Derrida's Politics of Autoimmunity

The reader will recognize that the following essay was written several years ago. I leave the opening paragraphs as they were originally written, as historical testimony. Now (23 May 2009) much has changed. Barack Obama has been elected president of the United States, with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. We have at least the audacity of hope. Obama, nevertheless, has enormous problems. He is finding it difficult to fulfill all his campaign promises, for example to close Guantánamo Bay or to have all those imprisoned there tried or to stop the war in Iraq. He is escalating the war in Afghanistan. The folly and greed of government deregulators, bankers, hedge-fund managers, and the like have brought about global financial meltdown that seems likely to change permanently the U.S. standard of living and social structure. Our universities are in financial crisis. Global climate change is continuing unabated and is most likely already irreversible, with big chunks of the Antarctic ice shield falling regularly into the ocean. Rising sea levels will sooner or later submerge our coasts and those in other countries around the world. The predictable forces resisting any changes in our disastrous health-care system are already preparing their lying TV ads against Obama's modest efforts to expand coverage to the uninsured and to make a government health-care plan an option. One small example of our folly: an amendment making it legal to carry loaded concealed weapons in our national parks was recently added to the bill trying to limit the outrageous usurious practices of credit card companies. This leaves President Obama the option to approve both or to veto both. Here is what I wrote several years ago: Things are not going all that well in the United States today, not to speak of the rest of the world. Our sad situation is clear enough, though many of our citizens are still in denial of it. We are engaged in a disastrous war in Iraq that was based on two great lies and a lot of smaller ones. We were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he was in cahoots with Al Quaeda, both lies. We were told that we would be greeted with open arms and with bouquets of flowers, whereas just the opposite has happened. We were told that the war in Iraq would cost perhaps forty billion dollars and that Iraq oil would pay for the rest, whereas no oil revenue from Iraq is footing the bill and the present estimate of the war's cost is two trillion dollars, probably still an underestimate. Everything that could go wrong in Iraq has gone wrong. Iraq at the moment I write this is in the midst of full-scale sectarian civil war. Bush and Co. are still in denial about the gravity of this situation, though they are beginning to admit there are some problems. They think a "troop surge," i.e., escalation of our involvement, will bring stability to Iraq.

We were promised that invading and occupying Iraq would make us safer at home. Exactly the opposite has happened. Iraq has now become what it was not before our occupation, a breeding ground for terrorists. Iran is winning control of Iraq as a result of our invasion. Our standing or credit in the world has diminished immeasurably. We are now the object of widespread hatred, distrust, and disdain, in part because we are a rogue state that ignores international law and the Geneva convention, to say nothing of our own Constitution. Nobody can be sure what mad act we will next commit. We torture and hold indefinitely without charge detainees in a prison falsely claimed to be extraterritorial. We operate secret prisons around the world where prisoners are held and tortured through what is called, in an extraordinary example of double speak, "Extraordinary Rendition." We have suspended our own precious civil liberties through something with the chilling Orwellian name of the Patriot Act. The Department of Homeland Security has conspicuously failed to secure our ports, our borders, or our chemical plants...