Derrida insists on highly tendentious translations from the German and generally does whatever the hell he feels like with Marx. This did not make me happy.

i really want to read this whole thing.

the love/hate relationship with Derrida continues, entering his universe is both the most mesmerizing and intriguing thing together with being the most frustrating and drawn out task at the same time

Yeah this needs several rereads.

"to this extent, 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 mesianic 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. awaiting wihout horizon of the weight, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longe, hospitality without reserve [...] just opening which renounces any right to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event that cannot be awaited as such, or recognized in advance therefore, to the event as the foreigner itself, to her or to him for whom one must leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hope--and this is the very place of spectrality"

I like referring to reading empiricists and analytic philosophers as pulling teeth or eating your vegetables or whatever, but reading this really made me want to not read philosophy. Nice

I think the ontological/epistemological/linguistic point that an entity carries with itself, or means nothing without, the implications of its own origin and end (the spectrality that accompanies a body, and so on) ... this point that's being made in every paragraph of this book is made better in Deleuze. and the point that an entity is itself empty, or more accurately spectral in its actual being, is also better made in Deleuze (because of his Humean influence, in the emptiness; and because of his Nietzschean influence (which Derrida shares), in the simulacrum of appearance). I should sound like a broken record here because I really like Deleuze.

I think that these points motivate the whole puppet play about Hamlet and Marx and Stirner and so forth. And that's fine, and that's fun, but it's grating in that the paragraphs are so circular. The sentences, even, are each given 18 bonus words where Derrida is playing with the pitch of his meaning. And that's fine, and that's fun, but it's not what I usually call great.

basically I now know more trivia about Marx? but we can talk about "trivia" if we're gonna talk about words...