Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy

STUDIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT

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David Wood

DERRIDA AND THE INHERITANCE OF DEMOCRACY

Samir Haddad

Indiana University Press

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© 2013 by Samir Haddad

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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haddad, Samir.

Derrida's inheritance of democracy / Samir Haddad.

pages cm. — (Studies in continental thought)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-00836-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00841-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00843-5 (ebook) 1. Derrida, Jacques. 2. Democracy—Philosophy. 3. Political science—Philosophy. I. Title.

B2430.D484H325 2013

320.092—dc23

2013002397

1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13

For my father, in thanks and admiration

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Derrida's Legacies

1  The Structure of Aporia

2  Derridean Inheritance

3  Inheriting Democracy to Come

4  Questioning Normativity

5  Politics of Friendship as Democratic Inheritance

6  Inheriting Birth

Conclusion: Inheriting Derrida's Legacies

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations have been used in the text for frequently cited works by Jacques derrida.

Throughout the text all references to works by Derrida that are available in both English and French refer first to the English pagination, then to the French. Unless stated otherwise, translations of works that are available only in French are mine.

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK WAS written over a number of years, and I have many people to thank for the inspiration, conversations, and help that were essential to its production.

First, thanks to David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, who, from the very beginning, provided excellent guidance and support, giving extensive feedback on everything he read. I owe an enormous amount to Penelope Deutscher, an inspiring philosopher whose influence on me is hard to measure. I'm very lucky to have first encountered European philosophy in Penny's lecture hall, and to have received her help ever since, not in the least across the whole process of the writing of this book. I am also grateful to Bonnie Honig and Sam Weber for their expertise and advice during the project's early stages. Their input was key in shaping the core argument.

I am privileged to have had Martin Hägglund as a friend and interlocutor over the past decade. I thank him for countless hours of conversation and argument, as well as for his feedback on the manuscript as a whole. Geoffrey Bennington and Johanna Oksala also read a draft of the manuscript, and their suggestions for improvement were invaluable. I thank Michael Naas for his generosity and insight the many times we talked—his clarity and knowledge never failed to illuminate the more difficult ideas that I sought to understand. And thanks also to Ann Murphy and Jeffrey Flynn, exemplary colleagues and friends with whom I've discussed so much that is in these pages.

I've benefited from a strong community of scholars who helped me work through the ideas in this book at various stages in discussion and correspondence. Thanks to Joshua Andresen, Pleshette DeArmitt, Matthias Fritsch, Allan Hazlett, Leonard Lawlor, Paul Patton, Gayle Salamon, Alan Schrift, Daniel Smith, Jill Stauffer, Nicholas Tampio, and Patrick Weil for their time and input.

At Fordham University I owe much to two of my senior colleagues, John Drummond and Merold Westphal, for their support in the early stages of my career. I also received valuable financial support from Fordham in the form of a Faculty Research Grant in 2009, a Summer Faculty Research Grant in 2011, and a Faculty Fellowship in 2011, which aided in the writing of this book.

At Indiana University Press, Dee Mortensen, Sarah Jacobi, and Tim Roberts were an excellent editorial team, providing expert knowledge and advice that went a long way to improving the book. I also thank Paolo Pecchi for the permission to use his wonderful painting for the cover.

Finally, I thank my parents for all they have done to support me across a lifetime of learning. And thank you to Luisa, my light, for everything.

Earlier versions of some of the arguments in this book appeared in the following publications: Derrida and Democracy at Risk, Contretemps 4 (2004): 29–44; Inheriting Democracy to Come, Theory & Event 8, no. 1 (2005); Reading Derrida Reading Derrida: Deconstruction as Self-Inheritance, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 14, no. 4 (2006): 505–20; A Genealogy of Violence, from Light to the Autoimmune, Diacritics 38, no. 1–2 (2008): 121–42; Language Remains, CR: The New Centennial Review 9, no. 1 (2009): 127–46; Jacques derrida, in History of Continental Philosophy, vol. 6: Poststructuralism and Critical Theory's Second Generation, edited by Alan D. Schrift (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 111–32; and Citizenship and the Ambivalence of Birth, Derrida Today 4, no. 2 (2011): 173–93. In all cases the arguments have been modified.

