Derrida’s “Very Idea of Democracy”

Abstract

This paper focuses on the relationships that Derrida establishes between three analytic discussions and three autoimmunities. The analytic discussions are (1) the antinomy of hospitality, related to what happens when the subject faces demands from strangers; (2) the antinomy of the death penalty, related to the meeting between the right to life and the right to end the life of another; (3) the antinomy of animality related to laws and what lies beyond them. The autoimmunities are (1) the autoimmunity of inclusion: democracy is open only to its sovereign citizens while it claims to welcome all who are excluded; (2) the autoimmunity of rights and liberties: in liberal democracy, rights and liberties are meant to challenge sovereignty’s absolutism, but any attack on sovereignty is an attack on rights and liberties; (3) the autoimmunity of globalization: for democracy to work it requires protection provided by a supersovereignty, which limits the sovereignty of states, and hence, democracy. The paper follows Derrida’s connections between the questions of hospitality, the death penalty, and animality on the one hand, and the autoimmune aspects of democratic politics on the other, to argue that his deconstruction of democracy is an ethicization of democracy activated by the concept of sovereignty, and a deconstruction of sovereignty via ethics.

Keywords:

• democracy
• antinomy
• hospitality
• rights
• sovereignty

1 introduction

Although Derrida refused to acknowledge a “political turn” dividing his early and late works, readers have observed that from the early 1990s, he focused on political topics more explicitly than before. These were

the great years devoted to philosophical Nationality and nationalism, to (Politics of) friendship, to Eating the other, to the secret, to Testimony, to the Lie, to Hostility/hospitality, to Perjury and pardon, to the Death Penalty, to the Beast and to the Sovereign. (Cixous 45)

In particular, during his last decade Derrida turned his sharp eye toward “the very idea of democracy” (V 62; R 37).

We can divide Derrida’s thought on the idea of democracy into three analytic discussions or, rather, constellations of significations intersecting with and leading to each other. Indeed, each of these conceptual contexts is determined by a particular contradiction, or antinomy, which leads to an interrogation about sovereignty, which challenges the idea of democracy. These are (1) ipseity and the challenge of otherness: what happens when my identity, my property, my territory face demands from strangers; (2) hostility and the confrontation with enemies: where the right to life meets the right to end the life of another; and (3) laws and what lies beyond them: the outlaw, the bestial, and the non-human.¹ It is through his deconstruction of hospitality, the death penalty, and the beast that Derrida draws the matrix of the democratic question.

This multidimensional problematization of sovereignty opens onto a second level of antinomies, called autoimmunities in Rogues.² Derrida first formulated his notion of autoimmunity in “Faith and Knowledge,” where he explains that the process of auto-immunization “consists for a living organism […] of protecting itself against its self-protection by destroying its own immune system” (Foi et savoir 67; “Faith and Knowledge” 80). In the political framework, however, autoimmunity takes different forms. Here I focus on three of them. The first is what I will call the autoimmunity of inclusion: democracy is open only to its sovereign citizens, but at the same time it claims to welcome all who are excluded (V 95; R 63). The second is the autoimmunity of rights and liberties: in liberal democracy, rights and liberties are meant to challenge sovereignty’s absolutism, but any attack on sovereignty is at once an attack on basic political and civil rights and liberties (V 216; R 158). The third is the autoimmunity of globalization: for democracy to work it requires protection, which is provided by a world sovereignty; but that supersovereignty also irreducibly limits or even destroys the sovereignty of states, and hence, democracy (V 143; R 101).³

In this paper, I focus on the relationships that Derrida establishes between these three autoimmunities and the three antinomies of democratic politics mentioned above. In effect, the autoimmunity of inclusion is a development of the antinomy embodied in the concept of hospitality; the autoimmunity of rights and liberties is a modification of the antinomy inherent in the death penalty; and the autoimmunity of globalization is related to the antinomy which arises in the meeting between reason and animality. I therefore follow Derrida’s connections between the questions of hospitality, the death penalty, and animality on the one hand, and the autoimmune aspects of democratic politics on the other, to argue that Derrida’s deconstruction of democracy is an ethicization of democracy activated by the concept of sovereignty, and a deconstruction of sovereignty via ethics. It is this antinomic relationship between ethics and sovereignty that Derrida famously called “democracy to come.” While both ethics and sovereignty are often criticized in contemporary political theory, Derrida’s deconstruction of democracy demonstrates that they are together ineluctably necessary to this concept.

