Contemporary Political Theory, 2002, 1, (518) r 2002 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1470-8914/02 $15.00 www.palgrave-journals.

com/cpt

Let the Dead Bury their Dead: Marx, Derrida and Bloch
Vincent Geoghegan1
School of Politics, Queens University, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK. E-mail: v.geoghegan@qub.ac.uk

The starting point of the article is the crisis that has beset modern secularism. Mindful of the threat from religious fundamentalism, it is committed to a postsecular reconfiguration of the relationship between the secular and the religious, where the strengths and weaknesses of both elements are acknowledged. It seeks to do this by an examination of Marxs critique of religion, and the response to the Marxist project exemplified by Derrida and Bloch. It argues that Marxs approach to the dead, as developed in the Eighteenth Brumaire (150-years old in 2002), provides a context for his hostility towards religion, and that Derrida and Bloch in their greater openness to the claims of the past, generate both a critique of Marxs strictures on religion, and a recognisably post-secular re-working of positive elements in Marxs project. Keywords: post-secularism; Marxism; post-structuralism; Marx; Derrida; Bloch

In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire. (Marx and Engels, 1979, 106)2 (2002 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of this text).

Introduction
Religion has acquired a new visibility in contemporary Anglo-American political theory. Connolly (1999) has recently explained to us why he is not a secularist, Taylor (1999), for the first time, has explicitly laid bare the Catholic dimensions of his work, and Cohen (2000, 6) has felt the need to share with his readership that he has been a long-standing Bible reader. The fact that Rawls (1999), who managed largely to ignore religion in A Theory of Justice, has devoted significant energy in Political Liberalism to establishing the proper relationship between the religious and the secular in a liberal society is surely indicative of a new agenda. There does seem to be a growing awareness that the familiar accommodation between religion and secularism is collapsing, holding out the promise of a post-secular redefinition of the relationship between the religious and the secular, and the threat of a

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fundamentalist pre-secular religiosity. As Keane (2000, 11) has noted: The victory of the forces favouring the privatisation of religion within civil society may yet prove to be temporary and (considered as an episode in the complex history of modern religious politics) fleeting. Post-secularism, whilst recognising the vital importance of the historic secular process, and concerned to defend its painfully acquired theoretical and practical achievements, nonetheless wishes to move beyond the narrow assessment of religion often associated with that process. It is to be distinguished from a number of reactive, conservative responses (some of which also term themselves post-secular) in that it does not desire to return to a purported religious hegemony, but rather intends to overcome the modern dualism of the secular and the religious, recognising the strengths and weaknesses inhering in both.3 Exploring this matter through a consideration of themes in the Marxist tradition must seem, at first sight, perverse. Marxs mordant pronouncements on religion are well known, and effectively blighted generations of followers from saying anything particularly fresh in this area. Yet the nature of Marxs hostility itself speaks volumes about the genesis of the secular experience, and the instabilities inherent in that project. Furthermore, later writers such as Bloch and Derrida have identified elements in Marxs work which point to precisely that post-secular reconfiguration referred to above. In a good Derridean manner, the margins (Marx) might turn out to be the centre. One particular text of Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, is to be the focus of the initial discussion. The opening section of this work has a particularly rich exploration of the role of the past in the constitution of the present, which provides a context for the ambiguities of Marxs approach to religion. As befits a religious exploration, there is a canonical text F Matthews Gospel (8: 2122): Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead F a text deployed by Marx in his well-known discussion of historical memory in the Eighteenth Brumaire. This will act as a guiding thread in an analysis of the role of religion in the power relationships between the living and the dead. Looking back on Benjamins suicide, Bloch (1991b, 339) recalled a poignant remark of his former friend: It is only over the dead that no one has power! The enigmatic opening section of the Eighteenth Brumaire can be read with many resonances of this assertion in mind. Marxs reflections are precisely concerned with the power of the dead over the living, and the struggles of the living to control this power. It will be argued that Marxs strictures on the dead do seem to provide a clue to his critique of religion. Furthermore, the Eighteenth Brumaire itself reveals a degree of powerlessness before the shades of the past, which, in turn, suggests that 150 years on from its publication, the dead may be having the last laugh.
