You are on page 1of 11

Philosophy

& Social Criticism


http://psc.sagepub.com/

Sovereignty renounced: Autoimmunizing and democratizing Europe


Meyda Yegenoglu
Philosophy Social Criticism 2014 40: 459 originally published online 12 February 2014
DOI: 10.1177/0191453714522477
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://psc.sagepub.com/content/40/4-5/459

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Philosophy & Social Criticism can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://psc.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

>> Version of Record - Apr 29, 2014


OnlineFirst Version of Record - Feb 12, 2014
What is This?

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on September 6, 2014

Article

Sovereignty renounced:
Autoimmunizing and
democratizing Europe

Philosophy and Social Criticism


2014, Vol. 40(4-5) 459468
The Author(s) 2014
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0191453714522477
psc.sagepub.com

Meyda Yegenoglu

_
_
Istanbul
Bilgi University, Istanbul,
Turkey

Abstract
This article suggests that the historical figuration of Islam as well as the discourse of secularization
has played a fundamental role in the constitution of Islams externality to Europe. The historical
figuration of Islam as Europes enemy is haunting Europe. The European secularist anxiety today,
which insists on the separation between the domains of the private and the public needs to be
understood against the backdrop of this history. If Islams inability to separate the religious and
the political was historically the dominant motif through which Islam was registered as the archenemy, the post-secular, post-Enlightenment period registers Islam as an enemy through a cultural
gesture. Derridas understanding of spectrality and the concept autoimmunity are deployed to
suggest that Islam as a specter haunting Europe undermines the sovereign constitution of a selfidentical Europe, but this haunting needs to be seen as Europes chance for a self-destructive conservation of Europe. European identity has to be rethought and renewed differently and this rethinking
requires that we attend to the present as well as the past and future of Europe, which requires the
opening of Europe to otherness and responsibility to the other. Such a rethinking of Europes history necessitates thinking about colonialism as well the living embodiments of this colonial legacy
today, which are the immigrants.

Keywords
Autoimmunity, colonialism, Europe, haunting, Islam, post-coloniality

The invention and identification of Islam as the enemy of Europe is a prolific process.
Certain features of the enemy disappear and others receive prominence in making the
enemy identifiable and familiar and these are contingent upon the predominant way in

Corresponding author:
Meyda Yegenoglu, _Istanbul Bilgi University, Santral _Istanbul, E-2, 205 _Istanbul, 34360, Turkey.
Email: meyda.yegenoglu@bilgi.edu.tr
_
A version of this article was presented at the Reset-Dialogues Istanbul
Seminars 2013 (The Sources of Political
_
Legitimacy. From the Erosion of the Nation-State to the Rise of Political Islam) that took place at Istanbul
Bilgi
University from May 1622, 2013.

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on September 6, 2014

460

Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(4-5)

which Europe identifies itself in different periods and contexts. The making of the internal enemy takes place through a multitude of social and legal as well as spatial arrangements. Ghassan Hage notes that when racist practices are also conceived as nationalist
practices, we can see how they always assume a national space and an image of the nationalist himself or herself as master or mistress of this national space. Ones imagination of
oneself as the owner of that space is always about claiming an exclusive power to manage and regulate that space.1 The imagination of a sense of European unity and the land
that belongs to European citizens is not independent of the institution of imaginary borders
and frontiers of Europe, which simultaneously creates the stranger or the internal enemy.
What is now first and foremost foreign to European culture is the non-secular ways of life
lived on European soil, exemplified by Muslim immigrant culture.

The discourse of secularism


The resolute secularism that one witnesses in the European public sphere is about the
creation of the division between the secular and the religious. As Talal Asads work
demonstrates, secularism is first and foremost about the creation of a division between
the secular and the religious.2 By creating a bifurcation between the secular and the religious, secularism manages to distance the religious from the domain of the public and
pushes it to the domain of individual faith. Historically, Europes imagining of itself
as secular simultaneously marks the moment of the discovery of the religiousness of the
East. In Gil Anidjars terms, secularism, that is, the internal transformation of Christianity or the process by which western Christianity renames and reinstitutes itself as secular,3 is the moment that coincides with the granting of religiosity to Islam. With
secularism achieving a sacrosanct status, Islam started signifying the status of a regressive, belated and therefore dangerous religiosity. Islams religiousness was made possible with the sacralization of European secularism.
In comprehending regions other than the Christian world, the discourse of secularization and its comparativist posture became the dominant framework. All parts of the
world that did not belong to the modern West were presumed to be within the grip of
religion.4 Islam is deemed as the quintessential example of religiosity and hence as the
exemplary enemy of secularism. How does Islam stand as enemy or menace to the integrity of European identity so effortlessly?

