Derrida: Democracy

Legitimacy is a concept that has been largely forgotten by the deconstructive discourse on law and politics. This article seeks, on the one hand, to reassess the role of legitimacy in deconstruction and, on the other hand, to bring deconstructive thinking to bear on the concept of legitimacy. By re-reading Derrida’s “Declarations of Independence” through the lenses of his later texts on sovereignty and (counter)signature, it is argued that, rather than being deconstructible, legitimacy is deconstructing any self-founding of law and (...) power. As such, legitimacy functions not as an evaluative concept of law and order but as a constantly insisting demand that facilitates the principles of responsibility and responsiveness. (shrink)

This article interrogates a certain philosophical scene – one which constitutes itself through the position of what Jacques Derrida calls “the ethical instance of violence.” This scene supposes a certain “style” of writing or doing philosophy, and perhaps even a certain philosophical “genre” or “subgenre”: the philosophical discourse on violence. In the course of the essay, I analyze this quasi-juridical scene through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Werner Hamacher, Rodolphe Gasché, and Martin Hägglund among (...) others. The scene, built on texts on texts on violence, demands a logic of purity; it is wary of contaminations and equivocations. And yet it thrives on them. In analyzing the implications of text, writing, and trace for the philosophical discourse on violence, I follow Derrida “just to see” what could make the scene tremble. (shrink)

This article explores Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘democracy to come’, showing how democracy generates what might be described as a ‘deconstructive’ relation to foundational ideas. This article opens with an overview of the political theory literature on Derrida’s political thought, arguing that scholars mistakenly present it as naïvely anti-foundationalist. The body of this article then briefly demonstrates that a Derridean approach to foundations does not aim to destroy or transcend them, but to interrupt our expectation that foundations be stable and (...) certain. Turning to Politics of Friendship and Rogues, this article shows that Derrida’s notion of the democracy to come hinges around the idea that there is precisely such a ‘deconstructive’ relation between democracy’s dual foundations of freedom and equality. Democracy is thus itself ‘deconstructive’. Far from the inconsistent and insincere defender of democracy that his critics describe, Derrida emerges as a provocative contributor to democratic theory. (shrink)

Review of Peter Gratton's 2012 book, "The State of Sovereignty".

Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy provides a theoretically rich and accessible account of Derrida's political philosophy. Demonstrating the key role inheritance plays in Derrida’s thinking, Samir Haddad develops a general theory of inheritance and shows how it is essential to democratic action. He transforms Derrida’s well-known idea of "democracy to come" into active engagement with democratic traditions. Haddad focuses on issues such as hospitality, justice, normativity, violence, friendship, birth, and the nature of democracy as he reads these deeply political (...) writings. (shrink)

Frantz Fanon’s theoretical and practical challenge is to identify how self-determination is possible for a subject whose agency and significance have, through colonization, been appropriated and shaped by others, a challenge to which he responds with the invocation of “national consciousness.” In this paper I describe this national consciousness and show how its exclusivity paradoxically establishes the ground for a kind of international or universal inclusiveness. I differentiate this inclusiveness from the universality of Western political ideals, which Fanon challenges, and (...) conclude by discussing how the tension between nation and internationalism in Fanon is illuminated by Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the idea of democracy and particular democracies in Rogues. (shrink)

This paper contends that Ananda Abeysekara’s notion of un-inheritance, developed via a Derridean analysis of contemporary Sri Lankan politics and society, can act as a helpful supplement to the concept of justice. What one finds in Abeysekara’s analysis is an interpretation of justice as ultimately aporetic: justice both opens up to the possibility of its ever greater concrete realization and continually defers its completion. This paper begins by examining the aporetic character of justice as articulated by Derrida. It then proceeds (...) to Abeysekara’s account, situated as it is within a largely political consideration of Sri Lanka’s multicultural heritage and the recent conflicts that have arisen there. Abeysekara offers the notion of un-heritance as a way of thinking the possibility of justice precisely when political—and also religious—traditions come to an impasse, thus recognizing the inescapably aporetic structure of justice itself. (shrink)

