The European Legacy, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp.

487490, 2007

Reviews
Sovereignty, Democracy, Autoimmunity
Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides. A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida. By Jacques Derrida with Giovanna Borradori. In Giovanni Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: rgen Habermas and Jacques Dialogues with Ju Derrida (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 224 pp. $25.00 cloth; $15.00 paper. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. By Jacques Derrida (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 175 pp. $57.95 cloth; $20.95 paper. the self. We can see this autoimmunity at work quite clearly in the case of 9/11. U.S. sovereignty was violated by a threat created by the American foreign policy that funded and trained Osama bin Laden during the Cold War in the name of protecting U.S. sovereignty. 9/11 is therefore best understood as an autoimmune attack by the U.S. on the U.S.: it was launched from within U.S. borders, using American flight schools, American planes and American citizens. Derrida locates the tendency of sovereignty to attack itself within its essential structure. The sovereign makes laws. However, a sovereign can only make a law that does not apply to him; for if he were subject to a law, he would no longer be sovereign, but would have to share his authority with the law. The sovereign is therefore always a rogue, always an outlaw. As Derrida puts it, Abuse of power is constitutive of sovereignty itself (Rogues 102). More precisely, he adds, there is no pure sovereignty, since [sovereignty] never succeeds in [reigning without sharing power] except in a critical, precarious, and unstable fashion (102). Pure sovereignty is unstable because once a sovereign establishes a law, he has made possible the inevitable critique of his own sovereignty: for why should he be above the law? What law could justify his exemption? In order to justify sovereignty, we must appeal to another law, another sovereignty that undermines the authority of the first (101). Sovereignty can never be purely sovereign, and its attempts to achieve moments of pure sovereignty merely give rise to forces that undermine and attack it. Although sovereignty is in its essence abusive lawlessness, Derrida cautions that we

Michaele Ferguson
The acts that go under the name of 9/11, according to Jacques Derrida, are evidence of an ongoing attack on the international system of sovereign nation-states. The terrorists who turned planes and people into missiles did not act in the name of any state, and did not act with the intention of creating a new state. Instead, by targeting the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, they attacked the symbolic head of the nation-state system: the United States. It is a dangerous misnomer, then, to call the response to 9/11 a war on terrorism, for the language of war implies a conflict between states, whereas this conflict signals the increasing obsolescence of the sovereign nation-state paradigm. While 9/11 marks one of the more visible challenges to sovereignty in recent years, the texts under review here are united by a concern with a less obvious (and perhaps more serious) threat: it is the essence of sovereignty to create the very forces that undermine it. In Derridas terminology, this is an autoimmunityan attack on the self, by the self, and in the name of

Dept. of Political Science Michaele.Ferguson@colorado.edu

333UCB,

University

of

Colorado,

Boulder,

CO

80309,

USA.

Email:

ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/07/0404874 2007 International Society for the Study of European Ideas DOI: 10.1080/10848770701396403

488

Reviews instantiation in the present time can never be democracy, for it is impossible to simultaneously satisfy all of the competing and contradictory demands of democracy. Democracy is thus never identical to itself; it is a democracy whose concept remains free, like a disengaged clutch, freewheeling, in the free play of its indetermination; it is inscribed right onto this thing or this cause that, precisely under the name of democracy, is never properly what it is, never itself (37). Another way of putting this is that we have no concept of democracy, because what it is is contradictory and cannot be grasped in a single thought. Thus, What is lacking is . . . the very idea of democracy (37). This conceptual indeterminacy means that we will never be able to settle the question of how to realize democracy in practice: one will never actually be able to prove that there is more democracy in granting or in refusing the right to vote to immigrants . . . nor that there is more or less democracy in a straight majority vote as opposed to proportional voting; both forms of voting are democratic, and yet both also protect their democratic character through exclusion (36). Every real democracy is forced to choose between competing democratic demands, and so every real democracy is achieved only by excluding some part of the ideal of democracy, and so by failing to be fully democratic, which means that democracy protects itself and maintains itself precisely by limiting and threatening itself (36). This democratic failure is the source of another set of autoimmune reactions, according to Derrida. Since no democracy can be fully democratic, it is an expected feature of democracies that they must limit democracy in the name of democracy, and thereby commit undemocratic acts. This leads to the disturbing result that democracys indeterminacy can be manipulated to give antidemocratic politics the air of democratic legitimacy. For example, Derrida mentions the case of the Algerian government suspending elections when it became clear that they would be won by Muslim extremists; here, it is in the name of democracyin order to save democracythat the government acts in a wholly undemocratic manner. Similar arguments support the Patriot Act in the U.S.: it is for the sake of democracy that democratic rights and freedoms must be curtailed. In this way, threats to democracy can

