Theory and the Democracy to Come

Well, I’ve always regarded the link . . . I’ve never really perceived much of a link to tell you the truth.

—Noam Chomsky

In the quotation above, Noam Chomsky attempts to answer a question put to him by Jonathan Ree in an interview for Radical Magazine about the relation between his theoretical work in linguistics and his activist and anarchist work in politics. In this interview and elsewhere, Chomsky denies that there is such a link, even though some of his readers might find that disconnect unfortunate. “I would be very pleased,” Chomsky says in another interview, “to be able to discover intellectually convincing connections between my own anarchist convictions on the one hand and what I think I can demonstrate or at least begin to see about the nature of human intelligence on the other, but I simply can’t find intellectually satisfying connections between those two domains.”¹ If, however, Chomsky rejects the possibility of those links, Jacques Derrida’s Rogues: Two Essays on Reason seems on the contrary to revel in making “intellectually satisfying connections” between the realms of epistemology and political philosophy.

Certainly, it makes sense to understand Derrida in his recent work as directly engaged with issues of contemporary political philosophy, even as he has continued to revise and advance a theory of language and thought which he began to develop in the 1960s. The marketing description of Rogues, for example, advertises “unflinching and hard-hitting assessments of current democratic realities,” claiming that the essays “are highly engaged with the current political events of the post-9/11 world,” and Derrida’s publishers will no doubt continue to accentuate this ongoing political relevance. But if it seems to some readers that Derrida’s work has become more political in recent years, Derrida himself refuses to see this as something new. In the two essays on reason that make up Rogues, Derrida attempts self-consciously to revisit and revise his earlier projects, bringing out their political relevance. For instance, in a passage on paradoxical tensions within the idea of “democracy,” Derrida argues,

there never was in the 1980s or 1990s, as has sometimes been claimed, a political turn or ethical turn in “deconstruction,” at least not as I experience it. The thinking of the political has always been a thinking of différance and the thinking of différance always a thinking of the political, of the contour and limits of the political, especially around the enigma or the autoimmune double bind of the democratic.

(39)

Derrida characterizes his initial, meta-performative revision of structuralist linguistics (différance) in terms of its relation to the empirical and ontological limitations of democracy important to his recent work.

The two masterfully translated essays collected in this volume were initially presented as lectures, one at Cerisy-la-Salle on 15 July 2002 and the other at the opening of the twenty-ninth Congrés de l’Association des Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue française [ASPLF] at the University of Nice, 27 August 2002. Mixing straightforward political commentary (on 9/11, the war on terrorism, human cloning, etc.) with discussions of political philosophy (in passages on Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Nancy, and others), the essays in Rogues work together to deconstruct “democracy” as a mode of sovereignty.

In his preface to the two lectures, Derrida quotes from La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” in which a ravenous wolf accuses an innocent lamb of having muddied the wolf’s drinking water. The lamb protests, citing the persuasive evidence that the lamb is in fact 20 feet downstream from the wolf and therefore could not have muddied the wolf’s water. “You’re muddying it!” the wolf insists, “And I know that, last year, you spoke ill of me.” But the lamb protests again, “How could I do that? Why I’d not yet even come to be . . . at my dam’s teat I still nurse...