“No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive ...
“No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into…”
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow[1]
“Here is where the problem of Etats voyous that I announced in the beginning forms a real knot. To understand this knot- I am not saying to undo it.”
Jacques Derrida, Rogues[2]
Viral Politics: Jacques Derrida’s reading of Auto-immunity and Carl Schmitt
Andrew Johnson, LSU
I:
Since Jacques Derrida’s 1989 essay “Force of Law: the Mystical Foundations of Authority,”[3] Carl Schmitt has been a perennial subject of Derrida’s political critique. I will argue that Derrida’s concept of auto-immunity is uniquely applicable to Derrida’s interpretation of Schmitt’s political philosophy. Therefore, my argument will consist of two interrelated but equally divergent parts; the digressive structure will attempt to mimic Derrida’s complex style of weaving opposed concepts into a coherent whole. First, I will demonstrate the many forms of Derrida’s concept of auto-immunity. Second, I will exhibit how this schema uniquely applies to Derrida’s criticisms of Schmitt and the contemporary state of politics.
II:
Derrida is a philosopher of a thousand faces. Perhaps, his last face was his concept of auto-immunity. Derrida begins to utilizes this biological concept as early as the 1990s, but only after the terrorist attacks of September 11th does this concept becomes a predominate schema in which Derrida configures his philosophy.
Derrida’s schema of auto-immunity also has a thousand faces. In many ways, this is the final concept of an illustrious history of prior concepts. However, auto-immunity retains shades of all the rest. Auto-immunity captures a pervasive and consistent philosophical critique that has taken many guises throughout Derrida’s career. Indeed, auto-immunity is deconstruction. As Michael Naas puts it: “Undecideability, aporia, antinomy, double bind: autoimmunity is explicitly inscribed in Rogues into a veritable ‘best of collection’ of Derrideo-phemes or deconstructo-nyms” (Naas, p. 29).[4] Or as Derrida puts it: “I have granted to this autoimmune schema a range without limits” (Rogues, p. 124). Therefore, it is my principal intention to untangle the various knots that Derrida has so carefully interwoven into the make-up of his final adieu.
III:
Auto-immunity first gained prominent attention with the spread of AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, during the early 1980s. It is under this guise that Derrida first began to discuss auto-immunity.[5] I would like to discuss the medical discourse surrounding AIDS and HIV, particularly as John Protevi describes this discourse in terms of Derrida’s political physics,[6] so as to assert a preliminary understanding of why it is important and difficult for philosophy to wrestle with the metaphysical problematic of auto-immunity.
By the time Michel Foucault died of AIDS in 1984, the disease he died from wasn’t fully understood publicly or scientifically. In the early 80’s the discourse surrounding AIDS was predominately moralistic as it was publicly derided as “the Gay disease,” and the scientific discourse surrounding the causes, effects, and possible cures were simultaneously lagging. In fact, Protevi’s argument is that AIDS is still not fully understood. Currently, there is a hegemonic interpretation of AIDS that describes it solely in terms of virology. This interpretation argues that AIDS is entirely caused exclusively by the HIV virus. Under this model of explanation, a virus, from the outside, infects and causes the AIDS disease. By describing AIDS in terms of virology there is a resulting interpretation of our bodies that is philosophically relevant. Protevi describes what this model means conceptually:
In this picture, the virus comes from outside, breaching the walls that should separate the unitary body from its opposite, the outside world. The body is seen as an interiority encased by a protective barrier, a frontier. According to the oppositional cultural imaginary, the ideally seamless mucous membrane walls are in fact fragile, prone to tiny invisible tears, opening the inside to an outside that should stay outside. The response to this factual degeneration from ideal separation is to police the borders of the somatic body politic. The messages we all know by now: separate inside and outside. Avoid mixing the famous bodily fluids. The truth about AIDS is a liminology, a discourse on borders: keep your fluids to yourself! Don’t bring foreign blood inside! Clean your needles, watch your blood supply: regulate the purity of the outside substances, if you must—through perversity or medical order- incorporate them. Keep your penis and its fluids to yourself! The condom keeps the outside, even when it is inside, outside. Keep your clitoris and vaginal secretions to yourself! The dental dam keeps the inside, even when it is outside, inside. Latex is life; fluid exchange, death (Protevi, p. 101).
Opposed to the HIV-only paradigm, Protevi believes that Derrida provides us the philosophical concepts to think otherwise. Insofar as virology creates an oppositional discourse that Derrida would deem a “restricted economy,” Protevi’s counter-paradigm, immunology, provides a non-oppositional logic of difference that he contends Derrida would rightly call a “general economy.” Mind you, the genius of Protevi’s analysis is that his publication predates Derrida’s extrapolation of auto-immunity as a dominant model to describe his philosophy.
The shift from a restricted economy to a general economy is the shift from a logic of opposition, inside versus outside, to a differential logic of force and physics that posits overlapping and opposed “systems.” Protevi explains the importance of such a shift:
For immunology, the question is never one of inside and outside, but of the economic distribution between intakes, assimilation or rejection and excretion. The unitary, self-present body is exploded into a systemic interchange, a point of exchange of forces; in other words, immunology studies forceful bodies politic. The outside is already inside, in relation to the inside; the regulation of this interchange is the job of the immune system (Protevi, p. 102).
Whereas the virological model describes AIDS in terms of a virus transmitted from a sexual exterior, Protevi’s immunological model deconstructs the trite demarcations between inside and outside.[7] This shift in emphasis and explanation provides a new economy of meaning that changes the context of AIDS discourse.
The general economy of the somatic body politic in the AIDS context, by contrast to the oppositional liminology of virology, focuses on immunology. Immunology is the study of a process, a discourse that attempts to explain the regulation of a site of interchange. Immunological models are fuzzy and soft compared to the elegant precision of virological experiments. Disturbing new logics are called for. There is frustratingly enough, no one ‘cause.’ Information theory and cybernetics, as Donna Haraway demonstrates…, are the paradigms of immunology. The immunological system’s task is one of reading, of espionage and counter-espionage. The endgame of auto-immune disease- especially when it targets the immune system itself- is that of the impossible task of undoing the mistakes committed by the internal police who confuse internal police for foreign agents masquerading as internal police dedicated to tracking down foreign agents masquerading as internal police…. Suspicion taken to the limit; hermeneutics in extremis. Compared with the paranoia of immunology, the virological war model, where the task is the defense of the garrison from the enemy storming the walls, is relatively reassuring (Protevi, p. 101-102).
Protevi’s argument does not ask us to abandon the virological model, but rather he contends that this model neglects important aspects of AIDS: such as microbiology or social/political conditions. The immunological model provides a much more robust and accurate depiction. No longer can AIDS discourse revolve solely around that of condoms and external viruses, but we must forge new frontiers in describing AIDS. The immunological model stresses a deconstructed model of metaphysical identity, corporeal constitution, and our physical relations with the external world, and configures new remedial policies that address the availability of sexual education programs, economic development, and stable political climates as factors in the severity of AIDS cases.
The beauty of Protevi’s explication is the obvious foreshadowing of how this seemingly biological condition, AIDS, has a distinctly political imagery. As opposed to a traditional war-model where there are clearly defined opposed sides with rigid borders and rules, the immunological model extends far beyond mere scientific discourse to a description of the world and our understanding of it as an asymmetrical battlefield of loosely defined alliances and ambiguous conflictual relations. In fact, we might not know whether the internal police are really foreign agents! The way in which a mere biological “model” can be used to describe a “physics of force,” even at the level of large nation-states and international law, is the focal point of my analysis of Jacques Derrida, auto-immunity, and Carl Schmitt.
IV:
Auto-immunity is, first and foremost, a biological concept. In all of Derrida’s subsequent writings on auto-immunity he always points to a long footnote, in his 1994 essay “Faith and Knowledge,” that demonstrates the biological necessity of his auto-immune logic:
It is especially evident in the domain of biology that the lexical resources of immunity have developed their authority. The immunitary reaction protects the ‘indemnity’ of the body proper in producing antibodies against foreign antigens. As for the process of auto-immunization,… it consists for a living organism… of protecting itself against its self-protection by destroying its own immune system… [W]e feel ourselves authorized to speak of a sort of general logic of auto-immunization (Religion, p. 72-73).[8]
Auto-immunity is the biological condition in which a living organism “works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’’ immunity” (Time of Terror, p. 94).[9]
The inherent biological definition of auto-immunity is the momentum that allows Derrida to proliferate the concept into a panoply of divergent meanings. However, as Derrida says above, he is less concerned with its biological implications and more interested in its “general logic.”
Auto-immunity is a relationship between self and other. The concept of auto-immunity obfuscates the traditional opposition between self and non-self. Hence, auto-immunity is the deconstruction of the self. This relationship has been a primary concern for Derrida for the better part of his career. The designation self and other ignores how neat divisions or boundaries are adopted or drawn with a certainty that remains problematic.
To understand auto-immunity we must first understand what separates it from immunity. The most significant thing that separates immunity from auto-immunity is the prefatory auto. Autos differs from other etymologies of the self, such as Ipse, by referring to an active self, a self that is involved in movement. Autos mean self, but retains shades of an entire lexicon of similar autos words: such as automatic, automaton, even autonomy. Derrida takes this prefix and creates an original vocabulary of like minded auto-words. Deconstruction is nothing but the destruction of the various types of self, or autos, in terms of their own identity. Discrepancies accompanying the full embrace of a self/non-self discriminatory model to explain auto-immune functions remain vexing; auto-immunity is a process that breaks down these neat divisions and boundaries. Derrida says: “Between the immune and that which threatens it or runs counter to it… the relation is neither one of exteriority nor one of simple opposition or contradiction. I would say the same about the relationship between immunity and autoimmunity” (Rogues, p. 114). This insight is helpful in two ways. First, auto-immunity is internal to immunity, but, perhaps, exceeds it. Auto-immunity is an immune reaction gone awry. Second, the relationship between a foreign antigen and the organism it threatens is not one of irreducible opposites, but two processes that imply each other. The disease is internal to immune defenses. Take the example of vaccinations: a vaccination, a routine procedure intended to increase one’s immunity, is a small dose of a given disease. Indeed, the analogy that our immune system signifies an unbridgeable wall between self and other is a false one. Our immunity is but one last hymen that is not able to separate the inside from the outside, self or other. Auto-immunity exposes the outside as implicitly internal to an organism. While auto-immunity is an entirely automatic and spontaneous process, it demonstrates an attack and degeneration against the self.
Before addressing Derrida’s logical perversion of auto-immunity it is first important to understand what relation this biological process has with his philosophical concerns of subjectivity. Derrida’s philosophical logic is grounded in the body, in the self, the human, and its essential anatomical constitution. Derrida’s philosophy concerns itself with biology insofar as it concerns life and death. Auto-immunity interests Derrida because it deconstructs the traditional demarcations that separate life from death. Derrida explains:
To lose itself all by itself, to go down on its own, to autoimmunize itself, as I would prefer to say in order to designate this strange illogical logic by which a living 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 an aggressive intrusion of the other. Why speak in this way of autoimmunity? Why determine in such an ambiguous fashion the threat or the danger, the default or failure, the running aground or the grounding, but also the salvation, the rescue, and the safeguard, health and security- so many diabolically autoimmune assurances, virtually capable not only of destroying themselves in a suicidal fashion but or turning a certain death drive against the autos itself, against the ipseity that any suicide worthy of its name still presupposes? In order to situate the question of life and of the living being, of life and death, of life-death, at the heart of my remarks (Rogues, p. 123).
