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What's to Become of "Democracy to Come"?
Alex Thomson
University of Glasgow
A.Thomson@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk
(c) 2005 Alex Thomson.
All rights reserved.
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There is something of a rogue state in every state. The use of
state power is /originally/ excessive and abusive.
--Jacques Derrida, Rogues 156
1. Faced with an apparently inevitable and overwhelming victory for
the Islamist /Front Islamique du Salut/ party, and following the
resignation of President Chadli on 11 January 1992, democratic
government in Algeria was dissolved between the first and second
round of elections, to be replaced by military rule. Jacques
Derrida draws our attention to these events in the third chapter
of "The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States?)" (2002),
the first of two texts collected in Rogues (2003).[1 <#foot1>]
Derrida does not go into any great detail about the event, whose
interpretation is extremely complex: neither Chadli, nor the
ruling /Front de Libèration Nationale/, nor the Islamist party
that looked set to gain nearly seventy-five percent of the
available parliamentary seats with the support of barely a quarter
of the electorate could have formed what might be comfortably
described as a legitimate government (Roberts 105-24). But
Derrida's attention is elsewhere, concerned not so much with the
specific history of his homeland as with what it might tell us
about the idea of democracy itself. This is an example, he
suggests, of a suicidal possibility inherent in democracy. Derrida
appears to mean this in two senses. First, it highlights a risk to
which a democracy is always exposed: the apparently suicidal
political openness that allows that a party hostile to democracy
might be legitimately elected. (Derrida acknowledges that this is
itself a matter of interpretation, noting "the rise of an Islamism
/considered/ to be anti-democratic" [Rogues 31, emphasis added].[2
<#foot2>]) Second, that democracy may interrupt itself in order to
seek to preserve itself: a suicide to prevent a murder. In either
sense, this seems to be both a threatening and unsettling way to
describe any political regime. Moreover, a stress on the end of
democracy would appear to be at odds with the emphasis on its
future that had previously characterized Derrida's political
writing, pithily encapsulated in a phrase borrowed for the title
of the Cerisy conference at which this troubling essay was first
presented: "democracy to come." Disentangling this puzzle means
posing a question that is crucial for the political future of
deconstruction: in the final years of his life, did Derrida change
his stance on the relationship he had asserted so memorably in
Politics of Friendship: "no deconstruction without democracy, no
democracy without deconstruction" (105)?
I
2. Derrida's account of suicidal democracy is closely linked in
Rogues to the idea of "autoimmunity," a figure introduced into
Derrida's long essay on religion, "Faith and Knowledge: the Two
Sources of 'Religion' at the Limits of Reason Alone" (1995), and
given its fullest development in his post-9/11 interview with
Giovanna Borradori, "Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides"
(2001). Autoimmunity is a term used in the biomedical sciences to
describe a phenomenon in which a body's immune system turns on its
own cells, effectively destroying itself from within. Autoimmunity
is a feature of /every/ immune system: although it is usually
harmless, there is no defense system that is not threatened by the
possibility of such a malfunction. To give a preliminary idea of
how Derrida links autoimmunity and democracy, it seems clear that
he wants to describe a threat to democracy that comes from
/within/ rather than from without. Or in more florid terms,
democracy always carries within itself the seeds of its own
destruction.
3. In the interview with Borradori, Derrida describes "autoimmunity"
as "that strange behaviour where a living being, in
quasi-/suicidal/ fashion, 'itself' works to destroy its 'own'
immunity, to immunize itself /against/ its own protection"
("Autoimmunity" 94). The immune system defends a body against
external threats, but depends for its effectiveness on, at the
very least, the ability to distinguish self from other, the body
it protects from the outside. Autoimmunity is the always-possible
failure of such a system to distinguish what it protects from what
it protects against. Deconstruction, which focuses on the
impossibility of ever finally distinguishing between what lies
within and without any limit, might find a figure here for what is
interesting about the formation of any identity. However, Derrida
is not exact about its use, and I am not entirely convinced it is
possible to reconcile the different uses to which it is put in the
three major published texts in which it appears. I think it fair
to say that the translation of the idea of autoimmunity from a
biomedical to a philosophico-political discourse infects it with a
certain amount of ambiguity. It will help to recapitulate the two
earlier discussions.
4. In "Faith and Knowledge," Derrida proposes "autoimmunity" as a way
of thinking about the relation between religion and technological
modernity. On the one hand, religions make use of radio,
television, the media--all the advantages given them by the
communications technologies of advanced industrial society; on the
other hand, religion protests against those /same/ developments,
which seem to threaten its authority, its established traditions,
or its power. Religion makes use of that which threatens it, in
order to develop and survive; so the means of its survival is
simultaneously the risk of its destruction: "it conducts a
terrible war against that which gives it this new power only at
the cost of dislodging it from all its proper places, /in truth
from place itself/, from the /taking-place/ of its truth. It
conducts a terrible war against that which protects it only by
threatening it, according to this double and contradictory
structure: immunitary and auto-immunitary" ("Faith" 46). The
autoimmune and immune reactions endlessly circulate: a religion
lives and prospers only to the extent that its autoimmune systems
can repress its reaction against the modern world from which it
tends to isolate itself. Derrida extends this autoimmunitary
economy to community as such, a concept of which he has always
been suspicious (e.g. Politics 298), to suggest its tendency to
close in on itself, to exclude that outside on which it depends
for its survival. This tendency is not a perversion of proper
community (whether inoperative, unavowable, or coming, as for
Blanchot, Nancy, Agamben), but the condition of its existence: "no
community that would not cultivate its own auto-immunity, a
principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of
self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact). .
