A.J.P. Thomson

Department of English Literature
University of Glasgow
A.Thomson@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

 

There is something of a rogue state in every state. The use of state power is originally excessive and abusive.

–Jacques Derrida, Rogues 156

 

 

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 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) 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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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).

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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).

 

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 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

 

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 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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?

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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).

 

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.

 

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. 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. 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. 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. 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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