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Jesus
In Matthews Gospel a disciple asks leave of Jesus to bury his father. Jesus response is uncompromising: Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead. This enigmatic statement has provoked a palpable unease amongst commentators F Christian and otherwise. What does it mean? There is no surface sense here, for the dead can clearly bury no-one. Deeper interpretations, however, open up vistas sufficiently worrying for ingenious, if implausible, exegesis to argue that there is mistranslation, misunderstood idiom, extenuating circumstances, or purely proverbial language at work here (see Davies and Allison Jr, 1991, 5657). The predominant construal of these words is that the burying of the physical dead can be left to the spiritually dead, an injunction which raises a host of perplexing questions both about the relationship between what has been and what is to come, and about the modalities and morality of the transition. To Jesus Jewish contemporaries, and, more generally, to the patriarchal mores of the ancient world, his words would have indicated a shocking violation of the claims of the historic. Whilst the imperative to bury a dead father spoke of a living past, Jesus, in this instance, equated a failure to make a radical break with the past with spiritual death. This was because he believed that his mission was so important, and represented such a seismic shift, that it both overrode obligations towards the past, and rendered them unnecessary and distracting. As Bloch (1986b, 12631265) has recognised, Jesus is articulating a messianic advent morality, a mode of conduct of the last days, preparing for the ingression of the radical otherness of the kingdom.

Marx
The biblical quotations and parodies which pepper Marxs works indicate an extensive and sensitive knowledge of both the Old and New Testaments. Indeed, it has been argued that the legacy of Luthers German translation of the Bible is evident in the very stuff and substance of Marxs language (see Prawer, 1976). Biblical knowledge was a fundamental element in the educational practices of his youth, and in the theologico-political circles of his Left-Hegelian apprenticeship, creative exegesis of scripture was a stock-intrade. By at least the early to middle 1840s Marx had clearly pondered the meaning of Matthews phrase. The German Ideology takes Stirner to task for his banal and mechanical use of the verse (jumping straight from Sophocles Antigone and the sacredness of the burial ceremonial connected with it to the Gospel of Matthew, 8: 22 (Marx and Engels, 1976, 137)), whilst Marx himself deploys it in a letter of May 1843 to Ruge, in which he articulates high hopes that out of the decay of the present a whole new world will emerge: give me your hand, so that we may begin again from the beginning. Let the dead bury
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their dead and mourn themy [I]t is enviable to be the first to enter the new life alive; that is to be our lot (Marx and Engels, 1975b, 134). Marx is thus aware of the provenance of the phrase, mindful of its subtlety, and uses it to dramatise the sharp contrast between an exhausted and doomed past, and a burgeoning, imminent future. In the Eighteenth Brumaire the past is a troubled, troubling, and ultimately dispensable presence. Its famous opening lines lead the reader to consider world history in terms of tragedy and farce. This reflection was not something new in Marx. In Scorpion and Felix, a youthful humoristic novel, Marx strikingly anticipates his later sentiments, noting that: every gianty presupposes a dwarf, every genius a hidebound philistiney and as soon as the first disappear, the latter begin, sit down at the table, sprawling out their long legs arrogantly. The first are too great for this world, and so they are thrown out. But the latter strike root in it and remainy. Caesar the hero leaves behind him the play-acting Octavianus, Emperor Napoleon the bourgeois king Louis Philippe. (Marx and Engels, 1975a, 628; see also Prawer, 1976, 1516; Wheen, 1999, 2526) In another early work, Contribution to Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Law. Introduction, Marx speaks of comedy as the last phase of world history; comic so that humanity should part with its past cheerfully (Marx and Engels, 1975b, 179). It would appear to have been Engels who brought this all together in a letter to Marx of 3 December 1851: It really seems as though old Hegel, in the guise of the World Spirit, were directing history from the grave and, with the greatest conscientiousness, causing everything to be re-enacted twice over, once as grand tragedy and re for Danton, L. Blanc for the second as rotten farce,y. Caussidie Robespierrey. And the moon-calf [Louis Bonaparte] together with the first available dozen debt-encumbered lieutenants for the little corporal and his band of marshalsy. Thus the 18th Brumaire would already be upon us. (Marx and Engels, 1982, 505) When Marx therefore came to begin the composition of the Eighteenth Brumaire in December of 1851 the image of the past he wished to implant in his readers was of a tragi-comic pre-history, a grisly and frequently risible preamble to the genuine history of communist society. The second paragraph of the Eighteenth Brumaire opens with a sharp crashing of gears. The initial sentence, so frequently cited in accounts of Marxs