2 the antinomies of democracy

2.1 hospitality and inclusion

Antinomy – which operates at the core of autoimmunity, aporia, double bind, double injunction, or double constraint, among other terms – is a major logical structure of Derrida’s work (V 60; R 35; Haddad 7).⁴ While it has several expressions, the formulation that will interest us is elaborated in Derrida’s deconstruction of hospitality. In his 1995–96 seminar, Derrida explains that “hospitality is a self-contradictory concept and experience which can only self-destruct or protect itself from itself, auto-immunize itself in some way, which is to say, deconstruct itself – precisely – in being put into practice” (Hospitalité 24; Hostipitality 5).⁵

The antinomy of hospitality comes from the fact that “hospitality” means two things at once. More exactly, it refers to two contradictory modalities of the law. On the one hand, hospitality means the welcoming of a stranger by a subject who is, by definition, at home in his house or within his borders (Derrida, Hospitalité 212).⁶ The master of the house or the sovereign of the state lets the stranger in what is emphatically his.⁷ In so doing, he takes a risk – the stranger could rob him, kill him, take control of his house; he could conquer his land, undermine his culture, replace his language. For that reason, the welcoming of the stranger must be regulated. In order to minimize threats toward the host’s identity and property, the guest will be received in accordance with certain rules of behavior and timing. Hospitality, therefore, consists of a set of laws that restrict and formalize the arrival and stay of a foreigner.

On the other hand, influenced by his interpretation of Levinas’s ethics, Derrida argues that hospitality has a second, pure signification. In its pure sense, hospitality means the absolute and unlimited welcoming of the other (Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas 91; Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas 48).⁸ In this meaning, hospitality consists of welcoming the other no matter how threatening the stranger may be (DQD 102; FWT 59). This second understanding of hospitality is what Derrida calls the law of hospitality. It is an ethical injunction demanding a total opening of subjectivity to the other (DH 97–98; OH 108–09; Derrida, Hospitalité 179, 280).

According to its pure definition or law, hospitality implies that one should unconditionally open one’s house to anyone, in all circumstances. Such openness, however, is unsustainable (Derrida, Hospitalité 182). Hence, hospitality also means a socio-political device, a set of conditions inscribed in laws. The contradiction between the two regimes of law is irreducible: both – the conditional and the unconditional – coexist in mutual dependence within the very concept of hospitality:

[T]he unconditional law of hospitality needs the laws, it requires them. This demand is constitutive. It wouldn’t be effectively unconditional, the law, if it didn’t have to become effective […] In order to be what it is, the law thus needs the laws, which, however, deny it, or at any rate threaten it, sometimes corrupt or pervert it […] And vice versa, conditional laws would cease to be laws of hospitality if they were not guided […] required even, by the law of unconditional hospitality. These two regimes of law, of the law and the laws, are thus both contradictory, antinomic, and inseparable.⁹ (DH 75; OH 79–81)

In my book Levinas’s Politics: Justice, Mercy, Universality, I emphasized the similar contradiction that infuses the relationship between ethics and politics in Levinas’s philosophy. In Levinas, indeed, there is an essential opposition between the ethical order of responsibility and sacrifice for the other, which is an absolute and, hence, unrealizable commitment, and the political rationality responsible for organizing duties and rights among many others, which is not ethical – indeed, is sometimes anti-ethical – yet gives phenomenal substance to the ethical responsibility. Derrida discusses this Levinasian configuration at length, calling it a “double bind” or “double constraint” (Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas 66–67; Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas 33). My argument, therefore, is that in his work on political concepts Derrida takes the structure that, in Levinas, organizes the relationship between two different domains (unconditional ethics and conditional politics), and transforms it into the antinomic structure of the concepts themselves. Here the concept of hospitality consists both of an ethical injunction and a political rationality.¹⁰

