Derrida and Democracy

Jonathan Culler

diacritics, Volume 38, Numbers 1-2, Spring-Summer 2008, pp. 2-6 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/dia.0.0043

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diacritics / spring–summer 2008 3

Foreword

derrida and democracy

Jonathan Culler

This special issue of Diacritics began as a conference in honor of Jacques derrida at cornell University in 2005, organized by Philip e. Lewis and sponsored by the French Studies Program, together with Diacritics and the comparative Literature Theory Proj-ect. after derrida’s untimely death in 2004, those of us at cornell who knew him and had worked with him organized an afternoon of tributes and recollections of the man, but it seemed important to generate an occasion to gather with colleagues from other institu-tions in order to reflect on and attempt to advance his legacy. The topic selected for the conference was “Literature and democracy,” and a citation from derrida’s “Passions: ‘an oblique offering’” served as point of departure: “no democracy without literature; no literature without democracy” [28]. in the end, some of the papers dealt with the logic of this link, but others focused more particularly on derrida’s thinking of the problem of democracy, in a wide range of texts and in a variety of contexts. For various contingent reasons, the process of moving from conference papers to a special issue of Diacritics was interrupted, and a number of papers delivered at the conference were promised or published elsewhere.1 But without exception, the authors of these papers, showing a commitment to Diacritics and to the exploration of derrida’s thought for which we are very grateful, were able to contribute new essays to our col-lection. This issue, then, is a logical extension of that conference, augmented by essays by Samir Haddad and michael Levine which were submitted separately but extend the investigation in productive directions, and by a stimulating exchange concerning derrida between ernesto Laclau and martin Hägglund. we offer, then, a range of papers on vari-ous aspects of derrida’s thinking of democracy, some of which, concentrated in Part 1, deal also with literature. in “The most interesting Thing in the world,” i introduce the topic of the relation between literature and democracy in derrida’s thinking, focusing especially on the prob-lem of the secret, which has loomed large in derrida’s late discussions of both literature and democracy. approaching the same questions from a different angle, david wills’s “Passionate Secrets” begins in the mode of exposition of the problem of the secret as the link between literature and democracy but moves to respond to derrida’s text with a “heretical rewriting,” pursuing the notions of heresy and of rhetorical dissidence and the functioning of the anecdote, which illuminate derrida’s account of democracy. This powerful essay anticipates the argument of wills’s recent book, Dorsality. Peggy Kamuf’s’s essay, “Signed Paine, or Panic in Literature,” based on a lecture delivered at a colloque de cérisy on democracy to come,2 alludes to derrida’s essay

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1. Geoffrey Bennington’s and Pheng Cheah’s original papers have been published in the ex-cellent collection derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac. Samuel Weber’s paper will appear in reading ronell, ed. Diane Davis (urbana: u of Illinois P) (in press). 2. the acts were published as La démocratie à venir: autour de Jacques derrida, ed. Marie-louise Maillet.

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Signéponge, delivered at an earlier colloque de cérisy, but Kamuf is concerned not with effects of signature in literature, though she reflects on the play of Paine’s name and links it can establish, but with the role of fiction in the performativity of texts, both literary and nonliterary, and especially texts that, like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, affect to abjure any literariness for their political efficacy. She reads Paine with Blanchot in elucidating the power of a certain fictionality, at work for instance in the performatives that found a democratic nation. Henry Sussman’s eloquent tribute to Jacques derrida takes in the sweep of his or-chestration of literature with philosophy, as two “counterposed moments” of his inter-rogation of the working of language and thought. Focusing especially on his reading of Mallarmé, which distills the philosophical resonance of discourse that identifies itself as literary, and on Specters of Marx, which displays the political resonance of deconstruc-tion, Sussman also turns to Derrida’s reading of Blanchot as a figure who resumes the tension between the literary and the philosophical but who “inscribes . . . life, in all its impossible conditions” [61]. To conclude this section of essays exploring derrida’s engagement with literature, michael Levine’s “Spectral Gatherings: derrida, celan, and the covenant of the word” takes as its point of departure derrida’s essay “Shibboleth: For Paul celan.” Less con-cerned with the questions of the nature of literature with which some other contributors are occupied, Levine focuses on the relation between the poetic discourse of several celan lyrics and the problematic of circumcision—as religious operation, wound, inscription, linguistic structure—foregrounded in derrida’s reading, and thus on the relation between the event of celan’s lyric, the critical language with which derrida and other readers engage it, and the discourse of Jewish identity. also crucial is the relation to Kafka, since the lyric principally under investigation here, celan’s “einem, der vor der Tür stand,” al-ludes to Kafka’s parable “Before the Law.” This detailed, resourceful reading of a major modern poet illuminates some of the stakes of derrida’s dealings with literature. Part 2 begins with Geoffrey Bennington’s mapping, across a wide range of works, of the coordinates of derrida’s thinking of democracy and its relevance to a series of crucial concepts, from difference to autoimmunity. distinguishing derrida’s idea of a “democ-racy to come” from the Kantian ideal, Bennington links it to aristotle’s insistence upon multiplicity and to a thinking of deviance and perversion, an appropriately deconstructive logic for thinking an absence of telos in democracy to come. Samuel weber’s “rogue democracy” and Samir Haddad’s “a Genealogy of Vio-lence” take off from derrida’s rogues—weber to outline the political dimensions of derrida’s later work, especially his engagement with carl Schmitt’s concept of the politi-cal and the state of exception and his own elaboration of the notions of sovereignty and of autoimmunity; Haddad to explore the treatment of violence in derrida’s ethico-political work. Both essays stress the underlying continuity of derrida’s thinking of politics, even as he responds to particular political circumstances, such as 9/11 and the so-called war on terror. and both give considerable importance to the notion of autoimmunity, where democracy attacks part of itself in order to preserve itself, or where its mechanisms of self-preservation are also those of self-destruction. Pheng cheah’s “nondialectical materialism” takes a different approach to derrida’s political thinking by exploring the implications of derrida’s suggestion in several texts that, while a classic dialectical materialism partakes of logocentrism, other sorts of non-dialectical materialism would be possible. different nondialectical materialisms emerge from the work of derrida and that of Gilles deleuze, and cheah explores the different ways in which these materialisms resist or evade the teleology of the dialectic. in the case of derrida, “the force of materiality is . . . the constitutive exposure of (the subject of) power to the other” [150]. Because “derrida understands material force as the reference