. . This self-contesting attestation keeps the auto-immune
community alive, which is to say, open to something other and more
than itself" ("Faith" 51).
5. In our second source, his interview with Giovanni Borradora,
Derrida underscores the "terrifying" quality of the autoimmunitary
process: that "my vulnerability is . . . without limit" before
"the worst threat," that which comes from the inside
("Autoimmunity" 188n7). This is developed in three forms. First,
9/11 itself should not be seen as an attack coming simply from
without, but from within. Alongside America's unprecedented and
apparently unthreatened status as a world power comes its massive
exposure to such attacks, through the concentrations of symbolic
and actual power in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and
the easy availability of the means to conduct such an attack.
Moreover this is not an attack from an external enemy, but from a
former ally, and so takes place within a process initiated by the
Americans when they armed bin Laden and his followers. Second,
Derrida diagnoses something like a post-Cold War world order in
which international terrorism replaces competition between power
blocs as the major threat to the world system: a threat grounded
in the possible repetition of such traumatic events. Third,
Derrida expands the idea of autoimmunitary reactions to be
regarded as something like an historical law: "repression in both
its psychoanalytical sense and its political sense--whether it be
through the police, the military, or the economy--ends up
producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks
to disarm" (99). Derrida will argue in Rogues that no enemy of
democracy can refuse to call himself a democrat; similarly "every
terrorist in the world claims to be responding in self-defence to
a prior terrorism on the part of the state, one that simply went
by other names and covered itself with all sorts of more or less
credible justifications" (103). In "Faith and Knowledge," the
autoimmune is what keeps religion, or community, alive, a virtuous
if dangerous principle of contamination by and exposure to the
world; to be wholly immune would be the closure of the system, or
of the body, to the outside. If this remains Derrida's model, the
American attacks on Afghanistan and on Iraq, for example, would be
examples of an autoimmune process that, in engaging the United
States in the world, exposing it to the world, suppresses the
immunitary response (some kind of retreat to isolationism), and
prolongs the cycle of violence, repression, and reaction.
6. In Rogues, Derrida develops his discussion of autoimmunity out of
the Algerian example I have cited. He reads the history of
colonial and postcolonial Algeria in terms of a similar cycle of
repression and reaction: a colonial power which denies democratic
government to its dependent territory provokes a war which can
best be seen as internal, rather than a war with an enemy power,
as the political consequences in France certainly indicated;
subsequently the postcolonial state is forced to suspend its own
democratization process to protect not only its own control but
the principle of democracy itself against the internal enemies it
has managed to provoke in the aftermath of independence. It
becomes hard to tell whether this action is that of the immune
system--a defense against a threat to democracy, as the opponents
of the Islamists might claim--or whether democracy's suicide is an
autoimmune reaction--another step in the existence of democracy, a
slow self-destruction. Derrida suggests that the two are fairly
indistinguishable: "murder was already turning into suicide, and
the suicide, as always, let itself be translated into murder"
(Rogues 59). This suggests that Derrida is not terribly concerned
to differentiate between the immune and the autoimmune, and
accounts for his use of the term "autoimmunitary" to refer to both
processes as if they were a single phenomenon whose pervertibility
or malfunction is regularly and critically indistinguishable from
its proper purpose.
II
7. Does the extension of the idea of the autoimmunitary from religion
in "Faith and Knowledge" to his account of democracy by the time
of Rogues constitute a significant alteration of Derrida's earlier
understanding of "democracy to come"? If we were to seek
confirmation that Derrida is challenging us to examine his use of
the concept of democracy, we need only look to comments he makes
immediately after citing the Algerian example. As a way of making
the outlandish notion of democratic suicide seem more familiar, he
draws a comparison between the cancelled Algerian election and the
French presidential election of 2002, the year in which his paper
was first given: "Imagine that, in France, with the National Front
threatening to pull off an electoral victory, the election was
suspended after the first round, that is, between the two rounds"
(Rogues 30). The possibility of a Le Pen presidency underlines the
ever-present threat of the legitimate democratic election of an
anti-democratic candidate. This becomes something like a general
principle of democratic systems: "the great question of modern
parliamentary and representative democracy, perhaps of all
democracy, . . . is that the /alternative to/ democracy can always
be /represented/ as a democratic /alternation/" (30-1). The virtue
of democracy, that opening to the future which leaves it open to
change, institutionalized as the possibility of competing parties
taking turns, exposes it in turn to the risk of destruction by the
electoral institution of those who seek to suspend or restrict
democracy. It is worth bearing in mind that Derrida rarely uses
"democracy" to mean simply a particular form of government, but
more often to suggest a whole political culture: equality, rights,
freedom of speech, protection of minorities from majority oppression.
8. A further implication is that today both friends and enemies of
democracy will present themselves as having impeccable democratic
credentials. One of Derrida's interests in Rogues is the apparent
hegemony of the democratic itself; as he comments, even "Le Pen
and his followers now present themselves as respectable and
irreproachable democrats" (Rogues 30). Only a passing acquaintance
with contemporary political trends in Britain suggests that this
might be more than an exceptional problem, but a commonplace. It
is not only the perma-tanned populist demagogue or the
single-issue party that seeks to short-circuit established
democratic decision-making procedures (although they may /always
also/ be the vehicle for a legitimate democratic response on
behalf of an excluded group). An elected administration with a
parliamentary majority but an increasingly centralized cabinet
government may well be judged a threat to democracy even before
the introduction of legislation which contravenes particular
democratic principles (but always in the name of the opinions of
the people, or the security of the state). The implication we
might take from Derrida's allusion to this problem is that
responsible citizenship must mean (at the very least)
interrogating all those who present themselves as democrats. They
may always turn out to be /voyous/--rogues.
