Enduring the Autoimmune Aporia of Democratic Sovereignty

Abstract

This article aims to read Rogues in order to argue that Derrida is neither an advocate of pure democracy nor a critic of sovereignty in general, but rather a thinker of democratic sovereignty that is based on articulating aporetic transactions between the exigency of the possible and what disrupts the order of the possible, i.e., the necessity of sovereign calculations and the exigency of a democratic “promise.” Present-day politics illustrate the “autoimmune” collapse of aporetic transactions: neoliberals hypostasize an existing democracy and protect it against popular sovereignty, while populists hypostasize nation-state sovereignty and immunize it against the promise of “democracy to come.”