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to the impossible other and because deleuze views materiality in terms of impersonal and preindividual forces, materiality, even if it is not unfigurable as such, is not easily instantiated by concrete figures that are recognizable by political discourse” [156]. There remains, manifestly, a good deal of work to be done to investigate the implications for politics of such materialisms. exploiting puns that reveal suggestive conceptual connections, avital ronell incor-porates an incisive reading of derrida on literature and democracy in a derridean reading of nietzsche, that antidemocrat, who “offers a link by which to explore some of derrida’s more concealed utterances on the related subjects of futurity, political formations, the will to fiction, acts of promising . . .” [158]. But above all Ronell’s reading, focusing on Beyond Good and evil, riding the motif of testing, takes up the question of a new species of philosopher, “the coming philosophers,” and the problem of the feminine in nietzsche, which should be grafted onto it, as an opening onto the “to come.” In another reflection on the power of futurity, Richard Klein returns to a lecture derrida gave at cornell at a Diacritics conference on nuclear criticism (published as Diacritics 14.2, summer 1984). Klein’s “Knowledge of the Future: Future Fables” links derrida’s lecture, “no apocalypse, not now (Full Speed ahead, Seven missiles, Seven Missives),” to his discussions of 9/11, which share a concern with fables of the future, fic-tions or fables that condition the political and economic life of the present. it is altogether fitting that this collection close on a reflection on futurity and the event, including the possibility of the destruction of the archive, in which, as derrida put it, what is at stake “is nothing less than the existence of the world, of the worldwide itself” [Philosophy 99]. The power of the worst to haunt our unconscious requires the greatest vigilance. Finally, in a supplement to these essays, comes an exchange between ernesto Laclau and martin Hägglund. Hägglund’s book, radical atheism: Derrida and the time of life, argues, against recent attempts to recuperate derrida’s thought for a thinking of tran-scendence in the manner of a Leviansian ethics or negative theology, that derrida’s work represents a radical atheism that denies the desirability of the transcendent and situates all value in what is mortal and passes away. “The radical finitude of survival is not a lack of being that it is desirable to overcome. Rather, the finitude of survival opens the chance for everything that is desired and the threat of everything that is feared” [radical atheism 1–2]. Hägglund’s book includes a chapter on Laclau, which, while praising his deconstruc-tive approach to politics, criticizes his adoption of a psychoanalytic thematics and of a notion of lack that derrida’s logic of survival resists. Laclau responds that his account is entirely compatible with the general functioning of Hägglund’s argument but accuses Hägglund of failing to proceed deconstructively, opting instead for one term of an op-position, between the desire for immortality and an irreducible mortality that structures all human desire, rather than exploring the contamination of one term of an opposition by the other. His critique expands to a defense of his account of articulation, which he claims Hägglund fails to comprehend. Hägglund’s reply elucidates his conception of finitude and the logic of survival, which does in fact involve a deconstruction of the opposition between mortality and im-mortality. returning to Laclau’s deployment of a psychoanalytic conception of lack in his thinking of politics, Hägglund concludes with a discussion of democracy that is germane to the rest of the issue. radical atheism, he stresses, does not seek to replace Laclau’s approach to politics, as a struggle through articulation for a hegemonic position, but “to demonstrate by way of an immanent critique that it requires a different conception of desire” [198]. For Laclau, political struggles require a radical investment in a particular finite condition or goal as if it incarnated the fullness of society (since it is that impossible fullness that structures desire), but because democracy explicitly presents the impossibil-

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ity of fullness or completeness, since even the ideal state of democracy is temporal and alterable, a democratic politics requires a different notion of value than one based on lack as a desire for fullness. “The investment in democracy,” Hägglund concludes, “hinges on the recognition that the impossibility of absolute fullness is not a negative limitation, not an ontological lack, but the possibility of the temporal being we desire” [196]. derrida’s thought, as outlined here and in the other articles of this issue, should pro-vide further stimulus to a thinking of democracy and of the sorts of democratic politics germane to the world of finitude we inhabit.

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190–99.Kamuf, Peggy. “Signed Paine, or Panic in Literature.” Diacritics 38.1–2 (2008): 30–43.Klein, richard. “Knowledge of the Future: Future Fables.” Diacritics 38.1–2 (2008):

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