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historical methodology, breathes cool common sense: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited. (Carver, 1996, 32) So far so good. But then a harsh change of tone: Tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. (ibid.) The imagery is stark and disturbing F dead generations, weighs, nightmare. Derrida, who is on the lookout for any evidence of the spooky in Marx, draws our attention to the fact that the word translated into English as nightmare appears in the German as Alp, referring to the supernatural creature once deemed to be responsible for the generation of nightmares (as often happens in translations, the ghost drops off into oblivion) (Derrida, 1994, 108). But even in its English form the phrase is shocking. In the text, the evangelists words are associated with Marxs attempt to differentiate the coming proletarian revolution from previous bourgeois revolutions. The new society will be so unprecedented that attempts to apprehend it in terms of contemporary or past experience will not only fall far short of the possible reality of this future, but might easily derail the movement that will create it. He is thus attracted by metaphors of memory and forgetting. In language acquisition, he argues, beginners proceed by translating the new language back into the mother tongue, but it is only when that person forgets [vergit]4 his native tongue (Marx and Engels, 1979, 104) that fluency is possible. The old language, although still available, has to be forgotten in the use of the new. The desire to relate the new language to the old, whilst understandable, will, if continued, wreck the whole process. A leap of forgetfulness is required. Historically, at certain revolutionary moments, a reluctance to forget has been a necessary feature of social and political progress. In the definitive bourgeois revolutions the nature of the new society has been sufficiently incongruent with the aspirations of revolutionary leadership that there was a real need to misapprehend the new in terms of past experience. Cromwell hid from the unheroic bourgeois society he was creating in the heroic imagery of the Old Testament. Here, the creative forgetting of the proletarian revolution would have been fatally demoralising. Once established, however, bourgeois society becomes forgetful of its heroic origins, as it must do if it is to carry out the prosaic functions of this mode of production. In the case of France, it could no longer comprehend that the spectres of Roman times had kept watch over its cradle (Carver, 1996, 33) whilst the English, supplanting prophets with profits, turned from Habakkuk to Locke. In turn, Marx distinguishes the great revolutionary leaders of the past from those reactionaries, such as Louis Bonaparte, whose amnesiac ambitions address the future. These people so fear the communist future that their
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historical drapery is an attempt to make people forget the promise of socialism. They want the backward glance to efface any memory of the forward. Their annexation of past revolutionary imagery conceals a deep counter-revolutionary atavism: instead of society gaining for itself a new content, it seems that the state has merely reverted to its oldest form, to the shameless, barefaced rule of sword and cross. (ibid., 34) It is this spectre, the spectre of communism, a spectre from the future, not the past, which is said by Marx in the Manifesto of the Communist Party to be haunting contemporary Europe.5 Marx stresses the semblance of this return to the past to indicate, that just as in the great bourgeois revolutions, the deception and self-deception involved in these historical fictions cannot stop the future from knocking at the door. If that future is to become a reality, however, the proletariat needs to resist the allures of what has gone before, and embrace the unfamiliar novelty of the road ahead. It therefore cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future; it must emancipate itself from past superstition; in short, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead [mu die Toten ihre Toten begraben lassen]6 in order to realise its own content. There phrase transcended content; here content transcends phrase. (Marx and Engels, 1979, 106). It is worth bringing in Derrida at this point, for in Specters of Marx he relentlessly deconstructs Marxs confident cadences and sharp distinctions, and unearths a host of fears, evasions and contradictions.7 This is not done in a vengeful anti-Marxist manner, but in the belief that the spirit of a specific Marx should be at the heart of modern social theory. More specifically, Derridas exploration of the imagery of the spectral in Marxs work has a direct bearing on the theme of letting the dead bury their dead. For Derrida, Marx is haunted by the ghostly. Marx wants the dead to stay dead, but as his own work demonstrates, they will not rest easily in their graves. The present is alive with the ghosts of the past. Derridas own reading of the Eighteenth Brumaire involves something like a spectropolitics and a genealogy of ghosts, more precisely a patrimonial logic of the generations of ghosts (Derrida, 1994, 107) in the text. Marx is like a sorcerer who thinks he knows the movements of, and can control, the spectral. But, as in his attempt to distinguish between the spirit (Geist) of revolution, and its specter (Gespenst)(ibid.), his control collapses, for he has to admit that historically the ghostly remnants of the past have been necessary to ensure the success of bourgeois revolutions. Yet, undaunted, he believes that the proletariat really can and must let the dead bury their dead. Derrida understands Marxs yearning for the content that transcends its phrase; such a content will no longer frighten, it will not hide itself, driven back behind the bereaved rhetoric of antique models and the grimace of death masks. It will exceed the form, it will break out of the clothes, it will overtake signs, models, eloquence, mourning. (ibid., 115) In Marxs
