Tulevan demokratia
Democracy to come. A Reading of Jacques Derrida's thinking of the political – or how to count one's friends?
Especially in his later works Derrida treats the problem of the political. One of his claims is that fraternity is the underlying structure of western political community. The other is always excluded by this kind of community. What could then be political without fraternisation? This article presents a reading of Derrida's deconstruction of the political in his later works Politiques de l'amitié and Spectres de Marx. The baseline for the study is the phenomenon and the notion of friendship. According to Derrida, every political structure implicitly contains the frontier between a friend and the one considered not to be a friend. In western tradition, this division makes possible the consensus of community as counted votes of friends. However, this counting is not counting applied to friends as singulars but to friends defined in relation to enemies. Therefore, the question "How to count one's friends?" is the political question par excellence. It turns out that the demand of counting among singulars is exactly the demand of democracy: democracy is the task of counting where counting is impossible. This is the original sense of democracy: democracy is an open, and as such, an impossible order. It is always to come.
