In the Name of Reason: The Deconstruction of Sovereignty

Jacques Derrida. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne

Brault & Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
In the age of so-called globalization, that is, the increasing expansion
and intensication of commercial, informational, and exchange relations
beyond national boundaries, the sovereignty of the states that emerged
in Europe until the seventeenth century has been signicantly curtailed.
The sovereign rule of the nation-states over a given territory is no longer
something that can be taken for granted. As a result, the identity of
the nation-states themselves becomes questionable. As Jrgen Habermas
has argued, the structural changes of the world economy, in particular,
are jeopardizing the integrity of the borders of the territorial state
within which the peoples of the state can constitute themselves as a
well-dened self [ein wohlbestimmtes Selbst ] (PC, 63).
1
He writes: While
the states sovereignty and monopoly on state power remain formally
intact, the growing interdependences of a world society challenge the
basic premise that national politics, circumscribed within a determi-
nate national territory, is still adequate to address the actual fates of
individual nation-states (PC, 70; transl. modied). Since, furthermore,
these states qua states of peoples, that is, nation-states, opened them-
selves up over the course of the nineteenth century to democratic forms
of legitimation, the threat by globalization to their sovereignty con-
siderably reduces the states ability of self-control; more precisely, of
inuencing itself, and working on, or acting upon itself (Selbsteinwirkung).
Indeed, the global markets have forced the nation-states into securing
their international competitiveness, and thus sustaining their positions,
by cutting away on their ability to be the potential subjects of self-
legislation (Selbstgesetzgebung). To remain competitive in the world economy,
the nation-states have come under the pressure of imposing self-
restrictions (Selbstbeschrnkung) on their power to freely shape themselves.
Such adaptation to the conditions of a transnationalized economy
undermines, in particular, the historical constellation that permitted
the European nation-states to shield their subjects from the most unde-
sired social and political consequences of the global markets. Over-
whelmed by the global economy, the previously sovereign states, in
order to catch up politically with the forces of a globalized economy,
further relinquish parts of their sovereignty, by expanding on their
political alliances, and thus joining supranational institutions.
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However, the loss of the nation-states well-dened self , as well
as of the possibility of self-acting and self-legislating, and consequently
the ability to freely shape itself in a world of increasing globalization,
is not simply negative. It also provides opportunities, once the creation
of greater political unities is no longer limited to a merely defensive
adaptation of new circumstances with the sole aim of enhancing ones
position in the global markets. According to Habermas, the increas-
ing interdependence of the actors in supranational regimes harbors the
possibility of inuenc[ing] the overall context of the economic system
itself, and to set a course for a democratic order beyond the national
state (PC, 53). Although globalization severely curtails political action
(insofar as politics is a function of the nation-states sovereignty, and
has, therefore, also led to the belief of the end of politics), it brings
about the possibility of a new kind of politics. Indeed, by opening
themselves up internally to the multiplicity of foreign, or new, forms
of cultural life, and externally, in relation to international regimes,
the nation-states face the challenge of creating political communities
from a collective identity beyond national borders, which meet the
legitimacy conditions for a postnational democracy (PC, 84, 90). Against
the postmodern claim that politics as such, vanishes with the collapse
of the nation-state, Habermas advocates a politics that can catch up
with global markets, one that will be able to challenge the mode of
locational competition . . . [whose] basis of legitimacy [is to be found]
in the organizational forms of an international negotiation system,
which already exist today in other political arenas (PC, 88, 109). The
renewed political closure that international organizational forms
such as, for instance, the European Unionprovide at the moment
when the classical world of states fades, thus giving way to an anar-
chistic openness, is, for Habermas, the foundation of a democratic pol-
itics beyond the nation-state. Indeed, this closure seeks to create new
forms for the democratic self-steering of society as a whole (PC, 8889).
