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Theory and the Democracy to Come
R. John Williams
University of California, Irvine
rjwillia@uci.edu
(c) 2005 R. John Williams.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne
Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. Voyous: Deux
essays sur la raison. Paris: Editions Galilée, 2003.
Well, I've always regarded the link . . . I've never really
perceived much of a link to tell you the truth.
--Noam Chomsky
1. In the quotation above, Noam Chomsky attempts to answer a question
put to him by Jonathan Ree in an interview for Radical Magazine
about the relation between his theoretical work in linguistics and
his activist and anarchist work in politics. In this interview and
elsewhere, Chomsky denies that there is such a link, even though
some of his readers might find that disconnect unfortunate. "I
would be very pleased," Chomsky says in another interview, "to be
able to discover intellectually convincing connections between my
own anarchist convictions on the one hand and what I think I can
demonstrate or at least begin to see about the nature of human
intelligence on the other, but I simply can't find intellectually
satisfying connections between those two domains."[1 <#foot1>] If,
however, Chomsky rejects the possibility of those links, Jacques
Derrida's Rogues: Two Essays on Reason seems on the contrary to
revel in making "intellectually satisfying connections" between
the realms of epistemology and political philosophy.
2. Certainly, it makes sense to understand Derrida in his recent work
as directly engaged with issues of contemporary political
philosophy, even as he has continued to revise and advance a
theory of language and thought which he began to develop in the
1960s. The marketing description of Rogues, for example,
advertises "unflinching and hard-hitting assessments of current
democratic realities," claiming that the essays "are highly
engaged with the current political events of the post-9/11 world,"
and Derrida's publishers will no doubt continue to accentuate this
ongoing political relevance. But if it seems to some readers that
Derrida's work has become more political in recent years, Derrida
himself refuses to see this as something new. In the two essays on
reason that make up Rogues, Derrida attempts self-consciously to
revisit and revise his earlier projects, bringing out their
political relevance. For instance, in a passage on paradoxical
tensions within the idea of "democracy," Derrida argues,
there never was in the 1980s or 1990s, as has sometimes been
claimed, a /political turn/ or /ethical turn/ in
"deconstruction," at least not as I experience it. The
thinking of the political has always been a thinking of
différance and the thinking of différance always a thinking
/of/ the political, of the contour and limits of the
political, especially around the enigma or the autoimmune
/double bind/ of the democratic. (39)
Derrida characterizes his initial, meta-performative revision of
structuralist linguistics (/différance/) in terms of its relation
to the empirical and ontological limitations of democracy
important to his recent work.
3. The two masterfully translated essays collected in this volume
were initially presented as lectures, one at Cerisy-la-Salle on 15
July 2002 and the other at the opening of the twenty-ninth Congrés
de l'Association des Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue française
[ASPLF] at the University of Nice, 27 August 2002. Mixing
straightforward political commentary (on 9/11, the war on
terrorism, human cloning, etc.) with discussions of political
philosophy (in passages on Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Nancy, and
others), the essays in Rogues work together to deconstruct
"democracy" as a mode of sovereignty.
4. In his preface to the two lectures, Derrida quotes from La
Fontaine's fable "The Wolf and the Lamb," in which a ravenous wolf
accuses an innocent lamb of having muddied the wolf's drinking
water. The lamb protests, citing the persuasive evidence that the
lamb is in fact 20 feet downstream from the wolf and therefore
could not have muddied the wolf's water. "You're muddying it!" the
wolf insists, "And I know that, last year, you spoke ill of me."
But the lamb protests again, "How could I do that? Why I'd not yet
even come to be . . . at my dam's teat I still nurse." At every
point of defense, the wolf seems to win out, and, in the end, "the
Wolf dragged and ate his midday snack. So trial and judgment
stood" (x). The moral of the fable comes, in a manner that seems
characteristic of the exercise of sovereignty, at the /beginning/
of La Fontaine's version, before the narrative has unfolded (the
decision before the evidence, the judgment before the trial): "The
strong are always best at proving they're right, / Witness the
case we're now going to cite."