The stakes of Derrida’s concept of auto-immunity is nothing less than life or death. Auto-immunity has a role in both protecting life and causing death. By protecting life, there is, in fact, death. “If only because they bear death in life” (Time of Terror, p. 119). What Freud calls the ‘death-drive’ and Heidegger terms ‘being-towards-death,’ Derrida might just as easily term auto-immunity. But, as we will see, this is only the preliminary wager; auto-immunity, as a political trope, is invested with the lives, and deaths, of millions.
V:
Auto-immunity is a logical concept. Just as the nation-state personifies immune-functions by protecting itself from foreigners, language attempts to remain immune to everything that threatens it logical syntax. A definition, by definition, is a border, an immune protection, from everything it is not. Derrida’s entire career has been dedicated to upsetting the immunity of definitions; deconstruction is the upsetting of definitions, particularly in terms of their oppositional structure.
As we saw with Derrida’s deconstruction of the self, auto-immunity, as a “general logic,” attempts to upset the authority of logical partitions. Auto-immunity is a final term in this continuous series of hierarchical ruptures.
I could… inscribe the category of the autoimmune into a series of both older and more recent discourses on the double bind and the aporia. Although aporia, double bind, and autoimmune processes are not exactly synonyms, what they have in common, what they are all, precisely, charged with, is, more than an internal contradiction, an indecideability, that is, an internal-external, nondialectizable antinomy that risks paralyzing and thus calls for the event of the interruptive decision (Rouges, p. 35).
Auto-immunity is an aporia: the very thing that aims to protect us is the thing that destroys us. The paradox at the heart of auto-immunity is the collaboration of two seemingly antagonistic processes. Auto-immunity demonstrates a double movement: protection and destruction, threat and chance.
The use of “constitutive,” by Derrida, to describe auto-immunity necessarily refers to the political concept of constitution. A constitution is a legal statute of definitions. A constitution as a set of laws creates a structural vocabulary and thereby constitutes its own logical language game. What is against the constitutions is, by definition, illegal. The use of logic, as a mobilization of divergent immune-strategies, is a power-mechanism intending to protect itself a priori. Politics is but one specific structure of language. Politics is literally the structure and/or logic of law. Derrida believes that the concept of auto-immunity upsets this traditional and prevalent misuse of definitions, and can open up the possibility of a new type of political thought.
VI:
Auto-immunity is a failed attempt by an organism to protect itself. It is clearly connected with another age-old Derridean trope: the pharmakon. The biological concept of auto-immunity is a question of health. In attempting to protect itself, it destroys itself; it plays both the role of both medicine and poison. “[T]his poisoned medicine, this pharmakon of an inflexible and cruel autoimmunity” (Rogues, p. 157). “Once again the state is both self-protecting and self-destroying, at once remedy and poison. The pharmakon is another name, an old name, for this autoimmunitary logic” (Time of Terror, p. 124).
As Derrida says there is no condom for auto-immunity. “For there is no absolutely reliable prophylaxis against the autoimmune. By definition” (Rogues, p. 150-151). Auto-immunity is pregnant with itself. This pharmakon partition, between poison and medicine, between self and non-self, signifies both a threat and a chance. Therefore, auto-immunity is not necessarily bad. In fact, while it threatens, it retains a hopeful chance and hyperbolic promise. As Derrida says: “[O]pportunity or chance and threat, threat as chance: autoimmune” (Rogues, p. 52). “[A]lready a question of autoimmunity, of a double bind of threat and chance” (Rogues, p. 82). We must be cautious to not easily discount auto-immunity as a mere poison threatening to destroy our defenses, but as a possible medicine that opens up chances and hope.
The threat is perfectly apparent; however, what is the optimistic chance of auto-immunity? Quite simply, hospitality.
In this regard, autoimmunity is not an absolute ill or evil. It enables an exposure to the other, to what and who comes- which means that it must remain incalculable. Without autoimmunity, with absolute immunity, nothing would ever happen or arrive; we would no longer wait, await, or expect, no longer expect another, or expect any event (Rogues, p. 152).
By opening itself up to the other, threatening to destroy itself, the organism has the chance to receive the other.
The relationship of self and other is synonymous with Derrida’s ethics of hospitality. In the twilight of Derrida’s late career, he began to posit a novel attempt at ethics. One of his most important contributions is his defense of a hyperbolic ethics of unconditional hospitality: we must remain open to the other, without conditions. A hospitality, worthy of its name, must never prescribe limits to the other if it expects to redeem its full and pure ethical value.
The biological vocabulary of immunity recognizes the difference between the “host body” and the “foreign antigen.” Immune processes automatically engage in a unique form of hospitality; immunity protects its host from what is foreign. By priding security over hospitality, auto-immunity undermines its security. According to Derrida’s hyperbolic ethic, unconditional hospitality would welcome a guest even if they threaten to destroy one’s immune system.
This relationship between auto-immunity and an ethics of hospitality is where, once again, the relationship to politics becomes apparent. Sovereignty, especially Carl Schmitt’s definition, is entwined with an inherent concept of self. Sovereignty describes an indivisible ability to make one’s own decisions. Derrida’s believes that the entire domain of political vocabulary is tied up with assumptions regarding the self and its autonomy.
Auto-immunity is a concept that seeks to undermine this dependence upon the self in political philosophy. Take the example of democracy:
In its constitutive autoimmunity, in its vocation of hospitality (with everything in the ipse that works over the etymology and experience of the hospes through the aporias of hospitality), democracy has always wanted by turns and at the same time two incompatible things: it has wanted, on the one hand, to welcome only men, and on the condition that they be citizens, brothers, and compeers, excluding all the others, in particular bad citizens, rogues, noncitizens, and all sorts of unlike and unrecognizable others, and, on the other hand, at the same time or by turns, it has wanted to open itself up, to offer hospitality, to all those excluded. In both cases, let us recall, and here is a problem I take up elsewhere, this hospitality remains limited and conditional. But even in this restricted space it is typical for the democracy to do one or the other, sometimes one and the other, sometime both at the same time and/or by turns. Rogues or degenerates are sometimes brothers, citizens, compeers (Rogues, p. 63).
Derrida locates within democracy a “constitutive autoimmunity,” that seeks to immunize itself against threats and at the same moment remain open to excluded populations. Thus its constitutive logic is at heart paradoxical. Democracy, by definition, is exemplar of the essential aporia of auto-immunity: by its constitution, it is unable to recognize its mode of protection from its open hospitality to the other. Derrida’s use of auto-immunity becomes political, insofar as it describes the defense mechanisms put into place by a state to protect itself from what is outside and foreign. Immunity, auto-immunity, both biological and political, is an entire way of thinking of security, of borders, of protection schemes, but also, inversely, the means and extent of one’s hospitality. Auto-immunity, as a political concept, describes the immune system of the nation-state itself. Whereas democracy it threatened by its own mode of security/immunity, it has the audacity to hope for an unconditional hospitality that might create an ethically imperative politics.
VII:
It was Hobbes who described politics in terms of the corporeal body. Auto-immunity is, no doubt, a type political logic. Politics attempts to protect itself against anything what threatens its mode of explanation. I have already begun to show how this seemingly biological concept becomes a predominately political metaphor for Derrida. However, to fully flesh this out, we must begin to discuss Derrida’s engagement with Carl Schmitt.
“Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority” is a truly hallmark essay in Derrida’s oeuvre; originally presented as a lecture in 1989, I believe, this essay spelled out a political debate and philosophical history that is of the utmost importance for contemporary politics. While it has been argued that this essay represents a political/ethical turn, or epistemological break, in Derrida’s work, I disagree. As Derrida says: “Deconstruction is justice” (“Force of Law,” p. 15). We can likewise add: deconstruction is political philosophy.
Derrida’s essay in split in two parts and I believe that it is meant to engage two thinkers. One, Carl Schmitt, is only mentioned on the periphery. Schmitt was a leading legal scholar during the Weimar Republic and quite infamously was the architect for Article 48, which gave the dictatorial authority to the executive in times of emergency. This was famously abused by Hitler to democratically instill the Third Reich dictatorship. While Schmitt’s relationship to dictatorship is incredibly difficult to untangle in such few lines, let it suffice to say that he continued to work as an intellectual proponent of National Socialism throughout the war. The second figure of importance is Walter Benjamin. In fact, the second part of Derrida’s essay explicitly goes step by step through Benjamin’s poignant 1920 essay “Critique of Violence.”
There are a couple of reasons to establish this relation. First, Derrida’s essay is a dialogue upon democracy, specifically democracy at its most vulnerable moment, the Weimar Republic shortly before its collapse into National Socialism. Both figures demonstrate a two-headed critique against the parliamentary democracy of the Weimar Republic in the early 1920’s. However, one would be the intellectual justification of the emerging Nazism and the other would become an early fatality of the Nazi regime. Therefore, I read it implicit within Derrida’s essay that he is carrying on Benjamin/Schmitt’s critique of parliamentary democracy. Second, both figures can easily be polarized into a protagonist and an antagonist, which instills a normative standard to respond to the atrocities of the Final Solution. Benjamin is arguably the good guy, the mystical Jewish Marxist, whose radical writing style is obviously an influence upon Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. Carl Schmitt is the bad guy, whose work cannot be easily dismissed because it is all-too important and must be reckoned with. Derrida’s project is to highlight this shared critique against the Weimar Republic, but at the same time declare the ethical and political imperative, for post-war political philosophy, of responding to the democratic and violent rise of National Socialism.
Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence” is ever important because his work stands as an ironic prophecy of his eventual death, the result of State violence, and the Holocaust, the ultimate lesson of National Socialism. Derrida’s principal mission, via Benjamin, is to deconstruct the social contract. Benjamin’s essay argues that law cannot establish itself without an original act of violence and cannot maintain itself and preserve the law without continual violence. This polarity captures the deconstructive method, or Derrida’s emphasis of aporia. Law is intended to protect it citizens from violence, but its inherent structure implies that it must both founds and maintain its authority with violence. Violence is much like a cancer, secretly implicit within the concept of law. The relationship of violence to law is auto-immune. Law cannot define itself in opposition to violence, because it is entirely reliant upon it. The traditional narratives of state-foundation and legitimation are deconstructed in this auto-immune reversal.
