POLITICS IN EXCESS OF LIFE: AUTOIMMUNITY, ANIMALITY, AND DERRIDA’S RESPONSES TO SEPTEMBER 11

Abstract

<p>This thesis examines how the late work of Jacques Derrida challenges the efficacy of the concept of biopolitics to describe the relationship between life and politics. The central question that occupies this thesis is how life becomes part of the political, how it exits the putative spontaneity of nature and enters the calculation of sovereignty. In order to posit this question, my work is organized according to two horizons. The first horizon centers on the ways in which Derrida configures the relationship between life and politics. The second horizon is that the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center or what is now known as September 11 or 9/11 became an event around which Derrida bends this critique of life in politics.</p> <p>My first chapter looks to Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity as a way to articulate the problematic conflation of life and politics by the term “biopolitics.” While Derrida does not explicitly state his complication of this term, I argue that “autoimmunity” positions life as an impossibly unstable concept, one that cannot and should not be confined to a single understanding. My second chapter turns to the first volume of Derrida’s final seminars The Beast and The Sovereign. This chapter continues many of the themes pursued in the first chapter, but changes the focus from an autoimmune critique of democracy toward a more generalized critique of human life as political and non-human life as apolitical. Ultimately I pursue the idea that Derrida sought to rethink a configuration of the political that apprehends life in excess of politics. Derrida imagines a politics that escapes being pulled into the political and contoured into so many configurations of death and subjugation.</p>