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hands, however, this involves a rejection of inheritance: they must no longer even do that mourning work in the course of which the living maintain the dead, play dead, busy themselves with the dead, let themselves be entertained, and occupied and played or tricked by the dead, speak them and speak to them, bear their name and hold forth in their language. (ibid., 113) This is the price, Derrida argues, for Marxs self-conscious ontology of objective reality, which undermines a more fruitful, spectral hauntology also glimpsed in Marxs work. But Marx himself is now dead (and buried), and one of the ironies of this situation for Derrida is that hopes for the future, in the post-Cold War world, are kept alive by the restless spectre of one Karl Marx. His beneficial spectral presence illustrates the need for constant conversation with ghosts. This is also a matter of justice. In an echo of the great conservative writer Burke, Derrida maintains that justice cannot be restricted to just one generation. It is imperative to have respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. (ibid., xix) Ethics and politics dovetail here. The interests of the future lie in the dead receiving their due in the present; a Chinese wall between the living and the dead impoverishes all generations. More specifically: no future without Marx, without the memory and inheritance of Marx. (ibid., 13) InheritanceF this is the key issue here. What do we gain from the dead, and what are our responsibilities to them? Let us now relate the notion of inheritance in Marx to his attitude towards religion. Immediately we are struck by a certain irony: Marx deploys a language deeply marked by biblical references and quotations to argue that the religious moment has passed. The proletariat is to create its poetry from the future, but Marxs imagery is profoundly marked by the religious poetry of the past. The ancient injunction that the dead should be left to bury their dead is deemed an appropriate maxim for those who must break with the past. The young Marx recognised the fundamental importance of the ambiguous legacy of religion F it copper-fastened oppression, but did so by articulating the deepest hopes of humanity. Atheist ridicule was no match for this combination, for it merely testified to, and if anything, enhanced, the continuing strength of the phenomenon; it reminded Marx of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man (Marx and Engels, 1975a, 395) Religion had an extraordinary power that had to be acknowledged before it could be overcome; a power Marx traced to extrinsic factors, ultimately to the social structure itself. This outflanked religion by refusing to adhere to a secularist version of its rules of the game, but it left the whole phenomenon of religious experience deeply undertheorised (and in Freudian terms unmastered), thereby fostering both the shallow atheism which characterised much of later Marxism, and the analytical
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lacunae to be found in Marxs subsequent treatment of religion. In one sense Marx lost interest in religion, believing that he had the measure of it, and certainly the relative paucity of references to religion in his mature work provides evidence for this. And yet his particular strategy of putting religion firmly in its historical materialist place paradoxically deprived him of the tools and the incentive to do this job properly. Religion eluded capture. Marx is quite unequivocal that religion has no future. No transformed moment awaits it. It also has no positive inheritance. Marxs relatively sparse references to religion in history are technical and/or disparaging. Thus, the triumph of Christianity is situated in the collapse of the ancient world, and its own collapse is in turn located in the bourgeois destruction of feudalism F in both cases the derivative and functional status of religious ideas is stressed. When commenting on these ideas, Marx is usually withering in his criticism, stressing their link with oppression, and warning the proletariat to keep well away; as he wrote in 1847: the social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, dejection, in a word all the qualities of the canailley the social principles of Christianity are sneakish and the proletariat is revolutionary. (Marx and Engels, 1957, 83) Turning to the writings of Engels will not substantially alter this state of affairs. It is true that in The Peasant War in Germany, Engels contrasts Luthers religious conservatism with the religious radicalism of Mu nzer, but insofar as he is more favourable to the latter, it is in terms of Mu nzers trajectory out of religion towards atheism (ibid., 111). Engels view is thus not materially different from Marxs own stricture on this episode in German history, namely that Mu nzer had some progressive principles wrapped up in the religious and superstitious nonsense of the age. (Marx and Engels, 1975b, 400) This to Denys Turner suggests that religion is being singled out for cruel and unusual punishment F if it does good it cannot be religion F further evidenced by Marxs unwillingness to entertain a positive revolutionary role for religion; the political, the economic, the intellectual and the cultural can all be turned to revolutionary purposes, but religion is unrescuably ideological (Turner, 1991, 329).

