Derrida, Closet Platonist

In Specters of Marxism, Derrida advocates a strongly eschatological Marxism but without committing himself to the specifics of a Marxist analysis of capitalism (must as he advocates a “messianism without messiah”). In both cases, he reaches for a formal structure without content, deliberately, because “content is always deconstructible.” Further, any time there’s flesh on dem bones, one has to make choices, which means excluding options. This, Derrida thinks, violates the fundamental principle of ethics, which is unconditional, infinite hospitality and welcome. To remain open to the alterity of the future requires that we don’t have a what James Smith calls a “particular, determinate horizon of expectation.”

Here we have a horizontal Platonism, the abstract and contentless form of the Good found not in the intelligible realm above but in the realm of justice that is always arriving but never arrived just over the horizon.