Derrida calls this a decision made “in a sovereign fashion.”20 This nod to Schmitt acknowledges the personal, decisionistic character of the suspension. This was no democratic sovereign, for those who decided were not the Algerian people, not even their elected representatives. Some of them were Algerian, Derrida writes, “although not a majority of the Algerian people.”21 They were also French and other Western governments and intellectuals—primarily French intellectuals like Derrida. Derrida names these with the anodyne phrase “people outside Algeria.”22 In short, the Algerian military, the ruling oligarchy, with the backing of Western governments and other “people outside Algeria” thought it best to put an end to Algerian democracy. Rarely has the postcolonial continuance of colonial authoritarianism shown itself so clearly. It is curious indeed to see this episode of the military suppression of democracy presented as evidence of Islam’s hostility to democracy.
Derrida takes “three lessons” from this event. The first lesson is the resistance of Islam to a “European” process “of secularization, and so of democratization.”23 Derrida’s analysis thus assumes that democracy either entails or is dependent upon secularization and that this is a European process. Certainly the world beyond Europe has been less receptive to the view that democracy requires secularism. It has very little currency in the Americas, where people have long been persuaded that they could retain their faiths and govern themselves. Derrida does not take up the familiar questions concerning the possibility of a secular Islam. Nor does he examine, in this context, the laïklik of Kemalist Turkey, which rivals French laïcité in severity. The more compelling questions might concern the implications of ambiguous secularism for the possibility of European democracy. Do the commitments of secularists to secularism make them, in some times and places, the enemies of democracy?
Derrida wrote in Rogues that he had based his affirmation of the hostility of Islam to democracy on “the little I know.”24 This admission of limited and possibly errant knowledge seems to invite a response, if not a refutation. This sense is enhanced by his subsequent characterization of Muslim philosophy. Derrida asserts as “fact” that Aristotle’s Politics was “absent in the Islamic importation” and that al Farabi had incorporated “only the theme of the philosopher king” into his political philosophy.25 That transmission of Aristotle went through not from Europe to Islam but from Islam to Europe is well known (though one might debate the journeying of particular texts). There are clear references to the Politics in classical Muslim philosophy. Finally (though this may be less widely known) al Farabi not only takes more than the philosopher king from Plato, he moves Plato in a democratic direction.26 The substance of the errors here is less interesting than Derrida’s willingness to construct Islam as antidemocratic based on what he himself calls his own ignorance, and his deliberate marking of that ignorance in the text.
The first lesson that Derrida marks as a lesson founded in ignorance is the hostility of Islam to democracy. A careful examination of that lesson offers another lesson subversive of the first: that the argument that Islam is hostile to democracy is dependent on two things we might choose against—willful ignorance and taking secularism as consubstantial with democracy.
The second lesson is what Derrida variously calls the autoimmune vulnerability of democracy, or democracy’s tendency to suicide. This lesson depends on a refusal to acknowledge that the abridgment of Algerian elections was not the work of democracy (or even democrats) but of the Algerian military. It requires the acceptance of a familiar liberal logic: that the possibility of murder (or, as in this case, suicide) in the future licenses a preemptive murder in the present.27 Democracy’s enemies, Derrida argued, are those who claim to be “staunch democrats,” who work for, call for, and participate in popular elections. Democracy must be killed, as Derrida wrote, “for its own good, so as to take care of it.” This is not suicide, this is murder.
The third lesson, so closely resembling the second that it might be taken for its twin, is that of democracy as constantly deferred, subject to the forces of autoimmunity. Derrida draws attention in this passage to something in which many democrats take particular pride, that though a democracy belongs to a particular people, a particular demos,
the force of democracy commits it, in the name of universal equality, to representing not only the greatest force of the greatest number, the majority of citizens considered of age, but also the weakness of the weak, minors, minorities, the poor and all those throughout the world who call out in suffering for a legitimately infinite extension of what are called human rights.28
Each of Derrida’s “lessons” concerning democracy is linked to Islam: to Islam as the other of democracy, to the democratic victory of the Algerian Islamists, and finally to a constitutive ambiguity in Islam (though not only in Islam) between the people and all people. Each of these is presented as a problem, perhaps an insoluble problem. All link democracy with difference, deferral, and death. Yet this democracy, fugitive, deferred, troubled by an inner uncertainty about those who are or are not its own, nevertheless has a place and partisans in the world. They are the rogues.