9. This poses a challenge, in turn, for Derrida's audience. For after
all, Derrida appears before us today, as he has done for a while,
as a democrat. Derrida begins his address in "The Reason of the
Strongest" with the idiomatics of /voyou/, but also by drawing our
attention to the possibility that he too, is /voyou/. Derrida
recalls his earlier words directly: "I would thus be, you might
think, not only '/voyou/' but 'a /voyou/,' a real rogue" (Rogues
1; 78-9). It is up to us to say; Derrida stresses that the word
/voyou/ is never neutral, but always a performative judgment, an
accusation, or an interpellation. To judge someone to be /voyou/
is to place them outside the law and to ally yourself with the law
(64-5). The possibility that a democrat is really a rogue reflects
a "troubling indissociability" between the two, in part because
the word's provenance in the nineteenth century associates it with
the threat of the /demos/, of the people at large, as it is
largely used to stigmatize a specifically modern, urban
population, perceived as a mobile, anarchic threat to bourgeois
order (66-7). The /voyou/ belongs among the spectres not only of a
specifically revolutionary or simply despised class, but also of
populism, which Benjamin Arditi helpfully describes as an
"internal periphery" of democracy. Or in Derrida's terms:
"Demagogues sometimes denounce /voyous/, but they also often
appeal to them, in the popular style of populism, always at the
indecidable limit between the demagogic and the democratic" (67).
If Derrida might turn out to have been merely a rogue, no true
friend of democracy, that must be an inexorable condition of his
own appeal to "democracy to come." In Rogues he exhibits this
undecidability, flaunting the necessary possibility that
"democracy to come" might also turn out to be merely a verbal
conjuring trick, mere politics in the pejorative sense. What is at
stake in reading and responding to Derrida's apparent revision of
his account of democracy is the status of political interest in
deconstruction, what Derrida argues is not a "/political turn/"
within deconstruction but has always been there as the question of
"the thinking of différance as always [a] thinking /of/ the
political, especially around the enigma or the autoimmune /double
bind/ of the democratic" (39).
III
10. Evaluating the place of "democracy to come" in Derrida's work
prior to Rogues is itself a challenging task. Since my conclusions
on the subject can be found at greater length in Deconstruction
and Democracy, here I will give an account of Derrida's use of the
term "democracy" that may allow us to judge whether his
presentation of the relationship between deconstruction and
democracy changes over time. (Since this essay takes into account
texts which were not available to me in 2001, when the bulk of
Democracy and Deconstruction was written, it may be read in part
as an attempt at self-criticism, in the light of what may now be
called, with regret, Derrida's last writings. It is also a work of
mourning.) Such an explication is made more difficult by Derrida's
refusal to define definitively what he understands by the word
"democracy," and his tendency to approach the subject from
entirely different angles in individual texts. In Politics of
Friendship, the most extensive treatment of these questions,
democracy is primarily analyzed in terms of the relationship
between fraternity and equality in the Western tradition of
political thought; but in other texts, for example in "Passions"
(1992), Derrida appears to suggest a more historical approach,
tying the development of Western liberal democracy to
institutional and legal developments, and particularly to the idea
of literature.
11. Derrida's hesitation about defining democracy also testifies to a
certain tension or torsion within democracy itself, beginning with
the problem of the word "democracy." This is not simply a matter
of distinguishing between democrat and rogue, or between a
democratic state and a rogue state. Indeed it might begin with the
question of whether we approach democracy as a word, rather than
as a concept. If we had a clear definition of democracy, many of
the difficulties in which Derrida is interested would disappear:
we would have fixed criteria against which an individual or a
state could be judged and declared democratic or not. Derrida does
not even begin to speculate on whether such a set of criteria
could be reasonably secured. This is not out of a desire for
obfuscation or obscurity, but out of the conviction that such
criteria would be inadequate to the futurity of democracy, to its
openness, in which lies both its promise and its risk, its chance
and its danger. All of that, indeed, which Derrida wishes to
underline in his use of the phrase "democracy /à venir/ ": usually
translated as "democracy to come," but in which we hear /avenir/,
"future." So Derrida never says quite what he means when he uses
the word democracy, nor when he intervenes in the name of
"democracy to come." Indeed, as he suggests in "The Reason of the
Strongest," he may not always have been entirely serious in his
use of the phrase: "I have most often used it, always in passing,
with as much stubborn determination as indeterminate
hesitation--at once calculated and culpable--in a strange mixture
of lightness and gravity, in a casual and cursory, indeed somewhat
irresponsible, way, with a somewhat sententious and aphoristic
reserve that leaves seriously in reserve an excessive
responsibility" (Rogues 81).
12. This may go some way to account for the confusion or bemusement
with which Derrida's political work has been greeted. Since the
late 1980s, it has no longer been possible for readers of Derrida
to accuse him of a failure to explain the political dimension of
deconstruction, a demand that had been clearly evident as long ago
as the interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta
entitled "Positions" (1971). In his written texts and numerous
interviews, Derrida has addressed an extensive range of specific
political concerns, including nationalism, religious
fundamentalism, cosmopolitanism in international affairs, the
United Nations, immigration, and the idea of Europe and its place
in world affairs, while more theoretical work has revolved around
the concepts of decision, responsibility, justice, and
hospitality. But where Derrida was once berated for failing to
address political questions, new concerns have arisen among those
following the development of his work. There has been a tendency
to assimilate Derrida's work to that of Levinas, despite the fact
that a careful reading of texts such as "A Word of Welcome" (1996)
will show that there has been no significant alteration in
Derrida's position on Levinas since his first criticisms in
"Violence and Metaphysics" (1964).[3 <#foot3>] In turn this has
led to the charge that Derrida has offered only "a politics of the
ineffable" (McCarthy 115). Even writers sympathetic to Derrida
have called for a political supplement to deconstruction such as
might be found in the work of Laclau and Mouffe (Critchley 283).