The essay continues the discussion on democracy begun in Derrida Today 4:2, interrogating the associations between the nature of the pharmakon and democracy ‘itself’, seen as ‘the sovereignty of the people’. Starting with Derrida's notion of writing (and grammatology in general) as what he calls the ‘errant democrat’, shared by – and indeed defining – all, and at the same time prior to the demos, Bernard Stiegler makes the further claim that this foundation of democracy, the pharmakon, is not simply (...) a dialectical site of poison and remedy, as it is often seen, but rather a neutral space or referent that simultaneously connects and disconnects through Stiegler's wider sense of grammatisation, which includes Derrida's sense but extends to all tertiary memory, those external mnemonic devices that not only articulate but guide and indeed anticipate culture and its evolution. The implications of a pharmako-democracy are enormous in a hypertechnological epoch in technics as a tool has emerged as a controlling cultural force. In this sense pharmacopolitics are the only politics. The essay considers how Derrida's exploration of this pharmako-neutrality is at work in Specters of Marx as well as ‘Plato's Pharmacy’, and how it provides a frame for and a bridge to Jean-François Lyotard's related sense of desire in Libidinal Economy, where pharmacological neutrality must also be seen as excess or, in Lyotard's word for it, ‘inascribable’. (shrink)

In this paper I analyse and critically assess Jacques Derrida’s political reading of Nietzsche. Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche’s multiple styles and their ramifications for how we read philosophical texts is well known. But Derrida also maintained that Nietzsche’s addresses to an unknown future readership evidenced a democratic aspect to Nietzsche’s work. Derrida’s is a heretofore unexamined interpretation, and in this paper I aim to show that his emphasis on the democratic style of Nietzsche’s writing raises different questions about the kind (...) of political values that support Nietzsche’s critique of modernity. I argue that Derrida’s reading merits discussion, particularly in virtue of its intriguing account of what it means to experience the future democratically. However, I think Derrida’s reading has its own exegetical and philosophical problems. In sections one and two I explain why Derrida thought that Nietzsche’s hopes for the future of Europe constitute a democratic comportment; in section three I show how this reading of Nietzsche can be defended against a philosophical objection to its plausibility; and in section four I suggest exegetical reasons for questioning Derrida’s interpretation. I will end by drawing on Nietzsche’s work to raise an objection to the political quietism of democracy to come. (shrink)

Shortly before his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida provocatively suggested that the greatest problem confronting contemporary democracy is that ‘the alternative to democracy can always be represented as a democratic alternative ’. This article analyses the manner in which certain manifestly anti-democratic practices, like terror and torture, come to be taken up in defense of democracies as a result of what Derrida calls democracy’s ‘autoimmune’ tendencies.

El objetivo de este trabajo es demostrar que aquello que vincula la deconstrucción con lo político es la idea de acontecimiento y, en concreto, la fe en el acontecimiento. Lo mesiánico consiste en esta fe en el acontecimiento que Derrida recupera de Marx. Para demostrar esta tesis procederé, en primer lugar, a distinguir la idea de mesianicidad de la idea reguladora kantiana; en segundo lugar, se analizará el concepto de creencia que, según Derrida, debe habitar el concepto mismo de democracia; (...) y finalmente se mostrará cómo este elemento fiduciario de la deconstrucción desborda el ámbito de lo ético para abrir una concepción de lo político vinculada a lo religioso. (shrink)

