An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literatures and Culture

AN ETHICS OF BETRAYAL

AN ETHICS OF BETRAYAL

The Politics of Otherness in Emergent

U.S. Literatures and Culture

CRYSTAL PARIKH

© 2009 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Parikh, Crystal.

An ethics of betrayal: the politics of otherness in emergent U.S. literatures and culture / Crystal Parikh. — 1st ed.

      p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-3042-6 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8232-3043-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. American literature—Minority authors—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Betrayal in literature. 3. Ethics in literature. 4. Literature, Comparative. 5. Race relations in literature. I. Title.

PS153.M56P37     2009

810.9’3529—dc22

2009004718

Printed in the United States of America

11 10 09              5 4 3 2 1

First edition

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

To Ila and Awanish Parikh

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: An Ethics of Betrayal

2 Late Arrivals: An Ethics of Betrayal in Racial and National Formation

3 Accidents and Obligations: Minority Neoconservatives and U. S. Racial Discourse

4 Ethnic America Undercover: The Intellectual and Minority Discourse

5 The Passion: The Betrayals of Elián González and Wen Ho Lee

Epilogue: The Traitors in Our Midst

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My greatest pleasure in completing An Ethics of Betrayal comes in the opportunity I have to thank the many individuals who have seen me through the process of writing it. To begin, I have been deeply indebted to the intellectual challenges and generosity that Sangeeta Ray and Kandice Chuh offered me as a graduate student. They each introduced me to the questions that stirred and haunted me for years afterwards. They have also provided me with models of the responsible, committed scholar I have endeavored to become. Sangeeta once assured me that the pleasure is in the critique, and this perspective has sustained my love of reading for quite some time. Also at the University of Maryland, I was fortunate to have had the guidance of exceptional teachers. I thank Orrin Wang, Martha Nell Smith, Bill Cohen, and Katie King for their particular contributions to my graduate education.

I am grateful for the friends and colleagues—many of whom work in areas quite distinct from my own—who have read, commented on, and helped me develop An Ethics of Betrayal. Vincent Cheng, Elaine Freedgood, and Corrinne Harol have been sources of insight and consolation for me, and they have each contributed to this project in ways that transformed it. I also thank Leslie Bow, Stuart Culver, Lisa Duggan, Adam Green, Philip Brian Harper, Martin Harries, Howard Horwitz, Jane Iwamura, Kimberly Lau, Alice Maurice, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Gary Okihiro, Minh-Ha Pham, Matthew Potolsky, Karen Shimakawa, Maeera Schreiber, Lok Siu, and Kathryn Stockton, for all that they have done to shepherd this book—and myself—along at different stages. I deeply regret that Gillian Brown passed away before I was able to share the outcome of this work with her; she remains for me a touchstone of integrity and compassion.

Although he might no longer remember, it was David Eng who suggested to me, many years ago, the concept of an ethics of betrayal, and that formulation provided me a way to begin sorting through the heterogeneous dimensions of subjectivity, agency, responsibility, and consequences in U.S. ethnic studies that had been troubling me for some time. On the other end of the process, I thank Tina Chen and Daniel Kim, as well as Ricardo Ortíz, for their generous, enthusiastic engagement with what resulted. I have been the beneficiary of Helen Tartar’s unflagging dedication to this project, and I am grateful to her for finding such an ideal home for An Ethics of Betrayal at Fordham University Press. I thank her, Tim Roberts, and Ruth Steinberg for their patience and for their extraordinary efficiency in bringing this book to print. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in Contemporary Literature, 43, no. 2 (2002): 249–84. Parts of Chapter 4 were also previously published as an essay in Racial (Trans)Formations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States, ed. Nicholas De Genova (Duke University Press, 2006). The editorial advice that I received on these pieces was critical to the development of An Ethics of Betrayal.

There have been many gifted students, far too many for me to name, who have inspired and challenged me over the years that I worked on An Ethics of Betrayal. Nevertheless, I owe a special debt that I want to acknowledge to Andre Carrington, Miabi Chatterji, Stephanie Hsu, Rana Jaleel, Sabrina Lechter, and Roy Perez for the camaraderie and many kindnesses they have extended to me. I am also grateful for the institutional support that helped me to complete this book. This includes, at the University of Utah, a mini-grant from the College of Humanities as well as a Faculty Research Grant from the University Research Committee and at New York University, a Goddard Junior Faculty Fellowship and support from the Department of English Stein Fund. I thank the helpful staff members for aiding my research at the University of Miami’s Cuban Collection at the Richter Library and the Asian American Collection at the Ethnic Studies Library of the University of California, Berkeley. I also thank Christopher Sánchez, who provided elegant translations for the numerous articles I located in these archives, as well as his genuine interest this project.