Slavoj Žižek speaks for many of Derrida's critics when he suggests
that Derrida's actual political commitments are those of a
concerned western European liberal, while his political theory
amounts to a "melancholic post-secular" lament for the
impossibility of politics (664-65). Derrida's account of
"democracy to come" seems to leave him open to attack from both
sides. For self-proclaimed radicals, his work is too close to the
liberal tradition, reformist rather than revolutionary. For many
liberals, and particularly for the discursive democrats influenced
more by the work of Jürgen Habermas, Derrida's political writings
are still too abstract, too vague, and remain divorced from
everyday politics. In Deconstruction and Democracy I have tried to
show that these concerns are misconceived and to substantiate
Derrida's claim that deconstruction is not best understood as a
theory or a method--that is, as a political program--but as a
description of "what happens." As a project of political analysis,
deconstruction is first and foremost a sensitivity or patient
attention to upheavals and disruptions already underway. From this
perspective, we should be able to see deconstruction,
/différance/, an opening to a future which cannot be predicted or
determined, in any political regime: by renaming this ungrounding
of politics "democracy to come" Derrida is countersigning a
political dimension which has been implicit in his work from its
very beginning.
IV
13. Most of the arguments Derrida attaches to the idea of "democracy
to come" are not particularly new in his work, but it is their
elaboration in terms of democracy which is original. In Politics
of Friendship (1989-90/1994), which contains its most extensive
discussion prior to Voyous, "democracy to come" functions as a
substitute for what Derrida more consistently calls justice.[4
<#foot4>] The book as a whole investigates the traditional
association of democracy with equality, manifest in the recurrent
figure of fraternity in political philosophy. Democracy is
distinguished from other forms of political association by analogy
with the non-hierarchical friendship between brothers. However
Derrida rewrites this equation in a startling manner. Brotherhood
betrays rather than confirms democratic equality. This does not
mean singling out good and bad instances of democratic theories
and polities. There is no democracy, Derrida argues, which will
not overwrite friendship with brotherhood. Friendship in this
schema stands for the possibility of befriending just anyone,
brotherhood for an established relation with particular friends.
As soon as I have determined friends, I owe them something; they
become my brothers, and my obligations to them appear natural, or
programmed. Such a programming cancels the very possibility of
responsibility for Derrida, just as brotherhood cancels equality
by virtue of being a /preferring/ of some others to other others.
14. It is important to stress that for Derrida friendship and
fraternity are inseparable, because this highlights the power, but
also perhaps the limits, of Derrida's analysis of democracy.
Fraternity is naturalized friendship, analogous to "nationality"
as a bond between citizens which claims to be natural, automatic,
unquestionable. Deconstruction, which is above all,
denaturalization, insists that the idea of brotherhood, as of the
nation, obscures particular political decisions. Friendship, which
prefers, cannot help becoming brotherhood. Similarly, democracy,
which embodies an appeal to equality, can never live up to its
name. As soon as a state prefers its citizens, even in so minimal
a way as by naming and counting them as its citizens, democracy is
being blocked or cancelled. All the more or less evident
restrictions of equality within a so-called democracy (the /de
facto/ or /de jure/ inequality of women, of the poor, of
minorities, of minors, of strangers tolerated only according to a
limited hospitality) can and must be criticized in the name of
democracy, judged and found wanting against the principle of
equality. But any and every democracy will also always be found
wanting because it must refer to a bounded territory or a limited
population, because it must be constituted by a decision as to who
is and who is not to count as "equal" in principle in this state.
Derrida extends the analysis to the principle of equality itself,
which can never do justice to the irreducible singularity of those
counted as citizens--but without which there could be no laws, and
no possibility of legal justice in the first place.
15. A similar double bind occurs in a discussion of democracy in
relation to freedom of speech. In "Passions," Derrida associates
deconstruction with literature and literature with democracy. The
right to say anything, the idea of literature, and the freedom of
speech guaranteed in liberal democracy in its modern form are all
related. This does not mean that all is for the best in the best
of all possible worlds. We might deduce that there will be "very
little, hardly any" democracy. There can be no absolute freedom of
speech, since it is limited by codes governing what can be made
known (publicity) and what must be protected (privacy) or hidden
(secrecy). These limits will, ideally, be subject to scrutiny and
political contestation: a society in which there is no debate on
what is right and proper and permissible to say is to that extent
no longer democratic. Democracy can never be an experience of
absolute freedom, just as it cannot be a matter of absolute
equality. Rather we have to understand democracy in terms of
tensions and strains, in the constituent limits that democracy
places on the principles which define it.