Beginning with a reconsideration of what the school is and has been, this paper explores the idea of the school to come. Emphasizing the governmental role of education in modernity, I offer a line of thinking that calls into question the assumption of both the school and education as possible conduits for either democracy or social justice. Drawing on Derrida’s spectral ontology I argue that any automatic correlation of education with democracy is misguided: especially within redemptive discourses that seek to (...) liberate education from its present enclosure. This rereading of the field of education in the light of an account of the fundamental ontology of its key institution problematizes all rhetorics of education as social salvation. Education, it proposes, cannot be conceived as the ideal soul of a corrupted or as yet defective body, the school. Education—having taken on the character of an ontotheological principle—has become a governmental instrument as much as its specific institutions. This ontological condition can be understood within various accounts of the nature of contemporaneity. This paper considers the monstrous proposal that education be abandoned as the grounds for social, ethical and cultural redemption. The good news is that this abandonment opens the possibility for thinking beyond education, a beyond that is also beyond the strictures of instrumental rationality. (shrink)

In the face of the ever-growing effect the actions of the present may have upon future people, most conspicuously around climate change, democracy has been accused, with good justification, of a presentist bias: of systemically favouring the presently living. By contrast, this paper will argue that the intimate relation, both quasi-ontological and normative, that Derrida's work establishes between temporality and justice insists upon another, more future-regarding aspect of democracy. We can get at this aspect by arguing for two consequences of (...) the deconstructive affirmation of sur-vivre, of the alterity of death in life. Firstly, justice is not first of all justice for the living, but intergenerational from the start. This is so because no generation coincides with itself; rather, it dies and is reborn at every moment, and so – and this is the second consequence – consists in taking turns. Affirming life as living-on means affirming that it involves exchanging life's stations, as the young become the old, and the unborn become the dead. In this sense, the justice of living-on, I will argue, shares an essential feature with democracy, whose principle of exchanging the rulers with the ruled led Derrida to characterize it in terms of the wheel. Democracy consists in the principled assent to power changing hands, a switchover life demands of every generation at every turn. This assent further requires an acceptance of the gift of inheritance without which no life can survive. But as the gift can also never be fully acknowledged or appropriated, it must be passed on to the indefinite, unknown future, in a turning that is the time of life. (shrink)

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Volume 19, Issue 5, Page 761-768, December 2011.

Does democracy lead to more ethical or just systems of welcoming, of hospitality? Derrida considers an analysis of sovereignty as pivotal to any re-evaluation of contemporary politics and ethics, tying such a project in with deconstructions of democracy and hospitality: ‘what is “living together”? …must one live together only with one's like, with someone semblables?’ he asks in Rogues, prompting us to think through what it means to be, at once, democratic and hospitable. In this paper I propose that Derrida (...) provides us with a way of re-orienting democracy and hospitality that complicates conditions of citizenship and belonging, of the nation-state and sovereignty and of justice and unconditionality. It is the contention of this paper that deconstructing sovereignty is essential for any re-orientation of practices of hospitality within liberal democratic countries. The figure of the foreigner and questions of hospitality reveal a deep ambivalence at the core of democracy in the sense that it provokes the desire for openness and closure simultaneously. In closing, I raise questions concerning the potential for deconstructive practice to engage in a future politico-ethics of the border in light of this critical evaluation of democracy. In so doing, I consider the role of deconstruction in relation to liberal modalities of hospitality. (shrink)

My paper examines Derrida's attempts to resist, on the one hand, what he thought of as the increasing international hegemony of American English as the technolanguage of communication, and, on the other hand, forms of linguistic nationalism, when using the resources of the French language to deploy the syntagma: démocratie à venir. It does this by investigating what happens when claims about democracy are made in such a way as to be singularly idiomatic – made from a cosmopolitan point of (...) view that takes into account, rather than vitiates à la Kant, the singular poeticity of idioms. It contrasts Derrida's analysis of the relationship between the national, democracy and idiomaticity with Tocqueville's nationalistic claims; examining, in particular, the issue of how language supposedly binds people together, the role of singularity and generality in thinking about idioms, the divide between originary and techno-scientific idioms, and Derrida's practice of writing in plus d'une langue. It also outlines how, paradoxically, it is a form of idiomaticity and not linguistic instrumentality that disrupts the logic of appropriation, the logic inscribed in the neighbouring, though different, conceptual values of idion, proprius and le propre. (shrink)