Derrida emphasizes that the unconditional law of hospitality is not an ethical law among others, but ethics itself. In so doing, he turns the antinomy of hospitality into a paradigm of the relationship between ethics and politics (Derrida, Hospitalité 60–61). Does this mean that the conditional laws of hospitality constitute politics itself? Derrida does not fully address this question. However, when he focuses on the particular political rationality that is called democracy, he shows that it is constituted by a new antinomy, or autoimmunity, of hospitality:

In its constitutive autoimmunity, in its vocation for hospitality […] democracy has always wanted by turns and at the same time two incompatible things: it has wanted, on the one hand, to welcome only men, and on the condition that they be citizens, brothers, and compeers […] excluding all the others, in particular bad citizens, rogues, noncitizens, and all sorts of unlike and unrecognizable others, and, on the other hand, at the same time or by turns, it has wanted to open itself up, to offer hospitality, to all those excluded. In both cases […] hospitality remains limited and conditional. (V 95; R 63)

Let us insist on Derrida’s insistence: this autoimmunity is that of conditional hospitality, namely, of socio-political laws that restrict pure hospitality. Therefore, democracy reenacts the aporia of hospitality at its conditional level. The system of laws and practices that constitutes democracy comprises both an unconditional desire to open itself to all, and a more restricted openness conditional upon citizenship. Is democracy a right offered to all, or a set of rights that require membership? Hence, this second level of antinomy raises the question of sovereignty: is democracy essentially linked to sovereignty via its citizens, or does it transcend sovereignty in its universal, ethical sense? The autoimmunity shows that while sovereignty reduces the scope of democracy and abrogates its unconditional welcome, it is necessary to the materialization of some kind of democratic openness, some set of rights. Without such a sovereignty, democracy cannot offer any welcome and, hence, cannot exist.

2.2 death penalty and rights

Derrida tackles the question of sovereignty from another perspective in his analysis of the death penalty, where he turns to the treatment of the “enemy,” both in general and in the context of liberal democracy. This deconstruction deals with the death penalty’s theologico-political framework, namely, its theological sources in the context of human rights and the rule of law.¹¹ In Derrida’s analysis, the discourse on the death penalty is sustained by a contradiction between two regimes of law: an unconditional law that forbids killing, and a set of conditional laws that allow putting enemies to death in certain circumstances.

This antinomy is perceptible in two examples. Firstly, the “Abrahamic” nation states that apply the death penalty are not deterred by the biblical sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” which, Derrida says, is the essence of ethics according to Levinas (PM 35; DP 11). Indeed, the antinomy is present already in the Hebrew Bible, where “it is the same law, the ethical law, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ that commands the juridical, or penal, law, the death penalty for the criminal who transgresses the ethical law” (PM 45; DP 19). Secondly, abolitionists who oppose the death penalty as a legal device do not necessarily oppose war – which is also a legal way to put others (soldiers and potentially civilians) to death (PM 35; DP 10). Both cases allow instances of killing despite their contradicting an absolute interdiction to kill. In other words, the political right to kill in particular situations contradicts the ethical unconditional right to life, subjacent to the interdiction to kill. As in the case of hospitality, the antinomy of the death penalty is paradigmatic of the relationship between ethics and politics. We should note, moreover, that Derrida asserts the unconditional right to life in the same way as he asserted the unconditional law of hospitality, namely, with neither criticism nor demonstration. Both have transcendent origins. Both unconditional commands are declared and never deconstructed.

While the unconditional law of hospitality was inspired by Levinas’s philosophy, the unconditional right to life is suggested both by Levinas and by Victor Hugo, who proclaimed the “inviolability of human life” one hundred years before the mention of a right to life in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (PM 150; DP 99). Hugo’s belief in the inviolability of life led him to press for abolition of the death penalty. The 1948 Declaration, however, did not go that far. Consequently, the antinomy of the death penalty remains today as a “double bind of the laws,” which composes sovereignty as a tension between unconditional and conditional rights (PM 143; DP 95).