Of course, the years and effort it takes to write a book require a good deal of personal and emotional support, and I am extremely lucky to have generous friends who have provided me with it. Christine Cupaiuolo, Liz Deloughrey, Bernie Heidkamp, Keely McCarthy, Steve Newman, Cathy Romagnolo, and Geoffrey Schramm have given me more than they could possibly know. I am grateful to Nancy, David, and Emily Sobie for their encouragement and good cheer over the years. I am happy to have a chance to welcome Charlie Sobie, the newest of the Sobies, who arrived in time for me to acknowledge him here.

I have come to understand and appreciate anew the unconditional support my family has provided me and how it allows me do the work I do. I thank Sushrut, Ivonne, Kirin, and Arjun Parikh for providing me a place where I can rest and be charmed over and over again. I have dedicated this book to my parents, Awanish and Ila Parikh, whose loyalty to me never wavers and with whom all of my questions begin. I find it nearly impossible to put in words my gratitude and affection for Eric Sobie, who has not only been with me as I wrote and rewrote each page of this book, but who has built a life with me and has been my home for as long as it has mattered. Nikhil Sobie, my own precious third, reminds me each and every day what a gift my responsibility to an-other can be.

AN ETHICS OF BETRAYAL

1 / Introduction: An Ethics of Betrayal

Treachery is more sweetly served by our dearest than by archstrangers we never see.

—CHANG-RAE LEE, NATIVE SPEAKER

In Dante’s Inferno, as is famously known, the ninth circle of hell is reserved for the most loathsome of sinners, those given special trust and love who have proven themselves traitors to God, country, and family. Most impressively, Lucifer gnaws on the heads of Judas, Brutus, and Cassius and weeps as he struggles futilely to free himself from his own entrapment. In Dante’s portrait, betrayal is a transgression in which crime provides its own punishment. Where traitor feeds upon traitors, betrayal exacts its own self-consuming vindication. Lucifer’s flapping wings only produce cold winds, gusts of ignorance and impotence that further ensure he is trapped in the icy hell created by his own rebellion against God. An Ethics of Betrayal asks why and how, in a very different place and time than Dante’s—the United States at the end of the twentieth century—this portrait of iniquitous betrayers remains a viable emblem of the relations between self and others, identity and difference, that undergird the charge of betrayal. This book investigates the structures of knowledge and feeling upon which betrayals depend, through which traitors are forged, and which these acts of betrayal transform.

In particular, An Ethics of Betrayal reads betrayals as performances of social difference in the context of Asian American and Latina/o racial formation and literary and cultural production. By adopting an ethical mode of inquiry to read what I describe below as parables of betrayal, this book asks what the possibilities and limitations of minority discourse are with respect to projects of democracy and social justice for the Other. Betrayals, I contend, can perform a cultural critique of the social conditions by which the minority subject comes into being and of the possibilities for agency and transformation available to that subject once it has come into being. Betrayals channel these questions of being, agency, and change through constitutive, if contingent, relations of responsibility. An Ethics of Betrayal contends that it is only through such relations of responsibility that the emergence of minority subjectivity is actually possible. When the protagonist of Chang-rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker (1995), Henry, surmises in every betrayal dwells a self-betrayal, which brings you that much closer to a reckoning, he casts betrayal as neither a simple deception nor an easily committed or readily justified transgression.¹ Henry’s further observation that treachery is more sweetly served by our dearest attests to how the force of injury and resulting bitterness that inheres in betrayal emanates from a privileged bond of intimacy, identification, or communion. In the exploitation of those closest and most dear, we turn the strength of our ties to others against those others, or they against us. Betrayals are only possible because of the inveterate attachments that the subject foregoes, in an act that evinces those attachments even as it violates them. Such betrayals are traumatic; they undo the binds between the self and those most intimate to the self. They enact ruptures that change one’s life-world, ruptures from which there is no recovery. The reckoning attendant upon the act of betrayal counts the costs, to the self and to others, and a betrayal costs everyone dearly.