For the purposes of Derrida’s “Force of Law” essay, two famous tag-lines of Carl Schmitt are incredibly important. Both from his 1922 book Political Theology, Schmitt proclaims first, “Sovereignty is he who decides the exception,” and second, “All political concepts are secularized theological concepts.”[10] It has been argued that Schmitt steals these concepts from Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence,”[11] but likewise argued that it is Benjamin who commandeered the concept from Schmitt.[12] While this history is interesting, what is important to note is that both of these concepts are political truths according to both Benjamin and Derrida. Derrida whole-heartedly agrees with Schmitt’s political theology and absolute conception of sovereignty. Just look at the sub-title to Derrida’s essay: “the mystical foundations of authority.” The first part of Derrida’s essay clearly spells this out: law is divine. This is distinguished from what Derrida calls justice, but it is clear that Derrida believes that law requires an act of divine violence to found it.[13] To protect and to preserve the law requires that the sovereign, or the state, must break the law. The etymology of immunity comes from the Latin immunis, which literally means exempt. To properly immunize the law, there must be no border, no limit, no exemption, which the law cannot, by definition, surpass.
VIII:
Carl Schmitt has become the paradigm antagonist of recent political philosophy. I contend that he is the principal, albeit unacknowledged, antagonist in Derrida’s essay “Force of Law: the Mystical Foundations of Authority.” However, Derrida’s deconstruction of the social contract, through the auto-immune relationship of the violence/law couplet, has become the basis of a larger trend in political theory after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Before engaging Schmitt, it is imperative that we take account of this history.
Giorgio Agamben’s work, whose influence is acknowledged by Derrida in a footnote in the back of Politics of Friendship,[14] hijacks many of Derrida’s themes from “Force of Law.” Agamben makes Benjamin and Schmitt’s relationship the bedrock of his own political philosophy in Homo Sacer[15] and State of Exception. He is famous for being the first (or one of the first; at least one of the most important if not the most important) to make the analogy between the Bush Administration and National Socialism. Agamben argues that the Patriot Act and the classification of terrorists as enemy combatants (their not being subject to the laws of the Geneva Convention) are distinctly rooted in Carl Schmitt’s legal and political philosophy. Agamben is not alone; Simon Critchley’s recent political manifesto Infinitely Demanding concludes with an essay describing the Bush Administration as “crypto-Schmittian.”[16]
There is little doubt that politics post-9/11 is haunted by Carl Schmitt: the exception has become the rule.[17] My analysis of Derrida and his response to 9/11 and the “war on terrorism” will likewise name Schmitt as an important manifold in which to understand the Bush Administration. However, I would like to warn against a too-hasty damnation of the Bush Administration (but indeed, we must!) in terms of Schmitt. By mere analogy, Agamben juxtaposes the fates of Hitler and Bush. However, if Schmitt is correct, and indeed he is, every executive uses the exception to define their authority. Whether we are discussing Obama or Franklin Roosevelt, the use of the exception is a political reality that is not reducible to fascism or excessive violence. The exception is used all the time in ways that do not result in the massacre of thousands or millions. Instead of aligning fascism to the excess and exceptionality of the law, perhaps the measure of violence would be a more stable criterion. In fact, one of the principal conclusions of my reading of Derrida, Schmitt, and auto-immunity is the ambiguous partition that separates the political threat from the political promise.
It is not easy to take seriously the political philosophy of unrepentant Nazi. Derrida offers two reservations we must acknowledge:
The first concerns the undeniable link between this thinking of the political on the hand and, on the other, Schmitt’s political commitments, those which lead to his arrest and conviction after the war. In many respects, these commitments often appear more serious and more repugnant than those of Heidegger… But the second conviction is that this should not distract us from a serious reading, nor keep us from taking up a thought and work so deeply rooted in the richest tradition of the theological, juridical, political and philosophical culture of Europe (Friendship, p. 107).
However, we still must damn Schmitt. His political philosophy is symptomatic of the worst perversions of auto-immunity. “There is something paradigmatic in this autoimmune suicide: fascist and Nazi totalitarianisms came into power or ascended to power through formally normal and formally democratic electoral processes” (Rogues, p. 33). The democratic rise of Nazism was only possible through the political genius of Schmitt. Regardless, we must listen and stay attuned to Derrida’s reading of Schmitt. Derrida provides a certain im-possible ethics of interpretation. To be able to damn Schmitt for his political injustices, we must take Schmitt’s thought seriously and judge it according to its own standards.
The themes of this encounter with the political thought of Schmitt are the fundamental basis of contemporary political philosophy. No political issue is as pressing or susceptible to being misunderstood.
IX:
The 1994 publication Politics of Friendship marks a special place in Derrida’s political philosophy. Politics of Friendship is a unique text because it attempts to combine Derrida’s ethical commitments with his political ones. One could easily be misled into thinking that Derrida will advocate a utopian politics of friendship. Instead, Derrida complicates the question of friendship through a proliferation of aporias at the heart of friendship. The real conclusion is the audacity to hope for the im-possible: we must not discount the politics of friendship just because it is difficult, if not truly impossible; instead the very essence of real ethical-political commitment is the paradoxical collusion of politics with hyperbolic and unconditional friendship.
Once again it is readily apparent that Carl Schmitt is the principal antagonist of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship; Schmitt’s “theory of the enemy” is diametrically opposed to Derrida’s “politics of friendship.” The famous tag-line that inspires Derrida’s work is Schmitt’s axiom from the 1932 publication The Concept of the Political, “The specific political distinction, to which political actions and notions can be reduced, is the distinction between friend and enemy.”[18] According to Schmitt, this is literally the definition of politics. Schmitt believes that politics without the figure of the enemy, or the constant threat of war, would no longer be politics at all. Therefore, according to Schmitt, all politics must distinguish friends from enemies. I believe that the entire publication, even the many chapters in which Schmitt is not discussed, can be read as an engagement with this question. Derrida wants to ask whether there can be a politics without enemies, whether there can be a politics amongst friends and what might that be. In doing so, I believe that Derrida’s entire mission is to explore whether a new type of politics, in contradistinction to Schmitt, is possible.
Derrida’s reads Schmitt in Politics of Friendship and performs a symptomatic deconstruction. Derrida’s reading takes place throughout three essays, exactly in the middle of the book.[19] The titles of Derrida’s essays are revealing: “The Phantom Friend Returning (in the Name of ‘Democracy’),” “On Absolute Hostility: The Cause of Philosophy and the Spectre of the Political,” and “Oath, Conjuration, Fraternization or the ‘Armed’ Question.” The first title obviously refers to both “Force of Law” and Derrida’s 1993 work Specters of Marx (which attempts to address politics in the wake of fall of the USSR and the “death of Marx”). Both essays consist of what Derrida calls a hauntology: a metaphor of ghosts haunting democratic politics. Schmitt is explicitly intertwined in this drama; we can rightly say Schmitt haunts democracy and politics. The second title refers to hostility, explicitly discussed by Schmitt, as that which haunts the political. Hostility, in one sense, is the opposite of Derrida’s hyperbolic ethics of hospitality; hostility is one way in which to deal with an undesirable guest. However, as Derrida points out, hostility is etymologically rooted and aligned with hospitality. Indeed, Schmitt’s “theory of the enemy” is directly reinforced by hostility and an expulsion of the foreigner. This not only haunts the political, but it is an “armed question” with war as the ultimate stakes.
At the very beginning of “The Phantom Friend Returning (in the Name of ‘Democracy’),” before Derrida even gets to Schmitt, the concept of auto-immunity prefaces all that will follow:
The modality of the possible, the unquenchable perhaps, would, implacably, destroy everything, by means of a sort of self-immunity from which no region of being, phúsis or history would be exempt (Friendship, p. 75-76).
One would then have the time of a world without friends, the time of a world without enemies. The imminence of a self-destruction by the infinite development of a madness of self-immunity (Friendship, p. 76).
The translation is notably different: self-immunity as opposed to auto-immunity. This is in large part due to the fact that auto-immunity was still an incomplete and neglected concept for Derrida at the time of these lectures. However, as we know, even though autos signifies self, Derrida’s concept of auto-immunity is principally engaged in deconstructing and overturning the self. Auto-immunity doesn’t merely seek to undo the opposition between self and everything that is not the self, but as a disease it actively threatens to destroy the self.
While Derrida still has not fully developed his concept, this immutable logic of self-destruction, is at the heart of Derrida’s deconstruction of Schmitt. Literally upon the next page Derrida begins his reading of Schmitt, but only after foreshadowing how Schmitt’s political logic is captivated by “a madness of self-immunity” which might “destroy everything.”
Schmitt intends to “ontologize the friend-foe relation”[20] and turn it into the substantial essence of politics. Literally, politics is, necessarily and sufficently, characterized by the identification of enemies.
We are saying ‘political expert’ here, for if Schmitt is a jurist-historian-of-the-theological-political, and so on, he would offer de jure its conceptual foundations, its phenomenological and semantic axioms to a science of the political as such: he is a political expert who would acknowledge no other regional knowledge, no other experience than the ‘political,’ the right to found a political discourse: an ontology or an epistemology of the political. Only the purely political can teach us how to think and formalize what is purely political (Friendship, p. 115).
This supposedly pure and concrete description of the political is what Derrida finds admirable (or perhaps vulnerable) about Schmitt. Schmitt is concerned with the definition of politics, with a pure understanding of politics, and the concrete description of the political:
Despite or on account of such an aim, Schmitt tirelessly claims concrete, living and relevant pertinence for the words of political language. Among these words, first and foremost for the word ‘political.’ These vocables must not and cannot remain, in their ‘ultimate consequences,’ the correlate of ideal or abstract entities (Friendship, p. 115).
Schmitt’s definition, or logical firewall, prevents any description of politics otherwise. Politics is immunized, automatically in fact, by any description that does not take into account this irrefutable friend-foe couplet. However, by its own attempts at immunity and self-preservation, it sows the seeds of it inevitable suicide.
Schmitt defines the politics “as the distinction between friend and enemy.” “Here is the Schmittian axiom in its most elementary form: the political itself, the being-political of the political, arises in its possibility with the figure of the enemy” (Friendship, p. 84). Schmitt manufactures a friend-enemy dichotomy, a friend-enemy opposition and hierarchy. The friend is the opposite of the enemy.
If this distinction or the differential mark, if the determination of the political, if the ‘political difference’ itself thus amounts to a discrimination between friend and enemy, such a dissociation cannot be reduced to mere difference. It is determined opposition, opposition itself (Friendship, p. 85).
Derrida prides himself on overturning such logical polarities. It is not just that the friend should be valued above the enemy, but that the entire differential account of friends defined in opposition to enemies is what is truly at stake. Thus, we should recognize that the easy reading of Derrida of prioritizing a “politics of friendship” is not entirely accurate. Giovanna Borradori thinks Derrida’s concept of auto-immunity distinctly applies as a non-dialectical term that undermines the entire oppositional structure of friends opposed to enemies:
One function of the concept of autoimmunity is to act as a third term between the classical opposition between friend and foe. As we have seen, to identify a third term is a characteristically deconstructive move aimed at displacing the traditional metaphysical tendency to rely on irreducible pairs (Time of Terror, p. 152).
Rather, for Derrida the entire concept of friend and/or enemy is unidentifiable. The entire postulate of purity or a concrete definition of politics is what is unthinkable.
The possibility of losing the concept of enemy is a political crime on the definition of the political itself.
First reminder: for Schmitt, it is indeed nothing more and nothing less than the political as such which would no longer exist without the figure of the enemy and without the determined possibility of an actual war. Losing the enemy would simply be the loss of the political itself- and this would be our century’s horizon after two world wars (Friendship, p. 84).
