In Specters of Marx, written with the dust still settling after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jacques Derrida positioned Marxism as an unsurpassable horizon of emancipation. Freed of science, political programmes and painstaking organisational efforts, for Derrida what was left of Marxism after the end of really existing socialism was a crystalline utopian promise. History had little part to play in this messianic calling. It required faith in an ‘ultimate event (immediate rupture, unheard-of interruption, untimeliness of the infinite surprise, heterogeneity without accomplishment) [which] can exceed, at each moment, the final term of a phusis, such as work, the production, and the telos of any history’ (Derrida 2006: 45). Attempting a rapprochement between Marxism and the new ethical sensibilities of the post-Cold War era, Derrida implores Marxism to abandon its science of history and make the leap to thinking change as the result of singular and contingent events. No meaning, no purpose, no reason should persist. History should be traded in for event, without remainder.

Some readers might be persuaded to concur with Derrida. What is to be gained, it may be asked, from clinging on to the seemingly petrified idea of a science of history? Is not the notion of a science of history wedded to a totalising hubris we long ago learned to be wary of? Is not the lasting message of poststructuralist critiques of these grand narratives that they cast over us an intoxicating spell of mastery when in truth, as everyone from bond traders to philo-sophical savants can vouch for, history is but a meaningless jumble of capricious ‘black swan’ (Taleb 2008) events? Are not philosophies of the event precisely attuned to heightening our sensitivity to the unpredictable, irrational moments of rupture in contrast to the Marxist longue durée in which reason weaves its way through history on the side of the forces of emancipation? Is not, finally, the moral of this intellectual shift that we have to make a choice: either to remain committed to the untenable historicism of Marxism, sacrificing events at the altar of the historical process, or to embrace the contemporary eventalisms which alone can think singularity, contingency and genuine novelty?