Introduction

Derrida's Legacies

UPON JACQUES DERRIDA'S death in October 2004, obituaries appeared, memorials were held, conferences were convened, and at least twenty-eight academic journals in disciplines across the humanities published special issues dedicated to his memory. Surveying the published record, one is struck by two dominant themes. The first is that of Derrida's legacy. This theme is not surprising, since raising the question of legacy is a common reaction to a public figure's death. But it was amplified in Derrida's case, no doubt owing first to the fact that his work as a whole is characterized by a constant engagement with the legacies of others. Deconstruction, the word he used consistently across decades of publishing to describe what he was doing (despite the occasional lamentation of its more popular associations), names an approach to inheriting from the work of others. As Derrida once claimed, This is one of the possible definitions of deconstruction—as inheritance.¹ Further, throughout his work Derrida also explicitly reflects on inheritance and related phenomena. From his early texts arguing for an essential relation between writing and death, to his final interview in which he considers what will happen to his work after his own death, one finds discussions of the themes of legacy and inheritance, and of what it is to be an heir. When Derrida died, these analyses provided a resource for those who had learned so much from his writings, seeming to speak directly to the current experience of inheriting from a thinker whose life had now ended, but whose work lives on. Thus, despite Derrida's claim in that final interview that he "never learned-to-live [appris-à-vivre] (a phrase which he points out can mean equally taught to live"), it was as if he had managed to accomplish the latter after his death, finally teaching his readers how to read his work and thus live as heirs to this work.²

The second dominant theme that one finds in the many texts written in response to derrida's death is that of politics. Although not as typical a response to the death of a thinker, the choice of this topic too has a ready explanation. In the last fifteen years of his publishing career, derrida turned his attention increasingly to politics, analyzing at length concepts central to political thought and writing extensively on contemporary political issues. As has often been remarked, by derrida himself and many of his commentators, this need not imply that his writings were ever apolitical to begin with. But it is the case that politics is treated more explicitly in the later work than in the earlier, with long and detailed explorations of issues such as state violence, the legitimacy of law, immigration, reconciliation, cosmopolitanism, sovereignty, and the nature of democracy. In The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States?), in Rogues, the last major work published in his lifetime, derrida brings all of these themes together, providing an extended analysis of democracy in the context of the post-September 11 world and elaborating on the rather enigmatic notion of "democracy to come [démocratie à venir]."³ Given the desire to speak of something new, together with the massive turn to political thinking that took place in continental philosophy and theory after September 11, it is thus to be expected that so many of those responding to derrida's death would highlight the political dimensions of his work, with special mention made of democracy to come.

Thus taking the initial reaction to his death as a guide, two of derrida's most important legacies concern politics, on the one hand, and the thought of legacy, on the other. In this book my aim is to demonstrate that these two themes are fundamentally related. My central claim is that inheritance, understood in a very precise manner, plays a crucial role in derrida's theorization of democracy. Now I am not alone in noting the connection between derrida's understanding of democracy and a certain relation to the past. Geoffrey Bennington claims that in every deconstruction the point is to exploit other resources in the inheritance and that the case of ‘democracy’ would in that case be exemplary.⁴ Matthias Fritsch argues that for derrida democracy's futurity is linked to the promise of repetition, a link achieved by the notion of history, and [which] seems to rely on modern forms of historical consciousness: as opposed to other political formations, democracy is aware of its perfectibility (and, we would have to add, the possibilities of its degeneracy) in history, thus opening and exposing itself to the future to come.⁵ Pheng Cheah speaks of the paleonymy of democracy…an essential historicity [that] gives it a to-come, sends it into a future to-come beyond any positive forms of democracy.⁶ And Judith Butler notes that ‘democracy to come’ is a presupposition of any existing democracy, and we err if we think that it belongs only to a future that is somehow dissociated from the past and present.⁷ There is thus acknowledgment in the literature of an important relation between the past and democracy to come.

