The law of hospitality is what lies at the core of Derrida's reading of Marx: it is the quasi-transcendental idea which is traced through concepts of "democracy to come", "inoperative community" and "revolutionary promise" which are expounded in Spectres of Marx. Derrida's initial approach to the question of inheriting Marx's ideas, an approach which he briefly sketched in Positions in the early 1970s, is to regard his texts as a provocation to "transformative reading": for in so far as the The Grundrisse and The Communist Manifesto depict capitalism as an open system which constantly exceeds its contemporary limitations, the critique of capital must evolve beyond the categories (the labour theory of value, the primacy of class antagonisms, the immanence of socialized production, etc.) which have become sacred to the Marxist canon (Derrida, 1980: 63). For Derrida, in other words, our inheritance of Marx ought to be informed by the statute of limitations which he put on his own writing (Derrida, 1994: 13); for if it is the case that the possibility of the M-C-M relation depends upon its ability to transform the techno-scientific and ideological conditions of its reproduction, then the critique of the commodity form must always question the adequacy of its powers of ethical and political representation. The possibility of such a non-iterative response to the machinic operations of capital, operations which have come to encompass the entire physical, affective, and spiritual life of Man, is given through the figure of the other: the spectral body which haunts the operational languages, corporate networks and virtual accumulations through which the world has become capitalized.