By taking Schmitt’s concerns seriously, Derrida acknowledges that he is risking, or inviting, the depoliticization of his entire philosophy. Schmitt would be the first to declare that Derrida’s elusive obfuscations of distinguishing friends and enemies is entirely non-political. A politics without enemy identifications, a politics of friendship, would not be purely political. However, Derrida is unable to accept this hostile description of politics.
X:
For Schmitt’s concept of the political to retain its definition it must demonstrate an adequate way to identify enemies from friends. What Schmitt needs is a dialectic of recognition. This is the central concern; if Schmitt cannot demonstrate a pure criterion that absolutely stigmatizes the essence of the enemy his political policy looses its claim to legitimacy. Purity requires a practical identification; there must be a rigid method that decides who the enemy is. For the identification of enemies to be the concrete definition of politics, there must be a concrete method of identifying enemies from non-enemies. Schmitt has two criterions.
First, the enemy is recognized as such because of the potentiality of war. Derrida describes Schmitt’s intent as one of conflating possibility with actuality. “As soon as war is possible, it is taking place, Schmitt seems to say… And it is eventual as soon as it is possible… As soon as war is possible-eventual, the enemy is present; he is there, his possibility presently, effectively, supposed and structuring” (Friendship, p. 86). The enemy presupposes war, which presupposes the actually killing of one’s enemy. The identification of the enemy is always a death drive in which a potential antagonism becomes an actual violence. This war is not a symbolic conflict, but the real possibility of death. While this could an allusion to Clausewitz, who argued that war was the continuation of politics by other means, instead Derrida posits “that this decision, naming ‘who is the enemy’ is preliminary” (Friendship, p. 126), hence constituting war as the continuation of politics.[21]
Second, the enemy is always defined as a public enemy. “Schmitt considers that the enemy has always been esteemed a ‘public’ enemy. The concept of private enemy would be meaningless” (Friendship, p. 85). This has several implications.
There can be no such thing as a civil war. War and politics, through this traditional model, is configured only through the nation-state as the identifier of enemies with the propensity for warfare. Following the long ling of classical European just war theory, war is merely, by definition, jus belli.
They remain natural even if one of them, civil war, sometimes takes on the figure of denaturalization. For this would then be a de-naturalization of nature in nature: an evil, an illness, a parasite or a graft- a foreign body, in sum, within the body politic itself, in its own body (Friendship, p. 114).
The logic of auto-immunity in the above passage is readily apparent. Civil war is im-possible instance of auto-immunity.
Further, the enemy is automatically other.[22] Automatically, by an auto-matic-immunity at the level of its very constitution, the enemy can never be the identified as inside the public or society. In The Concept of the Political Schmitt makes his argument:
Following its meaning in German (as in so many other languages), ‘friend’ is originally only the person to whom genealogical bonds unites. Originally the friend is but the friend of blood, the consanguine parent or again the ‘parent by alliance’ through marriage, oath of fraternity, adoption or other corresponding institutions (Concept of the Political, p. 104).
No doubt Schmitt’s criterion used to identify and distinguish enemies is symptomatically racist. Derrida says as much:
As in every racism, every ethnocentrism- more precisely, in every one of the nationalism throughout history- a discourse on birth and on nature, a phúsis of genealogy (more precisely, a discourse and a phantom on the genealogical phúsis) regulates, in the final analysis, the movement of each opposition: repulsion and attraction, disagreement and accord, war and peace, hatred and friendship. From within and without (Friendship, p. 91).
The identification of friends through genealogy and fraternity only serves to identify the enemy as always foreign and other. Let’s repeat: “From within and without.” Present “within” this schema is an auto-immune xenophobia that defines the enemy as a foreigner from “without.”
Schmitt uses a series of oppositional terms to concretely define the “logic of the enemy and politics.” At first, we have the opposition between friend and enemy. Next, Schmitt proposes a couplet of politics as war, or war as politics. Finally, we have the disjunction between public and private. If it is not enough to immediately recognize Derrida’s propensity for deconstructing such oppositions, then, as I propose, we can apply the perverse and suicidal auto-immune logic to Schmitt’s political discourse. The enemy is not a practical enemy, or a situational enemy, the enemy is automatically an enemy. “The concept of the enemy is thereby deduced or constructed a priori, both analytically and synthetically- in synthetic a priori fashion, if you like, as a political concept or, better yet, as the very concept of the political” (Friendship, p. 86). The enemy is par excellence the other; that person, or those people, who are systematically excluded. Schmitt says it is concrete: but Derrida says that it is actually a leap of faith. The identification of enemies is surely praxis, but it cannot escape its own arbitrary ideology.
But no politics has ever been adequate to its concept. No political event can be correctly described or defined with recourse to these concepts. And this inadequation is not accidental, since politics is essentially a prâxis, as Schmitt himself always implies in his ever-so-insistent reliance on the concept of real, present possibility or eventuality in his analysis of the formal structures of the political (Friendship, p. 114).
Deconstruction attunes Derrida to the specter of racism and xenophobia that haunts the identification of enemies. The entire definitional logic of politics, as described by Schmitt, is to posit an automatic immunity that involuntarily excludes and declares war against the other.
According to Derrida, the partition of enemy and friend haunt each other; one concept bears the phantom of the other. The enemy is always the public enemy; this of course being the exact rhetoric that the Nazis used to characterize the threat of the Jew. As we know from “Force of Law,” such a history haunts politics. An enemy is always someone who you can go to war with; war is the condition and analogue of the enemy. There is no enemy, or friend, without the possibility of killing. As soon as it is possible, it is already taking place. This distinction is a movement towards death and the acceptance and depreciation of killing the other. There is never civil war; it is always war with something foreign. Therefore, the enemy is always foreign, always inherently other, and whether this correctly or incorrectly defines politics, it is ethically unacceptable.
The war-model of politics, defined by Schmitt, rests upon the etymology of hostility. Schmitt, along with Derrida, claim that in Latin, the opposite of friendship, is not enmity, but hostility (Concept of the Political, p. 29-30).
We, speakers of Latin that we are, would have to understand, in adjusting our language on this point, that the antithesis of friendship in the political sphere is not, according to Schmitt, enmity but hostility. First consequence: the political enemy would be inevitably be inimical, he would not necessarily hold me in enmity, nor I him. Moreover, sentiments would play no role; there would be neither passion nor affect in general. Here we have a totally pure experience of the friend-enemy in its political essence, purified of any affect- at least of all personal affect, supposing that there could ever be any other kind. If the enemy is the stranger, the war I wage on him should remain essentially without hatred, without intrinsic xenophobia. And politics would begin with this purification. With the calculation of this conceptual purification. I can also wage war on my friend, a war in the proper sense of the term, a proper, clear and merciless war. But a war without hatred (Friendship, p. 87-88).
Hostility is of course contrasted with hospitality; absolute hostility can never be open to the other. As we addressed before, hostility carries a strange and illogical relationship with hospitality. Derrida argues that there is an uncanny fusion between the enemy and the host. This is due to the troubling analogy in their common origin: hostis. Hospitality carries within it the danger of hostility, but likewise all hostility retains a chance of hospitality. If hospitality carries within it its own contradiction, hostility, its is unable to protect itself from itself and is stricken with an auto-immune propensity for self-destruction.
Insofar as Schmitt commits himself to a definition of enemy that is a public enemy who we are war with, but a war without hatred and xenophobia, the entire artifice collapses. The friend can be one’s enemy.
Derrida feels that Schmitt’s concept of the political, as the identification of enemies, fails in its endeavor. By its very definition, by establishing its own security conceptually, it seals its inevitable demise.
Hence a first possibility of semantic slippage and inversion: the friend can be an enemy; I can be hostile towards my friend, I can be hostile towards him publicly, and conversely I can, in privacy, love my enemy. From this, everything will follow, in orderly, regular fashion, from the distinction between private and public. Another way of saying that at every point when this border is threatened, fragile, porous, contestable (we thus designate so many possibilities that ‘our time’ is accentuating and accelerating in countless ways), the Schmittian discourse collapses. It is against this threat of this ruin that his discourse takes form (Friendship, p. 88).
It is im-possible to not recognizing the auto-immune vocabulary in place: “against this threat of ruin,” “when this border is threatened, fragile, porous” Schmitt’s entire “discourse take form.” “It defends itself, walls itself up, reconstructs itself unendingly against what is to come; it struggles against the future with a prophetic and pathetic energy… With the energy of a last-ditch effort” (Friendship, p. 88). From the start, Schmitt’s definition of politics as the distinction between friends and enemies, is diseased by its own foundation. I contend that this reading consists of two parts. First, is the immune structure that Schmitt constructs in his concrete definition of politics: the enemy is purely and automatically other. Second, such a definition commits an auto-immune suicide in which Schmitt’s definition destroys the very thing it was attempting to protect. Schmitt’s definition of politics, as the identification of enemies, is where the threat of ruin takes form, explicitly from the inside. “He would wish- it is his Platonic dream- that this ‘as such’ should remain pure at the very spot where it is contaminated” (Friendship, p. 116).
XI:
Derrida’s etymological deconstruction, from “The Phantom Friend Returning (in the Name of ‘Democracy’)” through “On Absolute Hostility: The Cause of Philosophy and the Spectre of the Political,” of Schmitt’s position reveals the auto-immunity in which the enemy can never truly immunize itself from the friend. This leads Derrida to ask whether the partisan can be the enemy in the chapter: “Oath, Conjuration, Fraternization or the ‘Armed’ Question.” According to Schmitt’s earlier defense in the 1932 The Concept of the Political the war against the enemy could never be a civil war. War is only possible between nation-states. This immunity of the state is a central concern for Derrida:
How can Schmitt, at one and the same time, privilege the State (even if he does not reduce the political to it), base the concept of enemy on the possibility of war between States, and nevertheless symmetrically align, as he does, exterior and civil war- as if the enemy were sometimes the foreigner, sometimes the fellow citizen? (Friendship, p. 121).
Derrida engages the post-war thought of Schmitt to tackle this question, namely Schmitt’s prison diary and his 1962 reappraisal The Theory of the Partisan.[23] How, in the space of 30 years, and unspeakable political violence, might Schmitt readjust his political exclusion of the other as automatically the enemy? Quite clearly: Schmitt never renounces his political axiom of identifying enemies as publicly other, anymore than he renounces the atrocities of the Holocaust.
The spectre might well be- it might well have been, in 1932- this ‘partisan’ who no longer respects the normal conditions and the juridically guaranteed boundaries of war. And this has not begun today, nor did it begin yesterday, or the day before (Friendship, p. 138-139).
Taking the example of Lenin, Schmitt defines the paradox of civil war, or the politics of the partisan, in terms of competing states. The Russian Revolution was merely the war of one state overthrowing the previous one.
However, we know that Schmitt’s automatic recourse to the nation-state is myopic. The eurocentric refuge in the state-from is neither inherent, nor advantageous. Derrida’s deconstruction of the state in “Force of Law” provides a necessary critique to the crutches of the state as security against violence.
