Matthias Fritsch

Derrida's Democracy To Come

To assess the contribution of recent French thought to democratic theory, this paper discusses Derrida’s ‘democracy to come’ in relation to a quasi-transcendental account of the constitution of meaning and identity in terms of an excess of time named the future to come. This re-conceptualization of democracy cannot escape the affirmation of normative commitments, a commitment to futural openness that stands in need of justification. Derrida’s intent to expose ineluctable aporias and contradictions of democratic decision-making disallows what Habermas calls a transcendental-pragmatic argument to the effect that we ought to be open to the future because the openness of the future is always necessarily presupposed by our symbolic practices. However, Derrida’s insistence on unavoidable contradictions and aporias can provide a weak normativity if this insistence is viewed as aiming at the reduction of violence. I conclude by showing that Derrida tends to overreach the normativity he can justify, in particular in regard to the relatively neglected democratic values of economic and political equality.

Antagonism and Democratic Citizenship (Schmitt, Mouffe, Derrida)

In the context of the recent proliferation of nationalisms and enemy figures, this paper agrees with the desirability of retaining some of the explanatory and motivational potential of an agonistic account of politics, but gives reasons not to accept too much of Carl Schmitts account of citizenship. The claim as to the necessarily antagonistic exclusion of concrete others can be supported neither on its own terms nor on Derridian grounds, as Chantal Mouffe, in particular, attempts to do. I then indicate that differance may nonetheless account for strong (but not necessary) tendencies toward exclusion as well as for the intrinsic contradictions of liberal universalism.

Equality and Singularity in Justification and Application Discourses

To respond to the charge of context-insensitivity, discourse ethics distinguishes justification discourses, which only require that we consider what is equally good for all, and subsequent application discourses, in which the perspective of concrete others must be adopted. This article argues that, despite its pragmatic attractiveness, the separation of justification and application neglects the co-constitutive role that applicability plays for the meaning of normativity. Norms that do not, in a machine-like fashion, produce their cases, cannot already contain their appropriateness to the cases that nonetheless alone justify the existence of norms in th first place. The higher-order norm of appropriateness that enters normativity with th dependence on applications is one that remains implicit, and impossible to determine in advance. Thus, the justification of a norm is always incomplete for conceptual and not merely empirical reasons, as fallibilism typically has it.

Democracy, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice

Taking its cue from Derrida’s rethinking of political life as lifedeath, this essay argues that taking turns helps in conceptualizing the intra- and inter-generationally shared nature of democratic institutions. However, the generational taking turns with democratic power must be thought in conjunction with an environmental turning: not only do human generations seek to share sovereignty over subjects and the earth, but such human sovereignty is dependent upon a lateral turning with the earth.

Equal consideration of all – an aporetic project?

The article considers the relationships among three arguments that purport to establish the intrinsically contradictory or paradoxical nature of the modern project aiming at the equal consideration of all. The claim that the inevitable historical insertion of universal-egalitarian norms leads to always particular and untransparent interpretations of grammatically universal norms may be combined with the claim that the logic of determination of political communities tends to generate exclusions. The combination of these two claims lends specific force to the third argument according to which equal consideration perpetually requires the non-egalitarian project of understanding (excluded) individuals on their own terms. Hence, taking off from a recent debate between Christoph Menke and Jürgen Habermas, I argue that the former is right to diagnose an aporetic self-reflection in egalitarian universalism, while agreeing with the latter about the indispensability of deliberative democratic frameworks for the defence of both egalitarian and non-egalitarian norms.

A New Critical Theory Based on Rational Choice

Joseph Heaths Communicative Action and Rational Choice may be read as a critical commentary upon Habermass critical social theory, but it may also be read as merely using the latter as “scaffolding” (p. 10) for the presentation of Heaths own version of critical theory. In what follows, I will focus on the second option and thus largely ignore the exegetical question to what extent Heath provides a fair reading of Habermas. This does not mean, however, that I will not make comparative judgements. On the contrary, my overall claim will be that Heaths new critical theory is more functionalist, and. partly as a result, less critical than Habermass. Since lack of space does not permit me to argue this in accordance with the standards of detail that Heaths own book generally observes, my procedure may be justified by the attempt to provoke a clarificatory response from Heath.