5. Derrida's preface to these two essays thus invokes an old and
venerable tradition of thinking about the relation between force
and law and, indeed, the priority of force over law, which "long
preceded and long followed La Fontaine, along with Bodin, Hobbes,
Grotius, Pascal, Rousseau, and so many others, a tradition that
runs, say, from Plato to Carl Schmitt" (xi). But at the same time
Derrida wonders, "What political narrative, in the same tradition,
might today illustrate this fabulous morality? Does this morality
teach us, as is often believed, that force 'trumps' law? Or else,
something quite different, that the very concept of law, that
juridical reason itself, includes a priori a possible recourse to
constraint or coercion and, thus, to a certain violence?" (xi). Of
course, following Derrida's answers to these questions requires
not only a close reading of these two essays, but also an
understanding of much of his later work and especially of his last
lectures and seminars on "The Beast and the Sovereign," to which
he refers several times in Rogues.[2 <#2>]
6. Derrida's late politico-philosophical project proceeds from a
number of related ideas: as he explains in his Critical Inquiry
essay, "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)" (2002),
the axiomatic dichotomy between "man" and "the animal," which has
dominated Western philosophical "common sense," must be called
into question. This dichotomy must be interrogated not only
because the traditional markers of what is "proper to man" do not
stand up to deconstructive scrutiny, but also because the
delineation of the "human" coincides with the inauguration of the
"sovereign." More than that, one must recognize that the
sovereign, by definition, reserves the right /as sovereign/ to
become "bestial." In other words, the sovereign, as giver of the
law, as an agent /before/ the law, must occasionally /exceed/ the
law, that is, act as "outlaw." This is important because, as
Derrida puts it,
packed full of wolves from the four corners of the world, the
seminar [on the Beast and the Sovereign] was in large part a
/lycology/ and a /genelycology/, a genealogical theory of the
wolf (/lycos/), of all the figures of the wolf and the
werewolf in the problematic of sovereignty. It just so happens
that the word /loup-garou/ in Rousseau's Confessions has
sometimes been translated into English not as /werewolf/ but
as /outlaw./ We will see a bit later that the /outlaw/ is a
synonym often used by the American administration along with
or in place of /rogue/ in the expression "rogue state." (69)
7. The first and longer essay in Rogues, "The Reason of the Strongest
(Are There Rogue States?)," was presented at a conference entitled
"The Democracy to Come (Around Jacques Derrida)." This phrase,
"the democracy to come," echoes throughout Rogues as a kind of
refrain. "Democracy to come" comes to mean different, even
contradictory things over the course of Derrida's argument.
"Democracy to come" suggests, on the one hand, a protest "against
all naïveté and every political abuse, every rhetoric that would
present as a present or existing democracy, as a de facto
democracy, what remains inadequate to the democratic demand" (86),
and on the other hand, something charged and pregnant on the
horizon, an "event" with all of the political and sexual promise
of what is "to come." It signals, in other words, the political
/and/ the biological, "force /without/ force, incalculable
singularity /and/ calculable equality, commensurability /and/
incommensurability, heteronomy /and/ autonomy, indivisible
sovereignty /and/ divisible or shared sovereignty, an empty name,
a despairing messianicity or a messianicity in despair, and so on"
(86).
8. All of the binaries that Derrida balances in the notion of a
"democracy to come" turn on the fulcrum of what he calls the
paradox of "autoimmunity." Autoimmunization, as any doctor could
tell you, involves injecting one's body in controlled doses with
the dangerous elements that threaten it in order to protect the
body from those elements. In a like manner, "democracy" seems
sometimes to require a certain "autoimmunization" in order to
survive, as when populations decide democratically to abolish
democracy. Here Derrida points to the example of Algeria:
The Algerian government and a large part, although not a
majority, of the Algerian people (as well as people outside
Algeria) thought that the electoral process under way would
lead democratically to the end of democracy. They thus
preferred to put an end to it themselves. They decided in a
sovereign fashion to suspend, at least provisionally,
democracy /for its own good/, so as to take care of it, so as
to immunize it against a much worse and very likely assault. .