To the degree that sovereignty is defined it terms of the political decision, another Schmittian caveat, we must challenge the methodology behind this decisionism. Schmitt’s public enemy as automatically other lacks any independent decision. It automatic constitution is not the result of autonomy. Any decision, worthy of its name, can discriminate enemies from friend by an act of sovereign determination and personal judgment. We do not need Schmitt’s arbitrary method of identification. The enemy can be the other who is within our own home. The enemy can be the other who is providing the home. We can have home-grown enemies. We can be our own enemies, just as we can conceive of conspiratorial enemies that might not even exist.
The modern partisan, on the contrary, leaves this initial marginality, expecting from his enemy no respect for the rights of conventional warfare. In the course of civil war, as of colonial war, the partisan transforms the concept of conventional hostility and blurs its boundaries. Apparently the partisan is no longer an enemy, and has no enemy in the classical sense of the term. Real hostility henceforth extends, through terrorism and counter-terrorism, all the way to extermination (Friendship, p. 141).
Never more than today do we recognize the imperative truth of the interchangeability of friends and enemies. While this fact might not correspond to the political definitions established during the Peace of Westphalia, it does not make it any less apparent. However, Schmitt’s retort is that such dissolution is entirely unnatural and will increase the extent of violence.
They remain natural even if one of them, civil war, sometimes takes on the figure of denaturalization. For this would then be a de-naturalization of nature in nature: an evil, an illness, a parasite or a graft- a foreign body, in sum, within the body politic itself, in its own body (Friendship, p. 114).
By the inevitable erasure of borders between public/private and enemy/friend, the enemy as friend becomes “an illness, a parasite, a graft, and a foreign body.” This is the true essence of the auto-immune symptom of civil war and partisan conflict. We can be attacked by internal enemies.
This is the pinnacle political question. Can the enemy simply be someone we disagree with? The entire idea of the partisan blurs the line of enemy/friend, legal/illegal. Can the enemy be anyone? Have we not reached the point where everyone is, de facto, an enemy of the state? Are we not all policed? At this point there is a slippery slope in which the proliferation of enemy identifications knows no bounds. Everyone is a potential and actual enemy.
XII:
Schmitt asserts that this is properly depoliticized. The enemy partisan is a not a political issue according to his definition of politics. However, Derrida believes it is the very nature of politics. Partisan politics, the enemy within, is, in reality, our current saturation in overpoliticilization. Currently, we are involved in a ceaseless fratricidal war, where our own brothers are our enemy. The question of the partisan makes Schmitt’s distinctions reach and exceed its own limits.
Derrida believes that we are in a new age of politics that requires a new definition of the essence of the political. Quoting two Nazi enemies, Schmitt and Heidegger, Derrida contends that with world wars, with cold wars, and even the possible nuclear annihilation of the entire earth, the distinction between war and peace are falling apart, as is the friend/enemy distinction. Our friends are our enemies, and our enemies our friends; repeating an endless knot. In fact, we cannot distinguish who are our friend and who are our enemies. This does not condition peace, but perpetuates constant war.
Is a new type of political thought possible? Can we think a politics of friendship? Derrida, indeed, wants, acknowledges and demands a depoliticalization, especially in an age of overpoliticalization. More so, he advertises a new concept of politics, a non-political concept of politics, altogether; he demands a new concept of democracy. This is of course, a “democracy to come,” a “politics to come,” even a “friendship to come.” Is it possible? Derrida’s answer: perhaps. It is only possible as im-possible. Its impossibility is the condition of its possibility. This perhaps becomes a beacon to register his new moment of promise. The future is a possibility of chance and the entire nature of politics is clearly caught up in the engagement with these present’s implosion into the future. This perhaps, which is both a chance and a promise, is only possible because of the political possibility of the decision. Derrida reconfigures the concept of the decision by means of an ethical and political responsibility which must auto-nomously choose the future of the world in spire of everything that struggles to prevents and discourage such decisionism. While Derrida’s political utopianism is routinely made suspect, it might be the only defense against Schmitt’s nihilistic realism.
We must remain cautious in confronting the actuality of our partisan struggle as a war of all against all. No doubt, it is indisputable in contemporary politics. Schmitt’s dogmatic allegiance to the state-model exceeds its limits by not attesting to the actual evolution of politics. However, much like a curse, politics is haunted by Schmitt’s prophecy. Auto-immunity cannot distinguish its own boundaries in terms of civil war.
As a prefatory note to the evils of the Bush Administration, that Derrida knows well, we must confront the perversion or necessity of the various protest movements that followed in their wake. As a true example of the political chance, the opportunity and the hope, we cannot dismiss, but must praise and cultivate, the anti-Bush sentiments that captivated American politics in response to that irresponsible war. Auto-immunity is a symptom of democracy in its penchant for perpetual self-critique. However, the pendulum swings to the most opposite extremes. To the extent that auto-immunity demonstrates all that is valuable in actual democratic politics, it all retains the dangers of everything that threatens to destroy it as well.
The protests against the Bush Administration must be compared against the current auto-immune perversions of the Beck-Limbaugh-Palin hysteria against Obama. Their public campaign of catering to the lowest common denominator and their lack of any decorum threatens to destroy the future of American society and the possibility of democratic progress/change (if one allows the leap from Obama’s campaign rhetoric of change to Derrida’s fateful announcement of a “democracy-to-come”). What is it that sanctifies one and demonizes the other? What thin border separates the auto-immune reaction, as a democratic self-critique against an abusive state security system, verses the auto-immune suicide, which promises to destroy our democratic ideals and propensity for rational discourse? This apparent contradiction, in terms of the value and dangers of auto-immunity, pits everything that is dishonorable and unacceptable about the appeasement of evil against everything that is suicidal and reckless about perpetuating false fears for the sake of political opportunism. There is no possibility of a “post-partisan-politics-to-come.” Auto-immunity is a priori. What remains is the political choice, the auto-nomous decision: between the auto-immunity that challenges those self-protected architects of war crimes versus the auto-immunity that corrodes those hospitable to a different (differance) political future.
XII:
There are two conclusions we must draw from Derrida’s reading of Carl Schmitt in Politics of Friendship. First, it is a matter of historical necessity, empirical reality, and moral responsibility that we must discount Schmitt’s identification of the enemy as automatically other and constitutionally immune from partisan hostility. Second, democracy, by definition, is threatened and redeemed by its auto-immune, and self-critical, economy. These two inferences will remain relevant for our reading of Derrida’s summation of auto-immunity and his reading of Carl Schmitt in Rogues and Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Whereas Philosophy in a Time of Terror addresses the contemporary political age post-9/11, Rogues is Derrida’s final analysis of the future of democratic politics.
Derrida gave the lectures that comprised Politics of Friendship in 1994. In many respects these lectures were an assessment of a political world in transition after the collapse of the USSR. However, by the time that Derrida would re-address the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt, and cement his concept of auto-immunity explicitly, the political world was struggling to come to terms with the terrorist attacks of September 11th. The “event of September 11th” caused an original series of new political transitions. Derrida’s principal aim in Philosophy in a Time of Terror is to deconstruct the “event of September 11th.”
Auto-immunity is a type of suicide. In attempting to protect itself, an organism attacks the vital elements that keep it alive. Derrida describes this auto-immunity as a political metaphor to understand the September 11th terrorist attacks. 9/11 was a suicide attack, in which terrorists killed themselves as they killed others. However, this was not the only suicidal tendency of this momentous event: rather the motif of suicide haunts those fallen towers on that fateful day. Derrida’s title of his interview (to Giovanna Borradori in Philosophy in a Time of Terror) is revealing: “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides.” Derrida describes 9/11 in terms of a parade of physical and figurative suicides that demonstrate the “general logic” of auto-immunity.
He list three elements, all under the title “reflex and reflection,” of a singular auto-immune logic. “These three moments or series of arguments all appeal to the same logic. The same logic that elsewhere I proposed we extend to the limit of an implacable law: the one that regulates every autoimmunitary process. As we know, an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in a quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own immunity” (Time of Terror, p. 94).
First, Derrida contends that the 9/11 was the suicidal result of America’s Cold War foreign policy. 9/11 is nothing but a backlash resulting from a prior age of Cold War politics.[24] Islamic fundamentalism was cultivated as a political strategy to upset Soviet relations in the Middle East. It was only after the end of the Cold War, when American neo-imperialism became the primary enemy of the disenfranchised. Derrida concludes that the event is stricken with an inescapable auto-immunity. The terror we feel now is a reaction to a symptom from our past. The 9/11 event was the product of a series of prior events: a temporal auto-immunity of a haunted past. We will never be able to come to terms with 9/11 until we understand the material conditions which caused anti-American Islamic radicalism and the subsequent breakdown in our country’s immune defenses. After all, it was our opposition to the USSR, and our identification of them as our enemies, that inspired our first incursion into Afghanistan. It was the twilight of the Cold War that precipitated the establishment of military bases in Saudi Arabia, which originally roused bin Laden into declaring jihad against American neo-imperialism.
The only way for terrorists to strike at the capital of American economic and political power was through American technology. It was only through American instruments that terrorists were able to strike.
But here is the first symptom of suicidal autoimmunity: not only is the ground, that is, the literal figure of the founding or foundation of this ‘force of law,’ seen to be exposed to aggression, but the aggression of which it is the object (the object exposed, precisely, to violence, but also, ‘in a loop,’ to its own cameras in its own interests) comes, as from the inside, from forces that are apparently without any force of their own but are able to find the means, through ruse and the implementation of high-tech knowledge, to get hold of an American weapon in an American city on the ground of an American airport. Immigrated, trained, prepared for their act in the United States by the United States, these hijackers incorporate, so to speak, two suicides in one: their own (and one will remain forever defenseless in the face of a suicidal, autoimmunitary aggression- and that is what terrorizes most) but also the suicide of all those who welcomed, armed, and trained them. For let us not forget that the United States had in effect paved the way for and consolidated the forces of the “adversary” by training people like “bin Laden,” who would here be the most striking example, and by first of all creating the politico-military circumstances that would favor their emergence and their shifts in allegiance (Time of Terror, p. 95).
And in Rogues, Derrida elaborates:
Inversely, antithetically, so to speak, it is perhaps because the United States has a culture and system of laws that are largely democratic that it is able to open itself up and exposes its greatest vulnerability to immigrants, to, for example, pilots in training, experience and suicidal “terrorists” who, before turning against others but also against themselves the aerial bombs they have become, and before hurling them by hurling themselves into the two World Trade Towers, were trained on the sovereign soil of the United States, under the nose of the CIA and the FBI, perhaps not without some autoimmune consent on the part of an administration with at once more and less foresight than one tends to think when it is faced with what is claimed to be a major, unforeseeable event. The “terrorists” are sometimes American citizens, and some of those of September 11 might have been; they received help in any case from American citizens; they took American airplanes, took over the controls and took to the air in American airplanes, and took off from American airports (Rogues, p. 40).