16. But as soon as it becomes clear that democracy as equality is in
the sense to which Derrida appeals /impossible/, things start to
look more problematic. What use is a criticism so general that it
must by definition include every state which claims to be
democratic? What good is an analysis that will continually and
repeatedly testify only to the failure of democratic claims? My
own response is that such an understanding of democracy can at
least give us grounds to judge more or less democratic tendencies
within a particular state, or to compare (in a qualified manner)
two systems that claim to be equally democratic; but also that the
apparent negativity of this analysis is a necessary correlate of
the permanent critical vigilance on which the possibility of
responsible citizenship depends. A democrat may become a rogue,
even while pursuing the exact same aims, should circumstances
happen to change. Our political judgments require constant
reinvention. It should also be clear that the idea of democracy to
come is an acknowledgment that the idea of democracy, its name,
and its tradition, are what make possible such a criticism. For
this reason there can be no immediate question of jettisoning
democracy. Derrida's use of the phrase "democracy to come" is in
part an acknowledgement of this debt to both an historical and an
intellectual heritage. But it is also an attempt to stress or
underline the fact that for all the real and existing limits to
democracy identified by deconstruction, we should not lose faith
in it. Here Derrida's strategy is rather ambiguous. What sounds
like the promise of a more democratic future is in fact nothing of
the sort. There is a promise within democracy, as there has always
been, but there can be no guarantee of more democracy in the
future. "Democracy to come" implies rather that even where there
is less, or ever so little, democracy, a future for democracy
still remains--and this is perhaps clearer in Rogues, where
Derrida uses the figure of the turn to suggest that democracy
might always come around again. The suspension of democratic
government in Algeria in 1992 was not an end to democracy, but its
deferral. The futurity of "democracy to come" must be monstrous,
unimaginable because it implies the devastation of all the
conceptual systems by which we reckon politics. In Politics of
Friendship Derrida wonders a number of times whether democracy to
come would still even /be/ democracy: "Would it still make sense
to speak of democracy when it would no longer be a question . . .
of country, nation, even of State and citizen--in other words, /if
at least one keeps to the accepted use of these words/, when it
would no longer be a political question?" (Politics 104). The
title of another interview hints that democracy to come might be
both a promise to be welcome and a threat to be deferred:
"Democracy Adjourned" (the published translation bears the more
optimistic sounding "Another Day for Democracy," and cf. Rogues 68).
V
17. It is I hope clear that Derrida's use of the phrase "democracy to
come" prior to Rogues is by no means either simply critical or
simply affirmative. Both a profession of faith and an affiliation
to a particular tradition, Derrida's work reiterates and sends on
the democratic appeal he inherits: "When will we be ready for an
experience of freedom and equality that is capable of respectfully
experiencing that friendship, which would at last be just, just
beyond the law, and measured up against its measurelessness?"
(Politics 306). Yet it still seems to me that Rogues is
circumspect about "democracy to come." This difference however is
not conceptual--nor has Derrida's evaluation of democracy as an
ideal, or of liberal democratic states as a partial success and a
partial failure in relation to that ideal, changed. Rather, the
change from "democracy to come" to the suicidal democracy of the
autoimmunitary system must be understood first and foremost as a
political shift. Particularly in the first essay, I am tempted to
believe that faced with an admiring crowd, gathered to discuss
"democracy to come," faced with the risk of the complacently
remoralized deconstruction, the "consensus of a new dogmatic
slumber" against which he warned in "Passions," Derrida wanted to
make democracy look as ambiguous as possible ("Passions" 15). My
suggestion is that we might understand his account of democracy in
terms of autoimmunity as a definite development, although perhaps
not a substantial alteration, of what was already a deeply
ambivalent portrait of democracy.
18. I have cited Derrida's remark in Rogues that he may never have
been entirely serious about democracy. But what Derrida does not
quite say is that his use of the word "democracy" will always have
been itself a question of political strategy, meaning in part that
he chooses to employ a particular vocabulary in a particular
context, but also implying that a certain type of engagement will
have forced itself upon him, will have seemed necessary. However,
in interviews of the period in which he began to use the phrase,
this sense of strategy is quite clear. For example, in a 1989
discussion with Michael Sprinker, Derrida remarks that "perhaps
the term /democracy/ is not a good term. For now it's the best
term I've found. But, for example, one day I gave a lecture at
Johns Hopkins on these things and a student said to me, 'What you
call democracy is what Hannah Arendt calls republic in order to
place it in opposition to democracy.' Why not?" In fact Derrida
insists that his use of the word democracy is a polemical and
political intervention: "in the discursive context that dominates
politics today, the choice of the term [democracy] is a good
choice--it's the least lousy possible. As a term, however, it's
not sacred. I can, some day or another, say, 'No, it's not the
right term. The situation allows or demands that we use another
term in other sentences'" (Negotiations 181). In his 2003 decision
to be a co-signatory with Jürgen Habermas of a call for a
specifically European political initiative, Derrida seems to be
going against his earlier warning in The Other Heading (1991)
about assigning such a privilege to the idea of "Europe." But this
should remind us that such warnings are always bound to contexts.
19. Because of this insistence that we must use particular words here
and now, although this does not necessarily add up to a particular
political program, I propose that we consider Derrida's use of the
phrase "democracy to come" as a tactical, indeed as a political,
action. It is a pledge of faith in something attested to in
democracy, in both the history of the concept and in the
democracies of the contemporary world; but it is also a
capitulation to the demand for deconstruction's political secret,
which Derrida had refused to provide for many years. The timing is
critical. Although it actually precedes Derrida's decision to
finally address Marxism openly in Specters of Marx (1993), Derrida
confirms in Rogues that he first uses the phrase "democracy to
come" in the long introductory essay to the collection of his
previously published essays on the university, The Right To
Philosophy, in "1989-1990" (Rogues 81-2; cf. Who's Afraid 22-31).
