Democracy Against Democracy (I): Historical impossibility

I'm going to stick with Derrida a little bit longer. The following comes from Rogues; a great little book, and one of the last texts he composed (as a talk in French) before his death.

First of all, Derrida likes democracy. He prefers the "democracy to come" of course - and this book is an extended reflection on precisely this theme - but also concrete experiments in democracy. Why is democracy good? Derrida notes (in parentheses) that democracy is...

(the only name of a regime, or quasi regime, open to its own historical transformation, to taking up its intrinsic plasticity and its interminable self-criticizability, one might even say its interminable analysis). (p.25)

Leaving aside the allusion to psychoanalysis (but noting derrida's later reference to the problem of the unconscious in conceiving of a democratic equality (pp.54-55)), this is the "definition" of democracy that Derrida sees as stretching all the way back to Plato and Aristotle - notwithstanding their mutual ambivalence towards, sometimes disdain for, the idea of democracy as a political configuration. But of course, nothing is ever so simple for Derrida. This constitutive openness of democracy is at one and the same time its condition of possibility and its condition of impossibility - what Derrida refers to as a "double bind." At this point he appeals to a biological metaphor in order to expose this double condition. He claims that democracy is structurally autoimmune.

From the ever-helpful Wikipedia we learn that autoimmunity is "the failure of an organism to recognize its own constituent parts (down to the sub-molecular levels) as "self", which results in an immune response against its own cells and tissues." To say that democracy is subject to autoimmunity is another way of saying that democracy is suicidal. I does not, can not, or will not survive the onslaught of its own consequences. But how precisely is democracy suicidal or subject to the double bind of autoimmunity?

Democracy, in it efforts to be democratic is susceptible to two possible deaths:

1. Democracy, in the vein hope of preserving itself, can roll back democratic freedoms, civil liberties, or, as in the very recent legislation passed by the US congress, it can deny rights and power to certain segments of the demos - namely, it can suspend habeas corpus for those considered terrorists. Here democracy dies ("comically" we might say) by killing itself in the interest of self-preservation.

2. Democracy can also die ("tragically") by way of a hyper-democratic openness. That is, democracy can be subverted from the inside by non- 0r anti-democratic forces which have used democratic means to achieve such a possibility. So for instance, a theocratic or even a fascist state may have emerged (indeed have emerged) by virtue of the people's will. Democracy thus commits suicide in the interest of the democratic ideal. This is, no doubt, what the U.S. and other self-proclaimed guardians/purveyors of democracy saw to be at stake with the election of Hamas to a majority of the Palestinian parliament - and thus the reason for choosing a comic suicide.

Historical democracies can and must be always subject to this double bind, this autoimmune predicament. There is no escape from this democratic "death drive." This is why democracy, if such a thing exists, must be conceived as an undeconstructible democracy to come. This is Derrida's take.

I will reserve critical comments for a post to come.