Saturday, November 18, 2006

Democracy and St. Derrida

Edward Berge Says: November 15th, 2006 at 7:58 pm From Caputo’s referenced article above: “Without sovereignty, without being: unconditionality, the coming God and Derrida’s democracy to come”:
Derrida’s is a faith without religion or religious institutions, without theocracy and without a church, a faith in the unconditional and the incalculable. But this faith is also what Derrida means by reason (V, 211). Reason is a movement back and forth between the incalculable and the calculable, calculating always in the face of the incalculability, keeping calculability open to the incalculable. While the irrational for Kant lay in allowing reason to be overcome by something other, reason for Derrida is precisely defined by its openness to the other, to the event, to the future, its desire for the incalculable and the unconditional, for the promise. Reason is not measured by consensus, as for Habermas, which would always present a certain closure and compromise, but by the promise, which is open ended.
Anything as fetching and as haunting as this “democracy to come” would also be what Derrida calls “undeconstructible,” and it would relate to existing and highly deconstructible democracies just the way justice, which is unconditional, is related to the force of law, where laws are always positive and conditional. The democracy to come, s’il y en a, is not deconstructible, while existing democratic polities and juridical systems, which enjoy the prestige of being and the power of the possible, are deconstructible. The democracy to come, accordingly, is impossible, the impossible (PTT, 134), which solicits us from afar, demanding the impossible of us, as the object of a desire beyond desire for something unforeseeable to come. That alone should be enough to tell us that “deconstruction” is the least bad word for a profoundly affirmative undertaking to unearth the most deeply buried and unfulfilled promises lodged in our least bad words—words like “justice” and “democracy,” the “gift” and “forgiveness,” “friendship” and “hospitality.”
What does the democracy to come call for? If the call comes from the heart of a promise lodged deep within the word democracy, and if it calls to us democrats who are not yet democrats, what does it say? Like any call of conscience worthy of the name, in Heidegger or Levinas, say, it pronounces us guilty, guilty of being the basis of a nullity, of not yet being democrats, infinitely responsible to respond to the call to be or become democratic, asking us to put off the old way and to turn around.
…democracy today is suffering from an auto-immune disease….Democracy today is a victim of the “strange illogical logic” by which a living thing destroys the very thing that is meant to fortify (munis) it against attack by a foreign body (V, 173)….. So democracies often think that if, as a practical matter, they are to survive, they must make themselves safe from democracy and learn how to tolerate anti-democratic forces within their own bodies. Thus, in order to make the American way of life safe against the threat of terrorists who threaten democracy, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants to abridge the democratic rights of American citizens (V, 64-65), or the rights of prisoners being held inGuantanamo Bay, even as the Rehnquist court has seen fit to profoundly abridge the civil liberties of Americans to keep the streets of democracy safe….An absolute democracy could bring a democratic end to democracy; that risk is built right into democracy….The art of governing democratically is to know when democracy should suppress its own immunities to the undemocratic and attack itself (autos)—in the interests of democracy, of course.
To have faith in democracy is to trust and have faith in the many, to give up the rule of the sovereign one or few and share it among the many, among the “people,” come what may….So if we were true to this idea of democracy, we would end up with another and more radical idea of auto-immunity, one that is not simply self-destructive but rather breaks down the “ipseity” of the “self,” its mastery and autonomy (V, 71), in order to open the self to sharing with “the other.” That in turn would require a revolutionary turn, in which we would reverse the model that democracy follows from one of autonomy to one of “heteronomy” (V, 154), where the one would agree to be governed by the many, the self by the others, those among whom one is too. The symbiotic effect of undoing the idea of political sovereignty would be to have redescribed the autonomous self in terms of the other in the self, as a self that is not identical with itself, a self that is always already divided within itself, inhabited by the other, a complex of many selves….Auto-immunity then will mean the right to criticize oneself (V, 126).

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