And yet, if there is no recovering oneself from the trauma of betrayal, there is nonetheless an after to the act, a new world of meanings and relations, brought into existence by betrayal, into which the subject is thrown. Thus, An Ethics of Betrayal asks whether traitors might offer a crucial and unique perspective on the complexities of belonging, assimilation, and exclusion in U.S. culture and politics. I argue that democratic politics and social justice cannot be conceived as, in Richard Rorty’s words, a larger loyalty, a broadening of the sphere of loyalty in order to build a community of trust between ourselves and others, as benign as such an imperative might seem.² Because such an expansiveness recognizes the other only in its potential identification with, and assimilation to, the self, a larger loyalty obviates our obligation to the other as Other, an obligation that precedes the self and makes the self possible. In adjoining ethical inquiry to a project of social justice, I would like to illuminate the conditions of betrayal inherent in the limited vocabularies, conflicted and contingent subject positions, crossed meanings, and heterogeneous intentions that prevent the accomplishment of justice and democracy in a full or timely manner. As I describe below, an ethical perspective understands that the futurity, l’avenir, of justice and democracy is founded in the subject’s responsibility and responsiveness to the Other, involving all sorts of dissatisfaction, uncertainty, and even sacrifice, if the subject is to remain open to the possibilities of being.

An ethical betrayal, as I detail below, comprises the call of the Other and the reformulation of self-present identity that this call performs. The ethics of betrayal that concerns me in particular is the movement of alterity in American racial and national formation that I will examine in the following chapters. In these instances, betrayal is not a simple celebration of transgression, although transgression necessarily inheres in betrayals. Nor is it the institution of larger, more-encompassing, or even more tolerant communities of being (e.g., in this book, a rubric more inclusive than Asian American, Latino, people of color, or American). Instead, justice and democracy proceed through the often traumatic and unanticipated ruptures that open, in Jacques Derrida’s words, the avenues for the arrival of the Other. Accordingly, if the subject’s responsibility to the Other necessitates a sacrifice of the self, a sacrifice that amounts to a betrayal of the self, this does not mean in turn that all betrayals can be conceived as ethical in and of themselves. Rather, I emphasize ethical critique as a mode for following the minority subject as it wrestles with the implications of its own existence, that is, with a subjectivity that is at once ex-centric to the dominant political and epistemological regimes of U.S. culture and society but also authorized in certain limited ways to speak by and to that culture and society. In this book, I will demonstrate that, as the minority subject confronts (and is confronted with) the conditions of its own existence, it engages in acts of betrayal. This subject continually and necessarily returns to founding moments, reckoning with the literal and symbolic violence at the heart of its own being, and it risks the self in order to call forth the others who haunt that being.³ Thus, the ethico-politics I explore recognizes that the act of betrayal can simultaneously create and unmake selves in its orientations toward and obligations to the Other.

This is also a mode for reading cultural moments, social formations, and literary texts that, as part and parcel of the ethico-political project, faces up to the failures, responsibilities, and undoings of minority discourse. These failures, I should clarify, are not due to some shortcomings or flaws in individual visions that minority activists and agents propound. Rather, they are inevitable, structural incommensurabilities that plague social formations, juridico-political deliberation and agency, and cultural identities. This book draws extensively upon work in ethnic studies and critical race theory, along with feminist, queer, post-Marxist, and psychoanalytic theories. The analytical framework generated by this scholarship has proven crucial to understanding, in the site-specific context of the United States, how the ideal American is in part wrought through the deployment of racial and gender ideologies. Yet, a pitfall of this line of inquiry has too often been a seemingly facile celebration of transgression qua transgression. In such cases, critics have sometimes valued, above all else, any violation of normative subjectivity, without always considering the broader consequences and ongoing questions of responsibility that transgression and resistance entail. For example, for what injuries, to themselves and to others, can the minority subject be held accountable? By what means does one account for this responsibility? My analysis of betrayal in this book thus adds to extant criticism by foregrounding an ethical account of transgressions, especially as they reconfigure the cultural politics of minority discourse. An Ethics of Betrayal contends that we must account for the values that are established or undermined when antagonistic, or even traitorous, agents contest social identities and formations.