The mutation of an external enemy into an internal enemy


We cannot ignore the role of the peculiar doubling between history and the present, and the
interplay between the external and internal enemy in structuring the specific nature of
todays European apartheid.5 This enemy who used to camp on the margins of Europe (the
Ottoman threat) has now incarnated itself in the immigrant Muslim who is claiming to be
recognized as a naturalized component of the political and social system of Europe. It is
this incarnation and the demand to be naturalized that play a central role in the transposition of Islam from being an external enemy of European culture into an enemy within.
The enemy is thus both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. What is important in
its unfamiliar familiarity is the identification of the enemy as enemy. Islam is this enemy

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on September 6, 2014

Yegenoglu

461

that is still identifiable despite its transformation and mutation. It is this figuration of
Islam that is now haunting Europe. Islam functions as an adversary which is recognized
as familiar yet different against whom Europe has become Europe. The enemys mobile
and multiple character is what makes for the interchangeability of or transposition of the
ones who camped on Europes borders into the ones who now leaked through its borders.
A unique spectralization is at work in this metonymic substitution between the Mohammedans of the 18th century and the Muslim immigrants of the 21st century. The constitution of the European subject as sovereign is certainly not independent of this history.

Culturalization of religion
The apparently secular but theologico-political tradition6 states that the separation
between religion and politics is foreign to Islam. It is Islams inability to keep the realms
of politics and religion distinct that makes it the enemy of the political. If Islams inability to separate the religious and the political was earlier the dominant motif through
which Islam was registered as the enemy, the post-secular, post-Enlightenment Europe
registers Islam as an enemy through a gesture that I call cultural. The enemy of secular
Europe that Islam represents now appears as something more than religion: Islam is now
religions becoming cultural. While it was the lack of the theological that made Islam an
external enemy, it is the excess of the religiosity of Islam, that is, its becoming a marker
of cultural identity that now contributes to the making of Islam as the internal enemy of
Europe. Islams excess religiosity can be traced in its becoming culture, becoming a way
of life, shaping and conditioning the Muslim immigrants way of being in the European
public. Islam, through which the displaced immigrants of Europe assert their cultural
belonging, identity and way of life, is regarded as the name of fundamentalization of
an individual faith by being misplaced in the domain of the public.

Islam: The ghost that is haunting Europe


The external enemys metamorphosis into an internal enemy results in Islams becoming
the ghost haunting Europe. Following Derridas understanding of hauntology,7 it is possible to suggest that Islam, the political enemy, the enemy of the political, now incarnated as the religious/cultural enemy, is neither dead nor alive but falters between life
and death, presence and absence, external and internal. Islams visible and invisible
wavering in the heart of European identity implies a past that is still alive. Its survival
can be traced within the spectral presence, embodied in the Muslim immigrant.
However, the threat posed by the alien or the recognizable yet unrecognizable Otherness can be viewed not simply as a threat but a chance for the survival of a nonsovereign identity called Europe. This paradoxical nature of the simultaneity of
threat-and-survival can be explained through what Derrida calls autoimmunity. Autoimmunity is the specters haunting the self. Thus the specter is part of identity, non-life is
part of life, and death is part of the living auto identity. Autoimmunity is not simply a
threat but also an opportunity for any living organism, as without autoimmunity it would
eject the other element that is essential for a community, nation-state, individual, self, or
body to continue to survive and be.8

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on September 6, 2014

462

Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(4-5)

The anxiety provoked is due to the historically conditioned repression of a memory