I begin by examining the logic of autoimmunity as characterized by Jacques Derrida, ‘that strange behaviour where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘‘itself’’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its own immunity’ (Borradori, 2003: 94). According to Derrida, religion, democracy, terrorism and recent responses to the trauma of terrorism can be understood in terms of this logic. Responses to terrorism are ‘autoimmune’ and increase the trauma of terrorism as well as risking democratic values. I argue (...) that the risks of autoimmunity can be negotiated in better ways if we see how autoimmunity relates to another important Derridean concept, hospitality. (shrink)

After beginning by situating the author's (possible) relation to Derrida's expression, ‘democracy to come’, the article proceeds from the position that Derrida's phrase is to be understood as part of a political intervention. Indeed, the inseparability of democracy and deconstruction confirms this. After setting out some of the pertinent features of ‘democracy to come’ – seen, in part, in the General Will – the notion of political community in the thought of Hannah Arendt is brought into question, if not deconstructed. (...) Political community as presented by Arendt is seen to limit the inclusiveness of democracy. In the final section, the article suggests that Agamben's critique of the very structure of the nation-state opens the way for a renewal of the notion of the human in the ‘community to come’. (shrink)

Democracy is usually identified with openness, order and pluralism and thus peace. Yet, everywhere, from the political convulsions that bring it into being to the wars that aim to extend it, democracy is violent. Usually this violence is seen as accidental or forced upon democracy. The aim of this paper is to argue that the violence of democracy springs from its inextricable if denied relationship to revolution, the drive to re-found the political order properly and definitively. Through a reading of (...) Derrida’s account of the relationship between violence and justice in Walter Benjamin, violence is identified as the unstable founding moment which democracy must both pass through in order to emerge and also endlessly recall in its drive to both expand and complete its mission. (shrink)

Efforts to develop democratic schools have moved along particular rules and standards of ‘reasoning’ even when expressed through different ideological and paradigmatic lines. From attempts to make a democratic education to critical pedagogy, different approaches overlap in their historical construction of the reason of schooling: designing society by designing the child. These approaches to democracy make inequality into the premise of equality, assuming a consensual partition of the world and the need for specific agents to monitor partitioned boundaries, thus reinserting (...) differences as the basis of practice. Democracy, however, according to Jacques Rancière, only becomes visible when its partitioning is challenged under the opinion of equality. Yet, undoing the epistemological dogma of planning embodied in the notions of ‘critical’ and deliberative democracy might also involve confronting the comparative style of thought which provides the epistemological ‘rules’ that insert inequality as equality. Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome and Derrida's justice help extend Rancière's democracy and equality into unfamiliar terrain. What implications might this have for thinking about educational policy and curriculum? The argument, ironically, maintains Enlightenment attitudes about reason and rationality, but while ‘trying’ different epistemological rules and recognizing how the epistemological and ontological fold into one another it provides an alternative understanding of education and democracy. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that we need to re-address the issue of freedom as it relates to democracy and critical practice. My argument is drawn out of Derrida's deconstructive reading of Jean-Luc Nancy's The Experience of Freedom which proposes freedom in ontological terms as an experience of indeterminate openness that must be thought prior to any freedom of the self. I show how Derrida's reading of Nancy's text is itself a re-enactment of the freedom that Derrida finds wanting in (...) Nancy's text, but which, by that very fact, affirms the power of critique in its capacity to think freely. The urgency of the thought of freedom is not something that can be avoided, but is itself the fact of critique in its thinking of democracy as a possibility, as something that might come about, as distinct from an already accomplished idea. To think in this way is, I argue, a matter of virtue, that is, of being free, as the virtue of critique and its capacity to act decisively, thereby bringing something forth by risking what it already is, in the absolute possibility of it not being. (shrink)