In modern democracies, indeed, both sets of rights belong to the people regarded as de-divinized sovereign, and together they define the people’s sovereignty. On the one hand, the people, having become the nation state, “becomes aware of its absolute sovereignty” in seeing the death of those condemned:

Never is the state or the people or the community or the nation in its statist figure, never is the sovereignty of the state more visible in the gathering that founds it than when it makes itself into the seer and the voyeur [voyante et voyeuse], of the execution of an irrevocable and unpardoned verdict, of an execution. (PM 25; DP 2–3)

Put differently, the right to kill constitutes the ultimate and absolute affirmation of popular sovereignty. On the other hand, the right to pardon, held by the president or governor who embodies the people’s sovereignty, and who in pardoning acknowledges the condemned person’s right to life, also appears as the ultimate affirmation of sovereignty (PM 302; DP 220). As a result, the right to life channeled into the presidential right to pardon loses its unconditional character, while the right to kill seems to be an unalienable right of the sovereign, which is merely put on hold when the death penalty is abolished.

What this means, concludes Derrida, is that as long as one does not oppose the death penalty “on principle, and by clarifying what ‘on principle’ means, abolitionism will be problematic, limited and precarious, and subject to reversibility, which it remains to this day” (PM2 49–50; DP2 26). Moreover, “one cannot again place the death penalty in question in a radical, principled, unconditional way without contesting or limiting the sovereignty of the sovereign” (DQD 233; FWT 144). The only valid principle of abolition is the unconditional ethical inviolability of human life, which transcends sovereignty.

Therefore, contrary to what we see in the case of hospitality, what is politically at stake in the death penalty occurs at the unconditional level – here, the right to life. More precisely, what is at stake is the possibility of limiting not only the scope of sovereignty, as in the case of hospitality, but also its power, “in a radical, principled and unconditional” – namely, an ethical – fashion. It is at this unconditional level that we see a second autoimmunity: the right to life reduces the power of sovereignty, but in modern democracies any reduction of sovereignty may lead to a loss of basic liberties, and, hence, of the right to life. Therefore, while sovereignty is called into question by the universality of human rights,

it would be imprudent and hasty […] to oppose unconditionally […] a sovereignty that is 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. (V 216; R 158)

2.3 animality and world democracy

Sovereignty – with its right to kill and, hence, with a death penalty that can be only precariously put on hold – is the ultimate guarantor of the transcendent right to life. It is both a protection against oppression and death, and a potential source of oppression and death. In The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida analyzes a passage from Rousseau’s Social Contract to formulate this paradox slightly differently: sovereignty has the double character of peace and destruction, or, more exactly, of protection and devoration. Borrowing a familiar analogy, the sovereign is like a wolf who would guard his flock to better devour it (BS 31–46; BSʹ 11–24).

This opposition between protection and devoration is one of the main channels developed by Derrida in his discussion of sovereignty in his 2001–03 seminar. In a democratic context, this opposition is reinforced by the fact that it is the same people-sovereign which protects and devours itself. Hence, this discussion leads to our third antinomy:

Why is political sovereignty, the sovereign or the state or the people, figured sometimes as what rises, through the law of reason, above the beast, above the natural life of the animal, and sometimes (or simultaneously) as the manifestation of bestiality or human animality, i.e., human naturality? (BS 50; BSʹ 26)

Sovereignty is divided between two regimes of law, the law of reason and the law of nature, which raises the question of the concept of law in general:

So it is the concept of law, and with it of contract, authority, credit […] that will be at the heart of our reflections. Is the law that reigns […] in all the so-called animal societies a law of the same nature as what we understand by law in human rights and human politics? (BS 37; BSʹ 16)

Is the distinction between human and animal laws equivalent to that between unconditional and conditional laws? On the one hand, Derrida makes clear that reason considered as ipseity and auto-determination should be considered unconditional (BS2 124; BS2ʹ 78). It is indeed auto-determination, or the “absolute freedom of the citizen” (BS2 47; BS2ʹ 21), which becomes, through Robinson Crusoe’s building hands, the ethical and religious injunction that stands against the threat of auto-destruction or devoration, and imposes peace and order (BS2 118–33; BS2ʹ 74–85). Devouring animality abolishes such freedom; it transgresses order, limits, and frontiers, as savage wolves do (BS 23; BSʹ 4). It implies theft, conquest, enslavement, cultural appropriation, etc.