Within The Postnational Constellation, the reduction of the sovereignty
of the nation-state, and the purported right to self-determination within
such a statea right that Habermas qualies as sheer nonsense
is primarily, if not exclusively, attributed to the forces of globalization
(PC, 72). The disintegration of the sovereign state is explicated solely
in historical, social, and economic terms. The ideal of a postnational
democratic politics based on larger political unities, as for example the
European Union, is also modeled primarily on the experience of suc-
cessful forms of social integration throughout the history of European
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modernity, and especially, in the wake of a barbaric nationalism in
Europe during the last century (PC, 103). Habermas assessment and
critique of sovereignty is restricted to the purported well-dened self-
hood of nation-states and is, hence, an issue that is specic only to
modernity. This assessment is essentially of the order of a historical-
political or historical-juridical account and critique. Even though
Habermas critique of sovereignty in modernity is based on the only
authority that modernity retains, that is, that of reason, and is thus,
in principle, of a philosophical nature, philosophy, according to him,
must nally, cede the ongoing task of interpretation of modernity to
social theory (PC, 13031). And, indeed, the essays of this work, whose
subtitle is Political Essays, tackle the issue of sovereignty within the
parameters of socio-political thought alone. Yet, the discussion of the
disappearance of the sovereign nation-state also takes place by consis-
tently relying on concepts such as self, action upon oneself, and self-
legitimation, that is, terms whose nature is not solely psychological,
sociological, or political, but philosophical in origin. Habermas is not
concerned with the structures by which something like a self comes
into being. As a consequence, that which precisely permits a concept
of an autonomous self to relinquish its identity and to open itself up
to others, that which allows reason to become critical of itself and thus
to overcome its own historical limitationsthese are the aims of philo-
sophical questions that Habermas socio-political account of the loss of
sovereignty in postmodernity must leave unanswered.
In the article co-signed with Habermas, Unsere Erneuerung. Nach
dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas, published in Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, Derrida stresses the basic premisses and perspectives that he
shares with Habermas about the European responsibilities in the post-
national context and, more generally, about the need to arm but
also transform international law and its institutions.
2
Furthermore, he
observes that Habermas suggestions overlap on many points with
reections advanced in his new work, Rogues. Two Essays on Reason.
Indeed, in this work, now available in the wonderful translation by
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Derrida takes up the question
of sovereignty in the context of what he terms mondialization (which
is a philosophical concept referring to the genealogy, or genesis, of the
world), arguing that the concept of the nation-state as indivisible, and
thus unshareable, undergoes today an even more than critical test
(V, 212).
3
Like Habermas, Derrida, in Rogues, inquires into the practice
of the distribution of the powers of the state and of democracy in a
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world dominated by one superpower. He elaborates on the need to
eectively expand international right and its main institutions as well.
Given the confrontations that in the past have philosophically divided
Derrida and Habermas, the similarities between these two thinkers
regarding the analysis of the political challenges present in a postnational
constellation, and indeed the identity of the political itself, are, no doubt,
striking. However, the strategic reasons that explain Derridas and
Habermas rapprochement in the post-September 11 context regard-
ing European responsibility in face of American unilateralism in no
way eace the fundamental dierences between the two thinkers. Indeed,
I would hold that the shared premisses and perspectives concern pri-
marily, if not exclusively, socio-political and juridical analyses and prac-
tical suggestions regarding a postnational democracy. For Derridas
analyses of sovereignty reach well beyond the political and juridical
understanding that this concept enjoyed in modernity. Sovereignty,
in Rogues, is not only discussed as part of an intricate tangle of prob-
lems that include those of reason, democracy, world, and espe-
cially, the event, it is, above all, a philosophical discussion that
inquires into precisely those questions that Habermas socio-political
and juridical inquiries do not address. It is, furthermore, an inquiry
into these notions that not only diers from Habermas in terms of
style, but it is above all an inquiry that requires a dierentiating sophis-
tication and conceptual rigor that is not equaled by the latter.
Let me emphasize, from the start, that Derridas exploration of the
problem of sovereignty in this new work takes place in the name of
philosophical reason. The deconstructive transformation that reason
itself undergoes as a result of its encounter with the problem of sov-
ereignty in Rogues, not only reaches back to the enabling structures of
selfhood and self-legitimation (which for essential reasons limit all sov-
ereignty), but also lays the ground for understanding why a certain
occidental rationalism is capable of opening itself up to the other in
the rst place. Undoubtedly, Habermas acknowledges that occidental
rationalism has the advantage of gaining some distance from its own
traditions, to broaden limited perspectives, and to allow for a decen-
tering of our ways of viewing things (PC, 119), but this advantage is
not derived, as in Derrida, from the inner division of the autonomy
and authority of reason. Indeed, this inquiry into the structural limits
of sovereignty and its aporetic nature puts into question the value of
autonomy that continues to undergird all of Habermas analyses and
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provides illuminating insights into the end of sovereignty in the post-
national constellation.