cannot simply do without it. This is because there is no democracy without sovereignty. Democracy presupposes an autonomous self that governs itself in accordance with its own will; that is, democracy presupposes a sovereign power capable of enforcing its law. We arrive at an aporia: democratic sovereignty is the law, and yet it is also above the law. Or: sovereignty is anti-democratic because it is beyond the law, but there is no democracy without it. [T]hese two principles, democracy and sovereignty, are at the same time, but also by turns, inseparable and in contradiction with one another (100). This aporia is further complicated when democratic sovereignty takes the form of the nation-state: the sovereignty of the nation-state is salutary in that it provid[es] protection against certain kinds of international violence, but it does so at the same time as it closes its borders to noncitizens, monopolizes violence, controls its borders, excludes or represses noncitizens, and so forth (Autoimmunity 124). Derridas appreciation of both the justices and the injustices of the system of sovereign nation-states leads him to adopt a puzzling stance on sovereignty itself. We must mitigate sovereignty, but not jettison it altogether, for we neither can nor should renounce purely and simply the values of autonomy or freedom, or those of power or force, which are inseparable from the very idea of law (131). Therefore, instead of attacking sovereignty head-on (Rogues 158) by countering it with a principle of non-sovereignty, he suggests that we counter sovereignty with sovereignty. But what would this mean? Why, if Derrida is critical of sovereignty, does he seek to multiply it, rather than to move beyond it? While the texts under review here do not make the connection explicit, I suggest that democracy to come is the concept that can help us make sense of this position. Already introduced elsewhere, in these texts Derrida attempts to explain it and to counter various misunderstandings of it. Democracy is always to come because it cannot fully appear in the present. This is because it is aporetic, impossibly pulling us in opposing directions. It demands of us force without force, incalculable singularity and calculable equality, commensurability and incommensurability, heteronomy and autonomy, indivisible sovereignty and divisible or shared sovereignty . . . and so on (86). Since the idea of democracy is aporetic, its

Reviews always be disguised as democratic (3031). Democracy attacks itself in an autoimmune fashion by producing, through its very indeterminacy, the possibility of an antidemocratic politics that can masquerade as democratic even as it undermines democracy. We tend to associate the language of autoimmunity with disorders and deficiencies, with bodies that mistakenly, tragically, and often suicidally attack themselves. It is tempting, then, to understand the autoimmunity of democracy as wholly problematic. However, Derrida suggests that autoimmune reactions can sometimes be beneficial (here he departs from the ordinary usage of the term in medical discourse). The indeterminacy that makes it possible for antidemocratic politics to be represented as democratic is also what drives us to try to improve our imperfect democracies. Our real democracies will always fall short of the ideal, and so we can always find reason to critique them in the name of a more democratic democracy to come. This critique is another autoimmunity: the ideal of democracy inspires us to attack our democracies in the name of democracy (8687). Yet rather than undermining democracy, critique aims to improve itby unmasking antidemocratic politics and by taking responsibility for democracys necessary exclusions. Ultimately, however, Derrida gives us no way to distinguish the good autoimmunity from the bad. Since democracy is indeterminate, it may be difficult in practice to distinguish the two (21): perhaps the antidemocratic suspension of Algerian elections really was necessary to keep the democracy viable; perhaps those engaged in democratic critique will do so in the misguided belief that they have true knowledge of the idea of democracy. What Derrida does do is to call for a militant and interminable political critique (86). By making critique open-ended, he hopes that we can mitigate the antidemocratic tendencies of democratic autoimmunity. This interminable attack on democracy by democracy is likely to lead to more democratic outcomes for at least three reasons. First, it refuses identification of any present instantiation of democracy with democracy itself: every real democracy is and always will be short of the aporetic ideal. Endless critique is thus consistent with democracys lack of

