Democracy, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice

“Democracy, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice” Matthias Fritsch Mosaic 48.3, 27-45 (Sep. 2015) https://wwwapps.cc.umanitoba.ca/publications/mosaic/ Due to copyright restrictions, I post here only the abstract and the introduction.

Abstract Taking its cue from Derrida’s rethinking of political life as lifedeath, this paper argues that taking turns helps in conceptualizing the intra- and inter-generationally shared nature of democratic institutions. However, the generational taking turns with democratic power must be thought in conjunction with an environmental turning: not only do human generations seek to share sovereignty over subjects and the earth, but such human sovereignty is dependent upon a lateral turning with the earth.

Introduction In particular in the context of the environmental crisis and justice for future people, the concept and practice of democracy, like modernity generally, has frequently been accused of presentism, the favouring of the present at the expense of the future. Derrida’s democracy-to-come contests both the metaphysics and the politics of this presentism, and hence may contribute to a rethinking of environmental and intergenerational justice. In this essay, I pursue democracy’s presentism by suggesting that dominant layers in the democratic legacy conceptualize death as the end-point of life: both so that death does not really affect life while living (it’s merely the end of it), and so as to conceive of death as a

point in linear time. This bolsters a faith in—in fact, a passionate attachment to—the belief that we can pin-point the instant of death. In his recently published Death Penalty Seminars (The Death Penalty Vol. 1), for instance, Derrida seeks to show that this belief is powerfully at work in the modern-democratic expression of sovereign power over putting to death by way of the guillotine and the electric chair (death without cruelty because instantaneous), and also underwrites the in truth much more complicated distinctions among suicide, murder, and capital punishment. It is in this direction that we should understand Derrida’s otherwise somewhat surprising claim that the death penalty is the ‘keystone’ of the political (For What Tomorrow 147–48): capital punishment is the hallmark of the fatal, and fatally flawed, faith in the possibility of the human mastery of death. That is also why the conception of sovereignty that is expressed in capital punishment, as sovereign mastery of death, is so intimately linked to human exceptionalism and the traditional idea—dominant from Plato to Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Levinas—that animals, though living and thus by definition mortal, have no access to death, properly speaking. If what is proper to human beings is an appropriative and heroic relation to death, as shown for example in war or in the idea that every murderer deserves his death, then properly human sovereignty affirms itself also as mastery over the nonhuman. And when it comes to intergenerational relations, faith in the instantaneity of death supports belief in firm distinctions among the living, the dead, and the unborn. We may thus ask what the deconstruction of presentism tells us about the relation between democratic sovereignty and relations among the generations—without, however, supposing that generations are merely human, and keeping in view the problematic relation between sovereignty, mastery over (animal)

death, and a view of time that permits clear distinctions among the present, the past, and the future. To counter democratic presentism and human exceptionalism, I will extend the argument that democracy should be rethought as a matter of taking turns (see my “Taking Turns: Democracy to Come and Intergenerational Justice”). My principal concern is to show that, not only do rulers take turns with the ruled in the ancient idea of democracy, as discussed by Derrida in Rogues, but the present generation takes turns with the preceding and the following generations in governing the democratic institutions that express sovereign power. Taking turns offers an appropriate way of conceptualizing the intra- and inter-generationally shared nature of democratic institutions. Further, the generational taking turns with democratic power must be thought in conjunction with an environmental turning: not only do human generations seek to share sovereignty over subjects and the earth, but such human sovereignty is dependent upon, and criss-crossed, by a lateral turning with the earth. Stressing this second turning in the first, I argue, allows us to conceive deconstructive ‘double’ affirmation as an affirmation of life-death. As such, affirmation affirms the improper of the human and the vulnerable passivity or precariousness that exposes each of us to other humans as well as to the nonhuman.