Democracy Against Democracy (II): Semantic Indeterminacy

Derrida describes his interrogation of democracy, repeatedly, as a “double question” which is “at the same time semantic and historical, by turns semantic and historical.” (cf. p.7). Why the added emphasis?

The “by turns” refers to the etymological connections that “rogue” bears to the French word “wheel” (roue). Throughout the essay Derrida brings into play a whole series of philosophical and historical instances of the wheel or the circle – the significant point being that the wheel (e.g. as in the sovereign subject who has completed the circuit of ipseity: beginning in itself proceeding to alienate itself in otherness then returning more fully to itself) is that it cannot spin without an axel; it is conditioned by an emptiness, the “strange necessity of the zero” (p.13).

The “at the same time” refers to a essential connection that exists between these two aporetic modes of democracy: it’s historical impossibility and its semantic indeterminacy. I’ve already said some things about the former (thus, I have already betrayed the “at the same time” as has Derrida himself; albeit in a more careful way) now I would like to look to the latter. The thrust of this problem lies in another question that Derrida asks: how to speak democratically about democracy?

In short, it is not possible. The “interminable self-critique” that would condition any democracy, would preclude any settled definitions of democracy. It would be undemocratic to fix (as a sovereign decision) any definition of democracy.

To speak democratically of democracy, it would be necessry,through some circular performativity and through the political violence of some enforcing rhetoric,some force of law, to impose a meaning on the word democratic and thus produce a consensus that one pretends, by fiction, to be established and accepted - or at the very least possible and necessary: on the horizon. (p.73)

Just as democracy cannot be practiced democratically, it cannot be spoken of democratically either. Democracy is stuck in the double bind of autoimmunity at every turn.

...

So what then?

Derrida points out the aporetic structure of democracy. Every historical attempt at democracy will come up against the double bind, autoimmunity is constitutive, suicide is inevitable. Where does that leave us? Derrida's "posits?" "hypothesizes?" reocmmends? (all seem to be problematic terms in this case) the idea of a democracy to come. But what [ce qui] or who [qui] is this event that is to come? I could simply move on to Derrida's "5 foci" which characterize the democracy to come - and I will - but the question that remains for me - and this is a question that animates much of the larger project - concerns this what of the democracy to come. But discerning what it is is also a discerning of what it is not; namely, a Kantian "regulative idea."

The regulative idea of the "kingdom of ends" or what Kant calls, in the Religion book, the "ethical community" or the "invisible church" (props to John Calvin for that one!) is a supersensible idea, a goal unattainable for historical humanity. It is our task then, to approximate its instantiation, knowing full well that it will never fully measure up. It is hard not to read Derrida's democracy to come in precisely this way. Having said that, this is not an attempt to place the Derridian a-venir under suspicion; it is not to say that it necissarily collapses into a Kantian notion; it is not to say that a possible solution is not available in what I have alredy read of Derrida; it is only to say that it is a difficult question to work out. One that Derrida himself acknowledges in a quasi-confessional moment of Rogues:

Reference is...made each time to the regulative Idea in the Kantian sense, to which I would not want the idea of a democracy to come to be reduced.

Yet the regulative Idea remains, for lack of anything better, if we can say "lack of anything better" with regard to a regulative Idea, a last resort. Although such a last resort or final recourse risks becomign an alibi, it retains a certain dignity, I cannot swear that I will not one day give in to it. (p.83)

I suppose Derrida leaves the question open: has he, now that he has no days left, given in to the regulative idea?

I doubt it.