The Ethical Account

In reading betrayal in relation to an ethico-political project, I am concerned with an ethics that goes beyond the conventional notion of moral imperatives to which the normative subject is beholden. Instead, I adopt a post-Enlightenment conception of ethics as, in Emmanuel Levinas’s terms, a first philosophy. Ethical inquiry of this type positions ethics as a pre-ontological and irrecusable obligation to the Other, to which we are subject. For Levinas, responsibility precedes the notion of contracted commitments and ideas of community and arises from an unrepresentable immemorial past.⁴ This anachronistic and anarchic responsibility summons the subject from nowhere into a present time, bearing with it the system of an immemorial freedom that is even older than being, or decisions, or deeds.⁵ Levinas emphasizes a plurality of existence that otherness signifies, a plurality that is not a multiplicity of existents nor pure absence, but rather the stripping of the subject of its subjectivity, a stripping that participates in existence without existents.⁶ Traditional philosophy, in its adherence to the very existing of the [singular] existent, guards a relation of the self to itself. In contrast, Levinas contends that thinking the Being (or the Heideggerian Dasein) of being precipitates darkness, the impersonal and anonymous existence of there is, as its own residue. The fundamental presence of absence against which existents or beings are forged or (again in Heideggerian terms) thrown issues forth from our very attempt to grasp being as Being.⁷ Death, that which is insurmountable, inexorable, and fundamentally incomprehensible, delimits ontology as a first philosophy, because death always exhausts possible modes of meaning for thought.⁸ Levinas replaces Dasein with the self’s relationship to the Other by suggesting that death is not ultimately a test of authenticity or supreme virility, as in Heidegger’s being-toward-death, but something absolutely unknowable and always in the future that nevertheless confronts subjectivity, marking the limit of the subject’s virility. As Levinas contends, death stands not merely as the subject’s not-being (present), but rather figures a relationship with the impossibility of nothingness and, accordingly, with mystery and with the future.⁹ Located eternally in the future, death deserts every present, not because we evade death, but because death itself is ungraspable. If the now, the present of self-presence, designates the mastery of the subject over (its own) existence, death in its futurity always ascribes the end of the subject’s virility and heroism and proves the limits of idealism.¹⁰

Here, the assumption of being occurs only in and through the demand that the otherness of existence makes upon the subject, prior to which no self exists as self-presence. The possibility of the subject rests, in this account, in passivity, in its subjection to the Other.¹¹ The openness to that demand, the responsiveness to and responsibility for the Other, are the irrevocable conditions of the self assuming itself, so that, as Judith Butler observes with respect to the Levinasian subject, To claim the self-identity of the subject is thus an act of irresponsibility, an effort to close off one’s fundamental vulnerability to the Other, the primary accusation that the Other bears.¹² The Other exists not as an alter ego but is in and of itself the condition of alterity, and being accedes to an inter-subjectivity that is profoundly asymmetrical. Furthermore, the subject cannot return itself to the generalized existence of the Other, but it must also respond for one’s right to be, because Being forecloses the Other’s existence: My being-in-the-world or my ‘place in the sun,’ my being at home, have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved, or driven out into a third world? Are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing?¹³ Being, Levinas argues, entails a violence for which the subject is always responsible, despite its intentional innocence.¹⁴ The Other, as a neighbor to self-presence, immanently obligates the subject to respond to that Other. The subject is enjoined to responsiveness and responsibility in its very right to be.

An ideal(ized) subject justifies itself by declaring the unconditional self-identity of its presence. In contrast, ethics as a first philosophy undermines the ontological priority of the subject with the overriding question it poses, that of whether "my being is justified, if the Da of my Dasein is not already the usurpation of somebody else’s place."¹⁵ Responsibility provides the answer to this crisis of selfhood, but it is not a reply that consoles the subject. Rather, it returns the subject to its capacity to fear injustice more than death, to prefer to suffer than to commit injustice, and to prefer that which justifies being over that which assures it.¹⁶ In order to delineate a methodology of ethical inquiry and to describe an ethico-political project for minority discourse, we might say that this concern with the modes of self-justification of being, and the undoing of it, distinguishes the ethical turn in critical theory, most thoroughly expounded by Derrida in a number of his later writings; I draw in particular from The Gift of Death, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Force of Law, Specters of Marx, and Rogues.