In Roguesin particular, in the part devoted to exploring the mean-
ing of Kants expression, to save the honor of reasonDerrida avers
that deconstruction, which rather than abandoning the Enlightenment
remains faithful to its memory, follows in essence from an exigency
of reason. Indeed, the deconstructive exigency of reason is a cri-
tique of reason itself in the name of reason. Deconstruction, Derrida
writes, is an unconditional rationalism that never renouncesand pre-
cisely in the name of the Enlightenment to come, in the space to be
opened up of a democracy to comesuspending in an argued, delib-
erated, rational fashion, all conditions, hypotheses, conventions, and
presuppositions, and criticizing unconditionally all conditionalities, includ-
ing those that still found the critical idea, namely, those of the krinein,
of the krisis, of the binary or dialectical decision or judgment (V, 197).
The rational deconstruction of sovereignty that Derrida pursues in this
latest work is intimately interconnected with a critique of reason that,
in the name of reason, recognizes sovereignty as, rst of all, grounded
in the sovereignty of reason. Indeed, sovereignty is rst of all one of
the traits by which reason denes its own power and element, that is,
a certain unconditionality (V, 211).
As Derrida recalls, throughout the history of reason in the West,
the rationality of reason is essentially double in that reason both signies
an unconditional and incalculable principle, on the one hand, while
maintaining itself as a process of reasoning as rationalization, calcula-
tionin short, as ratioon the other. Derridas reading of Platos
inquiry in the Republic into the dynamis of knowledge (i.e., the power
of knowledge and as knowledge), that is, into the idea of the Good,
argues that reason, as an absolute and unconditional principle, is sov-
ereign. Indeed, Plato not only grants the idea of the Good the sover-
eignty of a king that reigns over the intelligible visible world, he also
establishes the Goods power as a superpower since the Good is beyond
being and beingness. Derrida writes: Besides basileus and kurion, the
words that Plato uses are those that will have named sovereignty in
the whole complicated, rich, and dierential history of the political
onto-theology of sovereignty in the West. It is the super-powerful origin
of a reason that gives reason or proves right [donne raison], that wins out
over [a raison de] everything, that knows everything and lets everything
be known, that produces becoming or genesis but does not itself become,
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remaining withdrawn in an exemplary, hyperbolic fashion from becom-
ing or from genesis (V, 192). From Platos idea of the Good (as the
ultimate sovereign power that orders, and is itself ordered, by logos),
to Kant and Husserl, reason in the sense of an unconditional principle
has been consistently given the status of a sovereign to which all cal-
culative reason has to submit. This seemingly irreducible alliance of
sovereignty and unconditionality (and hence indivisibility), rst of all,
within the philosophical concept of reason, but by extension, also in
the history of the onto-theological politics in the West, is the target of
Derridas rational deconstruction of reason. In the name of reason
itself, deconstruction seeks to dissociate sovereignty and uncondition-
ality that are inextricably interlinked in the traditional, that is, the
metaphysical concept of reason. When Derrida asks whether it is today
possible, in the daylight of today, to think and put to the test a sep-
aration that seems impossible and unthinkable (V, 196), it is, of course,
in light of certain experiencesabove all September 11, 2001
but also and, more generally, through the experience that lets itself
be aected by what or who comes [(ce) qui vient], by what happens or
by who happens by, by the other to come (V, 13). Sought in the name
of the event, including the to-come and the be-coming of reason, the
demand for dissociating the indissociable relation between sovereignty
and unconditionality is one that, given the intrinsic link that Derrida
establishes in Rogues between the event and the incalculable and uncon-
ditional, proves to be faithful to one of the two poles of rationality,
namely, to this postulation of unconditionality (V, 196).