. . There is something paradigmatic in this autoimmune
suicide: fascist and Nazi totalitarians came into power or
ascended to power through formally normal and formally
democratic electoral processes. (33)
9. Derrida also points to the example of the aftermath of 9/11 in the
United States and elsewhere, where a phantom "war on terror"
means, at least to some, that the United States "must restrict
within its own country certain so-called democratic freedoms and
the exercise of certain rights by, for example, increasing the
powers of police investigations and interrogations, without
anyone, any democrat, being really able to oppose such measures"
(40). This is not to say that 9/11 /created/ this situation, even
if that event "media-theatricalized" the effects and preconditions
of an autoimmunization already in progress (xiii).
10. Still, as useful as the concept of "autoimmunization" is, the
notion that "democracy" operates within a monopolizing code of
"exceptions" is not new; in the seventh chapter of Rogues Derrida
concedes as much: "Had I said or meant only that, wouldn't I have
been simply reproducing, even plagiarizing, the classical
discourses of political philosophy?" (73). In fact, Derrida
reminds us, Rousseau's On the Social Contract argues that in its
"strict" sense democracy is impossible: "Taking the term in the
strict sense, a true democracy has never existed and never will"
(73). So what, then, does Derrida contribute to the discourse of
political philosophy?
11. There are a number of important interventions in Rogues. In the
first essay, Derrida asks: "can one and/or must one speak
democratically of democracy?" (71). This question calls attention
to the general epistemological predicament of explaining democracy
(which Derrida has already shown to be an /aporetic/ concept) so
that "anyone" could understand it. It is a surprisingly simple
question that points to the difficulty in achieving any kind of
true democracy. As Derrida explains, to "speak democratically of
democracy," or to say that "anyone must be able to understand, in
democracy, the univocal meaning of the word and the concept
democracy" is to imply "that /anybody/ or /anyone can/ or /may/,
or /should be able to/, or /should have the right to/, or /ought
to/, and so on" (71). Significantly, the italicized portions of
that last quotation were delivered in English, the rest of it in
French, even as the previous paragraph is sprinkled with words in
Greek and German. Not surprisingly, Derrida implies in the
following paragraphs that it is /not/ possible to speak
democratically of democracy, for to do so, "it would be necessary,
through some circular performativity and through the political
violence of some enforcing rhetoric, some force of law, to impose
a meaning on the word /democratic/ and thus produce a consensus
that one pretends, by fiction, to be established and accepted--or
at the very least possible and necessary: on the horizon" (73).
12. This refusal to allow for some fixed and stable speaking
"democratically of democracy" may be what allows Derrida to posit
"intellectually satisfying connections" between his theoretical
and political work. By contrast, Chomsky, as I have mentioned,
sees no problem with "speaking democratically of democracy" and so
/resists/ any effort to posit necessary links between a
specialized theory and politics. In Language and Responsibility
(1979), for example, Chomsky emphasizes the danger in attempting
to find links between his writing in linguistics and politics:
One must be careful not to give the impression, which in any
event is false, that only intellectuals equipped with special
training are capable of [social and political analysis]. In
fact that is just what the intelligentsia would often like us
to think: they pretend to be engaged in an esoteric
enterprise, inaccessible to simple people. But that's
nonsense. . . . The alleged complexity, depth, and obscurity
of these questions is part of the illusion propagated by the
system of ideological control, which aims to make the issues
seem remote from the general population and to persuade them
of their incapacity to organize their own affairs or to
understand the social world in which they live without the
tutelage of intermediaries. For that reason alone one should
be careful not to link the analysis of social issues with
scientific topics which, for their part, do require special
training and techniques, and thus a special intellectual frame
of reference before they can be seriously investigated. (3)
Whereas Derrida's poststructuralist stance uncovers problems in
the very idea that "democracy" could as a concept be understood,
Chomsky's socialist libertarian work relies on the assumption
that, given the correct information, people will arrive at the
truth of a given political situation--a difference that helps to
explain their distinct approaches to the matter of bridging theory
and politics.