For all his doubts about democracy, Derrida will not disavow his solidarity with the democratic rogues. In the chapter entitled “Rogue That I Am,” Derrida looks to “the weak, minors, minorities, the poor” among his own people, “excluded or wayward, outcast or displaced, left to roam the streets, especially those of the suburbs.”29 Derrida gives us coordinates by which to navigate: first, the suburbs, or banlieues—called the “banlieues d’Islam” by Gilles Kepel (and thereafter by nearly everybody else)—and second, 1830, “the date of the conquest of Algeria.” It is there, among those “pointed out as actual or virtual delinquents,” “roaming the streets” jobless and alienated and setting cars on fire, that one finds the rogue, the voyou, brothers, “others of brothers, the non-brothers.” They are deviants “actual and virtual delinquents,” “unemployed” young men who wander the streets. They are the unemployed Muslims who riot in France. “It is always a question of suspicious or mixed origin.”30 It is among these that one can find democracy.
The rogue, Derrida writes, “belongs to what is most common or popular in the people” and the “demos is thus never very far away when one speaks of a voyou.”31 The rogue is a familiar figure for us, more attractive perhaps to Americans than Europeans. The rogue is an outlaw, roaming the streets, a gangster or a punk, a rebel (often, a rebel without a cause). These rebels, belonging to the people and the street, to “what is most common or popular in the people” are counterposed to law, to civilized citizens, and to the police. They are close to democracy in no small part because democracy is before and against the law. The people must rule the law before the law can rule the people, for democrats. This, as Derrida recognized, sets democracy against liberalism.
Derrida’s evocation of the banlieues d’Islam, the Muslim suburbs of Paris and (for that matter) Toulouse, Marseilles, and Lyon, as the site of the democratic rogue offers another reading of the democracy. It is in these places, among these people (and some others) that democracy is being born.
The construction of Islam as “the Other of Democracy” is questioned at the margins: by Derrida in the margins of his text, by Derrida in commenting on the rogues in the margins of French society. Islam is named as the other of democracy, but Muslims, the shebab, the Muslim youth of Paris and Algiers (and, one might add, Tahrir Square) are rogues and democrats. Derrida marks his own kinship—or friendship—with them.
The disavowal of Islam does not remain, for Derrida, at the level of politics—or indeed, of philosophy—if any question can be so isolated. The question of Islam, the question of the Arab, is the question of the brother and the friend, a question of belonging. Derrida’s writing on the Marrano echoes his writing on the rogue, “Marrano that we are.” He writes in Aporias, “let us figuratively call Marrano anyone who remains faithful to a secret that he has not chosen.”32 The Marrano, John Caputo writes, is an
apt figure for the “atheist Arab Jew” who knows that he is not quite: not quite Jewish, not quite Christian, not quite Arab. Mindful of the religious sensibility of his work, one might well add not quite atheist either.33
Derrida sees himself, as others have seen him, in the figure of the Marrano, one of the pretended converts hidden in the open after the Reconquista. The route his family travelled, from Spain to North Africa, was the route of many Marranos. So too was the route Derrida took later, from North Africa to Europe. Yet it is not the route travelled, not the experience of exile, but the experience of a solitary interiority that marks the Marrano. The Marrano shelters a secret within, a secret that is at once the danger of death and the promise of salvation.
The Marrano is marked not only by a secret, but by a denial: the secret “I am a Jew” is sheltered by the denial “I am not a Jew.” So it is with Derrida. In Derrida, however, it is not the Jew but the Arab who is denied; not the heritage of Judaism that is refused but that of Islam. Derrida’s citation of the Marrano holds a history of ambivalence within it. After the Reconquista, both Muslims and Jews were hidden as Marranos.
