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"One Nation •¦ Indivisible": Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity

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RP 36_f4_12-44 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 15 “ONE NATION . INDIVISIBLE”: JACQUES DERRIDA ON THE AUTOIMMUNITY OF DEMOCRACY AND THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD by MICHAEL NAAS DePaul University ABSTRACT During the final decade of his life, Jacques Derrida came to use the trope of autoimmunity with greater and greater frequency. Indeed it today appears that autoimmunity was to have been the last iteration of what for more than forty years Derrida called decon- struction. This essay looks at the consequences of this terminological shift for our under- standing not only of Derrida’s final works (such as Rogues) but of his entire corpus. By taking up a term from the biological sciences that describes the process by which an organism turns in quasi-suicidal fashion against its own self-protection, Derrida was able to rethink the very notion of life otherwise and demonstrate the way in which every sovereign identity, from the self to the nation-state to, most provocatively, God, is open to a process that both threatens to destroy it and gives it its only chance of living on. 1. Pledge of Allegiance I In a volume of remembrance, a volume “in memory of Jacques Derrida,” it is perhaps not inappropriate to begin with a personal memory, even if it might initially appear to have little to do with Derrida.1 It is an old memory, a quintessentially American memory, and one that I suspect many readers of this journal 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 school children, recited by heart, that is, in my case, thoughtlessly, mechani- cally, 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 school child—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: Research in Phenomenology,36 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands 2006 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 04:47:36AM via free access RP 36_f4_12-44 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 16 16 michael naas 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 some months ago when I began thinking about contributing to this issue of Research in Phenomenology, a journal that will have done so much for the work, the person, and now the memory of Jacques Derrida in the United States and through- out the world. In some very real sense, all of my reflections today can be traced back to the childhood memory of this pledge, to the memory of this childhood pledge, even if—and this is the genuine force and gift of the supplement—I would never have read or thought about this pledge in the way I have without the singular work and writing, without the genial inspiration and provocation, without the gracious friendship, of Jacques Derrida. In remembering Derrida here in the pages of Research in Phenomenology, and in trying to be respon- sible to his memory, I would like to recall this among so many other of his gifts. In beginning with a Pledge of Allegiance, I wish to draw attention to the way in which Derrida in some of 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 before the bond of any nation-state or religion,2 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 khòra of the political, or more provocatively still, a god to come. Sovereignty, the nation-state, politics, theology: these are the themes I would like to take up today through a reading of a couple of texts that I have had the extreme privilege to co-translate over the past few years, Rogues (or Voyous) and a long interview on 9-11 published in English under the title “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicide.”3 I will thus attempt 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 think the same has been true in many other places throughout the world, just about everyone—and not just inside the academy—has spent the last few years speaking about Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 04:47:36AM via free access RP 36_f4_12-44 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 17 “one nation ... indivisible” 17 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 nation-state, 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, multi- national corporations, and non-state 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 antici- pation 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 provoca- tive reading of several canonical texts on democracy (from Plato and Aristotle to Rousseau and Tocqueville) as well as some less canonical ones (from Schmitt and Benjamin to Nancy). Demonstrating the aporetic nature of concepts like sovereignty, self-identity, and democracy within these classic philosophical discourses, Derrida argues that such aporias will and must remain irreducible, due to a “constitutive autoimmunity” that at once threatens them and allows them to be perpetually rethought and reinscribed. What 9-11 confirmed beyond all doubt, Derrida argues, is that the cold-war logic that located the enemy within identifiable, self- identical, sovereign nation-states is no longer tenable. Today the threat is located not in “out-law regimes,” “pariah nations,” or “rogue states” (though this has not prevented the United States from continuing to use these terms as an alibi), but in non-state or trans-state entities that do not declare war like nation-states once did but work instead by turning the resources of a state (from its freedoms to its airplanes) against the state itself. Today the enemy is no longer within foreign Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 04:47:36AM via free access RP 36_f4_12-44 11/13/06 11:56 AM Page 18 18 michael naas nation-states but within non-state networks and within the immune system of the nation-state itself. True to the “method” of deconstruction or, better, true to the “autoimmune processes” he finds already at work, Derrida attempts to show that our traditional notion of sovereignty always harbors within it or always in fact produces, secretes, so to speak, the very forces that would compromise or undermine it. Though Derrida began using the term “autoimmunity” already back in the mid-1990s, particularly in the essay “Faith and Knowledge,” it became more prominent and got developed in a more accelerated fashion after 9-11. “Autoimmunity,” that “illogical logic,” as Derrida put it, that turns something against its own defenses, would appear to be yet another name, in some sense the last, for what for close to forty years Derrida called “deconstruction.” But whereas “deconstruction” often lent itself to being (mis)understood as a “method” or “textual strategy” aimed at disrupting the self-identity of a text or concept, the organization of discourses in the shape of what we assumed to be well-formed organic bodies, “autoimmunity” appears to name a process that is inevitably and irreducibly at work more or less everywhere, at the heart of every sovereign identity.
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