A Janus-faced democracy : on the autoimmune condition in the body of politics

Abstract

This paper revisits one of the main concerns of the late Jacques Derrida, namely, how the autoimmune condition affects the political sovereignty of the democratic body of politics. In keeping with its biological implications, the protective sense of immunity will be utilised to explore whether the immune condition gives rise to a dual vision of politics. Throughout the paper, the trope of Janus as the deity whose two faces looked in opposite directions will be deployed to illustrate this dual vision of politics as an attack/defence system. This illustration advances the argument by offering insight into how Janus-faced politics consolidate the state’s sovereignty particularly in the exceptional instances of when the state decides who lives or dies, who or what is included in the set of the viable or not. Socrates’ example of capital punishment is utilised as a springboard to analyse how the level of protection in the community appears to strengthen the attack/defence position implied by the immune condition. A critique will be made of how this divisive strategy contributes to the friend/enemy distinction. As a contrasting point, this paper demonstrates how in the case of political autoimmunity, the difference between friend and enemy is mitigated. The reason for this is that through the autoimmune condition, the political turns foreign to itself. The referencing to the examples of the 9/11 events and European populism will illustrate how these phenomena damage internally the democratic fabric. The last section of this paper reimagines the survival of politics and our democratic heritage by reassessing how autoimmunity makes the body of democracy ill. It is in the light of this illness that the concluding part examines whether democracy has lost its sovereign authority to control its own body and that of others. All the steps of this paper are here taken indicatively and cannot be fully unpacked for reason of space. Therefore, their deeper relevance to the issue of inclusions and exclusions, which is the topic of this workshop, will remain somewhat cryptic and undeveloped.