However, just what this relation is and what it entails are not so clear. This is apparent when considering two recent books that go far beyond just mentioning this relation, using Derrida's work precisely to intervene in debates on democracy and inheritance. In Aversive Democracy, Aletta Norval draws Derrida's understanding of democracy to come into close proximity to Stanley Cavell's perfectionism. Her aim is to articulate a democratic subjectivity that is normative without being teleological, and central to her use of Derrida is his claim that democracy has the structure of a promise, ‘a promise that is kept in memory, that is handed down…inherited, claimed, and taken up.’⁸ In this way Norval endorses the relation of inheritance that democracy carries, claiming it crucial to theorizing a democratic ethos more satisfactory than is currently found in poststructuralist and deliberative democratic thinking. Thus, although conscious of some of the dangers that Derrida sees in democracy to come, Norval nonetheless has hope in the inheritance it entails, a hope that through its relation to the past democracy might be improved. By contrast, Ananda Abeysekara, in his The Politics of Postsecular Religion, uses Derrida's work to argue the opposite in the context of religious and postcolonial studies. He claims that Derrida's writings demonstrate how the heritage of the name/identity of democracy means that it cannot be changed and improved; Abeysekara advocates instead that we un-inherit this name, a strategy not reducible to a ready-made binary of remembering/forgetting or embracing/abandoning.⁹ He thus interprets Derrida's thinking of democracy to come as demonstrating the inevitable failure of any inheritance of the democratic tradition to improve the current state of politics.

Much more would need to be said to do justice to Norval's and Abeysekara's use of Derrida. Here I simply wish to suggest that the existence of accounts so opposed attest to the complexity of Derrida's own position and the potential richness of his work for thinking inheritance in democracy. In addition, I would note that accounts such as these are relatively uncommon among the responses to Derrida's work on democracy. Although it would be too much to say that there exists a dominant interpretation of this work—it is still too new for comprehensive interpretations to have yet emerged—it is the case that one finds a dominant tendency to privilege the future in the many scholars engaging with or referring to Derrida on this topic. Thinking that the future is the primary temporal modality of Derrida's theorization of democracy is of course understandable, given his own emphasis on it, exemplified in the very vocabulary of the to come. But it is my contention that such a singular focus misses out on the most original and interesting aspect of this theorization, namely that there is a democratic injunction to inherit from the past in a very particular way. Without appreciating this fact, democracy to come is very quickly reduced to a simple passivity or utopianism in the face of what happens, which in turn allows for no response other than resigned acceptance or flat-out rejection. By contrast, I aim to show that recognizing democracy to come as involving inheritance not only better represents Derrida's own view but that it also opens up a space for richer responses to be pursued.

To make my argument, I first develop a general account of Derridean inheritance. Chapter 1 begins at a certain distance from the themes of inheritance and democracy by analyzing the structure of aporia. This lays the groundwork for all the claims that follow, since I will argue that for derrida all legacies are aporetic. I pursue my analysis by focusing on the specific case of hospitality, whose structure is exemplary of aporias and central to derrida's engagement with democracy, and show how he argues that being hospitable requires a response to two injunctions, one unconditional and the other conditional. These injunctions contradict one another at the same time as they are in an asymmetrical relation of interdependence, implying that their contradiction cannot be resolved, only negotiated. Having presented the features of this structure in detail, I then argue that, contrary to what is often assumed, unconditional hospitality does not operate as an ideal in derrida's writings. I acknowledge that my interpretation might be seen to encourage political paralysis, but I suggest that this worry is reduced when one appreciates the relation between aporias and inheritance.

Chapter 2 examines inheritance directly and articulates derrida's understanding of its general features. Focusing primarily on claims made in two works, Specters of Marx and For What Tomorrow, I argue that although derrida presents inheritance as a necessary relation that one has to aporias, this relation is not fully determined.¹⁰ For derridean inheritance does contain a restricted sphere of choice, and I show this by examining the way that, in his readings of others, derrida himself chooses to privilege the most living part of a legacy by aggressively raising the stakes of the aporetic tensions he receives, attempting to open them up to transformation. I then complete my general account by explaining the temporal logic of spacing to which derridean inheritance adheres, and the relation between inheritance and justice that this reveals.