As Gil Anidjar has recognized, it is not easy to separate the Arab from the Jew, the Arab from the Muslim.34 The name “Jew” defines both a religion and a people. Jewishness is at once a faith and an ethnicity. The same oscillation between religious and political identity is present in Muslims and in relation to Muslims in a slightly altered form. The Arab is read as Muslim, the Muslim as Arab. The Arab Jew, the Arab Christian, the Arab atheist, and Arab secularist disappear. Capturing two forms of belonging under a single name enabled the oscillation of Jewish identity and of anti-Semitism. Though the name “Islam” only errantly captures an ethnic with a religious identity, insistence on the absence of a divide between the religious and the political has had similar effects in exposing Muslims to the coupling of religious and political persecution.
The description Derrida gives of himself as a Marrano marks him as a traveler, an Algerian, a Muslim as well as a Jew, a man formed in the history of the Maghreb. The name “Arab” marks these, for it means “traveler.” Derrida is many times a traveler: as a Jew, as an Arab, as a theorist. Travel is central to the heritage of Islam. Muhammad took the Muslims from Mecca to Medina, in the hijra. The charter of Medina is a covenant between the new Muslims, the followers of the prophet Muhammad, and the Jewish tribes living in that land. The Qu’ran records another journey: “Glory to Him who took his votary to a wide and open land.”35 Islam inscribes the practice of travel in the yearly pilgrimage, the hajj. All Muslims should strive to make the hajj at least once, to protect the travelers and to support their pilgrimage. Those who have made the hajj are honored. Travel, willing and unwilling, is central to the Jewish experience as well. Jews remember the great journey of Exodus and, like Muslims, commemorate that journey every year. The experience of the Babylonian Exile is held in Jewish memory, along with the many moments of escape and exile that mark the diaspora. The figure of the Wandering Jew is inscribed in European myth. In legend and practice as well as scripture, travel is an experience that Judaism and Islam mark as constitutive. The practice of travel is also inscribed in the language of theory. Roxanne Euben writes of the complex pattern of linguistic connections knitting the Arab, the traveler, to theory. She observes that the Greek theoria refers not only to sight but to travel. The word binds theory both to travel and to theology. Theoros “has multiple meanings, including a spectator, a state delegate to a festival in another city, someone who travels to consult an oracle.”36 In travel, the Arab, the Muslim, the Jew, and the theorist meet.
In Derrida’s time and ours, as in its Andalusian past, Algeria is a place of travel and travelers. Romans and Arabs, Berbers and Phoenicians travelled there and traveled from there. Arabs and Jews from Spain traveled there, from the great expulsion of the Reconquista onward. The great traveler Tocqueville travelled there and, after him, French soldiers and settlers. From the time of the Romans to the time of the French, Algeria has been a place of colonists and pirates. In Derrida’s time, Algeria saw Jewish refugees from Northern Europe, Axis soldiers, Allied soldiers, French soldiers fighting to maintain colonialism traveling to North Africa. Algerians saw the pieds noirs, the harkis, many Jews, and the poor leave Algeria for France after the war.37 Now young Algerians, jobless and desperate, travel in small boats across the Mediterranean. These are called haragas, “burners” because they burn the identity papers that might identify them as illegal immigrants in France. They are part of what Paul Silverstein has called “Algeria in France,” part of the Muslim youth that Sarkozy called “canaille,” scum, and Derrida “voyous,” rogues.38
Derrida bears more than a passing resemblance to these young men. Like them, he was not born to wealth or privilege. Like many of them, he had a spell of leaving school for football. Like them, he left Algeria for opportunity in France. These are the Muslims Derrida disavowed when he left behind his being as an Arab. This is the space in which he grew up.
Jackie Derrida spent the first nineteen years of his life in Algeria.39 He was born to a family of Arab Jews. In our time, where the Jew and the Arab are given to us as primordial enemies, such people may be seen as the most vulnerable, as the first objects of Muslim hate. More often, they are not seen at all. Derrida’s insistent presentation of himself as a Jew, not an Arab, not Maghrebi, reinforced this construction of Arab and Jewish identities as mutually exclusive.40 Derrida’s denial of his Arab heritage alters as it enacts the idea of the Marrano. Once the secret Jew became the apparent Christian; now the secret Arab becomes the apparent Jew. The name taken openly conceals the persecuted identity. The denial of an Arab family, an Arab heritage, and his own Arab past may well have been the price of entry (paid under the table, a bribe at the border) into the French academy.