Auto-immunity is a war from the inside. The seeds of terrorism were inside American politics since the end of World War II. The technology and training to succeed with such a display of violence was developed inside by our own leisure industries. The media, which disseminated everywhere the violence of 9/11 and exacerbated its trauma, is inside of all of our homes. “My vulnerability is thus, by definition and by structure, by situation, without limit. Whence the terror. Terror is always, or always becomes, at least in part, ‘interior’… the enemy is also always lodged on the inside of the system it violates and terrorizes” (Time of Terror, p. 188). Auto-immunity cannot simply be dismissed as the loose fancy of a puppeteer of metaphors. Auto-immunity is all too real and scary, not because it can be applied to all sorts of contemporary political events or dilemmas, but because its proximity as indigenous creates a vulnerability without limit. Auto-immunity is one of the most vexing political issues today not because its “general logic” nicely mirrors political reality, but because it represents an absolute and perpetual threat.
Second, Derrida claims that what lies in the future is worse than either the Cold War or September 11th. The logic of auto-immunity deconstructs the concept of the event. 9/11 might be caused, in part, by the Cold War, but the extent of its terror far exceeds it.
Like the formation of Arab Muslim terrorist networks equipped and trained during the Cold War, this threat represents the residual consequence of both the Cold War and the passage beyond the Cold War (Time of Terror, p. 98).
Derrida asks what determines a “major event.” If we refer to its unforeseeability, we must conclude that we were not oblivious to the drastic rise of terrorism, whether in Oklahoma City or African embassies, during the 1990’s. As early as 1993 in his lectures Specters of Marx Derrida juxtaposed the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to the vacuum of Soviet power.[25] As opposed to the balance of power during the Cold War, with two polarized super-power stabilized through game theory, there is no balance in terrororism. Like Protevi’s predilection for immunology over virology, there is no prophylaxis to protect us from the auto-immune terror that is already present and already inside that which it threatens.
The terror of terrorism leads to a fear of the future, a paranoia about an upcoming, and possibly, worse attack, leading to a long-lasting trauma that outlives the violence of its original moment.
Yet all these efforts to attenuate or neutralize the effect of the traumatism (to deny, repress, or forget it, to get over it) are but so many desperate attempts. And so many autoimmune movements. Which produce, invent, and feed the very monstrosity they claim to overcome (Time of Terror, p. 99).
According to Derrida, the attacks on 9/11 created a trauma which cannot be easily healed, but requires a work of impossible mourning. “Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come” (Time of Terror, p. 97). This is the effect and purpose of terrorism. Once again, this is an auto-immune pathology. This original trauma faces an impossible mourning where Anthrax and Weapons of Mass Destruction are just around the corner posing an even greater future threat.
It was through American technology that the images of planes flying into the Twin Towers was the most recognizable image on the earth until it was superceded by Obama’s smiling mug.
What would “September 11” have been without television?… We must recall that the maximum media coverage was in the common interests of the perpetrators of “September 11,” the terrorists, and those who, in the name of the victims, wanted to declare “war against terrorism.” Between these two parties, such media coverage was, like the good sense of which Descartes speaks, the most widely shared thing in the world. More than the destruction of the Twin Towers or the attacks on the Pentagon, more than the killing of thousands of people, the real “terror” consisted of and, in fact, began by exposing and exploiting, having exposed and exploited, the image of this terror by the targets itself (Time of Terror, p. 108).
The real terror, the pure trauma, is the dissemination and pathos of that violence upon the screens of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of television screens across the world like a cathartic theatre aimed at shocking the imagination. It is only because of this frozen instant, that the future becomes haunted with a series of conspiratorial fears.
Third, Derrida contends that all of this creates a vicious and unending cycle of repression.
What will never let itself be forgotten is thus the perverse effect of the autoimmunitary itself. For we now know that repression in both its psychoanalytical sense and its political sense- whether it be through the police, the military, or the economy- ends up producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm (Time of Terror, p. 99).
We do not need to look back in hindsight upon the 9/11 terrorist attacks to see the series of further attacks and counter-attacks that would be unleashed. It was the strategy of the attackers to have America invade and wage war in a hostile region, while perpetuating their stereotype of being a neo-imperil regime.[26] The United States was vulnerable by its proclivity for overreaction. In the end we are all aware how America’s “war on terrorism” has created terrorists. “[T]he ‘bombs’ will never be ‘smart’ enough to prevent the victims” (Time of Terror, p. 100). The “war on terrorism” has provided a place for insurgency training, a platform for anti-imperil propaganda and terrorist ideology, undermined our diplomatic credibility internationally, and severely destabilized our economy. It is revealing that Derrida connects this cycle of violence to psychoanalysis. Psychologically the thing we repress is the very thing that ends up haunting us. Politically, the ways in which sanctify and legitimate repression properly captures the double-logic in which what we repress is the very thing we nourish and cultivate. This auto-immunity perversity captures a regressive loop that is inescapable.
This repression is not merely external. It took less time for the Bush Administration to enact the Patriot Act than to declare war against terrorist thousands of miles away. The failure of American immune defenses to ward off the dangerous elements that caused 9/11, gave excuse to undermine the very freedoms that were suppose to be protected. The profiteers of introspection into our daily lives sacrificed autonomy for immunity.
To follow just one among so many other possible threads in a reflection on September 11, we see an American administration, potentially followed by others in Europe and in the rest of the world, claiming that in the war it is waging against the “axis of evil,” against the enemies of freedom and the assassins of democracy throughout the world, it must restrict within its own country certain so-called democratic freedoms and the exercise of certain rights by, for example, increasing the powers of police investigations and interrogations, without anyone, any democrat, being really able to oppose such measures. One can thus do little more than regret some particular abuse in the a priori abusive use of the force by which a democracy defends itself against its enemies, justifies and defends itself, of or from itself, against its potential enemies. It must thus come to resemble these enemies, to corrupt itself and threaten itself in order to protect itself against their threats (Rogues, p. 39-40).
The internal repression of those who were the intended victims of terrorist violence became the victims for a novel and undemocratic state violence. This is one final element in the repressive cycle of auto-immunity. Our democracy has been sacrificed for Hobbes’ social contract. By making it harder for terrorists to access our most vital technologies we instilled a security apparatus that is not able to differentiate between foreign terrorists and the voting public. By sacrificing our freedoms so as to better protect them, the Bush Administration followed one more step down a path assuring a public movement of dissent, and auto-immunity, against these measures designed specifically to protect us.
XIV:
According to Derrida’s reading, 9/11 is the symptom of an auto-immune crisis occurring within the system that should have predicted it. Auto-immune conditions consist in the spontaneous suicide of the very defense mechanism supposed to protect the organism from external aggression.
The heart of Derrida’s political commentary on September 11th is concerned with the political transition from the Cold War model to a new age of politics represented by the “war on terrorism.” This new age and model deconstructs the traditional political philosophy espoused by Carl Schmitt. The cold-war logic that located within identifiable sovereign nation-states the subject of politics is untenable.
If this violence is not a “war” between states, it is not a “civil war” either, or a “partisan war,” in Schmitt’s sense, insofar as it does not involve, like most such wars, a national insurrection or liberation movement aimed at taking power on the ground of a nation-state (even if one of the aims, whether secondary or primary, of the “bin Laden” network is to destablize Saudi Arabia, an ambigious ally of the United States, and put a new state in power). Even if one were to insist on speaking here of “terrorism,” this appellation now covers a new concept and new distinctions (Time of Terror, p. 102).
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, traditional notions such as the nation-state, sovereignty, the enemy, even the event September 11th, have all become meaningless. A new economy has dawned.
Derrida believes that Schmitt’s trite distinctions are indefensible. It is no longer possible to draw distinctions between war and terrorism, or between state and non-state terrorism. The state is no longer the primary model in the political affairs of a globalized world and this has camouflaged the identification of enemies.
A critical reading of Schmitt, for example, would thus prove very useful. One the one hand, so as to follow Schmitt as far as possible in distinguishing classical war (a direct and declared confrontation between two enemy states, according to the long tradition of European law) from ‘civil war’ and ‘partisan war’ (in its modern forms, even though it appears, Schmitt acknowledges, as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century). But, on the other hand, we would have to recognize, against Schmitt, that the violence that has now been unleashed is not the result of ‘war’ (the expression ‘war on terrorism’ thus being one of the most confused, and we must analyze this confusion and the interests such an abuse of rhetoric actually serve). Bush speaks of “war,” but he is in fact incapable of identifying the enemy against whom he declares that he has declared war. It is said over and over that neither the civilian population of Afghanistan nor its armies are the enemies of the United States. Assuming that “bin Laden” is here the sovereign decision-maker, everyone knows that he is not Afghan, that he has been disavowed by his own country (by every “country” and state, in fact, almost without exception), that his training owes much to the United States and that, of course, he is not alone. The states that help him do not do so as states. No state as such supports him publicly. As for states that “harbor” terrorist networks, it is difficult to identify them as such. The United States and Europe, London and Berlin, are also sanctuaries, places of training or formation and information for all the “terrorists” of the world. (Time of Terror, p. 100-101).
The end of the Cold War brought about the end of a long legacy of easily identifiable enemies. The “war on terrorism” makes this brutally apparent. Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden network, and the thousands of auxiliary terrorist networks are the enemies of the new age, par excellence. No nation-state supports them and bin Laden’s network is the ultimate embodiment of a new era of unidentifiable enemies. Just like Heidegger’s ontological descent into the They (das Man) and Agamben’s description of Homo Sacer, the enemies of the new era of politics represent an absolute threat whose origins and composition are anonymous. The infinite detention of terrorists as enemy combatants, anonymous in the eyes of international law, serves to reflect the contemporary im-possibility of identifying enemies. Derrida’s political work since Specters of Marx has wrestled with the non-state networks that have resulted from advanced capitalism. The most threatening of contemporary enemies are no longer recognizable enemies. Instead we identify enemies and wage war against a whole host of non-state actors: ranging from drug cartel organizations and Mafia families, to terrorist ideologues and rogue pirates, including violators of economic regulations, trans-national corporations, and so many nameless faces engaged in environmental destruction. The end of the Cold War and the rise of globalized capital has only multiplied enemies, reinforced their structures and operational capacities, and hidden their alliances.
XV:
Whereas Philosophy in a Time of Terror presents Derrida’s immediate response to the real and symbolic suicides of the September 11th terrorist attacks, Rogues is Derrida’s penultimate reflection upon democracy in our post-political era.[27] Rogues primarily interrogates the state of democratic and international sovereignty, and provides Derrida’s most complete account of his concept “democracy-to-come.”
Democracy, as has been addressed, is distinctly entwined with the logic of auto-immunity. Derrida has called his methodology of deconstruction implicitly democratic by its anti-authoritarian and anti-essential ethic. Deconstruction and democracy are properly characterized by this ceaseless critical perspective. “No deconstruction without democracy, no democracy without deconstruction… Democracy is the autos of deconstructive self-delimitation” (Friendship, p. 105). Auto-immunity is necessarily democratic because it is constituted by its propensity for self-critique. Auto-immunity, democracy, and deconstruction are entangled with an ethic of automatic self-criticism.