An Ethico-Political Project

The post-Enlightenment ethics of Levinas and Derrida characterizes a radically subjective interdependence between self and Other, an interdependence that precedes subjectivity and makes subjectivity possible. Responsibility toward the Other is therefore not taken by the self, but rather conditions the subject’s very coming into being, a being that, as I have described above, must always attempt to justify itself to the Other.¹⁷ However, in a move that complicates the relationship of the highest passion between the self and the Other, Derrida recasts the assertion of the singularity of Otherness that Levinas ascribes to God—the infinite Other—as an infinitude of alterity. In his formulation of every other as every other (tout autre comme tout autre), Derrida radicalizes the theological ground on which post-Enlightenment ethical critique emerges, by contending that duty to God (i.e., the single Other) is never sufficient, since every other other demands absolute responsibility from the subject.

Here, Derrida blurs not only the line between religion and ethics, but, even more so, the line between these orders of inquiry, based as they are on the duty to the singular Other, and those of law and politics, where adjudication between responsibilities to others ensues. In conceiving of every other as every other, Derrida designates the unsustainability of the ethical relation as a dyadic responsibility between the subject and Other by evoking the third. As he writes in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, the interposition of the third inaugurates the orders of justice in politics and law.¹⁸ Because the third arrives without waiting, it necessarily shuttles the subject into the realm of visibility, representability, thematization, and decidability (as in before a court of justice), necessarily into, that is, places ethics should exceed.¹⁹ Because this third is always already an other other that accompanies the Other’s call to the subject, Derrida finds that questions of justice and politics attend Levinas’s first philosophy of ethics at its very conception. Derrida describes this thirdness as creating a necessary double bind in the ethical relation. Because of the absolute responsibility that the ethical relationship demands, pure and immediate ethics suggests a hypothesis of a violence, where the distinctions between good and evil, love and hate, giving and taking, the desire to live and the death drive, the hospitable welcome and the egoistic or narcissistic closing up within oneself become impossible to discern.²⁰ The third, Derrida suggests, protects against the vertigo of ethical violence by interrupting the absolute unicity of the self and Other. By mediating between demands of others, the juridico-political function called forth by the third breaks into the singular and exceptional ethical relation, bringing it into relation with all the other singular and exceptional relations to which the subject is responsible. Of course, this mediating role violates in its turn, at least potentially, the purity of the ethical desire devoted to the unique.²¹ The terrible ineluctability of a double constraint results from the absoluteness of the ethical bond and the necessary violation of that absolute bond by the necessary attention to other others.²²

The third, the other other, then configures the relationship between the ethical and the juridico-political not as a teleological progression, but rather, I suggest, as projects of one another. In the projection of ethical responsibility onto legal and political orders, and vice versa, the dyadic encounter of the ethical relation forms the constitutive grounds and remains embedded in the multiple and competing claims of the political sphere. As such, juridico-political deliberation always reverts to the ethical, and the subject’s asymmetrical relation of responsibility to the Other, such that the ethical always ruptures the political, rendering it continually unfinished and open.²³ Yet, if the ethical indexes the nontotalized and non-transcendent relation between the subject and the Other, then politics rewrites that relationship to all the others, to the plurality of beings that make up the community.²⁴ For Derrida, justice and democracy are to come, in the sense that they are always deferred onto the Otherness of the future. That which is to come impinges on self-presence. The future to come, paradoxically, does not wait and is always arriving, and its unknowability provides the time of the possibility of justice. In Specters of Marx, Derrida writes of this time, the time of the other, as occurring when ‘things are going badly’ and time [is] out of joint.²⁵ In contrast to Heidegger’s sense that time-out-of-joint requires, as part of making right, a proper jointure that restores the fullness and self-sameness of presence in the present, Derrida argues that to do or render justice occurs in the moment of disjunction: But with the other, is not this disjuncture, this dis-adjustment of the ‘it’s going badly’ necessary for the good or at least the just, to be announced? Is not dis-juncture the very possibility of the other?²⁶

