Dialogue Between Fukuyama’s Account of the End of History and Derrida’s Hauntology

Abstract

Introduction This paper examines Derrida's theory of hauntology, a theory which Derrida, himself, sets up in binary opposition to Fukuyama and Modernist-Enlightenment thought. It is not my aim to examine Derrida's direct criticisms of Fukuyama, per se; instead my aim is to examine the theory of hauntology, in order to see what might be useful for political theory in this notion of time. The first section of this paper elucidates how Derrida uses hauntology as a critique to the idea of a universal, teleological account of history and, especially, the idea of a history that can reach an end point. (1) I outline Derrida's theory of specters (2) and show that Derrida's theory of hauntology is based on the idea that there are specters which haunt the present and prevent the end of history. The theory of hauntology keeps the future open, since the specter ends, only by coming back: "the specter is the future; it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back." (3) The theory of specters and hauntology is the idea of there always being a future to come, the idea of a democratie a venir. In the second section of this paper, I explore the idea of hauntology in more depth and begin to present my central argument, a claim that the idea of a specter haunting the present does not need to be constructed as one side of a binary opposition to Fukuyama's theory of an end of history. I explore what it means for the specter to come back and argue that a specter from the past does not necessarily pose a threat to either liberal democracy or the idea of a metaphysical, universal, teleological history. I argue that a dialogue can be constructed between Derrida's idea of hauntology and Fukuyama's thesis that liberal democracy is the end of history. This attempt to bridge the dichotomy between Modernist and Postmodern theory has a resonance with the work of Biebricher. In, Habermas and Foucault: Deliberative Democracy and Strategic State Analysis, Biebricher attempted to forge a way out of the Modernist/Postmodernism dualism by incorporating Foucaultian elements into a Habermasian framework. (4) This paper pursues a parallel line of argument, by suggesting that Derrida's theory of hauntology can be worked into Fukuyama's theory that liberal democracy is the end of history. This paper argues that Derrida's idea of a hauntology is a valuable tool for theorising about politics, not least, because Derrida shows that the death of a particular social/political system (e.g. Communism) does not entail the death/devaluing of the thinker(s) who inspired that system and that critics of the contemporary social/political order may have something valuable to offer contemporary political thought. However, I do not endorse the view that history cannot reach an end due to the presence of specters, which await their return; instead, I argue that the specters which Derrida discusses (e.g. Marx) do not haunt us per se, since they do not necessarily pose a radically different future, and whilst a spectre may provide a critique to the contemporary, it is a critique which we must assimilate and accommodate. For example, Marx's ideas provide an awareness of injustices which must be addressed, but this does not, necessarily, lead to the abandonment of liberal democracy since ideas raised by specters can be used to enhance liberal democracy. Thus, ideas and thinkers which "haunt" us do not necessarily threaten to dismantle the principles of liberal democracy; instead they point out areas where the principles of liberal democracy are not fully realised. Therefore, the emancipation of Marx's "specter" is not a challenge to Fukuyama's theory of a history which ends in liberal democracy; instead, it is a recognition that we can re-think liberal democracy to take account of what is valuable in the ideas of "specters." The paper reaches the conclusion that it is possible to produce a dialogue between Fukuyama's theory of liberal democracy as the end of history and Derrida's notion of hauntology. …