This essay pursues a double strategy to transform our human collective relation to animal life. On the one hand, and this strategy is due to Derrida’s thought, it attempts to criticize the belief that humans have a kind of subjectivity that is substantially different from that of animals, the belief that humans have in their self-relation a relation of pure self-presence. On the other hand, the essay attempts to enlarge the idea of auto-affection to include the voices and looks of (...) animals in us. Being in us, the image of animal suffering changes who we are. Hence the subtitle. This second strategy is due to Deleuze’s thought. In fact, a large portion of this essay is devoted to a conceptual reconstruction of Deleuze and Guattari’s important concept of becoming. I argue that there are two central features of this concept. First, the concept of becoming involves a process of desubjectification which allows for the image of animal suffering to inhabit our consciousness as a “feverish thought.” Second, the outcome of becoming is not only that, due to the feverish thought, we change, but also that we write about this experience in order to lead others to it. The essay ends therefore by invoking a kind of writing—folktales—as a way of calling for a “people to come” or a “democracy to come”. (shrink)

This paper will address the political and ethical ramifications of Derrida's concern for friendship in relation to his concerns with the future of democracy, rights of hospitality and cosmopolitics. The questions addressed read as follows: Is there a way we can get beyond this stance which not only consolidates a friendship of the ‘perhaps’ with a friendship of the promise, but also implicates their consolidation with the very future of what we today call democracy? Is there a way in which (...) we can substantiate something more than a romanticized call for a future integration of friendship and democracy while avoiding the pitfalls of on one hand, substantiating a model of friendship for politics or, on the other, offering a disguised and naïve return to a metaphysics of friendship as the saving grace of social unity? Through a close reading of the conclusion to Politics of Friendship as well as his concerns with friendship in Spectres of Marx and Rogues: Two Essays on Reason it will be argued that Derrida's insistence on the future of friendship is bound up with the notion of an ethical promise to the thought of friendship as the condition for its political and ethical relevance. (shrink)

_Radical Atheism_ presents a profound new reading of the influential French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Against the prevalent notion that there was an ethical or religious "turn" in Derrida's thinking, Hägglund argues that a radical atheism informs Derrida's work from beginning to end. Proceeding from Derrida's insight into the constitution of time, Hägglund demonstrates how Derrida rethinks the condition of identity, ethics, religion, and political emancipation in accordance with the logic of radical atheism. Hägglund challenges other major interpreters of Derrida's work (...) and offers a compelling account of Derrida's thinking on life and death, good and evil, self and other. Furthermore, Hägglund does not only explicate Derrida's position but also develops his arguments, fortifies his logic, and pursues its implications. The result is a groundbreaking deconstruction of the perennial philosophical themes of time and desire as well as pressing contemporary issues of sovereignty and democracy. (shrink)

Democracy may indeed be an imperfect form of government, but all the others are far worse and this, surely, is a moment for recognizing the benefits which democracy brings, not a moment for drawing attention to its shortcomings. It is a moment for confirming our faith, not a moment for doubting it.” Published over ten years ago, Susan Mendus’ statement could stand as a mantra for our times with democracy diagnosed as being at risk almost as a matter of course (...) in our public domains over the last years. That is, despite its much touted benefits, the assumptions, concepts, and practices of democracy are currently depicted as being under threat from an array of terrorists, dictators, fundamentalists of various stripes, and even from the West’s own instituted reactions to the events of the past few years. On this basis at least it would seem that democracy has not lived up to its promise of being the “solution that other people will necessarily adopt when they cease to be ‘irrational.’” Given these points, perhaps it is advisable to follow Mendus’ advice and stop any examination of democracy that would further expose its frailties and shortcomings and simply affirm our faith in it. Of course, this is not what Mendus herself does. The above words are, after all, to be found at the beginning of an essay that goes on to consider yet another critique of democracy, that comprising the feminist challenge to the historical exclusion of women from democracy. (shrink)

