On the "to-come"

If the to-come of democracy or justice is not a regulative idea, then it is a promise. Derrida, in Rogues, quotes himself from The Other Heading (1991): “[the to-come is] not something that is certain to happen tomorrow, not the democracy (national or international, state or tans-state) of the future, but a democracy that must have the structure of a promise – and thus the memory of that which carries the future, the to-come, here and now” (p.86). The fundamental difference here, between the promise and the regulative idea, concerns the certainty of its arrival – and the form of its arrival. For Kant, as it was mentioned, the supersensible idea serves to regulate action in the sensible realm by holding out for it the hope of its full arrival. In this way the regulative idea is close to a promise in the common sense of the word: a word that can be counted on. We demand such an economical accounting of the promise in everyday use, I think. If a word is not kept – if we were cynical we could say, if there is no return on the investment – then it will not have been a promise, only empty words. This is precisely the everyday understanding of the promise at work in the line from the Fugazi song that I cited in an earlier post.

For Derrida, on the other hand, the promise, in order to be a promise, must retain the undecidability with respect to its arrival and the form of its arrival. He says that it “is thus indeed already a question of autoimmunity, of a double bind of threat and chance, not alternatively or by turns promise and/or threat but threat in the promise itself” (p.82). The promise of a classless society, or in Derrida’s terms, a justice to-come cannot be counted on or accounted for ahead of time. This would not be a promise, but a calculable, albeit deferred, fact – this was precisely Marx’s mistake in reading history teleologically. This is the structure of the a-venir the to-come of democracy.

Democracy's autoimmunity?

Bush signs into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006; effectively legalizing (certain types of) tortue for (certain types of) people.

Democracy: regulative Idea or a-venir

Derrida gathers his reservations with respect to the regulative idea into a set of three. The first two concern the question of possibility. The Kantian notion remains, claims Derrida, within the horizon of possibility, even if it is infinitely deferred. He says the regulative idea “partakes of what would still fall, at the end of an infinite history, into the realm of the possible, of what is virtual or potential, of what is within the power of someone, some “I can,” to reach, in theory, and in a form that is not wholly freed from all teleological ends” (p.84). If the future is subject to the law of différance and if différance is meant to signify both difference and deferral, it is certainly not meant to signify this Kantian deferral, or at least democracy would not be deferred according to an infinite line of time.

If possibility presents a problem for thinking the a-venir, then so does impossibility. Derrida's is not a dialectical thinking and the negation of possibility through impossibility moves one no closer to the absolute future of the to-come – both retain a relation to the “I can” (or, as the case may be, the “I can’t”) of the Kantian subject. Derrida appeals instead to a notion of the "im-possible." The im-possible would be that which subtracts itself from a dialectical relation. It would be, for Derrida, that space (as in the spacing of différance) between the possible and the impossible.

The impossible is not privative. It is not the inaccessible, and it is not what I can indefinitely defer: it announces itself; it precedes me, swoops down upon and seizes me here and now in a nonvirtualizable way, in an actuality and not potentiality. It comes upon me from on high, in the form of an injunction that does not simply wait on the horizon, that I do not see coming, that never leaves me in peace and never lets me put it off until later. Such an urgency cannot be idealized any more than the other as other can. This im-possible is thus not a (regulative) idea or ideal. It is what is most undeniably real. And sensible. Like the other. Like the
irreducible and nonappropriable différance of the other
(p. 84).

The im-possible, in short, is the other in a profoundly Levinasian sense. The proximity of the category of the other to the fact of the neighbour (i.e. the one who demands my responsibility) is a little less clear in Derrida than in Levinas, but the proximity remains. The future as a-venir comes upon me much like the neighbour does: as an unexpected arrival that places a demand on me, a demand to which I must respond here and now. Kant’s thought of the regulative idea as an infinitely deferred possibility of the sensible appropriation of the supersensible would thus differ form Derrida’s. While différance – thus, deferral – is irreducible in terms of presence, what is not deferred is the immediacy of the demand (e.g. for democracy). It cannot be idealized or made into a model that we might approximate. The border between the sensible and the supersensible would be problematized in Derrida; and the stability of such limits undone. The a-venir “swoops down” in an undecidable moment. (This presents an interesting reversal of Benjamin’s concept of history: where for Benjamin the past “flashes up” (cf. Theses V & VI), for Derrida the future “swoops down”).

The second reservation Derrida has with respect to the regulative idea concerns the means of its implementation. For Kant the approximation of the regulative idea (e.g. the kingdom of ends) proceeds according to a rule: the moral law. For Derrida, on the other hand, the availability of a law annuls any real decision a priori: “It is simply deployed, without delay, presently, with the automatism attributed to machines. There is no longer any place for justice or responsibility (whether juridical, political, or ethical) (p.85). To appeal to law as a condition for justice or responsibility would be to circumvent the différance which is the condition for both.

The third reservation Derrida offers concerns the philosophical maze of the Kantian architectonic. To simply take up the theme of the regulative idea into a new discourse without doing justice to the entire Kantian system would be irresponsible. I don’t blame him for this reservation.

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.

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.