By recognizing that the forces that shape the present world are in
want of sovereignty [en mal de souverainet]sovereignty in general but,
more visibly, more decipherably, indivisible nation-state sovereignty
(V, 196), and, furthermore, that such forces no longer ground a cal-
culating reason that addresses programmable or anticipatable events,
Derridas rendering of the question concerning a possible separation
of sovereignty and unconditionality, becomes more precise. He asks
whether we can and must not distinguish, even when this appears
impossible, between, on the one hand, the compulsion or auto-positioning
of sovereignty (which is nothing less than that of ipseity itself, of the
selfsame of the oneself ), . . . and, on the other hand, this postulation of
unconditionality, which can be found in the critical exigency as well as
in the (forgive the expression) deconstructive exigency of reason (V, 196).
Indeed, if todays eventsand, in particular, September 11have
opened up a world without a horizon in which the worst may still be
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to come, then to save the honor of reasonand, hence, the possibility
of a reason to comethe indivisibility of sovereignty and unconditionality
must be dissolved: one must even be questioned in the name of the
other, that is, sovereignty in the name of unconditionality. Derrida
writes: This is what would have to be recognized, thought, reasoned
through, however dicult or improbable, however im-possible even, it
might seem. Yet what is at issue is precisely another thought of the
possible (of power, of the masterly and sovereign I can, of ipseity
itself ) and of an im-possible that would not be simply negative, or
privative (V, 197). In short, the honor of reason is suspended from the
possibility of such a deconstruction of sovereignty, a deconstruction
that extends to the position of ipseity in general, including reasons
relation to itself.
To think through the im-possiblean im-possible that is, rst of
all, the condition of the event itself, an event being truly an event only
if it cannot be predicted, in short, if from the perspective of calcula-
ble reason it is strictly im-impossiblerather than indulging in irra-
tionalism, is required by reason itself. It is not to go against reason to
spell out the conditions under which alone the im-possible, the event
for instance, is possible. When Derrida holds that it is in fact the
only chance to think, rationally, something like a future [avenir] and a
becoming [devenir] of reason (V, 199), the dierence between his thought
and that of Habermas, in spite of all the notable similarities regarding
the political questions of sovereignty and democracy, begins to come
into view. Indeed, if the event, for instance, is im-possible, it is because
its eventfulness requires that it occur without any horizon of expectation
and any teleological preformation while at the same time remaining
recognizable as an event. Without being calculable, the event must not
refuse all knowledge, or rational calculation. Whether inquiring into
the event or democracy, Derrida demonstrates that the antinomic, or
rather, aporetic, nature of the demands intertwined in these concepts
characterizes them as im-possible. All of Derridas analyses of what
happens to democracy in the age of globalization, although they res-
onate with Habermas socio-political diagnoses, are not only analyses
that reach back to the rst articulation of these ideas in Plato and
Aristotle where they are intimately tied up with the essence of reason,
but are also foregrounded in the intricate web of aporetic demands
that structure the concepts that these analyses bring into view. In short,
the fundamental dierence between Derridas and Habermas account
of what happens today in politics, and to the political institutions of
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the nation-state, is that Derridas analyses of what has actually happened
take place against the background of, what he terms, the im-possible,
that is, the aporetic normative constraints that are intertwined in the
concept of democracy and that make democracy both an injunction
and an impossiblity. Furthermore, the promise of the im-possible inscribed
in democracy is a promise that risks and must always risk being per-
verted into a threat.
4
Although Derrida has consistently granted aporetic
thought a privilege in his previous writings, this thought is expanded on
and becomes further enriched in Rogues by the thought of auto-immunity,
that is, the implacable law that always turns the promise of the im-
possible into a possible threatthat in the name of democracy democ-
racy is sovereignly abolished, to name just one such threat.
As I have already pointed out, Derrida questions sovereignty not
exclusively in the shape of the autonomous nation-states, but more
fundamentally in the shape of ipseity, autos, and selfsameness in general.