On the other hand, contrary to the unconditional law of hospitality and right to life, Derrida does not uncritically claim freedom and auto-determination, because they are expressions of ipseity and force, namely … of animality. This is why

it is the most powerful states which, making international right and bending it to their interests, propose and in fact produce limitations on the sovereignty of the weakest states, sometimes […] going so far as to violate or not respect the international right that they have helped institute. (BS 280; BSʹ 208)

Therefore, animal states or rogue states are those “denounced, confronted and repressed by the police of supposedly legitimate states, those that respect an international law that they have the power to control” (V 101; R 68). Thus, while it is not surprising that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was declared a rogue state, and Saddam himself was called the “beast of Baghdad,” the “most destructive of rogue states would be […] the United States, and sometimes its allies” (V 139; R 97; BS 41; BSʹ 19).

Derrida’s deconstruction of the international right, which was intended to protect individual states, reveals, therefore, another level of autoimmunity:

For democracy to be effective […] which is to say, for it to give rise to an effective power, the cracy of the dēmos – of the world dēmos in this case – is required. What is required is thus a sovereignty, a force that is stronger than all the other forces in the world. But if the constitution of this force is, in principle, supposed to represent and protect this world democracy, it in fact betrays and threatens it from the very outset, in an autoimmune fashion. (V 143; R 100)

The “supersovereignty” meant to protect democracy is also the rogue force that devours democracy, both at a national level and as an idea (V 145; R 101). Here too autoimmunity involves a universalizable, hence ethical, dimension: “The paradox […] is that sovereignty is incompatible with universality even though it is called for by every concept of international, and thus universal or universalizable, and thus democratic, law” (V 144; R 101). A “legitimate and unconditional” sovereignty is needed, but it can never exist (Derrida, “Souverain bien” 140). Supersovereignty is required by ethics while it destroys ethics.

3 ethics and sovereignty

This examination of democracy’s antinomies leads to the conclusion that, by democracy, Derrida means the destabilization of sovereignty by ethics, namely by unconditional rights (to hospitality, to life, to protection), together with the destabilization of such rights by a conditioned sovereignty. Derrida coined the expression “democracy to come” to distinguish his conception of democracy from the common one.¹² Democracy to come is not a future instance of democracy. Rather, it is, here and now, sovereignty deconstructed by ethics together with ethics deconstructed by sovereignty: “The to-come of democracy is also, although without presence, the hic et nunc of urgency, of the injunction as absolute urgency” (V 53; R 29).¹³

However, democracy to come does not mean a symmetry between ethical and political constraints. Indeed, ethics always has priority: “There is a strange hierarchy in this. The law is above the laws” (DH 73; OH 79). Therefore, “through the experience that lets itself be affected by what or who comes […] a certain unconditional renunciation of sovereignty is required a priori” (V 13; R xiv). Yet, while ethics comes first, sovereignty is necessary to give substance to it. We should therefore add to Derrida’s sentence that a certain conditional renunciation of ethics is required a posteriori. Ethics and sovereignty affect each other here and now, but according to different modalities of time: one is unconditional or a priori, the other is conditional or a posteriori.

For that reason, sovereignty and ethical rights should not be regarded as distinct but equal entities in contact with each other, like colors that would mix and transform each other on a painter’s palette. They are two unequal and asymmetrical but imbricated expressions of the same thing, democracy. They constitute democracy’s force (kratos) and its unconditional injunction (V 33; R 13), at work against each other within democracy. Sometimes the ethical injunction will demand more force, and sometimes it will limit force. Sometimes, for democracy to continue existing, sovereignty will strengthen itself, and sometimes it will have to reduce itself, as Derrida shows in the example of the electoral process in Algeria: “They decided in a sovereign fashion to suspend, at least provisionally, democracy for its own good […] By definition, the value of this strategy can never be either confirmed or confuted” (V 33; R 57).

