![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
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.
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.