Terror, torture and democratic autoimmunity

Abstract

Shortly before his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida provocatively suggested that the greatest problem confronting contemporary democracy is that ‘the alternative to democracy can always be represented as a democratic alternative’. This article analyses the manner in which certain manifestly anti-democratic practices, like terror and torture, come to be taken up in defense of democracies as a result of what Derrida calls democracy’s ‘autoimmune’ tendencies.

Education, Immunity and Autoimmunity—A Study of Medicalized Philosophy of Education

“…Democracy is therefore fragile, unstable, unresolved, and hard to discover, according to Derrida. In addition, it is worth noting that while Derrida sees immunity and autoimmunity as a metaphor that expresses and illuminates the essence of a community, all communities are at risk and always attempting to fail because of their inherent character of drawing lines between "us and them", who and what are common, or who or what are outside [21]. Much like the auto-immunitary processes of the protective system of the body that destroys itself (i.e., the immune system), the community destroys itself when "it fails to distinguish between what it protects and what it protects against, so too do democracies sometimes deploy their own systems of self-protection against those who purport to represent democracy or, in what amounts to the same thing, against those that democracy purports to represent" [21].…”

“…. ), democracy is something that is pursued rather than achieved, and this structural deferral of any final evaluable meaning, implicit in the very concept of democracy, that both frustrates it and pushes it forward [21]. What we find particularly interesting in Derrida's account of immunity and autoimmunity is the relationship between the school or educational institution as a place where both students can acquire and develop an immunity to exclusion and loneliness, and one in which the community thus becomes (or can become) a form of resilience against negative social influences.…”

“…Both education and democracy are emergent and not static-and both can be said to be underpinned by an ideal to be realized. "By definition, the meaning of democracy is not a decision made by one, but by the many" [21]. Democracy, like education, must at the same time be given some kind of delimitation.…”