He writes: Before any sovereignty of the state, of the nation-state, of
the monarch, or, in democracy, of the people, ipseity names a principle
of legitimate sovereignty, the accredited or recognized supremacy of a
power or force, a kratos or a cracy. That is what is implied, posed, pre-
supposed, but also imposed in the very position, in the self- or auto-
positioning, of ipseity itself, everywhere there is some oneself, the rst,
ultimate, and supreme source for every reason of the strongest as the
right [droit] granted to force or the force granted to law [droit]
(V, 3132). The sovereignty of the nation-state not only presupposes
the form of self-hood, but also that such selfhood is a function of a
self-positing, and self-positioning. Indeed, the argument made in Rogues
is that in terms of possibility any democratic space requires some
automobilic and autonomic turn or, rather, return to self, toward the
self and upon the self [whether it is a question] of sovereign self-
determination, of the auto-nomy of the self, of the ipse, namely, of the
one-self that gives itself its own law, of all auto-nality, all auto-tely,
self-relation as being in view of the self, beginning by the self with the
end of self in view, in short, ipseity in general (V, 30). Needless to
say, this turn by which a self returns to itself to become an ipse, implies
the possibility of a turn against itself, that is, of a suicidal perversion
of autonomy. If the self can return to itself to posit and position itself,
it can in the same movement annihilate itself. This questioning of the
self-positioning of the self as oneself, and hence of the sovereign author-
ity and autonomy not only of any self, whether that of private or civic
individuals, of nation-states, and even of transnational organization
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(such as the United Nations), but also of the proper and univocal
meaning of a concept itself (such as the concept of democracy), under-
lies all of Derridas analyses of the sovereignty of nation-states and of
democracy within the limits of such autonomous states.
This, then, is also the moment to highlight the notion, or schema,
of auto-immunity so prevalent in this book. Although the notion of
auto-immunization refers to this strange illogical logic by which a liv-
ing being can spontaneously destroy, in an autonomous fashion, the
very thing within it that is supposed to protect it against the other, to
immunize it against the aggressive intrusion of the other (V, 173),
Derrida has not, as he remarks, privileged this notion out of some
excessive biologistic or geneticist proclivity on [his] part. Rather, it is
a scheme that imposed itself, when it became clear that any autos
requires a return to itself (or auto-aection), which is also, at the same
time, the possibility of a turn against itself. Indeed, the circular or
rotary movement of the self s return to itself and against itself, in the
encounter with itself and countering of itself, takes place before all
life (whether bios or zoe) insofar as life is understood in opposition to
its others, such as the spirit, culture, or politics (V, 154). In auto-immu-
nity (which goes far beyond the biological processes by which an organ-
ism tends to destroy, in a suicidal fashion, its own immunitary pro-
tections), it is not some particular thing that becomes aected, but
rather, rst and foremost, the self, the ipse, the autos that nds itself
infected (V, 154). Derrida writes that auto-immunity consists not
only in harming or ruining oneself, indeed in destroying ones own
protections, and in doing so oneself, committing suicide or threaten-
ing to do so, but, more seriously still, and through this, in threaten-
ing the I [moi ] or the self [soi ], the ego or the autos, ipseity itself, com-
promising the immunity of the autos itself: it consists not only in
compromising oneself [sauto-entamer] but in compromising the self, the
autosand thus ipseity. It consists not only in committing suicide but
in compromising sui- or self-referentiality, the self or sui- of suicide itself
(V, 71). Such autoimmunal perversion occurs also in advance of all
normal or normative perversions of autonomy in the socio-political
sphere. As Derrida suggests in a discussion of Husserls diagnostic, at
the beginning of the Vienna Lecture, European rationality is sick with
objectivism, in other words, with a form of rationality produced by
reason itself. What is at issue here is a transcendental pathology and
even a transcendental auto-immunity (V, 176). This evocation of a
transcendental phenomenological auto-immunity, whose raison dtre,
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according to Derrida, could be shown to be located in the very struc-
ture of the present and of life, in the temporalization of what Husserl
called the Living Present (die lebendige Gegenwart) [in that] the Living
Present is produced only by altering and dissimulating itself (V, 179),
is a clear indication not only of the terms in which Derridas use of
the notion of auto-immunity is to be understood, but above all of the
level on which the inquiry into the autos, and ipseity in general, takes
place. To argue that no autonomy of the self is conceivable without
the circularity of self-aection, and that this return to oneself inscribes
within oneself at once the possibility of auto-immunity, is to engage
transcendental questions. Derrida stresses, furthermore, that this cir-
cularity must be thought of as the rotundity of a rotating movement
that is super-preliminary (V, 30) not only to any distinction between
physis and techne, thus not only to the thought of the technical form of
a wheel, but also prior to the purely geometrical gure of the circle
or the sphere, that is, of a constituted ideality. This concern with auto-
aection and auto-immunity is, therefore, one with quasi-transcendental
structural limits of autonomy that are older than all established dis-
tinctions and that concern structures of sui-referentiality in advance of
all possible ideality.
