![\"parliamentpic\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.nd.edu\/druttley\/files\/2016\/12\/parliamentpic-300x172.jpg\")
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During last summer as my mind wandered to a chilled Burgundy in the land of Rousseau and Voltaire it was the more recent French radical controversialist, Jacques Derrida, whose work seemed germane as our nation faced unprecedented political choppy waters. Derrida, the twentieth century Jewish-atheist, French-Algerian, post-structuralist was a philosopher who relished contradictions though, in his later, more political thinking, not for their own sake or as fashionable \u2018left-bank\u2019 philosophy, but rather as an antidote to a world dominated by the hubris of short-term \u2018solutions\u2019, so often benefiting the strong to the cost of the weak. Derrida’s method was to construct thorough readings of philosophical and literary texts, to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to their apparent structural unity or original intention. By demonstrating the\u00a0contradictions -the aporias,<\/em>or impasses –\u00a0<\/em>in much of what we think \u2013 he aimed to show the infinitely subtle ways in which apparent resolutions collapse into themselves, morph and transform. And never more so than when thinking about democracy.<\/p>\n First there is the aporia<\/em> of democracy and sovereignty. Democracy \u2013 the will of the people \u2013 immediately has to collapse into the exercise of sovereignty; of power exercised by the few<\/em>. To protect the demos<\/em>, the process must be curtailed, limited. Whether it be curtailed to include – through the exclusion of the ‘other’ – the card carrying conservative or labour party voters on the one hand or,\u00a0to exercise the power to say No to a second referendum. Democracy is as much about exclusion and (dis-)entitlement as it is about franchise. And democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.<\/p>\n Second, the aporia<\/em> of democracy and freedom. Democracy requires freedom, however (mis-) understood. Should card-carrying labour party members enjoy an additional freedom to vote for their leader not enjoyed by the [democratically elected] parliamentary labour party whose role, partly, is to secure power so as to make changes it perceives as \u2018for the good\u2019? And in the Brexit debate, how free<\/em> were voters when the information they used to make an ‘informed’ choice\u2013 a key element in the exercise of freedom \u2013 is subject to the warp and refraction of the lens of the media? And how is freedom understood differently when the immigrant is perceived as the one providing an essential service [whether in the NHS or as, perhaps, one’s nanny]as against those who, right or wrong, perceive the same as a threat to their economically precarious and socially excluded position. Freedom is not satisfied by the existence of the ballot box.<\/p>\n Finally, in the employment of the In-Out referendum we have seen not an exercise of pure democracy<\/em> but a fundamentally mistimed exercise of sovereign power. The sovereignty was the Government’s\u00a0power to \u2018grant\u2019 the referendum at the time and in the form it was placed. It was curtailed, highly managed \u2018democracy\u2019 offered by and on the terms of the few<\/em>\u00a0which, on this occasion, back-fired spectacularly.<\/p>\n To use Derrida\u2019s language, democracy is never\u00a0present\u00a0<\/em>but is always\u00a0deferred<\/em>. In its claim to presence (\u201cthis is democracy here-and-now\u201d) democracy evokes the sovereignty that calls forth its destruction.\u00a0While democracy may be the best we have, it must remain subject to a critical eye and not become a secular deity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" During last summer as my mind wandered to a chilled Burgundy in the land of Rousseau and Voltaire it was the more recent French radical controversialist, Jacques Derrida, whose work seemed germane as our nation faced unprecedented political choppy waters. … Continue reading