Chapter 3 moves to the heart of my argument by connecting the general theory of inheritance I have developed to derrida's theorization of democracy. I begin by expanding on the link derrida makes between democracy and the idea of a promise. This provides the characteristics that democracy ought to have, including an aporetic structure, instability in its name, an essential dimension of nonknowledge, and an undecidability between safety and danger. To show that for derrida democracy indeed has these traits I next turn to The Reason of the Strongest, focusing in particular on this essay's central concept, autoimmunity. With derrida's understanding of democracy articulated, I then examine the role that inheritance plays in his account. I first establish that democracy is inherited according to the theory developed in Chapter 2, showing that it conforms to the aporetic structure and the logic of spacing. I then argue for a second, stronger claim, that through his emphasis on the role of self-critique in democratic practice, derrida can be read as asserting that participants in democracy must inherit if they are to pursue its promise. democracy is thus not only inherited; it also contains the injunction to inherit, and democratic action requires an active response to this injunction. In this way derrida's notion of democracy to come harbors an inextricable link to the past.

With my interpretation established, the second half of the book is devoted to pursuing its implications. Chapter 4 addresses the normative status of derrida's work. This issue has been in the background of my account, with Chapter 2 arguing that Derridean inheritance contains a certain space for choice, and Chapter 3 that Derrida values democracy despite its inevitable dangers. My interpretation thus underlines the fact that Derrida's writings contain normative claims. However, there is disagreement in the secondary literature as to whether Derrida is justified in making such claims. I analyze this issue by examining two prominent interpretations—Leonard Lawlor, who in This Is Not Sufficient attempts to justify Derrida's normative claims through appeals to a lesser violence, and Martin Hägglund, who in Radical Atheism argues that Derrida cannot support such claims when performing a deconstructive analysis.¹¹ I argue that neither interpretation is satisfactory, and propose an alternative account. On my interpretation, since the structures Derrida theorizes must be linked to language that is inherited (in words such as democracy, hospitality, and so on), a field of normative values associated with the history of this language is opened up in his writings. I thus argue that Derrida's writings contain possibilities for making legitimate normative claims, without these claims being immune to critique or question.

Chapter 5 highlights one such normative claim by analyzing the most developed example of democratic inheritance in Derrida's writings, Politics of Friendship.¹² I show that in this work's engagement with discourses of friendship and political belonging in the Western tradition, Derrida inherits according to the scheme I have articulated, raising the stakes of traditional theories in order to call for a transformation in conceptions of democratic citizenship that would break with the language of fraternity. It is in this resistance to fraternity that Derrida's strategy of inheritance can be seen to be democratic, since it responds to the injunction to promote greater inclusiveness. This is not to say, however, that Derrida's inheritance of the tradition is safe from all critique, and I draw attention to two of its aspects that can be called into question. First, I argue that despite the feminist impulse in Derrida's inheritance of the tradition, he nonetheless perpetuates a certain exclusion of women in determining this tradition's makeup as being exclusively male. Second, I note that Derrida's resistance to fraternity relies on a particular understanding of birth as a past, negative necessity that is immune to all revision, and I suggest that one need not be restricted by this narrow definition.

Chapter 6 takes up this last theme, that of birth, seeking to inherit Derrida's democratic discourse so as to open it up to further transformation. I first show that in addition to the negative determination as past necessity presupposed in Politics of Friendship, Derrida's writings seem also to contain an alternative understanding of birth, as a positive figure for contingency that lies in the future. I argue, however, that this division is misleading and that properly understood there is only one conception of birth that can be said to operate across Derrida's writings. I make this argument in two steps. First, I show that within the Derridean framework the second understanding of birth cannot be purely positive, but it is ambivalent, and lies in a time between past and future that is one of inheritance. Second, I argue that the first understanding of birth also possesses this structure, showing how derrida transforms this supposed figure of necessity precisely through an act of inheritance.

To conclude, I reflect on my analysis in order to outline a model for inheriting from derrida's work as a whole. deconstruction is an exercise in inheritance, and my reading of Politics of Friendship highlights the central feature of this exercise—i demonstrate how derrida provisionally stabilizes one aspect of the tradition (the meaning of birth) in order to destabilize other aspects (the links between fraternity, friendship, and democracy). This stabilization is necessary for the success of derrida's intervention. But at the same time it marks a point requiring further engagement, since, as I show, birth cannot be reduced once and for all to any single determination. This suggests a general strategy for future readings of derrida: every time he inherits, which occurs every time he writes, look for those points of seeming stability and exploit their underlying instability in order to generate further possibilities for carrying his work forward.