However, such limitation of auto-nomy is nothing to be deplored.
It is, rst and foremost, the very condition under which anything can
happen at all. Derrida avers: auto-immunity is not an absolute ill or
evil. It enables an exposure to the other, to what and to who comes
which means that it must remain incalculable. Without auto-immu-
nity, with absolute immunity, nothing would ever happen or arrive;
we would no longer wait, await, or expect, no longer expect one
another, or expect any event (V, 210). Insofar as auto-immunity
breaches the self s autonomy and sovereignty, it opens it up to the
otherto the event, that is, to what Derrida calls the uncalculable or
unconditional. With this question of the unpredictable coming of the
other (and thus of a heteronomy, or law of the other that includes
the responsibility and decision of the other), auto-immunity becomes
the condition of a democracy that is not based on autonomy (which
by welcoming only citizens, brothers and compeers excludes the others),
but is instead open to the excluded, the other, any other. Finally, auto-
immunity, the turn of the self against itself, is what secures the possi-
bility of self-critique, perfectibility, and thus the historicity of democ-
racyin short, to what makes democracy so unique among all the
other political regimens.
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If the democracy of the One (demos) presupposes the turn and return
to self as the freedom and power (kratos) of an autonomous self to be
its own master, then democracy is intimately tied to sovereignty. A
democracy, Derrida argues, is a force (kratos), a force in the form of
a sovereign authority (sovereign, that is, kurios or kuros, having the
power to decide, to be decisive, to prevail, to have reason over or win
out over [avoir raison de] and to give force of law, kuroo), and thus the
power and ipseity of the people (demos) (V, 33). As such a force, a
force more powerful than all other forces, sovereignty does not suer
any division; it is unique and indivisible. Such indivisibility has been
acknowledged by all the theoreticians of sovereignty from Jean Bodin
and Thomas Hobbes on to Carl Schmitt who links it to decisionist
exceptionality. This is also to say that, by not being in need of any
legitimation, sovereignty withdraws . . . from language, which always
introduces a sharing that universalizes . . . The paradox, which is always
the same, is that sovereignty is incompatible with universality even
though it is called for by every concept of international, and thus uni-
versal or universalizable, and thus democratic, law. There is no sov-
ereignty without force, without the force of the strongest whose rea-
sonthe reason of the strongestis to win out over [avoir raison de]
over everything (V, 144). Furthermore, because sovereigntys force is
indivisible, absolute, and unconditional, the abuse of power is consti-
tutive of sovereignty that as such betrays the very democracy (whether
national or international) that it inaugurates. In short, the very indi-
visibility of sovereignty on which universalizable law rests contradicts
universality from within. But if, on the other hand, sovereignty is made
to justify itself by giving reasons for itself, sovereignty is subjected to
rules, a code of law, some general law, and thus deprived of its ground-
ing function for a universalizable law. It is thus to divide it, to sub-
ject it to partitioning, to participation, to being shared. It is to take
into account the part played by sovereignty. And to take that part into
account is to compromise sovereigntys immunity, to turn it against
itself (V, 144). Derridas deconstruction of sovereignty, which bases
itself as much on a sharpening of the classical and canonical aporias
of democracy that Aristotle already pointed atthe aporia between
freedom and equalityas on an analysis of the role of the interna-
tional organizations (and above all the sovereign power of the United
States in the post-September 11 context), highlights the aporetic struc-
ture of the concept. Unlike Giorgio Agamben (who in attempting to
provide a general theory of sovereignty argues that the notion of a
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state of exception is aporetic only because it has not been correctly
dened, and seeks to overcome the aporias of sovereignty in a unied
concept of this notion), Derrida highlights the aporetic logic of sover-
eignty.
5
However, distinct from a merely negative assessment, Derridas
account points to negative and armative consequences that might
ensue [from the principle of sovereignty], the aporia being the condi-
tion of possibility and impossibility of responsibility (V, 76). Against
the backdrop of the aporias of democratic sovereignty, a responsibil-
ity toward the democratic thus becomes manifest. As a result, reason
is led to conceive of, and work towards, a democracy that calls upon
an unconditionality without sovereignty.