regarding Islam as an inassimilable alterity or difference within Europe. This is also
about Europes inability forever to be an autonomous sovereign entity. The unassimilable and irreducible alterity necessarily opens up the community called Europe to something that exceeds it and thereby threatens its sovereignty. Indeed, the gesture to posit a
European identity, entails inescapably the cultivation of what Derrida calls autoimmunity, which he regards as something suicidal or sacrificial. Autoimmunology is the term
Derrida develops to think the identity of the nation-state, body, national spaces, or political institutions as well as individuals in self-identical terms. With this term Derrida
enables us to grasp how any identifiable sovereign entity is being perpetually threatened
or undermined. The term autoimmunity, the metaphor derived from biology, refers to
those elements that turn something against its own defense. This renunciation of sovereignty implied in the concept of autoimmunity, in fact, evokes the vulnerability, dependence and instability of every self or sovereign identity. Thus the very gesture of the
assertion of a sovereign community called Europe inescapably carries within itself something other than itself, an otherness within, an otherness that in turn keeps the community alive.9
Jacques Derrida subjects the notions of selfhood and autonomous subject to a deconstructive reading as part of his analysis of the onto-theological concepts that lie at the
heart of sovereignty, be it in the form of self or ipseity, nation-state, or the God. Taking
my inspiration from Derridas understanding of sovereignty and counter-sovereignty,
autoimmunization and unconditionality, I want to explicate the key mechanisms that
operate at the heart of the sovereign European subjects power to constitute the fiction
or phantasm of an autonomous self by expelling migrancy from its so-called own space
and how this fiction is inevitably interrupted by the immigrants presence in the European metropolitan space.
The sovereign constitution of the subject, this self-identical and autonomous subject,
is a phantasm. The presumption about the coincidence of the self with itself is a phantasm of auto-affection and is a metaphysical posing. While metaphysically this phantasm
does not exist, it poses itself to be in existence. In other words, sovereignty is about the
staging of a certain power. However, the posited sovereign self, despite the phantasm of
sovereignty and the staging of omnipotence, is indeed powerless as it is always and
inevitably open to counter-sovereignties. As sovereignty, the self-identical and autoaffectionate self expands itself, justifies and maintains itself, it opens itself up to
counter-sovereignties. Thus the very being of a self-identical subject or the unity of
self-identity is inevitably compromised and undermined. This is mainly because the
forces that threaten, compromise, or undermine sovereignty exude or emanate from
sovereignty itself. This process of production of counter-sovereignties is unavoidably
at work in the heart of every sovereign self-identity. Autoimmunization is the name of
this radical contamination. Thus sovereignty is at once an ultimate power and yet the
source of its vulnerability is built into itself.
Therefore, autoimmunization is about taking away the life of the self. While the phantasm of sovereignty directs our attention to sameness, illusion, self-generation and identity, the second set of terms alludes to the intrinsic possibility of the repetition, doubling
and iteration of the former.10 Thus, spectrality refers to a deconstruction of an alleged

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on September 6, 2014

Yegenoglu

463

origin and phantasm of purity and self-presence, self-possession or self-coincidence or the


coincidence of the self with itself. The deconstructive notion of haunting is an attempt to
disrupt the priority of presence with the figure of the ghost. In other words, the figure of the
ghost is an attempt to capture a life-form that is neither absent nor present, neither dead nor
alive. It refers to an irreversible intrusion of otherness into our world.
I suggest that the sovereign constitution of the European subject is secured in relation
to its others and yet at the same the European subjects sovereignty is inevitably compromised. This I call autoimmune Europeanization. While extending and expanding its
sovereignty, Europe is becoming more vulnerable as a sovereign community, for this
is a process that entails its opening itself up to the counter-sovereignty of the other, thus
compromising Europe, perhaps undoing itself by autoimmunizing its sovereignty as Europe. Hence autoimmunity becomes the condition of thinking a democratic Europe
because whenever the sovereign tries to make its power an all-expansive one and extend
its scope, it inevitably opens itself to the counter-sovereignties and thus compromises
and autoimmunizes itself. Its every positing of itself implies its own renunciation and
undermining of its sovereignty. Therefore, Europe can exist only in that act that is
shared, compromised and partitioned by the participation of something other than itself.
Counter-sovereignty is thus built into the very sovereign identity of Europe.
So, autoimmunity is not the name of a malevolence or an ailment. By making possible
the exposure to the otherness of the other, by enabling the opening and exposure of the
auto to otherness, it enables the return of the self to itself, thus interrupting the stability of
an enduring self of the auto. In this respect, Islam has to be regarded as Europes chance
to open itself to something beyond itself, to maintain a relation to something that is
beyond the European self. Islam, embodied in its Muslim immigrants, is now Europes
chance for a self-destructive conservation of Europe, for a relation to something beyond
the European self. Islam is indeed Europes chance or opportunity for a democratic iteration of Europe.