Derrida
This provides a link with Derrida who suggests that the religious haunts Marxs work. The religious, he maintains, has a different status in Marxs mental universe to the political, economic and so forth. Like Turner, Derrida holds that there is a special link in Marxs mind between the religious and the ideological, in that the sphere of the religious is the early defining model of the ideological: The religious is thus not just one ideological phenomenon or phantomatic among othersy [I]t gives to the production of the ghost or of the ideological phantasm its originary form or its paradigm of reference, its first
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analogy (Derrida, 1994, 166). This, however, is just a preamble to the very controversial claim that a religious, messianic impulse energises Marxs project, and that this dimension, so at variance with much of the letter of Marxs output, is at the root of all that is valuable and living in Marxs heritage. As he puts it: the religiousy informs, along with the messianic and the eschatologicaly that spirit of emancipatory Marxism whose injunction we are reaffirming here, however secret and contradictory it appears (ibid., 166 167). Within the Marxist tradition there has, of course, been an extreme reluctance to explore the religious dimensions of Marxism. The overt disdain of the founders of historical materialism structured and reinforced a more general perception of the time that religion was indissolubly wedded to the obsolete. Furthermore, although no part of Derridas contention, the fact that the claim that Marxism was a religion (in terms of supposed intentions and structures), tended to be deployed by political opponents, further strengthened this resolve. Thus, it was said that Marxism was an ersatz religion that covertly, yet inadequately, drew on the powerful resources of traditional religion to bolster its fundamental weaknesses, nicely conjoining impotence and hypocrisy. The application of the word messianic to this critique helped to link Marxism to outmoded conceptions of bloody apocalypse, and to suggest (with or without racial slurs) that Marxism was merely a mutated Judaism, and Marx a secular rabbi. For many Marxists, therefore, religion threatened to pull them back into a past confidently colonised by the forces of conservatism and reaction. Here again the injunction let the dead bury their dead had obvious attractions.

