The deconstruction of “discomfort in/ of/ for Sovereignty” and its role in a critique of representative democracy

Abstract

In this paper, the imprint of the deconstructive perspective of evil in / of / for sovereignty, in the work of Jaque Derrida, for an anti-idolatrous critique of democracy is valued. Part of the critical study of two contemporary traditions of representative democracy. The examination of the proposal of deliberative democracy of Habermas and of the conception of radical democracy by Ernesto Laclau, allow demonstrating the reproduction of a formalization of democracy. Both criticize the paradigm of the material conflict of classes of Marxist origin. They respond to this with a communicative understanding that starts from the centrality of language and discourse as a subjective consensual practice. From the reduction of the subjective process to the pre-eminent precedent of the discourse, democracy ceases to understand the material conditions of reproduction of the bodily subject. Framework before which we value the role of criticism of the unease of the sovereignty present in the work of Jaque Derrida. Derridian thinking about the Upset of Sovereignty criticizes the reduction of the difference from a categorical and methodical constellation that implies the recognition of the irreducible conflict that represents the contingency of the other. The spectrality as a comprehensive intuition allows the affirmation of responsibility, ethical, as the basis of every gnoseological position, which seeks to give condition of possibility to a true discourse. Position that protects the transformative possibility of the exercise of sovereignty from revealing its processes of subjective repression. This categorical constellation is substantive to a critique of the reduction of democracy as a sovereign exercise.