This emphasis on sovereignty and the ethical dimension at work in democracy has given rise to two important critical arguments, which mirror each other. The first comes from Jacques Rancière.

Rancière praises the fact that Derrida’s democracy to come is not a regime that will materialize in the future, and that what “comes” is a supplement here and now, inseparable from democracy itself. For him, however, this supplement may have two significations. According to the first, the supplement will be the excess that, for Rancière, defines politics, and that he conceptualized as disruption or dissensus – the claim of equality of the underprivileged, and their entrance into discourse. However, says Rancière, in Derrida’s work the supplement is understood as “something that exceeds the rationality of politics and makes it dependent upon another law, which is generally conceived of as the ethical law” (Rancière 276).

In Rancière’s philosophy, the supplement consists of the demos itself:

The demos is a supplement to the collection of social differentiations. It is the supplementary part made by those who have no qualification, who are not counted as units in the calculation of the differentiations […] The power of the demos is the power of whomever […] it is heterogeneous to the calculation of the parts or shares of a society. (277)

In Derrida’s philosophy, the supplement is an addition to politics rather than being what makes politics possible (Rancière 278). It is so, argues Rancière, because Derrida’s democracy abandons the idea of demos. According to Rancière, the theological origin of sovereignty highlighted by Derrida turns democratic power into a remainder of theology in which the demos has no specificity. Moreover, what supplements and disturbs sovereignty is a hospitality that, in its antinomy, opens the gap “between the sphere of political compromise and the sphere of the unconditional” (Rancière 281). As a result, Derrida’s political characters are the sovereign and the hospes, who replace the political subject and the demos, and democracy to come “has to act here and now as the impossibility of any here and any now” (Rancière 283).

Rancière’s critique of Derrida’s abandonment of the demos and of the impossibility of democracy to come finds an interesting echo in Wendy Brown’s reading of Rogues. For Brown, while one would expect deconstruction to interrupt all sovereign claims, Derrida “recuperates a conditional and conditioned sovereignty from its absolutist and unconditional heritage,” and makes it necessary to his notion of democracy (Brown 115). Derrida’s requirement of sovereignty comes from his understanding of democracy in relation to “kratos” (strength or force) rather than to “kratia” (rule). In understanding cracy as kratos, Derrida’s democracy to come

obscures to the point of erasing the shared governance that democracy promises. Shared rule, shared power, cherished by radical and republican models of democracy and nearly extinguished by representative modes, is very different from the collective force of the people on something or against something. (Brown 124)

Contrary to Rancière, therefore, Brown does not argue that Derrida directly neglects the demos, but she claims that he misunderstands its features and functions. Moreover, while, according to Brown, democratic freedom consists of collective practices of self-governance, for Derrida, in a very liberal and individualistic way, it is “the faculty or power to do as one pleases […] to have self-determination, to be master, and first of all master of oneself.” This conception of freedom is an additional argument in favor of a sovereignty seen as ipseity (see V 45; R 22–23). Therefore, says Brown, if, as Derrida asserts, “democracy secures the freedom to do as one pleases, then it secures our freedom from one another, including our freedom from ruling together or taking responsibility for the whole […]” (Brown 125). In emphasizing the people’s force rather than its collective deliberation and rule, and individual freedom rather than shared power, Derrida’s democracy ultimately prevents the demos from ruling, and supports state sovereignty rather than governance by the people in order to secure individual freedom regarded as unconditional.

In different ways, Rancière and Brown deplore Derrida’s lack of interest in the processes of participation and insurgency that they argue make a society democratic. At first sight, indeed, Derrida seems to have nothing to say about what the democratic functioning of a political collective should look like. However, closer observation reveals that he does have a conception of the demos, but one that is associated with what he calls the identitarian [identitaire] or communitarian [communautaire] logic. In a few pages of his interview with Elisabeth Roudinesco, Derrida summarizes his entire work by establishing an analogy between the questions of republic vs. democracy, differance vs. differences, and universalism vs. communitarianism.¹⁴ In all three cases, the first term represents a “universalizing potential” and an openness or reference to alterity, which, as we know, has an ethical dimension. The second term – democracy, differences, communitarianism – represents ipseity and a narcissism that affects all groups, including minorities in their truthful and undeniable situation of discrimination and suffering.