Bloch
Exceptions existed: most notably, Ernst Bloch. Bloch sought to validate the rich religious heritage of humanity within a Marxist perspective.8 Religion was deemed to embody the most sublime human aspirations, aspirations which had been blocked by repressive society, and which therefore still retained their value. A critique of theism, though necessary, did not thereby involve the death of religion. Though convinced that this approach was compatible with the spirit of Marxs work, Bloch had to work hard to provide any textual basis for this perspective. Not surprisingly, the Eighteenth Brumaire was not at the forefront of Blochs attempt to fashion a useable Marxist past. In fact, Bloch seeks to draw the teeth of this text. Marxs grappling with the nightmare of historical consciousness is reduced to a mere attack on the false consciousness of the historical costumes of a Cromwell and a Robespierre, and the distinction between the poetry of the past and that of the future is transformed into one contrasting the poetic character of all previous revolutions with the sobriety of the proletarian revolution (Bloch, 1986a, 170), which is not what Marx is saying. Like Derrida, Blochs attempt to
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isolate a Marxist religious heritage involves the construction of a spirit of Marx considerably at variance with much of the explicit word of Marx. In at least one respect, it is possible to view Bloch and Derrida as exploring a common territory. This terrain Bloch calls Ungleichzeitigkeit (Bloch, 1962, 104; ite (Derrida, 1993, 16) F both 1991a, 97) and Derrida non-contemporane rendered by their English translators as non-contemporaneity. This space is also clearly visible in the Eighteenth Brumaire, where the opening section is a meditation on the complex modalities of the past in the present. Marx wishes to uncover those contemporary conditions which facilitate the gravitational pull of the historical (invented and otherwise). Bloch, on the other hand, keen to celebrate a wide range of historical surpluses, attempts to develop normative criteria for distinguishing genuine (that is revolutionary) non-contemporaneity (the gold-bearing seams of human hope) from the false non-contemporaneous dross of anachronistic dreams. In Derridas case, the non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present (Derrida, 1994, xix) enables the claims of those who are absent (both dead and unborn) to be heard. It is a sense that Marx is open to the realm of non-contemporaneity that encourages both Bloch and Derrida to maintain that an affirmation of the religious is in harmony with the spirit of Marx. This project is further facilitated by Bloch and Derridas particular conception of emancipatory religion. Marx was principally polemicising against nineteenth-century institutionalised theism. Whilst it is probable that he would have critiqued Bloch and Derridas notions on a number of grounds, it is by no means clear that he would have characterised their ideas as religious. Bloch, like Marx, unequivocally nails his colours to the mast of atheism. What remains is a meta-religion stripped of theism, but full of the rich sublimity and exalted vision which has been the living core of traditional religion F a transcending withouty transcendence (Bloch, 1986b, 1288) Derrida speaks of a messianic without messianism (Derrida, 1994, 181) to denote an openness, in the service of justice, to radical possibility, and which is distinct from the religious messianism of the past. He terms this conception quasiatheistic (ibid., 168). In contrast, the closer one gets to theism the greater is the necessity to acknowledge that this is at variance with Marxs explicit remarks on religion; thus, for example, Dalys contention (1996, 43) that philosophical theism is consistent with Marxs ideas requires the claim that while Marxs thought is atheist in fact, it is not necessarily so in principle. In short, any exploration of a possible relationship between Marxs project and theism has to register the fact that there are limits beyond which Marxs historically situated texts cannot plausibly be stretched. In this respect, Bloch and Derrida had less of a problem. Although there is no direct link between Bloch and Derrida, an indirect link is provided by Benjamin. Benjamin was undoubtedly influenced by Blochs
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early messianic socialism. In works such as Spirit of Utopia and Thomas Mu nzer as Theologian of Revolution Bloch extolled the radicalism of apocalyptic religion; there, unlike the interpretation offered by Marx and Engels, Thomas Mu nzer was valued as a radical religious thinker. Bloch and Benjamin developed a good deal of common ground in the 1920s, to the point where Benjamin would accuse Bloch of purloining his ideas. In turn, Benjamins ideas on the messianic were to provide an important resource for the development of Derridas own conception of the messianic without messianism. Although critical of aspects of Benjamins conception, and of those commentators who had sought to narrow the distance between himself and Benjamin, Derrida saw a degree of consonance between Benjamins messianic linkage of past, present and future, and his own.9 Alongside Derrida and Blochs attempt to resurrect an authentic spirit of Marx is their struggle with malign invocations of the dead Marx. In Weimar Germany, Bloch critiqued the German Communist Partys rationalistic and unhistorical disdain for the non-contemporaneous dreams of important social strata. The contemptuous refusal to engage with the religious consciousness of the peasantry, for example, impoverished the Utopian imagination of the socialist movement, and allowed the Nazis, whose social position bred great intimacy with archaic material, successfully to colonise and distort these potentially progressive hopes. The Third Reich, once the repository of the spiritual communism of the mystical Joachim of Fiore, was annexed to the hellish project of Fascism; likewise the Nazis steamed into the vacated, originally Mu nzerian regions (Bloch, 1991a, 140). For Derrida the ontological dimension in Marx, with its flight from the ghostly, created conditions in which a totalitarian inheritance of Marxs thought (Derrida, 1994, 104) emerged F as in the Stalinist phantasy of an entirely new and unproblematic society. Frederic Jameson succinctly summarises Derridas fears thus: Marxy wants to get rid of ghostsy But a world cleansed of spectrality is precisely ontology itself, a world of pure presence, of immediate density, of things without a past. (Jameson, 1999, 58) Furthermore, as Derrida has suggested in his exploration of modern religious fundamentalism, dangerous energy is released when Enlightenment modernism forces religion to adopt the weapons of its opponents. The ghosts of religion can become truly malignant (Derrida, 1998, 5253).

