructed.Specters of Marx, pp. 73–74
But whatever may be the conflicts, inequalities, or overdeterminations among them, they communicate and cooperate at every moment toward producing the greatest force with which to assure the hegemony or the imperialism in question.Specters of Marx, pp. 66–67
Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task. It remains before us just as unquestionably as we are heirs of Marxism, even before wanting or refusing to be, and, like all inheritors, we are in mourning. In mourning in particular for what is called Marxism. To be, this word in which we earlier saw the word of the spirit, means, for the same reason, to inherit.Specters of Marx, pp. 67–68
Specters of Marx (1993) provoked sharp response from substantive Marxist critics. The Ghostly Demarcations symposium volume (Sprinker ed., 1999) collected Aijaz Ahmad's "Reconciling Derrida," Terry Eagleton's contribution, and others; the charge was that the messianic-without-messianism evacuates the materialist analysis Marx insisted on. My reply, "Marx & Sons" (1999), defended the structural status of the messianic. The book has become, in the years since, a major reference in left political theory and in cultural-theoretical work on hauntology (Mark Fisher, the later cultural turn). The live debate is whether the messianic is politically substantive or politically meditative.