While not opposing head on, all sovereignty, sovereignty in general,
without threatening at the same time, beyond the nation-state gure
of sovereignty, the classical principles of freedom and self-determina-
tion (V, 216), Rogues is at the same time also intent on deconstruct-
ing the state form, which should, as Derrida states elsewhere, one
day, no longer be the last word of the political.
6
Rogues argues for a
democracy without sovereignty, in other words, without auto-nomy.
Such dissociation between democracy and auto-nomy (a dissociation
that is, admittedly, im-possible, i.e., foreign to the order of the pos-
sible), is made in the name of another truth of democracy. The inquiry
into the rotatory movement by which a self comes into being and is
at the same undone is an investigation into what structures a partic-
ular axiomatic of a certain democracy, namely, the turn, the return
to self of the circle and the sphere, and thus the ipseity of the One,
the autos of autonomy, symmetry, homogeneity, the same, the semblable
or the similar, and even, nally, God, in other words everything that
remains incompatible with, even clashes with, another truth of the
democratic, namely, the truth of the other, heterogeneity, the heteronomic
and the dissymmetric, disseminal multiplicity, the anonymous anyone,
the no matter who, the indeterminate each one (V, 35). A democracy
that is open to the other becomes possible on the basis of the auto-
immunity of the autonomous self to its own autos, an auto-immunity
that even though it clashes with autonomy, is structurally pregured
in the circular process by which autonomy comes into its own to begin
with. As we have seen, such auto-immunity is also what permits democ-
racy to be a system, the exclusive one, indeed, where one has or
assumes for oneself the right to criticize everything publicly, including
the idea of democracy, its concept, its history, and its name. Including
the idea of the constitutional paradigm and the absolute authority of
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law. It is thus the only paradigm that is universalizable, whence its
chance and its fragility (V, 127). In short, this self-contestation of the
autos by itself, which opens up democracy to the coming of the other
as well as to the possibility of self-improvement, makes democracy the
only political regime that, in the name of a reason to come, can appeal
to and seek assent from every one.
If sovereignty, then, is to be deconstructed in the name of reason
(and is, as such, also the deconstruction of classical reason), it is in order
to meet the exigency of unconditionality. Indeed, what the autonomous
self or nation-state must open itself up to in a democracy without auto-
nomy, is the other, the event, and the future, in the sense of the im-
possible to which Derrida associates incalculable and exceptional singularity,
since without the absolute singularity of the incalculable and the excep-
tional, no thing and no one, nothing other and thus nothing, arrives or
happens (V, 203). This then is also the point where it becomes pos-
sible to elicit more clearly what Derrida, in Rogues, seeks to accom-
plish. Rather than seeking to plunge reason as it is commonly under-
stood, into the abyss of the irrational, by deconstructing sovereignty,
the metaphysical concept of reason is brought face to face with its
aporias, and that means nothing less than its responsibilities. It is pre-
cisely the sovereignty that constitutes reason that inhibits reason from
meeting its responsibilities. Grounded in sovereignty, reason has to turn
against itself in the auto-immunitary process in order to become capable
of letting the unconditional comethe other, the event, the future
and thus also to account for (in the form of ratio, logos, and calcula-
tion) what is incalcaluble, unconditional, absolute. Indeed, it is never
a question of surrendering calculation in the name of the uncondi-
tionality of reason (nor the unconditional to which it responds). Derrida
writes: According to a transaction that is each time novel, each time
without precedent, reason goes through and goes between, on the one
side, the reasoned exigency of calculation or conditionality, and, on
the other, the intransigent, non-negotiable exigency of unconditional
incalculability. This intractable exigency wins out [a raison de] and must
win out over everything. On both sides, then, whether it is a question
of singularity or universality, and each time both at once, both calcu-
lation and the incalculable are necessary (V, 208). Within the uncondi-
tionality of reason, each singularity is to be related to the universalizable
in the name of a universal beyond all relativism, culturalism, ethno-
centrism, and especially nationalism (V, 204). Universal translatability,
however hypothetical and problematic, is one of the fundamental
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302 nr\irv .n+icrrs
stakes of reason, Derrida remarks (V, 172). In fact, such translation
is said to be woven into the entire destiny of reason, that is, of the
world universality to come (V, 168). Yet, reason has a responsibility
toward both the singular and the universal. It can meet these respon-
sibilities, implicated in the concept of reason we have inherited, only
within the auto-immunitary aporia of this impossible transaction
between the conditional and the unconditional, calculation and the
incalculable (V, 208). For this always perilous transaction, Derrida
proposes the term reasonable, rather than the term rational. Taking
into account the incalculable so as to give an account of it, there
where this appears impossible, so as to account for or reckon with it,
that is to say, with the event of what or who comes, is the sole way
of saving the honor of reason (V, 217).