Perhaps French colonization had been so severe that it eradicated Arabic not only from the school but from the household. Perhaps the centuries-old ties to a predominately Muslim world were severed by colonialism. Certainly the French colonial administration insisted on French as the language of the state and civilization, in the accomplishment of the mission civilisatrice. Whatever the cause, Derrida insisted that he knew no Arabic. “I have only one language. I don’t know any other. So, I was raised in a monolingual milieu—absolutely monolingual.” That cannot have been true, even under the heavy hand of the French, and Derrida goes on to say, “around me, although not in my family, I naturally heard Arabic spoken, but I do not speak—except for a few words—Arabic. I tried to learn it later but I didn’t get very far. Moreover, one could say in a general way, without exaggerating, that learning Arabic was something that was virtually forbidden at school. Not prohibited by law, but practically impossible. So, French is my only language.”41 Arabic, Derrida tells us, is the forbidden tongue, the speech of the other, not of his family.
The ear, however, is not an orifice that can be closed. Perhaps the young Derrida played only with footballers who spoke French. Perhaps he learned no Arabic in the shops and on the streets of el Biar. In any case, the French authorities did not forbid the sounding of the adhan. Five times a day the call to prayer echoes though the city. Five times a day the calls travel from one muezzin to the next. Five times a day the call to bear witness goes out “ashadu-ana,” I testify, I bear witness. Five times a day, for nineteen years, Derrida would have heard the call to prayer, the call to bear witness. Though he did not acknowledge hearing it, that is the call Derrida’s work answers.
Islam is at the heart of Derrida’s work. In her introduction to Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak writes of how Rousseau is set “dreaming of Derrida.”42 Derrida, asleep and in the sleep of death, dreams of Islam.
In looking for the Arab, the Muslim hidden in Derrida, one is only following his directions. It is Derrida who calls himself a Marrano and in so doing tells us to look for the hidden identity, the secret faith. It is Derrida who echoes the call to bear witness. It is Derrida who tells us
that the written is already present in the spoken. It is Derrida who direct us to the mystery of the khora and tells us that it belongs to the desert. It is Derrida, too, who tells us what is at stake in the taking of the friend, the brother, as the enemy. It is Derrida who links the democracy to come to the figure of the Muslim rogue.
The complex of rejection and belonging entailed in the unchosen secret of the Marrano is evident at the site—intimate, embodied, political, linguistic, and religious—of circumcision, a practice shared by Jews and Muslims. Derrida’s account of his own circumcision speaks to his relation to Islam as well as Judaism and Christianity. Circumcision is an Abrahamic ritual, and a marking of the body that binds Jew and Muslim as it has historically set them apart from Christians. Though the mark and the act of circumcision are profoundly personal (for Derrida, as for all), the practice is political and religious and unites three elements of Derrida’s work: the linguistic, the theological, and the political. With regard to circumcision and the Abrahamic, Derrida’s relation to Islam is seen as imbricated with the other Abrahamic faiths, and the question of Islam with the political, philosophic, and the linguistic.
“Circumfession” is cast in a confessional mode but marks itself as an evasion. In Catholicism, confession is a formal and formally dialogic enterprise. The one who confesses repeats an initiating formula, the priest responds. The variation arises in the sins and in the penance prescribed by the priest—though these too tend to have a ritualistic quality about them. The dialogic structure of the work by (or between) Derrida and Bennington reflects this. The popular and scholarly meanings of “confession” are also on display in “Circumfession.” Derrida’s scandalous account of his mother staunching his wounded penis with her mouth is at once Biblical and tabloidesque. Is the referent the dramas of incestuous love that play out on television or the Mosaic? Does the reference to the confessional ally this text to Foucault’s work on sexuality, on deviance, on the confessional impulse? These questions are themselves a distraction and evasion. Casting circumcision as a drama of sex and violence seems to reveal as it more effectively conceals. The apparent overcoming of the distinction between Jew and Catholic hides the rooted likeness of Jew and Muslim, Judaism and Islam.
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