13. If Derrida and Chomsky are coming from different places, the
former nevertheless draws productively on the latter in Rogues. In
what may be the most interesting chapter of the book, "(No) More
Rogue States," Derrida refers to Chomsky's Rogue States: The Rule
of Force in World Affairs in order to present the hypothesis that
"if we have been speaking of rogue states for a relatively short
time now, and in a recurrent way only since the so-called end of
the so-called Cold War, the time is soon coming when we will no
longer speak of them" (95). We will no longer speak of them
because, in the first place, people have since 9/11 begun to take
a more active and instrumental interest in the official discourse
of "rogue states," which means that it will be more and more
difficult to speak of them other than in the self-contradictory
terms of U.S. political discourse.
[Chomsky's] Rogue States lays out an unimpeachable case,
supported by extensive, overwhelming, although in general not
widely publicized or utilized information, against American
foreign policy. The crux of the argument, in a word, is that
the most /roguish/ of rogue states are those that circulate
and make use of a concept like "rogue state," with the
language, rhetoric, juridical discourse, and
strategico-military consequences we all know. The first and
most violent of rogue states are those that have ignored and
continue to violate the very international law they claim to
champion, the law in whose name they speak and in whose name
they go to war against so-called rogue states each time their
interests so dictate. The name of these states? The United
States. (96)
14. But if the United States seems the most roguish of rogue states,
it is not the only one. /All/ states, whether "democratic" or not,
act according to the foundational logic of roguishness. Such is
the fundamental clash between the /demo/- and the -cracy: "As soon
as there is sovereignty, there is abuse of power and a rogue
state" (102). There cannot be, in other words, a sovereign who is
not also a rogue: "There are thus only rogue states. Potentially
or actually. The state is voyou, a rogue, roguish. There are
always (no) more rogue states than one thinks" (102). The
parenthetical "no" is Derrida's shorthand way of saying "when
there are only rogues, then there are /no more rogues/" (103).
15. Another reason why, in Derrida's hypothesis, the phrase "rogue
states" will eventually disappear is that the hyper-theatricalized
media aftermath of 9/11 illustrated an already obvious truth:
"after the Cold War, the absolute threat no longer took a state
form" (104). 9/11 simply announced or amplified this fact:
Such a situation rendered futile or ineffective all the
rhetorical resources (not to mention military resources) spent
on justifying the word /war/ and the thesis that the "war
against international terrorism" had to target particular
states that give financial backing or logistical support or
provide a safe haven for terrorism, states that, as is said in
the United States, "sponsor" or "harbor" terrorists. All these
efforts to identify "terrorist" states or rogue states are
"rationalizations" aimed at denying not so much some absolute
anxiety but the panic or terror before the fact that the
absolute threat no longer comes from or is under the control
of some state or some identifiable state form. (105-106)
If, however, the phrase "rogue states" has fallen or will shortly
fall into desuetude, "rogue" is by itself still very much with us.
In fact, the Pentagon now describes those soldiers accused of
torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib as "rogue soldiers," a move that
demonstrates the depth of Derrida's contention that "abuse of
power is constitutive of sovereignty itself" (102).
16. Another contribution made by Derrida's Rogues occurs in the second
lecture, at a moment when the /aporetic/ aspect of democracy seems
to have made political action all but impossible. What is one to
do if democracy, in all its messy autoimmunity, must remain
forever on the horizon, always only "to come"? What can we do
while we wait for what is "to come"? In a complex, but strikingly
lucid passage, Derrida attempts to answer these questions by
referring to the question of "unconditionality." Political
philosophy has seemed fairly unanimous on the connection between
unconditionality and sovereignty:
This inseparability or this alliance between sovereignty and
unconditionality appears forever irreducible. Its resistance
appears absolute and any separation impossible: for isn't
sovereignty, especially in its modern political forms, as
understood by Bodin, Rousseau, or Schmitt, precisely
unconditional, absolute, and especially, as a result,
indivisible? Is it not exceptionally sovereign insofar as it
retains the right to the exception? The right to decide on the
exception and the right to suspend rights and law [/le
droit/]]? (141)
17. If sovereignty and unconditionality are inseparable, what would it
mean to speak of their separation? Derrida argues that the
"democracy to come" /depends/ on our attempt to separate them: "It
would be a question not only of separating this kind of
sovereignty drive from the exigency for unconditionality as two
symmetrically associated terms, but of questioning, critiquing,
deconstructing, if you will, one in the name of the other" (143).