In an elaborate discussion of democracy in Plato and Aristotle, Derrida
shows that there exists in ancient Greece no proper, stable, and univocal
meaning of democracy, that is, no concept of democracy itself, of
democracy properly speaking. Everything Plato and Aristotle advance
about freedom and political behavior, as either eleutheria (the freedom
to be master of oneself ) or exousia (license), indicates, according to
Derrida, a freedom of play, an opening of indetermination and inde-
cidability in the very concept of democracy, in the interpretation of the
democratic (V, 47). This freedom in the concept, like a kind of a priori
freedom, in advance of the dierence between liberty and license,
functions as the empty opening of a future of the very concept and thus
of the language of democracy. The essential historicity of the con-
cept of democracy, the possibility of what Derrida has called democ-
racy to come is thus opened up. This notion of a democracy to
come extends the democratic beyond the nation-state sovereignty and
citizenship, including world-citizenship. It extends it in principle, that
is, by right, to all non-human living beings, or again, even beyond
that, to all the non-living, to their memory, spectral or otherwise, to
their to-come or to their indierence with regard to what we think
we can identify, in an always precipitous, dogmatic, and obscure way,
as the life or the living present of living [la vivance] in general (V, 81).
As Derrida remarks, to speak of a democracy to come is not to
invoke a current, determinate, and limited concept of democracy. It
does not refer to a democracy in the future, one that one day would
be present, or something that in the present could be deferred to another
time. Instead, it is an injunction and an urgency that concerns the
present itself. The to-come of democracy is also, although without
RIPH 34_f17_266-314 10/27/04 9:08 AM Page 302
presence, the hic and nunc of urgency, of the injunction as absolute
urgency (V, 53). Although the democracy to come is not something
that one day in the future could be a present reality, it is not, there-
fore, an idea in the Kantian sense. A regulative idea is still, as Derrida
explains, the idea of something possible even though it is innitely
deferred. As for democracy to come, it actually announces nothing
(V, 131). It is always to come. But though it will never be present,
since its aporetic structure inhibits it from ever acquiring a presence
as such, it remains the heritage of a promise. Here and now, an uncon-
ditional urgency, the democracy to come always remains, here and
now, the memory of that which alone carries the future, the to-come.
Rodolphe Gasch
State University of New York at Bualo
NOTES
1. Jrgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation. Political Essays, trans. M. Pensky
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); hereafter cited as PC.
2. Jacques Derrida and Jrgen Habermas, Unsere Erneuerung. Nach dem Krieg: Die
Wiedergeburt Europas, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 31, 2003, p. 33.
3. All quotes from Rogues are from the forthcoming translation by Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Naas, but the page references are to the French original: Jacques
Derrida, Voyous. Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galile, 2003); hereafter cited as V.
4. Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides. A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida, in
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jrgen Habermas and
Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 120.
5. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. II, 1, Etat dexception, trans. J. Gayraud (Paris: Editions
du Seuil, 2003).
6. Autoimmunity; Real and Symbolic Suicides, 131.
Of Origins and Ends
Leonard Lawlor. Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. 286pp.
The rst detailed and comprehensive examination of all of Derridas
major writings on Husserl, Leonard Lawlors Derrida and Husserl is a
genuine labor of explication and close reading, meticulously unpack-
ing and elucidating works that 40 or 50 years after their publication
still prove forbiddingly dicult. Yet, Lawlor has not shirked from tack-
ling all the complexities inherent in these texts; his book is a model
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Research in Phenomenology, 34
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands 2004
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