“The time is out of joint”: time is disarticulated, dislocated, dislodged, time is run down, on the run and run down, deranged, both out of order, and mad. “The time is out of joint.” Theatrical speech, Hamlet’s speech, Hamlet’s speech before the theater o f the world, of history, and of politics. The age is off its hinges. Everything, beginning with time, seems out of kilter, unjust, dis-adjusted. The world is going very badly, it wears as it grows, as the Painter also says at the beginning of Timon of Athens (which is Marx’s play, is it not). For, this time, it is a painter’s speech, as if he were speaking of a spectacle or before a tableau: “How goes the world? It wears, sir, as it grows”.
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. It is an untimley link, without status, without title, and without name, barely public even if not clandestine, without contract, “out of joint”, without coordination, without party, without country, without national community (International before, across, and beyond any national determination), without co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class. The name of new International is given here to what calls to the friendship of an alliance without institution among those who, even if they no longer believe or never believed in the socialist-Marxist International, in the dictatorship of the propletariat, in the messiano-eschatological role of the universal union of the proletarians of all lands, continue to be inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx or of Marxism (they now know that there is more than one ) and in order to ally themselves, in a new, concrete, and real way, even if this alliance no longer takes the form of a party or of a workers’ international, but rather of a kind of counter-conjuration, in the (theoretical and practical) critique of the state of international law, the concepts of State and nation, and so forth: in order to renew this critique, and especially to radicalize it.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. The State of Debt , the Work of Mourning, & the New International. London – New York : Routledge, 1994