Justice to come thus proves not only a juridical or political concept, but "opens up for l’avenir the transformation, the recasting or refounding of law and politics."²⁷ The possibility for this transformative refounding of law and politics bespeaks the imperative to enter juridical and political battles, so as to prevent the idea of justice from being appropriated by the most perverse calculation.²⁸ The idea of infinite justice continually "requires us to calculate, but at the same time, opens up those calculations to uncertainty. Thus, each advance in law or politics requires also that we reinterpret the very foundations of law such as they had previously been calculated or delimited."²⁹ This return, made by and in the name of justice and democracy, which reinterprets the foundations of law, order, and governance, also provides, in Specters of Marx and in Rogues, the democratic politics of deconstruction. The method that this ethico-juridical orientation poses is never a simple reparation to an original state of being, but rather a rearticulation of the very structure or conditions of the disjointure.³⁰ Deconstructive justice illuminates that which cannot be gathered into the One as traces of both, that which does not happen and of "what would happen otherwise."³¹ To seek out the Other, that which remains unintelligible and unintegrated to laws, norms, and representations, is to seek out the ethical possibility of justice to come and democracy to come.

Democracy to come then asks about the possibility of living together, in such a way that undermines the positioning of the self-same as sovereign; it asks, Must one live together only with one’s like, with someone semblable?³² Derrida contrasts the structure of the One, around which forms of actual democracy are realized and recognized, with democracy to come, the truth of the other, heterogeneity, the heteronomic and the dissymmetric, disseminal multiplicity, the anonymous ‘anyone,’ the ‘no matter who,’ the indeterminate ‘each one.’³³ In the character of freedom that has become the basis for imagining and defining democracy (even beyond the more literal, etymological significance of the word to mean the rule of the people), he discerns the suicidal kernel at the heart of the concept of democracy. Taken in its most radical form, the freedom of democracy includes the freedom for the enemies of democracy to suspend or destroy democracy through the very channels of democracy itself, namely, those of egalitarian and majoritarian consensus.³⁴ Democracy’s elemental freedom, which sustains its unpredictability and openness, means that democracy is what it is only in the différance by which it defers itself and differs from itself.³⁵ Conceptually at least, democracy carries within itself the promise or threat that the presence of an axial or univocal meaning might destroy or get carried away with itself.³⁶

At the same time, the to come or futurity of democracy does not authorize a deferral of democratic politics; rather, Derrida contends, the injunction of democracy carries with it an urgency that cannot be postponed.³⁷ For this reason, he argues that thinking of différance and thinking the political, together, can amount to a democratic politics.³⁸ Where freedom entreats an openness to the most radical of possibilities, to the horizon of possibility (and not as power, mastery, or force, or even as a faculty, as a possibility of the ‘I can’ but rather as incommensurability), the possibility of democracy to come confounds the idea of democracy as the power of the people or the rule of the majority.³⁹ This critical advance toward the horizon of the idea of democracy, where the truth of the Other cannot be assimilated to the One, provides us with an opportunity to "know better what ‘democracy’ will have been able to signify, what it ought, in truth, to have meant.⁴⁰ Democracy to come, like justice to come," never indicates simply and only that ideal forms of democracy and justice do not and will never actually exist, but neither that one day they will be fully self-present. Rather, while these expressions do emphasize the ongoing deferral of democracy and justice in the material and historical practices of politics and law, they also yoke together the necessary survival of desire for democracy and justice and the obligation that forces the continual reemergence of democracy and justice in the conditional grammar of an if there were.⁴¹

Derrida (reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau on democracy) contends that it is the gap between the impossible presence of democracy and justice and their flawed, finite actual forms (forms that exist nonetheless in the order of the possible) that provides the avenue of the Other’s arrival. The to come sustains the unpredictable but assured movement of democracy and justice in the world.⁴² It is precisely the urgency and imminence of (the demand for) democracy and justice that interrupts the idealization of these concepts as impossible: This im-possible . . . is what is most undeniably real. And sensible. Like the other. Like the irreducible and nonappropriable différance of the other.⁴³ Thus, democracy to come and justice to come have what Derrida calls the structure of the promise, the memory of that which carries the future, the to-come, here and now.⁴⁴ While these expressions announce nothing about the present or even about the certainty of a future present, in a constative sense, they continually and performatively enact conviction as to the possibilities of justice and democracy to come.

An Ethics of Betrayal

The non-assimilative encounter between self and