In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

7 ‘‘One Nation . . . Indivisible’’ Of Autoimmunity, Democracy, and the Nation-State Pledge of Allegiance I To bring the work of Derrida into even closer proximity to the American context, I would like to begin this chapter with a personal and quintessentially American memory. It is a rather old memory for me, but one that I suspect many readers of this work may share. It is the memory of a speech act, a sort of originary profession of faith, the memory of a pledge that I, like most other American schoolchildren, recited by heart, that is, in my case, thoughtlessly, mechanically, irresponsibly, with the regularity of a tape recording played back in an endless loop, at the beginning of every single school day. So as to try to bring it all back for some of you, and simply to inform the rest, imagine a young schoolchild—he could be any child in an American public school—standing beside his desk some morning , any morning, putting his hand over his heart and reciting by memory so as not to have to put his heart into it, this inaugural pledge: ‘‘I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.’’ There it is, the United States Pledge of Allegiance, more or less as it was originally penned by Francis Bellamy in 1892, more or less as I myself recited it every school day for twelve long years, more or less as it welled up within me as I began to reflect on Derrida’s work on the nation-state, sovereignty, and democracy. In beginning, then, with this Pledge of Allegiance , I wish to draw attention to the way in which Derrida in some of 122 his last works linked the ‘‘I’’ of the ‘‘I pledge’’ not only to the sovereignty and indivisibility of the autonomous subject or nation-state but to a kind of profession of faith or pledge of allegiance, a kind of originary fidelity —as we saw in Chapter 3—before the bond of any nation-state or religion ,1 a faith that opens up the nation-state and every national context to something that exceeds it, call it the democracy to come, or the khōra of the political, or, more provocatively still, a god to come. I will thus attempt in this chapter to retrace just some of Derrida’s recent thought with regard to the political, theological, and philosophical heritage of the concept of sovereignty and the ways in which this heritage is being transformed today, the way in which it is subject, in truth, to what Derrida calls a terrifying and suicidal autoimmunity. In the United States, and I know the same has been true in many other places throughout the world, just about everyone—and not just inside the academy—has spent the past few years speaking about sovereignty . While those, for example, who supported the American intervention in Iraq often appealed to perceived threats against United States national sovereignty post–9/11, those who opposed such actions argued that the United States had no right to attack another sovereign nationstate or that it should do so only under the auspices of a more sovereign international body, such as the United Nations. Something is clearly happening today not just to sovereign nations but to the very notion of sovereignty itself, as the sovereignty of nation-states continues to be threatened by other nation-states, to be sure, but also by the transnational sovereignty of international organizations, multinational corporations , and nonstate terrorist networks. Old sovereignties are thus threatened by new ones, and sometimes in the name of the oldest sovereignty of them all, that is, in the name of the Sovereign Himself, the One God who, as we will see, is thought to protect and bind the United States into ‘‘one nation indivisible.’’ These are some of the central issues in Derrida’s interview on 9/11 and, even more poignantly, in Rogues. Written between the winter and summer of 2002, in the wake, therefore, of 9/11 and in anticipation of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Rogues treats the themes of sovereignty, democracy, freedom , and the relationship between politics and theology within the context of the Unites States’ use and abuse during the past two decades of the demonizing expression rogue state. This timely political analysis is embedded by Derrida within a rich and provocative...

Share