Conclusion
Let us therefore, for the sake of argument, go along with the opening line of the Eighteenth Brumaire F that (as Hegel nowhere observed!10) great events and characters of world history occur twice (Carver, 1996, 31) F and try to draw together this discussion of Marx, Derrida and Bloch. For some Marxists, the
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twentieth century pair provide the moment of farce, a risible attempt to put the clock back, resurrecting perspectives long buried by Marx. This is not the view of this article. Instead, the notion of historical repetition might be more fruitfully deployed in examining the nature of the Blochian and Derridean interventions. Both can be located in distinctive religious moments in twentieth century thought, moments at variance with the reductive atheism that Marx both criticised and, to an extent, espoused. Bloch was a part of an extraordinary early twentieth-century cultural renaissance in Central Europe, whose aim was to revalidate a cultural and spiritual heritage deemed to be under threat from the forces of modernity; a phenomenon Michael Lo wy calls anti-capitalist romanticism, and which he characterises (a trifle negatively) as a nostalgicyattempt at re-enchantment of the world, one of whose main aspects was a return to religion (Lo wy, 1992, 28). Though Bloch, along with cs, and a host of other Jewish radicals developed a leftist Benjamin, Luka messianism, this tendency extended across the political spectrum, such that when Bloch joined battle with Fascism there was some recognisable common territory. As the twentieth century drew to its close Derrida took his place in what one commentator has called the turn to religion in philosophy (de Vries, 1999), whose presence in Anglo-American thought was the starting point of this article. Furthermore, the religious right, sensing a loss of confidence within secularism, has pushed its own illiberal version of a return to religion, a process greatly facilitated by the inability of its opponents to contest matters on the terrain of religion. Confronted with a passage from scripture, doughty debaters are rendered speechless! It is therefore necessary to go beyond the historical antagonism between the secular and the religious, retaining all the vital gains of the secular movement, but in combination with a more nuanced approach to religion. This is not a return to religion, for the religious has been at the heart of the secular imagination, but a reconfiguration of the modern secular project. A sensitivity to the ancient voices of humanitys religious heritage, as part of an adventurous and forward-looking pluralism, is very different from the dystopian golden age of the fundamentalists. In post-secular time, therefore, the dead must get their due, for as that great critic of ahistoricist currents in the Enlightenment, Edmund Burke, noted: an authentic social contract is a partnershipy between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born (Burke, 1969, 194195).

Notes
1 I would like to thank the following for their comments on earlier drafts: Yves Le Juen, Moya Lloyd, Iain MacKenzie, Shane ONeill, and the two anonymous reviewers of Contemporary Political Theory.
