>From an Interview with Richard Beardsworth: Nietzsche and the Machine
Journal of Nietzsche Studies 7 (1994), 7-66
Jaques Derrida: [...] what's the situation today of democracy?
"Progress" in arms-technologies and media-technologies is
incontestably causing the disappearance of the site on which the
democratic used to be situated. The site of representation and the
stability of the location which make up parliament or assembly, the
territorialisation of power, the rooting of power to a particular
place, if not to the ground as such - all this is over. The notion of
politics dependent on this relation between power and space is over as
well, although its end must be negotiated with. I am not just thinking
here of the present forms of nationalism and fundamentalism.
Technoscientific acceleration poses an absolute threat to
Western-style democracy as well, following its radical undermining of
locality. Since there can be no question of interrupting science of
the technosciences, it's a matter of knowing how a democratic response
can be made to what is happening. This response must not, for obvious
reasons, try to maintain at all costs the life of a democratic model
of government which is rapidly being made redundant. If technics now
exceeds democratic forms of government, it's not only because assembly
or parliament is being swallowed up by the media. This was already the
case after the First World War. It was already being argued then that
the media (then the radio) were forming public opinion so much that
public deliberation and parliamentary discussion no longer determined
the life of a democracy. And so, we need a historical perspective.
What the acceleration of technicisation concerns today is the
frontiers of the nation-state, the traffic of arms and drugs,
everything that has to do with inter-nationality. It is these issue
which need to be completely reconsidered, not in order to sound the
death-knell of democracy, but in order to rethink democracy from
within these conditions. This rethinking, as you rightly suggested
earlier, must not be postponed, it is immediate and urgent. For what
is specific to these threats, what constitutes the specificity of
their time or temporality, is that they are not going to wait. Let's
take one example from a thousand.
It is quite possible that what is happening at present in former
Yugoslavia is going to take place in the Ukraine: a part of the
Ukrainian Russians are going to be re-attached to Russia, the other
part refusing. As a consequence, everything decided up to now as to
the site and control of the former Soviet Empire's nuclear arms will
be cast in doubt. The relative peace of the world could be severely
endangered. As to a response, one that is so urgently needed, that's
obviously what we've been talking about all along. And yet, it's
hardly in an interview that one can say what needs to be done. Despite
what l've just said - even if it is true that the former polarity of
power is over with the end of the Cold War, and that its end has made
the world a much more endangered place - the powers of decision in
today's world are still highly structured; there are still important
nations and superpowers, there are still powerful economies, and so
forth.
Given this and given the fact that, as l've said, a statement specific
to an interview cannot measure up to the complexity of the situation,
I would venture somewhat abstractly the following points. Note,
firstly, that I was referring with the example of the Ukraine to world
peace, I was not talking in local terms. Since no locality remains,
democracy must be thought today globally (de facon mondiale), if it is
to have a future. In the past one could always say that democracy was
to be saved in this or that country. Today, however, if one claims to
be a democrat, one cannot be a democrat "at home" and wait to see what
happens "abroad". Everything that is happening today - whether it be
about Europe, the GATT, the Mafia, drugs, or arms - engages the future
of democracy in the world in general. If this seems an obvious thing
to say, one must nevertheless say it.
Second, in the determination or behaviour of each citizen or
singularity there should be present, in some form or other, the call
to a world democracy to come, each singularity should determine itself
with the sense of the stakes of a democracy which can no longer be
contained within frontiers, which can no longer be localised, which
can no longer depend on the decisions of a specific group of citizens,
a nation or even of a continent. This determination means that one
must both think, and think democracy, globally. This may be something
completely new, something that has never been done, for we're here
talking of something much more complex, much more modest and yet much
more ambitious than any notion of the universal, cosmopolitan or
human. I realise that there is so much rhetoric today - obvious,
conventional, reassuring, determined in the sense of without risk -
which resembles what l'm saying. When, for example, one speaks of the
United Nations, when one speaks in the name of a politics that
transcends national borders, one can always do so in the name of
democracy. One has to make the difference clear, then, between
democracy in this rhetorical sense and what l'm calling a "democracy
to come". The difference shows, for example, that all decisions made
in the name of the Rights of Man are at the same time alibis for the
continued inequality between singularities, and that we need to invent
other concepts than state, superstate, citizen, and so forth for this
new International. The democracy to come obliges one to challenge
instituted law in the name of an indefinitely unsatisfied justice,
thereby revealing the injustice of calculating justice whether this be
in the name of a particular form of democracy or of the concept of
humanity. This democracy to come is marked in the movement that has
always carried a present beyond itself, makes it inadequate to itself,
"out of joint" (Hamlet); as I argue in Specters of Marx, it obliges us
to work with the spectrality in any moment of apparent presence. This
spectrality is very weak; it is the weakness of the powerless, who, in
being powerless, resist the greatest strength.
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new Derrida sites at:
http://www.lake.de/sonst/homepages/s2442/jd.html
http://www.cas.usf.edu/journal/fobo/jd.html
http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~johnm/Archive/jd.html