That is to deconstruct sovereignty /in the name of/
unconditionality. With this gesture, Derrida refers us again to
some of his previous work:
Among the figures of unconditionality without sovereignty I
have had occasion to privilege in recent years, there would
be, for example, that of an /unconditional hospitality/ that
exposes itself without limit to the coming of the other,
beyond rights and laws, beyond a hospitality conditioned by
the right to asylum, by the right of immigration, by
citizenship, and even by the right to universal hospitality,
which still remains, for Kant, for example, under the
authority of a political or cosmopolitical law. Only an
unconditional hospitality can give meaning and practical
rationality to a concept of hospitality. . . .
Another example would be the unconditionality of the /gift/ or
of /forgiveness./ I have tried to show elsewhere exactly where
the unconditionality required by the purity of such concepts
leads us. A gift without calculable exchange, a gift worthy of
this name, would not even appear /as such/ to the donor or
donee without the risk of reconstituting, through
phenomenality . . . , a circle of economic reappropriation
that would just as soon annul its event. Similarly,
forgiveness can be given /to/ the other or come /from/ the
other only beyond calculation, beyond apologies, amnesia, or
amnesty, beyond acquittal or prescription, even beyond any
asking for forgiveness, and thus beyond any transformative
repentance, which is most often the stipulated condition for
forgiveness, at least in what is most /predominant/ in the
tradition of the Abrahamic religions. (149)
Hospitality, the gift, forgiveness. These are difficult concepts,
and it is difficult to imagine what forms they may take in our
postmodern political sphere. But this invitation to imagine
otherwise is necessary at a moment when the vulgar adhesive that
joins unconditionality and sovereignty seems to be drying fast. Is
Derrida's complex mix of poststructural and political philosophy
(presented within an "undemocratic" matrix of rhetorical play and
discursive sophistication) more likely to split the atom of
sovereign unconditionality than Noam Chomsky's quasi-Cartesian
attack on American exceptionalism? Fortunately, we need not answer
that question absolutely, since both have something to offer; it
is, however, important to keep asking.
Department of English
University of California, Irvine
rjwillia@uci.edu
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. Both interviews are featured in Achbar and Wintonick's
now-classic documentary "Manufacturing Consent--Noam Chomsky and
the Media." As recently as 2 November 2003, in an interview with
the New York Times, Chomsky maintains that there is "virtually no
connection" between his publications in linguistics and politics.
Chomsky's refusal to find a link between these domains has not
prevented others from attempting to find it for him. See, for
example, Salkie, chapter 9, "Connections." The introduction to The
Cambridge Companion to Noam Chomksy also contains a section on the
unity of Chomsky's theoretical and political thought.
2 <#ref2>. The brief summary of Derrida's seminar that follows is
based on my notes of his lectures at the University of California,
Irvine, from 2002-2004.
Works Cited
Achbar, Mark and Peter Wintonick. Manufacturing Consent--Noam
Chomsky and the Media. Zeitgeist Films, 2003.
Chomsky, Noam. Language and Responsibility. New York: Pantheon, 1979.
---. Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs. Cambridge:
South End, 2000.
Derrida, Jacques. "The Animal That Therefore I am (More to
Follow)." Critical Inquiry. 28 (Winter 2002): 369-418.
Salkie, Raphael. The Chomsky Update: Linguistics and Politics.
Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990.