The series of conversations between Angela Y. Davis and Eduardo Mendieta entitled Abolition Democracy is a powerful investigation of the failed moral imagination of imperial democracies. After examining their discussion of how truncated political discourses enable abuses in both war and imprisonment, I look to the “exceptional” status of war prisons such as at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that domestic prisons, like international war prisons, are means for the paradigmatic functioning of the exception in modern democracy, as described (...) by Giorgio Agamben, and thus constitute no less of an “ultimate carceral threat.” Within the domestic prison, the legal status of inmates is virtually suspended and they are reduced to bare life. I conclude that we may yet share the hopes of Davis and Mendieta for an abolition democracy, and that such a democracy would bear the echoes of the unconditional sovereignty “to come” theorized by Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the issue of Derrida’s influence on philosophy by focusing on the nature of deconstructive reading as double reading, and tracing thisto the specific reception of Heidegger’s thesis on the history of being. After reviewing some of the dubious and mistaken polemics against Derrida, I go on to describe what I see as the ethical and political richness of Derrida’s work, focusing in particular on the theme of democracy to come.

One of the major political problems the world faces at the moment of its so-called globalization concerns the possibilities of maintaining, transforming, and expanding democracy. Globalization, as the extension of neo-liberal markets, the formation of multi-national, non-democratic economic powers, and the ubiquitous use of teletechnologies, threatens the modus vivendi of older democracies in ways that call for the reinvention of an old idea. Inasmuch as teletechnical globalization transforms space and time so as to put into question their very presence, and (...) inasmuch as deconstruction has always sought to rethink the constitution as well as deconstitution of the metaphysics of presence, I will here examine the concept of democracy that Jacques Derrida developed over the last few years of his life. (shrink)

Seguindo de perto o traço deixado em aberto pelo pensamento de Jacques Derrida, a autora do presente artigo começa por sublinhar os limites da hospitalidade universal (der allgemeine Hospitalität) de Kant. Com efeito, o artigo pretende demonstrar até que ponto estes limites, apesar do espírito das Luzes que inspira Kant, lhe advêm dos seus próprios fundamentos ontoteológicos e jurídico-políticos, em virtude dos quais essa hospitalidade universal deixou de corresponder às urgências do nosso hoje cataclísmico. Num segundo momento, a autora tenta (...) igualmente mostrar de que modo a hospitalidade incondicional, tal como Derrida a pensa e a oferece à nossa reflexão, se descobre justamente como o passo em frente que comuta a hospitalidade cosmopolita de Kant ao mesmo tempo que constitui oportunidade para pensar e pôr em obra uma nova ordem política e jurídica mundial, de que a democraciaporvir ou a nova Internacional democrática constituem a promessa. Uma promessa igualmente traduzível pelo conceito mais recente de altermundialização. (shrink)

Seguindo de perto o traço deixado em aberto pelo pensamento de Jacques Derrida, a autora do presente artigo começa por sublinhar os limites da "hospitalidade universal" de Kant. Com efeito, o artigo pretende demonstrar até que ponto estes limites, apesar do espírito das Luzes que inspira Kant, lhe advêm dos seus próprios fundamentos onto-teológicos e jurídico-políticos, em virtude dos quais essa "hospitalidade universal" deixou de corresponder às urgências do nosso hoje cataclísmico. Num segundo momento, a autora tenta igualmente mostrar de (...) que modo a hospitalidade incondicional, tal como Derrida a pensa e a oferece à nossa reflexaão, se descobre justamente como o "passo em frente" que comuta a hospitalidade cosmopolita de Kant ao mesmo tempo que constitui oportunidade para pensar e pôr em obra uma nova ordem política e jurídica mundial, de que a "democracia-por-vir" ou a "nova Internacional" democrática constituem a promessa. Uma promessa igualmente traduzível pelo "conceito "mais recente de altermundialização. /// Following closely the traces of Jacques Derrida's thought, the author of the article starts underlining the limits of the "universal hospitality" de Kant. The article aims in the first place at a demonstration of how these limits, regardless of the enlightened spirit of Kant, derive of his onto-teological and juridicalpolitical foundations. According to the author, it is in virtue of these that such "universal hospitality" no longer corresponds to the urgencies of today's crisis. Secondly, the author also shows how the unconditional hospitality of Jacques Derrida can just represent the needed step in order for us to overcome the cosmopolitan hospitality of Kant as much as it constitutes a royal opportunity for thinking and enacting a new political and juridical order for the world, one of which we can find a promise in the "democracy-to-be" or the democracy's "new International". The article makes clear that such promise can be also translated through the more recent concept of altermondialization. (shrink)