Towards a democratic Europe


However, one of the tests that awaits Europe is whether it will be capable of articulating
a new but democratic identity for Europe, or, to put it differently, does Europe want to
continue to be European by way of exclusion or will it have the audacity to develop a
new Europe by being responsible to the difference of the Other?
It is the possibility of the experience of the otherness within and the responsibility to
the other, which can pave the way for the birth of a different Europe. This new Europe
will emerge precisely in not closing itself off from its own identity but by advancing
itself towards what it is not. The gesture towards a new Europe entails engaging with the
past so as to be able to experience an opening onto the future. The holding onto and
adhering to the principles of Enlightenment have to be accompanied with an expedition
into Otherness. Such a redoing of Europe demands both being rooted in a tradition, history and language while also gesturing toward a future that has to remain heterogeneous
to that particular tradition, history, or language. The Europe that has yet-to-come is
not simply about a Europe to be instituted in the future, but more importantly it is about
a Europe that has to remain heterogeneous to what is called Europe today.11 The new

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on September 6, 2014

464

Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(4-5)

figure of Europe does not entail relinquishing or simply disowning the memory of Europe, its tradition, or history; but reconfiguring them so as to exceed any particular European and Eurocentric proclivity of Europe.12
The new Europe that needs to be envisaged invites us to be responsible to the memory
of the Enlightenment while being aware and critical of the colonialist and nationalist
bend of that history. The European experience cannot be embraced without critical
appraisal, as that experience also involves genocide, racism, colonialism, nationalism
and totalitarianism. A critical and responsible relation to the European past is indispensable for a future Europe, for a Europe to come. Derridas suggestion is an invitation to
interrogate, and not simply become heir to Europes past and tradition. By inviting the
development of this critical relation to the European past, Derrida encourages us to
rethink what it means to inherit and what it means to be responsible to the memory of
Europe. Derridas argument is not so much about a developed thesis about Europe but
a final call for it, analogous to messianity without messianism. The critical relation
to the European past involves a certain responsibility to the discourses that we inherit.
For Derrida, one is an heir even before one explicitly assumes or rejects a particular
inheritance and therefore we are what we inherit.13
However, inheritance, for Derrida, is not about being simply faithful to tradition or
developing a nostalgic relation to what we inherit. In that sense, to inherit does not entail
a simple affirmation of what is bequeathed to us. Inheritance also requires that we abide
by the responsibility that comes with it, which includes changing what has been passed
onto us. For this reason, responsibility towards what we inherit involves a task. That is,
responsibility to the tradition and its deconstruction go hand in hand as responsibility
calls not only for the affirmation of what has been inherited but also for the radical transformation of the heritage.14 Hence, inheritance comes with a double command: it
requires that we be loyal to and affirm what we inherit, but at the same time transform
and deconstruct it by not letting that tradition close itself off and thereby allow that tradition to open itself to its heterogeneity, open it up to a relation with alterity.
The double command that comes with responsibility attests to the aporetic nature of
inheritance. Responsibility in the case of Europe, then, involves both claiming the tradition of European discourses, in particular the tradition of Enlightenment, but also transforming that tradition by exposing it to conflicting demands and traditions. This
inexorably implies inventing new ways of imagining Europe. This means not letting one
tradition overrule, overthrow and surpass the other. It is this radical openness and unconditional hospitality to non-European Otherness, this negotiation with more than one
tradition, that characterizes European responsibility. The unconditional receptivity to
non-European demands and injunctions goes hand in hand with being responsible to
what one inherits. For Europe to be able to offer another mondialization, it has to remain
heterogeneous to itself. This requires that Europe does not relinquish or simply disown
its memory, but takes responsibility for that heritage of history.
When one discusses the history of Europe and its memory, one inevitably has to
plunge into the grubby water of the history of colonialism and its convoluted relationship
with racism. That is to say, one has to attend to the ways in which colonialism is remembered and/or forgotten, and how the inventory of racism is peculiarly disavowed as part
of that history. European memory or heritage needs to be discussed in relation to