That expression of autoimmunity called the right to self-critique and perfectibility. Democracy is the only system, the only constitutional paradigm, in which, in principle, one has or assumes the right to criticize everything publicly, including the idea of democracy, its concept, its history, and its name (Rogues, p. 87).
Auto-immunity is critical endeavor because it attacks or questions what is internal to a system. By exposing the automatic and spontaneous defense mechanisms of biological organisms, political ideologies, inclusive definitions, and intrinsic vulnerabilities are exposed. Auto-immunity is a vital mechanism that Derrida uses to critique the definitions, authority, and security of political institutions and vocabulary. Only by revealing auto-immune tendencies is the authority of hegemonic political logic subverted.
Derrida’s account of the constitution of modern democracy faces two auto-immune challenges. Derrida provides two prominent examples that test the feasibility and principles of democracy.
First, Derrida takes the recent Algerian election as a profound case of auto-immunity and the threat it poses to democracy. A democracy, by definition and constitution, is composed of elections in which a population gets to vote for politicians. However, what about when a population attempts to freely elect a politician who advocates an immediate and permanent suspension to all subsequent elections? As Derrida points out, this was recently the case in Algeria. Can a democracy maintain an automatic mechanism to immunize itself against its dissolution? Or, as was the case in Algeria, should a government then suspend democratic elections in order to save its democracy? Quite clearly, this comes down to what is and isn’t legal, by means of what is constitutionally defined as allowable.
The suspension of the electoral process in Algeria would be, from almost every perspective, typical of all the assaults on democracy in the name of democracy. The Algerian government and a large part, although not a majority, of the Algerian people (as well as people outside Algeria) thought that the electoral process under way would lead democracy to the end of democracy. They thus preferred to put an end to it themselves. They decided in a sovereign fashion to suspend, at least provisionally, democracy for its own good, so as to take care of it, so as to immunize it against a much worse and likely assault (Rogues, p. 33).
The example of the democratic suspension of democracy in Algeria is juxtaposed against the democratic rise of National Socialism. In “Force of Law” Derrida warned against the inescapable potential to elect anti-democratic and totalitarian regimes, with the ghosts of those killed by the Third Reich as the most somber and hyperbolic of reminders. Just as Schmitt’s theory of the exception was the judicial underpinning of Hitler’s decision to suspend parliament and establish a permanent state of emergency, the same state of exception is invoked to suspend a potential anti-democratic election result.
This reversal of the state of exception to save democracy is instructive. The automatic firewall, within a democracy, to guard against the free election of an anti-democratic government is the political example of auto-immunity at work, par excellence. However, is such a democratic caveat useful or valuable? Is the prevention of a possible rise of a National Socialist repetition, even at the cost of violating the most basic ideals of democracy, a democratically valuable solution? Derrida is notoriously ambiguous on this point: “For such a strategic and sovereign decision is not like a reversible laboratory experiment: its effects with no turning back the process to be analyzed” (Rogues, p. 33). As outside observers it is ostentatious and indolent to project our values upon an-other. While it appears normatively valuable to presuppose an auto-matic-immunity mechanism to suspend democracy to save democracy, such a mechanism is routinely abused to suspend elections and sustain power for countless authoritarian regimes. The question of normative value is perpendicular to legislative structure of a certain democratic potential for suicide. Derrida concludes with the idle retort that the suspension of the Algerian democracy was but “a certain suicide of democracy” (Rogues, p. 33). This suicidal auto-immune penchant within democracy is the real aporia.
XVI:
Derrida’s central, and second, investigation focuses upon the UN Charter and the diagnosis of “rogue states,” or as Derrida’s translates it into French, “Etats voyous.” Embedded within the context of Derrida’s reflection is the transition from the September 11th attacks to the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Before attempting to analyze the specifics of the performative denunciation of “rogue states,” Derrida provides a paradigmatic deconstruction of the etymological history of “rogues” and “voyous.” Derrida’s beautiful reading of “outlaws” throughout the history of the French language is well worth reading for its own benefit; however, for the purposes of my analysis of auto-immunity and its relation to the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt, it is beside the point.
Derrida takes the case of the UN Charter and the intensification, in political vernacular, of charges of “rogue states.” Routinely the phrase “rogue states,” or “outlaw states” or “pariah states” or “renegade regimes,” has been increasing used, since the Reagan Administration, to describe marginal powers hostile to American political interests. In a typical deconstructive fashion, Derrida reads Noam Chomsky’s Rogues States: The Rules of Force in World Affairs, to invert the charge “rogue state” back upon the American government that so routinely uses it to deride others. Taking Chomsky’s analysis as his precedent, Derrida summarizes:
The crux of the argument, in a word, is that the most roguish of rogue states are those that circulate and make use of a concept like “rogue state,” with the language, rhetoric, juridical discourse, and strategico-military consequences we all know. The first and most violent of rogue states are those that have ignored and continue to violate the very international law that they claim to champion, the law in whose name they speak and in whose name they go to war against so-called rogue states each time their interests so dictate. The name of these states? The United States (Rogues, p. 96).
Derrida’s overt intention is to undermine the traditional legalistic vocabulary that is so often the impetus for American intervention in foreign affairs. To properly untie this hegemonic discourse, Derrida first must describe the most sympathetic reading of America’s use of “rogue state” parlance.
Since the Cold War, America has regularly intervened in the affairs of nation-states, from Chile to the Congo to Panama to Iraq, but as Derrida rightly concludes “the list is endless” (Rogues, p. 97). Chomsky’s political narrative is notable hostile to the United States’ explicit defense of “policing the world” in terms of their peacekeeping responsibility. However, even the most astute defense is vulnerable to Derrida’s deconstruction. Derrida cites a former Clinton official, and policy advocate for the Woodrow Wilson International Studies think tank, Robert Litwak who claims that: “A rogue state is basically whomever the United States says it is” (Rogues, p. 96). Just as Schmitt’s identification of enemies is distinctly not concrete, but situational and arbitrary, America’s denunciation of hostile regimes is predominately predicated upon their selfish interests. Even under the most sympathetic guise, Derrida believes that the United States denunciations of rogue regimes is concretely immune from any stable criterion.
Derrida says: “The voyou is always the other… The voyou is always a second or third person… no one will say, in principle, ‘I am, ego sum, a voyou’” (Rogues, p. 64). Such an action is always accusative, pejorative, and performatively violent. I contend that this same auto-immune logic that governs the identification of enemies governs the identification of “rouge states.” The enemy is always other; the rogue state is always other. “A rogue state is basically whomever the United States says it is” (Rogues, p. 96). “The enemy is not given” (Friendship, p. 174). The enemy is never identified as one’s self; the enemy is always a public enemy who is arbitrarily selected. “Its structure is teleologically immanent, auto- and tauto-teleological (war aims at the death of the enemy, etc.), even if- or, rather, because- this political telos is irreducible to any other” (Friendship, p. 132). The definition of politics, and its pure and concrete criterion, is automatically tautological. It maintains an auto-immune function that protects it from all non-political applications and merely designates isolated and selfish interests.
Derrida’s deconstruction of “rogue states” comes down to the legislative structure of the UN charter and the principal membership of the Security Council. The United Nations is an international supra-state, created and organized by democratic ideals. The paradox of this is that, by its very constitution, a contingent of highly powerful nation-states seek to immunize itself from democratic consensus de facto. The Security Council of the UN is composed of five permanent members, America, Britain, France, Russia, and China, who have automatic veto powers. The only permanent members are super-powers that possess nuclear weapons as the force behind their law. Derrida argues that without the establishment of the Security Council the United Nations would be powerless. It is only through their membership that any sort of executive force can constitute international law: “it is the Security Council, with its veto power, that has all the power to make binding or enforceable decisions, that wields all the force of effective sovereignty” (Rogues, p. 98). Without the constitution of an executive exceptionality in the make-up of the United Nation their global democracy lacks any real force of law. However, this exceptionality is the very thing that threatens its democratic ideals: “This is a diktat or dictatorship that no universal law can in principle justify” (Rogues, p. 99).
In spite of the democratic spirit of the United Nations, the theory of exceptionality haunts its very constitution. Just as the Security Council is exceptional in its use of force of found and preserve international law, there is an explicit rule of exception not unlike Schmitt’s Article 48. “Then comes the exception, as if to confirm that the exception is always what determines or decides sovereignty” (Rogues, p. 99). Only three numbers removed from Schmitt’s infamous variant, Article 51 of the United Nations charter states that a country can defend itself, unilaterally and with force, if they have suffered an armed attack until the Security Council has taken the measures to respond multilaterally. While this Article is notable for being invoked to allow Bush’s unilateral engagement against Iraq in 2003, it has been habitually conjured to justify numerous violent interventions, by the United States, in foreign affairs. It was used by the first Bush to sanction his defense of Kuwait, but Clinton and Albright, later during the mid-90’s, claimed that they would use of the article of exception whenever they deemed fit.
In his discussion of the neologism “rogue states,” Derrida argues that the United States presence on the Security Council means that it is automatically immune from ever being a “rouge state.” By definition, and therefore, automatically, the constitution of the UN immunizes certain powerful states, such as the United States, from international sanction. The identification of “rogue states” is always and automatically other, “whomever the United States says it is,” because of the auto-immune exceptionality of Security Council veto powers. The United States is entirely immune from censure, but this is the very reason why it is always subject to unofficially denunciation by all of those disenfranchised and delegitimized voices that are mechanically and systematically excluded from what purports to be a free and equal international democracy created to protect perpetual peace. However, the deck is stacked. The only perpetual peace is a Pax Americana, structurally fortified and violently imposed.
This is an incisive moment in Derrida’s critique. The democratic values of the UN make the institution of the Security Council vulnerable: the automatic protection mechanism of veto-power exposes the permanent membership to critique because of the inherent violation of the democratic ideals of equality. This is the double movement in which the Security Council betrays itself, in which it opens itself up to critique because of an illegitimate monopoly on power. “If the constitutions of this force is, in principle, suppose to represent and protect this world democracy, it in fact betrays and threatens it from the very outset, in an autoimmune fashion, and in a way that is, as I said above, just as silent as it is unavowable” (Rogues, p. 100).
However, as Schmitt made clear, many years prior, this is the aporia of democratic politics. To confer meaning on sovereignty, to justify it, to find a reason for or against it, is already to compromises its exceptionality, to subject it to rule, to a code of laws, to partition it and make it a shared commodity, i.e. such a position demands that it compromises its immunity.
This brings Derrida to the final throws of his deconstructive assault on the “rogue state” concept. There is a large part of Derrida that accepts Schmitt’s theory of exception. “Abuse of power is constitutive of sovereignty itself” (Rogues, p. 102). There is a mystical foundation of authority in which violence begets law, and law begets more violence. This is an inescapable aporia, even, and especially, if it threatens the principles of our democratic values. “As soon as there is sovereignty, there is abuse of power and a rogue state. Abuse is the law of use; it is the law itself, the ‘logic’ of sovereignty that can reign only by not sharing” (Rogues, p. 102).
This Schmittian conclusion, the abusive constitution of sovereignty, allows Derrida to overturn the imagery of “rogue states.” Most notably, Derrida is able to return to the thesis first put forth by Noam Chomsky, that the United States is the most iconic “rogue state.”