of the tension between universality and singularity in the constitution of political community. Politics for Derrida refers to demands for universal justice, while friendship stands in for demands to recognize the incomparable uniqueness of each person. Derrida develops the incompatibility between these demands to its furthest extreme while arguing that democracy paradoxically requires meeting the demands of both claims. The result is a democracy that is never achieved but always present only in the form of a desire for democracy. This (...) article evaluates Derrida’s position that political community is simultaneously impossible and necessary in light of similar proposals by Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray. It also asks whether the political community Derrida imagines is one in which women’s desires are represented. Key Words: Derrida • friendship • Irigaray • politics • sexual difference. (shrink)

On February 22, 2001, three Bosnian Serb soldiers were found guilty of crimes against humanity. Their offense? Rape. This is the first time that rape has been prosecuted and condemned as a crime against humanity. Appealing to Jacques Derrida's democracy of the perhaps and Judith Butler's politics of performative contradiction, I see this judgment inaugurating a politics of the vulnerable body which challenges current understandings of evil, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

: On February 22, 2001, three Bosnian Serb soldiers were found guilty of crimes against humanity. Their offense? Rape. This is the first time that rape has been prosecuted and condemned as a crime against humanity. Appealing to Jacques Derrida's democracy of the perhaps and Judith Butler's politics of performative contradiction, I see this judgment inaugurating a politics of the vulnerable body which challenges current understandings of evil, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

What is the significance of and logic behind Jacques Derrida's recent "political" writings? While Derrida's work refuses to obey any singular movement or register, he does, nonetheless, make recurrent attempts to negotiate between a politics of identity and difference. A similar undertaking can be found in the radical democratic writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. An encounter between these thinkers is here carried out in order to elucidate key themes in Derrida's The Other Heading. The reading aims at developing (...) and contextualising Derrida's relation to radical democratic thought so that his political strategies can be made more explicit. (shrink)

Derrida's treatise on Marxism, Spectres of Marx, sheds light on the politics of Derridean deconstruction. It is worth taking seriously Derrida's efforts to ally his project, both strategically and critically, with a "left," "democratic," even Marxist one, and to advance the debate regarding the status of deconstruction within such a project. Nevertheless, his reading of Marxism and his call for a New International indicate the limitations of deconstructive theory for precisely the kind of strategic and radically democratic project that Derrida (...) advocates. These limitations arise from a number of sources, including: an abiding ambivalence regarding the "materialist" status of his project, the difficulties that arise from his definition of "justice" as différance in application to an analysis of oppression, an oversimplification of debates about the ontological status of class in Marxist theory, confusion regarding the political logic of the radical democratic project, and both inconsistency and vagueness in the theorization of the "present" proposed in deconstructive terms. (shrink)

Using the occasion provided by a review of "Deconstruction and Pragmatism" (ed. Chantal Mouffe, Routledge: 1996), the article situates the differences between the political dimension of Rortyesque pragmatism and Derridean deconstruction, foregrounding where Derrida's thinking generates an understanding of democracy beyond the modern distinctions between liberalism and its others. Welcoming, but also disagreeing with the overall orientation of the book, it then argues that the political dimension to deconstruction is also underestimated by its own sympathizers for lack of an articulation (...) between the ethical and the political, the indeterminate and determination, an articulation increasingly, if ambivalently, present in Derrida's work. (shrink)