My suggestion is that both gestures need to be understand as
attempts to maintain a critical stance in the face of the supposed
post-Cold War triumph of liberal democracy following the fall of
the Berlin Wall. In this context it seems as if the phrase
"democracy to come" may well be an attempt to say something
critical about the so-called democracy of the times, in
underlining an obligation for democracy to continue to transform
and improve itself. But wishing to avoid both the inevitable
accusations of nihilism and the charge of political naïvety in
being unable to differentiate democracy and totalitarianism
levelled by Claude Lefort in a combative paper to Phillipe
Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's Centre for Philosophical
Research on the Political in 1980, Derrida has to find a way to
retain the name of democracy, while reserving a space for its
equally urgent critique.
20. Over a decade later, and in changing geopolitical circumstances,
Derrida re-issues his appeal for a "democracy to come," but the
terms in which it is phrased have hardened. What do we gain
politically by translating "democracy to come" into
"autoimmunity"? We learn that modern democracies may be seen to be
caught up in a permanent process of self-destruction, inseparable
from their attempts to sustain their own existence. Democracy, the
legal and political frameworks of the sovereign state, can secure
all kinds of goods, but only at the cost not only of
others--Derrida refers to the classical example of the tensions
between liberty and equality--but also of its own existence. To
the extent that it protects itself, that its borders are patrolled
and its immigrants counted and controlled, the state is no longer
democratic, it closes itself against the future; yet to the extent
that the rule of law is not maintained, that the boundaries of its
territory are indeterminate or its citizens undifferentiated from
others, the state no longer exists, and we are no longer able to
speak of anything like a democracy, and certainly not of a
democracy to come, that seems to depend upon the survival of a
particular tradition of critical and reflective thought linked to
the state form. Derrida stresses the link between the
autoimmunitary and undecidability. The suppression of civil
liberties in the name of security may be legitimate in protecting
democracy against those who are set against it, but it is also
autoimmunitary in exposing the immune system, by which democracy
defends itself from its enemies (and thereby threatens the
principles of democracy), as an "/a priori/ abusive use of force"
(Voyous 65). We can extend these figures, should we so wish. A
state whose repressive measures outlaw a peaceful opposition party
will doubtless provoke more violent measures--may rule out the
possibility of reform rather than revolution.
21. So the idea of the autoimmunitary can help to sharpen our sense
that the effort to maintain democracy will always threaten to
erase the public goods that make it worthwhile. But that process
of destruction, in threatening to create ever greater
counterforces, will in turn open new possibilities for democratic
change. In particular it shifts us away from the apparent promise
of "democracy to come," and clarifies a mode in which we might
undertake the analysis of actually existing democracy, as well as
the theoretical and philosophical tradition that underpins it.
(This looks like a shift from one philosophy of history to
another, from a more messianic account to a more dialectical one:
this might be seen as problematic, had we not learned from Derrida
the impossibility of doing without metaphysics, so long as such
schemes are subject to a perpetual critical and deconstructive
vigilance.) Politically, I think the idea of democracy's
autoimmunitary systems might serve to bulwark a skepticism against
the attack on freedom in the name of security. Democracy's
/exposure/ is the price of its liberties; while democracy's
closure, its need to secure its borders, its need for a mediated
system of political representation, contravenes the unconditional
principles of democracy to come, and so threatens it as
/democracy. / There can be no question of programming decisions
here: no one can dictate the balance of liberty and security in a
particular situation, just as no one can predict what degree of
protection a democracy will finally provide for those minorities
sheltered within. Derrida's work on hospitality suggests that
there is only hospitality when it is offered unconditionally, that
is to the point at which the guest becomes the host in my place,
when I no longer insist on asking the stranger his name in my
language rather than in his. But this does not lead to the
conclusion that all restrictions on immigration, even though they
are always unjust, and we must work for less unjust laws, should
be lifted. To do so would be to dissolve the constraints that
define and protect the democratic space being offered to the
newcomer. Similarly, we can only expect so much of democracy, so
long as the political form most devoted to freedom and equality
remains linked to security, property, sovereignty, state,
territory, people, or nation.
VI
22. Derrida's ultimate target in Rogues may not be democracy after
all, but sovereignty, and with it our sense of propriety, of
sanctity and security, of the supposedly legitimate force wielded
over any body, state, or identity. Derrida underlines another
double bind. As we have seen, democracy depends on something like
sovereignty: there can be no democracy without political control
over a territory, a population; but democracy also means that same
political control must in turn be subject to the authority of the
people. The /demos/ is a threat in any regime: democracy is
suicidal in enshrining that threat at the heart of the regime. A
whole tradition, the most insistent modern representative of which
is Carl Schmitt, has argued that sovereignty is indivisible or is
nothing. Derrida will agree with Schmitt, and with the tradition,
that sovereignty must be indivisible, but, like other exceptional
and sovereign features of the philosophical in which Derrida has
taken an interest--reason, decision, responsibility, forgiveness,
exception, presence--this means sovereignty is also impossible. It
can never achieve the indivisibility it claims as its
prerequisite. To the extent that it seeks to do so, it must
enforce the law with violence. Derrida reminds us that "there are
in the end rather few philosophical discourses, assuming there are
any at all, in the long tradition that runs from Plato to
Heidegger, that have without any reservations taken the side of
democracy" (Rogues 41). Might this be because the sovereignty of
reason is itself threatened by the figure of democracy, the
arguments of the philosophers by the voices of the people? Just as
deconstruction seeks to open philosophy to its outside, so the
faltering of sovereignty within democracy needs to be exposed.