Well, that those states that are able or are in a state to denounce or accuse some “rogue states” of violating the law, of failing to live up to the law, of being guilty of some perversion or deviation, those that claim to uphold international law and that take the initiative of war, of police, or peacekeeping operations because they the force to do so, these states, namely, the United States and its allied states in these actions, are themselves, as sovereign, the first rogue states (Rogues, p. 102).
This ‘logic’ would make it clear that, a priori, the states that are able to are in a state to make war on rogue states are themselves, in their most legitimate sovereignty, rogue states abusing their power (Rogues, p. 102).
By accepting Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty as power to decide the exception, Derrida contends that such sovereignty is the right of the strongest. Only those states that contain the power to wage war and use violence, which construct legal vocabularies and subsequently exceed, whether according to the rule or spirit of law, these vocabularies, are “rogue states.” The most exemplar “rogue state” is exactly the state that cannot be accused of being a “rogue state.”
If “all states are rogue states, when voyoucracy constitutes the very cracy of state sovereignty, when there are only rogue states, then there are no more rogue states” (Rouges, p. 102-103). If the principal accuser is the most vulnerable to accusation, then this oppositional logic between legal and illegal states breaks down. If all states are “rogue states” then the meaning of what constitutes a “rogue state” apart from a regular state loses its meaning. “There are thus only rogue states. Potentially or actually. The state is voyou, a rogue, roguish. There are always (no) more rogue state than one thinks” (Rogues, p. 102). “There are thus no longer anything but rogue states, and there are no longer rogue states” (Rogues, p. 106). This is the final point of Derrida’s deconstruction of the vocabulary of “rogue states.” If Chomsky is correct, and we can just as easily, accuse the United States of being a “rogue state” then the use of such phrases are ultimately meaningless, philosophically. Their political meaning, disguised in the double-speak of international democracy, is nothing more than the political interests of one nation-state applying an abstract and arbitrary enemy identification upon an-other.
All of these efforts to identify states and enemies, state as enemies, are rationalizations aimed at appeasing an absolute anxiety. No longer can we identify any recognizable and archetypal enemy, if we ever could. The biggest threat in the future, is not the controlled simulation of political game theory between warring nation-states, but the persistent fear of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons which do not require a state, and all continual subject to our worst fears in which they might escape the control of state oversight and fall into the hand of anonymous and unidentifiable forces.
XVII:
Derrida’s auto-immune typology weaves a scary quilt; a quilt that is unable to protect us from the elements outside, but leaves us absolutely and infinitely vulnerable.
To conclude, let’s return to the principal conclusion we can draw from this narrative.
First, auto-immunity as a distinctly biological concept is distorted, by Derrida, into a panoply of divergent meanings. Auto-immunity reflects a schema in which Derrida interposes a host of biological, metaphysical, logical and epistemological, ethical, and political tropes into a coherent whole.
Second, auto-immunity, though only fully developed in Derrida’s late analysis of post-9/11 politics, is uniquely applicable to Derrida’s engagement with the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt as far back as Derrida’s work in “Force of Law” and Politics of Friendship. In “Force of Law” we can trace the etymology of immunity, as immunis, to the state of exemption. This causes a political aporia in which the opposition between law and violence breaks down into an auto-immune dependence of one upon the other. In Politics of Friendship the identification of enemies is automatically other. This involuntary selection is both rationally and ethically indefensible. However, the paradoxical inversion of this formula, in which our friends might be our enemies, in the most hyper-politicized accounts of civil war or partisan conflict, only reinforces the political threat and promise of the auto-immune perversion of the nation-state. We are responsible for a perpetual, democratic, auto-immune self-critique, but the hyperbolic version of this creates the most destructive and suicidal populist voices.
Third, auto-immunity, explicitly when Derrida fleshes out the concept fully, is distinctively applicable to the terrorist attacks on September 11th and the resulting “war on terrorism.” This stage of political history is a nostalgic reminder of the political philosophy, and the consequences, of Carl Schmitt. The auto-immune suicide that Derrida describes is two-fold: both real and symbolic, both constitutional and normative. There is the actual suicide of those that attempt to destroy our defenses, and there is likewise the metaphorical suicide we constantly tempt by our own defeatist policies. September 11th was the outbreak of a disease that we had seen symptoms of long before, and the “war on terrorism” has only recycled the failed policies and intensified violence that continue to exacerbate the return of this suicidal loop. This suicidal couplet is transposable upon “general logic” of democracy. There is the real suicide in which our democratic practices sacrifice the democratic ideals they are designed to hold in place, and the metaphorical suicide in which democracy struggles with its own hospitable affluence with both valuable and antagonistic elements alike. The auto-immune typology within democracy threatens to expose peacekeepers as outlaws, while protecting us from dictators posing as bastions of the people.
What does this narrative have to teach us? Quite simply: Derrida’s schema of auto-immunity, and his interventions against and with Carl Schmitt, teaches us about our political reality, but also the im-possible possibility of its transformation.
If you recoil to the beginning in which I discussed John Protevi’s insightful analysis of virology versus immunology, you will remember that his distinction is between protection from an outside virus and the collapse of such internal-external difference. This is helpful is characterizing the auto-immune typology of politics, which is Derrida’s most nuanced and veiled conclusion. Politics cannot maintain irreducible oppositions between internal and external. The intrinsic auto-immune character of the democratic state is an ethos of governance from the inside, by the inside. There can be no opposition between the state and its populace. The breaking of this wall only serves to break further walls that oppose national interests in an international world. We are no more inside American, than we are outside of the world. The contemporary state of politics, and Derrida’s critical assessment of it, is our sense of vertigo in the establishment of so many arbitrary and ambiguous divisions. We are lost in the labyrinths of our own creation.
The deconstruction of traditional political oppositions creates a normative vacuum. The oppositional structures that Derrida so eagerly wants to destroy are reproduced in the form of inescapable political aporias. The empirical structure of both politics and democracy makes it im-possible to choose between so many auto-immune perversions. Must we immunize ourselves against everything which threatens our democracy, even it that immunization threatens us as well? Must we attack what is suspect, or should we hold our tongue and not bite the hand that feeds us? How we choose to protect ourselves is often times the very thing that threatens to make us the most vulnerable. Protection and vulnerability, threat and chance, cure and poison: the irreducible oppositions between im-possible political decisions. The auto-nomy of political choice, the leap of faith needed to make a normative decision, diverges into two strands, aporias, that do not digress, but often times lead into the same knot.
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[1] Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. Penguin Classics: New York, NY. 2006. p. 5
[2] Derrida, Jacques. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Tr. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA. 2005. p. 80. Hereafter cited as Rogues.
[3] Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. Routledge Press: New York, NY. 2002. Hereafter cited as “Force of Law.”
[4] Nass, Michael. “’One Nation…Indivisible’: Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity of Democracy and the Soverignty of God.” Research in Phenomenology. v. 36. 2006.
[5] Derrida, Jacques. “The Rhetoric of Drugs.” Points… Interviews, 1974-1994. Ed. Elizabeth Weber. Tr. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA. 1995.
[6] Protevi, John. Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body Politic. Athlone Press: London, UK. 2001. Hereafter cited as Protevi.
[7] Alphonso Lingis provides a beautiful analysis of how we misunderstand the self. “Human animals live in symbiosis with thousands of species of anaerobic bacteria, 600 species in our mouths which neutralize the toxins all plants produce to ward off their enemies, 400 species in our intestines, without which we could not digest and absorb the food we ingest. Some synthesize vitamins, others produce polysaccharides or sugars our bodies need. The number of microbes that colonize our bodies exceeds the number of cells in our bodies by up to a hundredfold. Macrophages in our bloodstream hunt and devour trillions of bacteria and viruses entering our porous bodies continually. They replicate with their own DNA and RNA and not ours. They, and not some Aristotelian form, are true agencies of our individuation as organisms. When did those bacteria take up lodging in our bloodstream?” Dangerous Emotions. University of California Press: Berkeley, CA. 2000. p. 76.
[8] Derrida, Jacques. “Faith and Knowledge.” Religion. Ed. Gianni Vattimo and Jacques Derrida. Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA. 1998. fn. 27.
[9] Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL. 2003. Hereafter cited as Time of Terror.
[10] Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Tr. George Schwab. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL. 2006. p. 1.
[11] Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Tr. Kevin Attell. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL. 2004. pg. 52-55.
[12] Bredekamp, Horst. “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 25, No. 2, “Angelus Novus”: Perspectives on Walter Benjamin (Winter, 1999). pg. 254.
[13] While apart of a philosophical history that is distant from the Schmitt/Benjamin debate, we can extend this analysis to the anthropologist Georges Dumezil’s distinction (and Deleuze/Guattari’s adoption in A Thousand Plateaus), in Indo-European mythology, between the Jurist-priest and the Magician-king. Sovereignty is distinguished between the spontaneous moment of execution, of original violence, of the despot who founds the State and the preserving moment of laws, of the legislator who binds and organizes.
[14] Derrida, Jacques. Politics of Friendship. Tr. George Collins. Verso Press: New York, NY. 1997. Hereafter cited as Friendship.
[15] Agamben, Girogio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Tr. Daniel Hellen-Roazen. Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA. 1998.
[16] Critchley, Simon. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. Verso Press: New York, NY. 2007.
[17] Perhaps the homage to Benjamin’s “11th Theses on the Philosophy of History” best characterizes the [auto]immunity of Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty. The exception is the automatic and exclusive character of the state.
[18] Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Tr. George Schwab. Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ. p. 26. 1976. Hereafter cited as Concept of the Political.
[19] Perhaps a telling sign to a similar deconstructive and patient reader, and friend of Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss.
[20][21] As described by Jürgen Habermas: Time of Terror, p. 53.
[22] Perhaps this is insincere. Was not Clausewitz merely reversing the order of the war/politics couplet that Hobbes originally described?
[23] Jürgen Habermas, in The Inclusion of the Other, does an excellent job of demonstrating the pervasive and consistent racism/xenophobia of Carl Schmitt throughout his career. Schmitt was a vocal proponent of ethnonationalism being a part of the Weimar Constitution (claiming that democracy could not survive amongst strangers), going so far as to physically remove ethnically diverse populations to colonies or excluded locales outside the nation-state.
[24] Schmitt, Carl. The Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political. Tr. G.L. Ulmen. Telos Press Publishing: New York, NY. 2007.
[25] What might we say about the entire lineage of auto-immune foreign policy objectives in history? We do not need to censure ourselves to the self-defeating logic of the Cold War. Since early colonialism, European metropoles have instilled Western political structures upon foreign geographies only to see these very ideals and their military technologies used against them in liberation struggles.
[26] Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Tr. Peggy Kamuf. Routledge Press: New York, NY. 1994. p. 72-73.
[27] Though we can lay a great deal of blame on the Bush Administration and their unpredictable incursion and adventure into Iraq.
[28] Derrida’s two volume The Beast and the Sovereign has yet to be fully published. A series of lectures given concurrently with Rogues, and mentioned in Rogues, is Derrida’s final analysis of Schmitt, Agamben, and the state of contemporary sovereignty.
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