sovereignty renounced: autoimmunizing and democratizing europe

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DOI: 10.1177/0191453714522477 2014 40: 459 originally published online 12 February 2014Philosophy Social Criticism

Meyda YegenogluSovereignty renounced: Autoimmunizing and democratizing Europe

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Article

Sovereignty renounced:Autoimmunizing anddemocratizing Europe

Meyda Yegenoglu_Istanbul Bilgi University, _Istanbul, Turkey

AbstractThis article suggests that the historical figuration of Islam as well as the discourse of secularizationhas played a fundamental role in the constitution of Islams externality to Europe. The historicalfiguration 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 beunderstood against the backdrop of this history. If Islams inability to separate the religious andthe political was historically the dominant motif through which Islam was registered as the arch-enemy, the post-secular, post-Enlightenment period registers Islam as an enemy through a culturalgesture. Derridas understanding of spectrality and the concept autoimmunity are deployed tosuggest that Islam as a specter haunting Europe undermines the sovereign constitution of a self-identical Europe, but this haunting needs to be seen as Europes chance for a self-destructive conser-vation of Europe. European identity has to be rethought and renewed differently and this rethinkingrequires that we attend to the present as well as the past and future of Europe, which requires theopening of Europe to otherness and responsibility to the other. Such a rethinking of Europes his-tory necessitates thinking about colonialism as well the living embodiments of this colonial legacytoday, which are the immigrants.

KeywordsAutoimmunity, 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: [email protected]

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.

Philosophy and Social Criticism2014, Vol. 40(4-5) 459468

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which Europe identifies itself in different periods and contexts. The making of the inter-

nal enemy takes place through a multitude of social and legal as well as spatial arrange-

ments. 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 nation-

alist 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 man-

age 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 reli-

gious, 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 Christian-

ity or the process by which western Christianity renames and reinstitutes itself as secu-

lar,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 regres-

sive, belated and therefore dangerous religiosity. Islams religiousness was made possi-

ble with the sacralization of European secularism.

In comprehending regions other than the Christian world, the discourse of seculariza-

tion 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 integ-

rity 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 transposi-

tion 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

460 Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(4-5)


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 Moham-

medans of the 18th century and the Muslim immigrants of the 21st century. The consti-

tution 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 inabil-

ity 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 pos-

sible to suggest that Islam, the political enemy, the enemy of the political, now incar-

nated 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 Other-

ness can be viewed not simply as a threat but a chance for the survival of a non-

sovereign identity called Europe. This paradoxical nature of the simultaneity of

threat-and-survival can be explained through what Derrida calls autoimmunity. Autoim-

munity 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

Yegenoglu 461


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 unassimil-

able and irreducible alterity necessarily opens up the community called Europe to some-

thing that exceeds it and thereby threatens its sovereignty. Indeed, the gesture to posit a

European identity, entails inescapably the cultivation of what Derrida calls autoimmu-

nity, 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 polit-

ical 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 sover-

eignty implied in the concept of autoimmunity, in fact, evokes the vulnerability, depen-

dence 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 some-

thing other than itself, an otherness within, an otherness that in turn keeps the commu-

nity alive.9

Jacques Derrida subjects the notions of selfhood and autonomous subject to a decon-

structive 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 Eur-

opean 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 phan-

tasm 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 auto-

affectionate 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 phan-

tasm of sovereignty directs our attention to sameness, illusion, self-generation and iden-

tity, 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



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 presencewith the figure of the ghost. In otherwords, 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 compro-

mised. 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 Eur-

ope. 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 itera-

tion 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, his-

tory 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

Yegenoglu 463


figure of Europe does not entail relinquishing or simply disowning the memory of Eur-

ope, its tradition, or history; but reconfiguring them so as to exceed any particular Eur-

opean 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 indispen-

sable 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 trans-

formation 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 tra-

dition 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 tradi-

tion of European discourses, in particular the tradition of Enlightenment, but also trans-

forming 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 uncon-

ditional 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 remem-

bered 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



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 coloni-

alism 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 ref-

erence point for race and racism, Europe managed the evaporation of the European colo-

nial 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 Eur-

ope 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 haunt-

ing Europe. The legacy of the colonial mark of the past upon todays post-colonial Eur-

ope 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 colo-

nial 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 respon-

sible awareness of its genocidal and colonialist crimes.19 It is such a critical and respon-

sible 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 decon-

struction. 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

Yegenoglu 465


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 fanta-

sies 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. Colonial-

ism thus refuses to disappear and fade away in the abyss of the past. Its always-

already 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 ges-

ture 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 interrup-

tion of a unified and sovereign sense of Europe based upon the phantasm of an omnipo-

tent, 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 ex-

colonial 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 hos-

pitality, 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 unan-

ticipated. 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 condi-

tioned. Such an unconditional welcoming or hospitality raises a number of important

issues that pertain to home, ownership and proprietorship and the other concerns of sub-

jectivity, ipseity and sovereignty. Uunconditional hospitality can exist only as uncon-

strained 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.



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 wel-

coming 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 indisso-

luble 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 some-

thing 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 prom-

ise 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 transforma-

tion 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: Stan-

ford 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 Plur-

alism (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.

Yegenoglu 467


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.



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