Beyond Derrida: The Autoimmunity of Deconstruction

Mabini Review, 2012

Philosophy Compass, 2007

Derrida's early reluctance to spell out political implications of deconstruction gave way during the course of the 1980s to a series of analyses of political concepts and issues. This article identifies the principal intellectual strategies of Derrida's political engagements and provides a detailed account of his concept of 'democracy to come'. Finally, it suggests several points of contact between Derrida and recent liberal political philosophy, as well as some areas in which deconstructive analyses require further refinement if fruitful exchange is to occur.

International Philosophical Quarterly, 2015

European Journal of Political Theory

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.

Histories of Postmodernism ed M. Bevir, J. Hargis and S. Rushing, 2007

Opinion remains divided over the value of Derrida's contribution to political philosophy. Does his work provide important challenges to established ways of thinking about politics or does it amount to no more than hyper-critical posturing that adds nothing to political thought? In part, the difficulty of answering this question may be attributed to local differences in the vocabulary, style and concerns of political philosophy. In Derrida's case, the difficulty is exacerbated by his apparent reluctance to engage with political philosophy during the early part of his career. My aim in this chapter is, first, to replace Derrida's thought in its context of origin and to suggest how the transition from avoidance to engagement with political concepts might be understood in relation to developments in French thought during this period. Second, I will outline the different kinds of conceptual analysis undertaken during the period of so-called "affirmative deconstruc-tion " since the mid-1980s, in order to clarify the nature of his engagement with political philosophy and specifically his analyses of democracy and " democracy to come. " Finally, I will argue that there is more common ground than is often realized between his deconstructive analyses of democracy and some tendencies within contemporary liberal political thought. I conclude that both deconstructive and liberal normative approaches to political philosophy would benefit from further constructive engagement.

Constellations, 2002

To assess the contribution of recent French thought to democratic theory, this paper discusses Derrida's 'democracy to come' in relation to a quasi-transcendental account of the constitution of meaning and identity in terms of an excess of time named the future to come. This reconceptualization of democracy cannot escape the affirmation of normative commitments, a commitment to futural openness that stands in need of justification. Derrida's intent to expose ineluctable aporias and contradictions of democratic decision-making disallows what Habermas calls a transcendental-pragmatic argument to the effect that we ought to be open to the future because the openness of the future is always necessarily presupposed by our symbolic practices. However, Derrida's insistence on unavoidable contradictions and aporias can provide a weak normativity if this insistence is viewed as aiming at the reduction of violence. I conclude by showing that Derrida tends to overreach the normativity he can justify, in particular in regard to the relatively neglected democratic values of economic and political equality. Many commentators on democracy's recent crisis of legitimization agree that the modern processes of 'secularization' and 'disenchantment' have divested democracies of its traditional normative foundations that tied modern democracy to Enlightenment ideas of emancipation. The increasing recognition of contingency and the closure of the 'metaphysics of presence' have cast doubt on the centrality of the rational subject, on natural law and foundations of human rights, on ideas of progress, and so on. While some theorists seek either to abandon (Schumpeter, Downs) or re-found (Habermas, Rawls) democracy's normative footing, others affirm even those processes that have eroded it. They argue that secularization -due to its inherent suspicion of religious foundations, tradition, and the affirmation of a contingent and open future -should be

This paper begins from the claim that the currently dominant approaches to the study of political resistance in global politics, namely the (Neo-)Gramscian and Foucauldian traditions, suffer from a common problem in that the forms of resistance they conceptualise are highly susceptible to appropriation by, or reinscription within, prevailing forms of global ordering. In an attempt to respond to this shortcoming, or, more properly, to explore how this reinscription of resistance might itself be resisted, the paper offers an account of political resistance developed using the thought of Jacques Derrida. Having established the parallel between the way in which prevailing relations of sovereign power and governmental ordering all too quickly co-opt and engulf resistance, and the way in which metaphysics calls thought back to order and tends towards onto-political totalisation, it is argued that by means of a deconstructive approach, acts of resistance may be further radicalised by adding to them second- and third-order onto-political critiques—namely of the resistance-act itself and the agent or actor of resistance herself. The core claim made is that inasmuch as deconstruction attempts to interrupt forms of thinking and knowing right up to and including processes of conscious and unconscious subjectification, it can provide valuable means by which the micro-gestures of onto-politics can be resisted at the (fundamentally interrelated) levels of political thought and concrete praxis.

Essays in Philosophy, 2004