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on September 6, 2014

Yegenoglu

465

colonialism and racism, both at the individual and the collective level. This heritage and
the amnesia that surround colonial history have important implications for the ways in
which race and racism are engaged with in contemporary Europe. The denial of colonialism as part of European history leads Theo Goldberg to suggest how racial denial,
despite the prevalence of racism and racially marked relations, is transformed into a
non-issue in Europe.15 By reducing racism to the Holocaust and making it the only reference point for race and racism, Europe managed the evaporation of the European colonial history and its legacy. Racism and race are recognized as operating only in relation
to Europes internal others. Such a gesture manages the denial of colonialism and racism
as being part of Europe. Colonialism is thought to happen in other lands, in places other
than Europe. Colonialism, in this view, has had little or no effect in the making of Europe itself or of European nation-states. And its targets were solely the indigenous far
removed from European soil.16 Despite this invested and desired historical amnesia,
however, there remains what Goldberg calls the deafening silence in Europe concerning
its colonial legacy.17 Race and racism, as they pertain to colonialism, refuse to remain
silent. To quote Goldberg again:
European racial denial concerns wanting race in the wake of WWI categorically to implode,
to erase itself. This is a wishful evaporation never quite enacted, never satisfied. A desire at
once frustrated and displaced, racist implications always lingering and diffuse, silenced but
assumed, always already returned and haunting, buried and alive. Race in Europe has left
odourless traces but ones suffocating in the wake of their at once denied resinous stench.18

This denied impervious, indiscernible but strong stench emanating from history is
made visible, pervasive and present by the 20 million Muslims who inhabit European
geography. Their post-colonial presence as the legacy of former colonizing practices
is reminding Europeans powerfully that race and racialized colonialism are now haunting Europe. The legacy of the colonial mark of the past upon todays post-colonial Europe is imprinted through the presence of migrants. The day-to-day encounter with the
living embodiments of this history effectively makes it impossible to deny the presence
of such legacy. The denial, which compartmentalizes colonialism in Europes history as
a superfluous episode, is practically made inconsequential by the undeniable presence of
ex-colonial populations, claiming and sharing European space.
However, the manner in which the questions of colonial inheritance are dealt with has
great significance in terms of its ethico-political implications. Responsibility to the colonial heritage calls for a new relationship with the neo-colonial present. Colonialism, as it
was lived then, and through its continuing legacies in the present, is the means by which
we need to establish a different relationship to present-day Europe; it requires a responsible awareness of its genocidal and colonialist crimes.19 It is such a critical and responsible relation to the European past, memory and heritage, not a simple inheritance of that
past or a simple evasion of that past with a guilty liberal conscience, which can open up
the condition of the possibility of a Europe-to-come, to use Derridas phrase. Such a
responsible relation to the colonial past and heritage goes hand in hand with its deconstruction. Placing todays post-colonial immigrants at the very center of our analysis of
Europe implies that the colonial past did not come to a clean end and that we do not have

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on September 6, 2014

466

Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(4-5)

an uncontaminated present. The colonial past is not simply to be found in the dusty
archives, but is here and haunts us in the suburban spaces of postmodern European
metropolises, in the multifarious forms of contemporary racism, in the collective fantasies and borders set between the comfort zones of middle-class domestic interiors and the
shabby shanty towns of second- and third-generation post-colonial migrants. Colonialism thus refuses to disappear and fade away in the abyss of the past. Its alwaysalready present nature can be seen in the way colonialism is re-experienced and
re-remembered. Hence contrary to the European collective desire for the story of the
colonial past to be closed off and consigned to another chapter in history, thus deflecting
and denying it as an essential part of its national history, the new Europe demands that
we establish a critical relation with this past and underline the intertwined nature of the
colonial past and todays racism. This would be an attempt not to repeat the dogmas of
the previous constitution of European identity in sovereign terms, but to transform that
tradition by exposing it to conflicting demands, injunctions and traditions. This is a gesture that yields Europe to heterogeneity and opens it to a future. By opening European
history to otherness and difference, our critical appraisal can contribute to the interruption of a unified and sovereign sense of Europe based upon the phantasm of an omnipotent, self-sufficient and self-identical European subject. The post-colonial immigrant is
the specter that haunts Europe. Rather than being a repressed or hidden secret whose
knowledge has to be deciphered, the undaunted presence of the past by way of the excolonial immigrants indicates a productive ethical opening in the phantasm of purity
of Europe and a deconstructive gesture toward an opening of European sovereignty to
counter-sovereignties. The post-colonial migrants distressing presence in the midst of
peaceful European life is in fact a reminder that the suppressed and forgotten colonial
violence is indeed something very familiar.
Growing enthusiasm about the concept of hospitality should be seen an attempt to
understand the nature of the encounter between immigrants, exiles, foreigners, refuges,
and other displaced populations. Guest is the predominant motif through which these
groups are portrayed which also led to an exploration of a series of other terms related
to it, such what does to welcome and receive mean, conditional and unconditional hospitality, hostility, home, ownership and dispossession.
For hospitality to be hospitable and capable of welcoming the other, it needs to be
extended without the imposition of any condition to a guest who is unexpected or unanticipated. For hospitality to be a hospitable welcome, it should be hospitality of visitation
not of invitation.20 In that sense, hospitality needs to be extended without being conditioned. Such an unconditional welcoming or hospitality raises a number of important
issues that pertain to home, ownership and proprietorship and the other concerns of subjectivity, ipseity and sovereignty. Uunconditional hospitality can exist only as unconstrained and hence entails a restructuring of the relationship between the host and
master of the house and the guest. Such a restructuring implies a deconstruction of the
at-homeness of the sovereignty of the host. This requires that the ownership and control
of the house are relinquished and that the home becomes hospitable to its owner. This
would turn the host (owner) into a guest received or welcomed in his own home and thus
transform owner into tenant. When there is unconditional hospitable welcoming, then
there is no at-homeness from which the subject is able to welcome the other.

