ABSTRACT
Derrida’s work on democracy has had relatively little impact on the vast field of democracy studies. Although scholars of Derrida have explored his work on democracy,1 and Derrida has himself problematized aspects of particular democracies,2 these interventions have rarely found a place among theories and analyses of democracy – even those of the more critical or disruptive kind. They have seemed even less relevant to understanding the manner in which actually existing democracies are experienced and challenged. It is easy to speculate why this might be the case. Derrida is not, nor has
ever considered himself, a theorist of democracy. Only obliquely concerned with the political prior to the 1980s, an explicit concern with democracy does not emerge until his later work, and when it does, it is difficult (and somehow underridean) to cobble it into a legible ‘theory’ of democracy. Previously discussed arguments regarding Derrida’s ‘withdrawal from the specificity of politics or empirical social research’3 and accusations of ‘terroristic obscurantism’ have probably discouraged many from perceiving in Derrida’s work a serious intervention into democratic theory and practice. Syntagmas such as ‘no democracy without deconstruction, no deconstruction without democracy’ and neologisms like ‘democracy-to-come’ have probably not helped either. Without trying to cobble Derrida’s interventions into a ‘theory’ of
democracy, the first three chapters explore the relevance of his work to contemporary (interpretive and experiential) struggles over democracy. This chapter explores two of Derrida’s cardinal propositions about democracy: that there is ‘no democracy without deconstruction’, and that democracy is always ‘to-come’. The next chapter considers Derrida’s articulation of the aporetic and autoimmune structure of democracy, and attempts to situate Derrida’s work on democracy within some of the debates and problematics of democratic theory. The third chapter explores Derrida’s potential contribution to theories of democratization, and considers the relevance of Derrida’s treatment of democracy to understanding recent struggles over democracy in Turkey. Thomson suggests that Derrida’s ‘telegraphic’ statement, ‘No democracy
without deconstruction, no deconstruction without democracy’, seeks to
provoke.4 Haddad similarly assesses the relationship Derrida constructs between deconstruction and justice. The expression ‘deconstruction is justice’, suggests Haddad, ‘functions more as a provocative call to further thinking than as a statement of established fact’.5 Derrida, Haddad observes, ‘makes this kind of identity statement regularly, linking deconstruction to all sorts of terms’.6 This book takes up the provocation, offering a way to think through the relationship between democracy and justice, as held together by the relationship between democracy and deconstruction on the one hand, and deconstruction and justice on the other. This chapter begins with the democracy-deconstruction side of the equation, suggesting that whilst Derrida’s telegraphic statement is indeed provocative, it is also something of a ‘statement of fact’, as there would indeed be no democracy(-to-come) without deconstruction.