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17 2 In this article, I have used both the Lawrence and Wishart translation (1979) and Carvers (1996) translation of the Eighteenth Brumaire. 3 I discuss post-secularism further in Geoghegan (2000). For a variety of uses of the term postsecular see: Martin (1996), Blond (1998) and Caputo (2001). Martin notes an early usage of the term post-secular in Emil Fackenheims (1970) text Gods Presence in History. 4 See Marx and Engels (1977, 226). 5 Derrida (1994, 101) recognises the different nature of the Manifesto spectre. It is not the return of the dead, but a call for a presence to come. 6 See Marx and Engels (1977, 228). 7 For some of the critical literature on Derridas reading of Marx see: the collection of responses gathered in Sprinker (ed.) (1999); also specific sections in: Caputo (1997), Carver (1998) and Critchley (1999). 8 I give a more detailed reading of Blochs religious thought in Geoghegan (2001). 9 Benjamin, incidentally, was clearly intrigued by a degree of convergence between Poe and Marx in a passage in the Eighteenth Brumaire where Marx claimed that Americans had neither time nor opportunity for abolishing the old spirit world; Benjamin noted: Americas spirit world enters into the description of the crowd in Poey It is remarkable that Marx invokes the world of spirits to help explain the American republic. (Benjamin, 1999, 358). A more tenuous link between Bloch and Derrida is provided by Levinas. Levinas (1986) wrote a very appreciative essay on Bloch, whilst Derridas high regard for Levinas is well attested. 10 Assiduous burrowing by the editors of the Collected Works has unearthed a passage in Hegels Philosophy of History as a possible (if problematic) source for Marxs (or Engels) recollection. Hegel is making the less ambitious claim that in all periods of the world a political revolution is sanctioned in mens opinions, when it repeats itself. Thus Napoleon was twice defeated, and the Bourbons twice expelled. (Hegel, 1956, 313; Marx and Engels, 1979, 643). I have benefited from Terrell Carvers discussion of this point in Imagery/Writing, Imagination/Politics: Reading Marx through the Eighteenth Brumaire (forthcoming).

References
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Vincent Geoghegan Let the Dead Bury their Dead

18 Cohen, G.A. (2000) If Youre an Egalitarian, How Come Youre So Rich, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 233pp. Connolly, W.E. (1999) Why I am Not a Secularist, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 210pp. Critchley, S. (1999) EthicsPoliticsSubjectivity, London: Verso, 302pp. Daly, J. (1996) Marx: Justice and Dialectic, London: Greenwich Exchange, 144pp. Davies, W.D. and Allison Jr D.C. (1991) A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on The Gospel According to Saint Matthew: Commentary on Matthew VIIIXVIII, Vol. II, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 807pp. de Vries, H. (1999) Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 475pp. e, 279pp. Derrida, J. (1993) Spectres de Marx, Paris: Galile Derrida, J. (1994) Specters of Marx, London: Routledge, 198pp. Derrida, J. (1998), Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone, in J. Derrida and G. Vattimo (eds.) Religion, Polity: Oxford, pp. 178. Geoghegan, V. (2000) Religious narrative, post-secularism and Utopia, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 3: 205224. Geoghegan, V. (2001) Ernst Bloch: Postsecular Thoughts, in L. Wilde (ed.) Marxisms Ethical Thinkers, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 5170. Hegel, G.W.F. (1956) The Philosophy of History, New York: Dover Publications, 457pp. Jameson, F. (1999) Marxs Purloined Letter, in Sprinker (ed.) Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx, London: Verso, pp. 2667. Keane, J. (2000) Secularism?, in D. Marquand and R.L. Nettler (eds.) Religion and Democracy, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 519. Levinas, E. (1986) On Death in the Thought of Ernst Bloch, in E. Levinas (ed.) Of God Who Comes To Mind, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 211pp. Lo wy, M. (1992) Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe, A Study in Elective Affinity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 276pp. Martin, B. (1996) Politics in the Impasse: Explorations in Postsecular Social Theory, Albany: State University of New York Press, 300pp. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1957) On Religion, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 379pp. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1975a) Collected Works, Vol. 1, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 806pp. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1975b) Collected Works, Vol. 3, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 670pp. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1976) Collected Works, Vol. 5, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 661pp. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1977) Ausgewa hlte Schriften, Bd. I, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 761pp. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1979) Collected Works, Vol. 11, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 769pp. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1982) Collected Works, Vol. 38, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 712pp. Prawer, S.S. (1976) Karl Marx and World Literature, Oxford: Clarendon, 446pp. Rawls, J. (1999) Commonweal Interview with John Rawls, in J. Rawls (ed.) Collected Papers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 616622. Sprinker, M. (ed.) (1999) Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx, London: Verso, 278pp. Taylor, C. (1999) A Catholic Modernity?, in J.L. Heft (ed.) A Catholic Modernity?, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1337. Turner, D. (1991) Religion: Illusions and Liberation, in T. Carver (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 320337. Wheen, F. (1999) Karl Marx, London: Fourth Estate, 431pp.

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