[D66] The Deaths of Margaret Thatcher: Between Spectre and Event

[Nord]

    The Deaths of Margaret Thatcher: Between Spectre and Event

Given that a/revenant/is always called upon to come and to come back, 
the thinking of the specter, contrary to what good sense leads us to 
believe, signals toward the future. It is a thinking of the past, a 
legacy that can come only from that which has not yet arrived—from 
the/arrivant/itself.

Jacques Derrida,/Specters of Marx/(p.245, note 39).



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Derrida works with a few concepts in/Specters of Marx/which will become 
important here, in an article which will attempt to fathom the/deaths/– 
to borrow the term (again from Derrida) – of Margaret 
Thatcher./Conjuration/,/Event/, and/Spectre/(and Derrida 
distinguishes/spectre/from/spirit/, a concept which might be highlighted 
by the invocation of a/certain spirit/, such as the obitural spirit 
ofHunter S. Thompson 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/>, 
for example…).

First,/conjuration/; conjuring, to conjure. There are the senses in this 
word of/conjuring away/and/conjuring up/, and they are necessarily 
linked; inextricable, even. One cannot proceed without the other, not in 
this political climate at least; to try to/conjure away/Thatcherism – 
and that’s what right-minded, left-thinking critics have been trying to 
do since Stuart Hall gave us the word – is, now,/necessarily/also 
to/conjure it up/. To conjure up its spectre that is haunting all 
subsequent governmental policy; that haunts/in,//through/, 
and/by/Thatcher’s children, bearing the signs of/inheritance/in the 
deepest sense (‘being-with specters[:] a/politics/of memory, of 
inheritance and of generations’ – ibid. p.xviii). In this way, the 
deaths of Thatcher – from her exeunt from office to passing from life – 
are, and have always been, spectral. As we know, a spectre haunts – a 
spectre is haunting the UK –/and that spectre is Thatcherism/. It’s not 
a/legacy/, it’s the/demonic/: a/spectrality/.

Second, the/event/of Thatcher was/change/in the political scene, but 
change in the most/conservative/sense, so we won’t evoke Alain Badiou, 
but Derrida’s thesis on the ghostly again. This is the/event/as the 
‘question of the ghost […] the event itself, a first time is a last 
time. Altogether other. Staging for the end of history. Let us call it 
a/hauntology/’ (p.10). Derrida is here citing Francis Fukuyama who uses 
Hegel’s phrase, ‘the end of history’, to beckon in the 
capitalist-liberalist utopia in the early 1990s; the best of all 
possible worlds. But of course it wasn’t, and Fukuyama has even reneged 
somewhat since. But Thatcher didn’t, hasn’t, would never; she claimed 
her greatest achievement was Tony Blair and New Labour, that is, to have 
(re)made the opposition in her own image, to have/changed/their minds so 
as to have/conserved/her mind-set. The/event/of Thatcher/is/the question 
of the ghost – the real/enemy within/– the question of what she created, 
and what has been retained; a true/hauntology/: Thatcherism; its definition.

And last, the/spectre/itself: it comes and comes back. When Thatcher 
‘/personified/’ the country – calling its workers, its people, the/enemy 
within/, and getting their blood on her hands, as well as the crew of 
the/Belgrano/’s; in nailing the coffin of industry shut; in teaing with 
Augusto Pinochet and denouncing Nelson Mandela; and in looking on as 
reaction to stringent sus laws (stop and search) and the homophobic 
attitude that led to Section 28 boiled over into riotous eruptions – it 
was as a/spectre/that she did. She/did not/personify the/spirit/of the 
country, of its people, of its/society/; she did not even believe there 
was such a thing, and the ghost of that disbelief is its bloated 
simulacrum, the ‘/big Society/’: inflation.

These are the spectres that live on after Thatcher is buried, and they 
are the hatchet that won’t be buried with her. Official Britain might 
not find the jubilation at Thatcher’s passing tasteful, but that 
indicates little more than differences between home and foreign policy. 
The deaths of Margaret Thatcher are the haunting melodies that have been 
with us for years: from the music of Crass, Elvis Costello and Billy 
Bragg to that of Morrissey, Mogwai and NOFX, amongst countless others; 
in the wish-fulfilment of a/strike/over a/stroke/. This death is only 
the stark reminder of for whom the bell really tolls, and that 
toll/will/celebrate its dead, its casualties, and its survivors. The 
Tories may have waited for the veil of death to have explicitly heaped 
their praises from under, but they are being assured now that such a 
veil is not a bulletproof vest. Further, in terms of taste, the idea 
that a leopard changes or loses its spots because of old age or 
infirmity beckons rather a profound reflection on amnesia, or aphasia 
(work to be done another time) than one on the past which haunts our 
future, and from which we can only hope for the arrival of a 
true/legacy/; an exorcism.


http://everydayanalysis.tumblr.com/day/2013/04/10/

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