Derrida strongly posits that he “mistrusts” the “identitarian or communitarian demand as such” (DQD 44; FWT 22), which is undoubtedly why he never focuses on the practices of the demos. In any popular activity or request, Derrida suspects an identitarian demand, even when it uses universalist rhetoric. Derrida’s criticism of the demos’s identitarian drive, however, is at the same time a deconstruction of the universalist rhetoric itself:

What is defended under the banner of secular and republican universalism (and this is what they want neither to say nor to see) is also a communitarian constellation: the French republic, the French citizenry, the French language, the indivisible unity of a national territory, in short, an ensemble of cultural traits bound up in the history of the nation-state, embodied in it, in its tradition, and in a dominant part of its history […] And the protest against “democratic” communitarianism in the name of “republican” universality is almost always voiced by the strongest community that still thinks it’s the strongest and intends, perhaps, to remain so by resisting the threats from communities that are diverse and are still in the minority. (DQD 49; FWT 24–25)

As a result, Derrida adds that in cases where minorities are oppressed in the name of a universality that is, in fact, another parochialism, he will defend some version of communitarianism. In other words, he is faithful to his idea that in order to realize some aspects at least of the ethical unconditional injunction, a conditional compromise is sometimes necessary. That is, because the universality of ethics takes priority, Derrida rejects groups, identity, communities, and demos, but for the same reason he must sometimes defend them.

Democracy to come, therefore, cannot have anything to do with the demos per se or with its collective practices because it is “the autos of deconstructive self-limitation [l’autos de l’auto-délimitation déconstructive]” (PA 129; PF 105).¹⁵ Democracy to come does not deal with political practices, because it deals with

the limit between the conditional (the edge of the context and of the concept enclosing the effective practice of democracy and nourishing it in land [sol] and blood) and the unconditional which, from the outset, will have inscribed a self-deconstructive force in the very motif of democracy. (PA 129; PF 105)

Contrary to what Rancière claims, what is significant here is not that democracy acts as the impossibility of the here and now, as if Derrida had imagined an unrealizable political utopia, but that it displays the relationship between ethics and politics. Democracy to come is the name of this antinomic in-between.

Why then use the word democracy? Why does Derrida take a word so saturated with a political tradition – in both the empirical and philosophical contexts – to say something that is exterior to that tradition? We opened this discussion with the answer to that question: the three autoimmunities that lead to the conceptualization of democracy to come appear in the context of real, empirical, modern democracies. The autoimmunities of inclusion, of rights, and of globalization capture the self-contradictions revealed by current democratic regimes – in their treatment of immigrants, refugees, and indeed all minorities; in their neoliberal policies, which in the name of free competition demote both popular sovereignty and rights; and in their relations to the UN, international trade, and international courts. These autoimmunities are not abstract concepts, but the concrete experience of political life as we know it in liberal democracies today.

What this experience teaches, therefore, is that beyond its practices of popular governance, deliberation, claims, and rebellion, or maybe through them, the very idea of democracy consists of the antinomy of sovereignty and ethics.¹⁶ Ethics is the irreducible transcendent injunction, the unconditional order already present in the “old” Greek concepts of equality (isogonia and isonomia) and eudoxia (good judgment), which acts to “exclude democracy from autochthonous and homophilic rooting” (PA 127; PF 104). Sovereignty, completely antithetic to ethics, and, hence, both autochthonous and homophilic, is, in its indivisible ipseity, the guarantor of freedom: “There is no freedom without ipseity and, vice versa, no ipseity without freedom – and, thus, without a certain sovereignty” (V 45; R 23). Through freedom, sovereignty makes possible the realization of some of the unconditional order. Hence,

pure sovereignty does not exist; it is always in the process of positing itself by refuting itself, by denying or disavowing itself; it is always in the process of autoimmunizing itself, of betraying itself by betraying the democracy that nonetheless can never do without it. (V 144; R 101)