23. Derrida argues that there are always "/plus d'états
voyous/"--"(No) more rogue states" (Rogues 95-107)--than you
think. The idiom resists translation: there are always no rogue
states, and always more rogue states. Being "/voyou/" is inscribed
into the very principle of sovereignty, into the constitution of
every state. The play on the idea of rogue state is an explicit
attempt to link geopolitical reflection, and in particular a
contestation of the right of the United States to identify and
vilify particular "Rogue States," to the more profound sense that
all sovereignty is somehow abusive and violent. Yet where the
retort that takes the United States as the exemplary rogue state
has a clear political and polemical force, Derrida seems to risk
going astray: if states are rogue not in exceptional
circumstances, but by default, isn't there a temptation to shrug
one's shoulders?
As soon as there is sovereignty, there is abuse of power and a
rogue State. Abuse is the law of its use; it is the law
itself, the "logic" of a sovereignty that can reign only
without division [/partage/]. More precisely, since it never
succeeds in doing this except in a critical, precarious and
unstable fashion, sovereignty can only /tend/, for a limited
time, to rule indivisibly [/sans partage/]. (Rogues 102,
translation adapted)
We're faced with the same dilemma that arises from a "democracy to
come": that if all politics is hostile to democracy, just as all
politics is an opening to more democracy, more equality, more
justice, how are we to choose and prefer some politics rather than
other politics? If all states are rogue states, which should we
denounce?
24. Yet the emphasis he places on "/plus de/" shows that Derrida
acknowledges this problem. If there are only rogue states, there
are no rogue states: the distinction appears to lose its force.
This is no excuse to back away from politics itself, nor for a
resignation in the face of the future: patience need not mean
waiting. Despite the fact that "there is something of a rogue
state in every state [and] the use of state power is /originally/
excessive and abusive" (Rogues 156),
it would be imprudent and hasty, in truth hardly /reasonable/,
to oppose unconditionally, that is, head on, a sovereignty
that is in itself unconditional and indivisible. One cannot
combat, /head on/, all sovereignty, sovereignty /in general/,
without threatening at the same time, beyond the nation-state
figure of sovereignty, the classical principles of freedom and
self-determination. . . . Nation-state sovereignty can even
itself, in certain conditions, become an indispensable bulwark
against certain international powers. (Rogues 158)
Despite its opposition to nationalism, as an exemplary form of
political brotherhood, deconstruction cannot dictate a categorical
opposition to the idea of "nation," not least where it might
provide a point of resistance to imperialism, and precisely in the
name of democracy. The deconstruction of reason, and of its
political logic of sovereignty, is not to be accomplished by
simply opposing democracy to sovereignty, or by setting security
against freedom. The relation between these figures is more
complex; to appeal to "democracy to come" is one way of saying
this--to underscore the autoimmunity of democracy, of sovereignty,
of reason, is another. "Democracy to come" highlights an
insufficiency within any and every existing or possible democracy,
while promising more rather than less democracy: but the figure of
suicidal democracy emphasizes instead that what promises more
democracy may well be the extent to which democracy takes risks.
The distinction is one of words, that is to say of the different
strategies that evolving political contexts may call forth. But
the deconstruction of sovereignty cannot mean the rejection of
sovereignty.
25. In an interview given shortly before his death on 9 October 2004,
Derrida confesses to two "contradictory feelings" concerning the
legacy of his thought: "on the one hand, to say it smiling and
immodestly, I feel that people have not even begun to read me,
that if there are very many good readers (a few dozen in the
world, perhaps), they will do so only later. On the other hand, I
feel that two weeks after my death, nothing at all of my work will
be left" ("Je Suis"). This is a question of a legacy, of the past,
but also of the future. I have argued that in Rogues Derrida
continues to develop his analysis of democracy, and to some extent
might be seen as backing away from the syntax of "democracy to
come." As elsewhere, what Derrida is really interested in is a
future that cannot be identified in advance, since it would be a
break with all the old names. Democracy without sovereignty might
no longer be democracy, either. Yet for all this talk of the
future, Derrida does not mean us to turn away from what is
happening now. Autoimmunization, with its insistence on a process
that is always already underway, for all its potential
confusions--and it's clear that, as Gasché comments, this must be
understood "far beyond the biological processes" (297)--may prove
a more useful starting point. As in the case of the link between
sovereignty and democracy: "such a questioning [of democracy] . .
. is already under way. It is at work today; it is what's
/coming/, what's /happening. / It /is/ and it /makes/ history"
(Rogues 157). In his 1981 interview with Richard Kearney, Derrida
remarked that "the difficulty is to gesture in opposite directions
at the same time: on the one hand to preserve a distance and
suspicion with regard to the official political codes governing
reality; on the other, to intervene here and now in a practical
and /engagé/ manner whenever the necessity arises" (120). Although
Derrida is silent on the subject in /Voyous/, we must reserve a
place for the possibility that what is coming will not be
democracy, or might no longer be usefully called democracy.
Despite its prominence in his work since 1990, we cannot take
Derrida's engagement with democracy to be the last word on the
politics of deconstruction.