489

self-identity, insofar as it subjects each successive assertion of what democracy is to examination and thereby refuses to settle its content. Second, it exposes the autoimmune character of democracy that can legitimize antidemocratic politics in the name of democracy. This critique is therefore A weapon aimed at the enemies of democracy, it protests and every political abuse, against all na vete every rhetoric that would present as a present or existing democracy, as a de facto democracy, what remains inadequate to the democratic demand (86). Third, by encouraging us to be critical of all real democracies, Derridas call for constant critique is also a call for us to be more sensitive to the exclusions that are necessary to democracy, and therefore a call to be more responsive to and responsible for those exclusions. We must be vigilant and constantly critical because any claim in the name of democracy (including our own) requires undemocratic exclusions. This call for deconstructionist critique in the name of democracy can explain Derridas response to the problem of sovereignty. He deals with the problem of democratic sovereignty by calling for a constant selfcritique that would attack the very notion of a democratic self that could be identical to itself. In the same way, Derrida hopes to effect a constant self-critique of sovereignty that reveals that sovereignty is likewise never identical to itself (that is, it is never pure sovereignty). This is what he means by countering one sovereignty with another. He wants to counter sovereignty with sovereignty as a way of institutionalizing the autoimmune self-critique that sovereignty generates. The multiplication of sovereignties facilitates this deconstruction. Derrida illustrates the concept of countering one sovereignty with another with the Declaration of Human Rights. He writes, The Declaration of Human Rights is not . . . opposed to, and so does not limit, the sovereignty of the nation-state in the way a principle of nonsovereignty would oppose a principle of sovereignty. No, it is one sovereignty set against another. Human rights pose and presuppose the human being (who is equal, free, self-determined) as sovereign. The Declaration of Human Rights declares another sovereignty; it thus reveals the autoimmunity of sovereignty in general (88). This assertion of another sovereignty (that of

490

Reviews be guided by the aporetic ideal of a world democracy that could replace the state system. This democracy would require the unconditional renunciation of sovereignty (xiv), or else it, too, would become an outlaw to its own law. It would have to be therefore a force without a sovereign, a force without a self, the new figure to come of an ultimate recourse, of a sovereignty (or rather, and more simply, since this term sovereignty is still too equivocal, still too technologicopolitical: a force or power, a -cracy), of a -cracy allied to, or even one with, not only law but justice. This is what I wished to bring out in the phrase democracy to come (la democratie a venir) (Autoimunity 120). We cannot think this democracy to come at present; we do not know what the future holds. Derrida identifies Europethe ideal of Europe, not its imperfect realization in the European Unionas an inspiration to guide our thinking in the future (117). We are at a moment of transition: we know what from (the Westphalian system), but we do not know what is to come (131). When he calls for the strengthening and multiplication of international institutions, Derrida appears indistinguishable from neoliberals who seek to build an international structure of law to counteract the anarchy of the state system. Where he differs from them is not in his policy recommendations so much as in the reasons he gives for them. His support of international institutions is grounded in an analysis of the essential autoimmune logics of sovereignty and democracy. In these texts, Derrida tries to make sense of what would be the best response to our world of selfdestructing and self-deconstructing sovereign states. His answer: to call for endless autoimmune critique of the present in the name of an aporetic ideal that will always only be to come.

the human being qua rights bearer) undermines the principle of state sovereignty by suggesting that there is another law (the law of human rights) which justifies and governs the authority of the sovereign (the state). Countering one sovereignty with another in this fashion is a way of institutionalizing the autoimmunity of sovereignty: the capacity of sovereignty to call itself into question by positioning itself as above the law. Setting institutions against one another, each with their own competing claims to sovereignty, ensures that each sovereignty will be called into question each time they conflict. Over time, perhaps, the logic of sovereignty itself will be at issue. In order to effect this institutionalized autoimmune self-critique of sovereignty, Derrida calls for extending and giving teeth to international institutions that counter the sovereignty of the state by positing another law to which the state is subject (Autoimmunity 114). Institutions like the Declaration of Human Rights and the International Criminal Court counter the sovereignty of the state without denying it: they recognize the claim of the nation-state to be sovereign even as they assert a law to which it is subject. They are thus in virtual contradiction with the principle of nation-state sovereignty, which there remains also intact (Rogues 87). His goal appears to be to multiply the opportunities for the conflict between sovereignties asserting competing jurisdictions that could call into question the very logic of sovereignty. Yet even to counter sovereignty with sovereignty in this way can only be an interim response to the ongoing dismantling of the system of sovereign states. Derrida acknowledges that we cannot know where this deconstruction of the nation-state might lead us, and so we may in the future need to change course. Ultimately, he suggests that we should