Derrida’s deconstruction of democracy reveals that its very idea includes two dimensions often forgotten or denigrated in some currents of political theory – namely, ethics, the transcendent order of openness and protection of the rights of the other; and sovereignty, a principle of ipseity that constitutes the freedom and will to decide. The neglect of the ethical order engenders theories of democratic participation which are unable to judge or choose between different practices. Some will accordingly regard all popular deliberation, claim, or revolt as legitimate, which Derrida, in his rejection of communitarianism, cannot accept. The renunciation of sovereignty – fashionable both for proponents of neoliberal governance, who consider sovereignty as misleading and dysfunctional in a free market ruled by competition, and for critical thinkers who regard the concept as obsoletely predicated on self-mastery – results in the impossibility of substantive auto-determination. In both cases, therefore, democracy will be affected, degraded, and possibly destroyed. Derrida’s political work shows that while ethics and sovereignty interrupt each other, their antinomy constitutes the precondition of a concrete democratic life that respects rights and differences without fetishizing them.

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See, for example, Rogues, The Politics of Friendship, and The Animal That Therefore I Am.

2 The notion of a “second level” does not imply ontological depth but indicates a network of meanings.

3 On autoimmunity, see Haddad, Hägglund, and Naas. Vardoulakis emphasizes three other versions of democratic autoimmunity (47).

4 While the published translation in English posits that autoimmunity, aporia, and double bind are “not exactly synonyms,” Derrida writes that they are not “de simples synonymes,” which means that they are synonyms in a stronger sense, having in common a “nondialectizable antinomy that risks paralyzing and thus calls for the event of the interruptive decision” (V 60; R 35). See Naas 18; Caputo 295.

5 At the time of writing this paper, the first volume of Derrida’s seminar on hospitality has not yet been translated into English. The first session of the seminar has been published separately in English under the name “Hostipitality.” The fourth and fifth sessions appear in DH/OH.

6 “The question of hospitality is therefore also the question of ipseity” (Derrida, Hospitalité 56).

7 The master of the house is “male in the first instance” (Derrida, Hospitalité 45; “Hostipitality” 14).

8 On Levinas’s influence on Derrida’s conception of hospitality, see Still; De Ville; Noble and Noble. Hospitality, however, has a long moral tradition independently of Levinas. See Friese.

9 Italics within quotations are in the original source. As Haddad explains, the conditional laws allow for a realization of the unconditional law “without which hospitality would simply be an impotent desire.” At the same time, “without the unconditional law as their guide and inspiration, the conditional laws risk losing their sense as hospitable and would simply be laws of economy” (Haddad 13–14).

10 In Derrida’s late work, “unconditional” is a synonym for “ethical.” While he used the words “conditional” and “unconditional” in his early writings, they appear more often and more consistently from the beginning of the 1990s, when he began directing specific attention to political questions.

11 “The theologico-political is […] an apparatus of sovereignty in which the death penalty is necessarily inscribed. There is theological-political wherever there is death penalty” (PM 51; DP 23). By theologico-political Derrida refers to the Schmittean assertion that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (Schmitt 36). See PM 134; DP 88.

12 Vardoulakis emphasizes the distinction between democracy and sovereignty, but, according to him, Derrida “poses the dilemma: democracy or sovereignty” (Vardoulakis 52), while I argue that democracy consists of the reciprocal destabilization of sovereignty and ethical rights.

13 See also Derrida, Spectres de Marx 60; Specters of Marx 37.

14 Communitarianism must be here understood in the French sense of communautarisme, an ideology that includes both insularism and identity politics.

15 The formulation first appeared in Right to Philosophy and was formalized in The Politics of Friendship.

16 Both Rancière and Brown neglect the purely ethical and unconditional demand at stake in democracy. As a result, their theories lack criteria to judge particular practices of popular deliberation or rebellion, as is immediately visible in Rancière’s philosophy.