VII
26. Because Derrida's death is written into every single word he ever
wrote, so his literal, physical decease /changes nothing./ No
philosopher has insisted so completely and so powerfully on the
fact that one's future demise is a necessary precondition of one's
every utterance. Friendship is always mourning, because it must
always anticipate the death of my friend. As Derrida described it
in mourning his own friend Paul de Man,
the strange situation I am describing here, for example that
of my friendship with Paul de Man, would have allowed me to
say all of this /before/ his death. It suffices that I know
him to be mortal, that he knows me to be mortal--there is no
friendship without this knowledge of finitude. And everything
that we inscribe in the living present of our relation to
others already carries, always, the signature of
/memoirs-from-beyond-the-grave./ (Memoires 29)
This situation is neither to be regretted nor condemned, since it
is what makes friendship possible: "there belongs the gesture of
faithful friendship, its immeasurable grief, but also its life"
(Memoires 38). Returning to this theme in Politics of Friendship,
Derrida remarks: "I could not love friendship without engaging
myself, /without feeling myself in advance/ engaged to love the
other beyond death. Therefore, beyond life" (12). Our first
engagement with the thought of Jacques Derrida will always have
condemned us to suffer his loss. But then, as he famously argues
in Speech and Phenomena, his death was already predicted and
anticipated in every word he wrote: "My death is structurally
necessary to the pronouncing of the /I/. . . . The statement 'I am
alive' is accompanied by my being dead, and its possibility
requires the possibility that I be dead, and conversely" (Speech
96-7). If Derrida's death was always inscribed in his writings, we
must refuse the temptation to ascribe his work a provisional or
hypothetical unity based on its finally delimited finitude: its
physical completion should not be allowed to dictate a conceptual
closure. This means seeking not only to reconstruct the steps in
the trajectory of his own work, but also continuing to challenge
and renew his questioning, to think it in other ways, and in other
words.
27. In a short and lucid article on Derrida's political thought,
Geoffrey Bennington argues that "deconstruction on the one hand
generalises the concept of politics so that it includes all
conceptual dealings whatsoever, and on the other makes a precise
use of /one/ particular inherited politico-metaphysical concept,
democracy, to make a pointed and more obviously political
intervention in political thought" (32-3). There is a danger in
this account that it returns us to democracy: that democracy might
become the last word, the only word, through which deconstruction
might seek to engage politically. The inverse of such a risk is
that any existing democracy could seek to shore itself up with the
prestige of a deconstructive logic. I have argued that this need
not be the case, and that "democracy" is only one word under which
a political intervention might be made. Yet there are places in
his work where Derrida does seem to grant a particular privilege
to democracy, which must mean not only a concept but also a name
and a particular historical tradition. For example, in the
Borradori interview:
Of all the names grouped a bit too quickly under the category
"political regimes" (and I do not believe that "democracy"
ultimately designates a "political regime"), the inherited
concept of democracy is the /only/ one that welcomes the
possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of
criticizing and indefinitely improving itself. ("Autoimmunity"
121)
Democracy, he continues, "would be the name of the /only/ 'regime'
that presupposes its own perfectibility" (121, emphasis added).
28. This is a figure of intense ambivalence. Is democracy the only
site of a political invention of the future? Is democracy the only
possible name for such an invention? Does the Western
philosophical tradition, do the Western liberal democracies, offer
the only spaces in which alternative political possibilities might
develop? Is there really no future for politics, for
deconstruction, outside of democracy? This remains to be seen.
Derrida insists that democracy is always and will always be a
question of what is to come. The challenge of a political
invention of the future, and this is perhaps where
deconstruction's real radicalism lies, is the acknowledgment that
what makes a new politics possible is that which also threatens to
destroy politics. Only a state willing to consider the surrender
of its own sovereignty, to place equality before security, only a
suicidal democracy might live up to the idea of a "democracy to
come." This may seem a long way to go in the current political
climate--or indeed in any political climate. But we should
remember that by the logic of the autoimmunitary process, the
logic of deconstruction itself, even a state that appears to be
drawing rapidly away from democracy may in fact be exposing itself
even more to the possibility of what remains to come.
Department of English Literature
University of Glasgow
A.Thomson@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk
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Notes
An early version of this essay was presented to the conference
"Derrida: Negotiating the Legacy" at the University of
Aberystwyth, January 2005. I would like to thank both the
organizers, the Aberystwyth Post-International Group, and the
participants for their responses to the paper. I am also grateful
to the editors of this special issue of Postmodern Culture for
their suggestions.
1 <#ref1>. Where I associate a date with Derrida's works, it is
not usually the date of first publication, but the date the work
was first presented in public, at which an interview was given, or
the date of revision where one is indicated in the published text.
This is an attempt to suggest a more accurate chronology for
Derrida's writings than that provided by the somewhat erratic
order of their publication.
2 <#ref2>. The ambiguities raised by Derrida's choice of example,
and the apparent confrontation in the Algerian political process
between a Christian Enlightenment heritage and the question of
Islamism, are deliberate.
3 <#ref3>. I make this argument in part 3 of Deconstruction and
Democracy. Derrida suggests elsewhere that his later engagement
with Levinas has been overdetermined by a political question: the
need to rearticulate Levinas in order to rescue his work from a
growing religious and moralistic appropriation (see Papier Machine
366; see also comments by Hent de Vries in the Preface to Minimal
Theologies xix-xx).
4 <#ref4>. Politics of Friendship is presented as a transcript of
Derrida's seminar of 1989-1990 of the same title. This would make
the use of "democracy to come" in the text contemporary with its
use in The Right to Philosophy. However one assumes that the text
has been revised for publication (in 1994). Since it shares many
features in common with Specters of Marx (first presented and
published in 1993), which does make some use of "democracy to
come," but also with "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation' of
Authority" (first presented in 1989 and 1990, and published in
English in 1990, before being slightly revised for the French
edition of 1994), which makes very little, my guess is that many
of the references to "democracy to come" are later additions, but
that "democracy" is certainly on Derrida's agenda for the first
time in 1989-1990. A textual criticism to come will prepare us to
answer such questions, and begin to read Derrida with the
attention to singularity his texts demand.
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