Across his writings derrida inherits from writers and thinkers working in a number of traditions and genres, resulting in a rich and multifaceted oeuvre that resists mastery. This complexity is one of the reasons for the impressive multidisciplinary impact of his work. It also leaves one with diverse methodological options of how to go about responding to what derrida has written. In this book I have chosen to analyze derrida's texts on their own terms, uncovering connections and tensions within them in order to articulate and develop further a conceptual framework that is often only implicitly or partially theorized by derrida himself. There are thus no chapters or long sections analyzing other thinkers or issues external to derrida scholarship. The obvious danger of this approach is that of producing an elaborate edifice, perhaps intriguing in some respects, but sealed and isolated in its own internal relations. Needless to say, I have sought to avoid such an outcome, and in any case I thought it a risk worth running in order to present the originality, sophistication, and occasional strangeness of derrida's position on democracy in all of its complexity. I hope that the result is a clear, comprehensible, and comprehensive interpretation that I and others may take up in the future and connect more fully to related thinkers and topics. As derrida states in Specters of Marx, "inheritance is never a given, it is always a task. It remains before us" (SOM, 54/SDM, 94).

1

The Structure of Aporia

Aporias

Despite the many different topics on which he writes, and the large diversity of authors he reads, Derrida's texts return the reader with insistence to what seems to be the same logical structure. This structure goes by various names, including undecidable, double bind, double constraint, aporia, contradictory injunction, antinomy, and process of autoimmunity. In each case, at stake is a relation between two elements that contradict each other at the same time that they depend on each other. It is thus a necessary contradiction, which cannot be resolved by traditional means such as denying one of the elements or lifting the relation up in a dialectical movement. The power of Derrida's analyses lies in his demonstration of the ways traditional modes of thinking lead to such irresolvable contradictions, and it is impressive that he is able to show this so consistently across readings of so many different authors, texts, subjects, and traditions.

Now Derrida himself resists reducing all of these analyses to one master structure or term that would hold sway over the others, even while the similarities among them are so striking. Otherwise put, the variation in names has not occurred by chance. Each name carries different connotations and resonates in a particular way with its specific context. For example, aporia, meaning without passage or having no way to move forward, receives its most extensive discussion in a text (Aporias) first delivered at the Cerisy-la-Salle conference titled The Passage of Frontiers.¹ Derrida uses antinomy most often in discussions that approach Kant, yet precisely at the point in which he wishes to distinguish himself from Kant, examining how the law (nomos) seems to undo itself in a hyperbolic raising of the stakes.² And the originally biological term autoimmunity appears when Derrida examines a certain kind of life (the life of religion, the life of democracy) which partially destroys its own immune system in order to live on.³ These names thus work because of their respective contexts, and one cannot easily transfer them across the different texts in which they appear.

But this is not to say that such a transfer is impossible. Indeed, Derrida does this all the time, speaking of the aporetic structure of an antinomy, the antinomic nature of autoimmunity, and so on. This does not contradict what I have just claimed, for these interchanges are always provisional, one might even say experimental. The text mentioned above, Aporias, provides a good example of this strategy. Here, as is appropriate in the context of a conference devoted to his own work, Derrida takes the time to examine what he sees as his past invocations of aporias and aporetic structures (A, 12–21/AP, 31–48). He notes that "aporia, this tired word of philosophy and logic, has often imposed itself upon me, and recently it has done so even more often, and then goes on to provide a kind of aporetology or aporetography" in which he lists and cites a number of his texts (A, 12–13, 15/AP, 32, 35).⁴ In these texts it is not always the case that aporia is the central term used to focus on the contradictory structure in question, and sometimes the word itself does not even appear. Yet Derrida is nonetheless willing in this context to group them under this name. He risks calling them all aporias, even though he may have used different names in the past.

Having provided an overview of aporias across his writings, Derrida's self-reflection in Aporias then focuses more narrowly