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on September 6, 2014

Yegenoglu

467

Given that absolute hospitality implies a radical dispossession of the home, it also
implies loss of sovereignty. The loss of sovereignty not only pertains to the land that one
inhabits but also concerns the very concept of subjectivity. The welcome offered to the
other entails the subordination or putting the sovereignty of the subject into question and
involves an interruption of the self as other. The responsibility to the other, the subjects
being a host, is about putting the subjects being in question. This means that the welcoming subject can no longer retain its sovereignty. The welcoming that is offered to the
quest entails that the self is interrupted as ipseity, authority, mastery, and thus indissoluble sovereignty contradicts with absolute hospitality. In relinquishing sovereignty, the
host and hostess give up possession of their subjectivity; he is no longer in possession of
himself, she of herself.
Even though one cannot deduce a political program from unconditional hospitality
and even though unconditional hospitality cannot be reduced to a legal formulation that
the conditional hospitality implies, the two are nevertheless indissociable. For Derrida,
democracy is the possible happening of something impossible, and needs to be thought
as something to come [a` venir]. Speaking of democracy, Derrida states: It is not something that is certain to happen tomorrow. Not the democracy (national, international,
state or trans-state) of the future, but a democracy that must have the structure of a promise and thus the memory of that which carries the future, the to-come, here and now.21
The happening as a miracle and lasting more than an instant implies the necessity that
the politics of hospitality has to be immanent to the present and requires the transformation of the present conditions of conditional hospitality, and yet will never be capable of
exhausting all the possibilities of unconditional hospitality.
Notes
1. Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (New
York and London: Routledge, 2000).
2. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
3. Gil Anidjar, Secularism and the Theologico-Political: An Interview with Gil Anidjar,
conducted by Nerman Shaik, Asia Source (28 January 2008), accessible @: http://www.asia
source.org/news/special_reports/anidjar1.cfm
4. For a keen analysis of the history of world religions see Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of
World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2005).
5. See Gil Andijar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press; 2003).
6. For a discussion of this tradition see Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans.
P. A. Brault and M. Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
7. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New
International, trans. P. Kamuff (New York and London: Routledge, 1994).
8. For a discussion of autoimmunity in Derridas writing see Michael Naas, One Nation . . .
Indivisible: Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity of Democracy and the Sovereignty of
God, Research in Phenomenology 36 (2006): 1544.
9. Derrida, Rogues.

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on September 6, 2014

468

Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(4-5)

10. Jacques Derrida, Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of
Reason Alone, in G. Anidjar (ed.) Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002).
11. See Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Todays Europe, trans. P.-A. Brault
and M. B. Naas (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992)
12. ibid.
13. Rodolphe Gashe, European Memories: Jan Patocka and Jacques Derrida on Responsibility,
in Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (eds) Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 13557.
14. ibid.: 151.
15. Theo Goldberg, Racial Europeanization, Ethnic and Racial Studies 29(2) (March 2006):
33164.
16. ibid.: 336.
17. ibid.: 337.
18. ibid.: 334.
19. Jacques Derrida, A Europe of Hope, trans. P. DeArmitt, J. Malle and K. Saghafi, Epoche
10(2) (Spring 2006): 40712 (410).
20. See Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Werner Hamacher and David E.
Wellbery, trans. P.-A. Blunt and M. Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999); Paul Patton and Jacques Derrida, A Discussion with Jacques Derrida, Theory and
Event 5 (2001): 125; Jacques Derrida, Hostipitality, trans. B. Stocker with F. Morlock.
Angelaki, 5(3) (December 2000): 318.
21. Derrida, The Other Heading: 78.

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at NORTHWESTERN UNIV LIBRARY on September 6, 2014

You might also like