Ghost of Our Fathers: Jacques Derrida and Barack Obama Discussing Inheritance

Ghosts of Our Fathers:
Jacques Derrida and Barack Obama Discussing Inheritance

Dissertation submitted in requirement for MA in Political Theory Department of
Government, University of Essex Colchester, United Kingdom
Supervisor, Aletta Norval Submitted on 15 September 2008
Introduction
Ghost: I am thy father’s spirit,

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night;
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done to my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house;
I could a Tale unfold…1
What kind of tale concerning democracy could ‘fathers’ unfold? We look to our fathers
for instruction, guidance, safety and assurance. But to complicate this image with that of a ghost,
what can we learn, find, secure, or guarantee? Are not ghosts phantom non-images that find us,
call to us, render us insecure, and lack guarantee? Such questions beg for an exploration into the
past, into secrets, into the very inner-workings of heritage itself. If we, as theorists of democracy,
accept the implications of these questions, we are therefore obliged to embark on the very quest
present in Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx – we must learn to live with2 and speak to3 ghosts.
According to Derrida, we are indebted to these ghosts. Such an indebtedness points to the
presence of ghosts through their necessary absence. The tension between presence and absence is
a common theme not only in Derrida but also in the contemporary tradition(s) of the United
States. At this very juncture in time, one cannot help but wonder about the implication of the
‘absent’ father that drives and haunts Barack Obama’s political narrative. 4 Also, consequentially,
why the absence of fathers remains a dominating concern in the American context, as magnified
for Obama’s in his ‘Fathers Day Speech’ 5? And, finally, in understanding the reality of this
1
W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), Act 1, Scene
5, Lines 9-15.
2
J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: the state of debt, the work of mourning, and the new international,
trans. P. Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. xviii.
3
Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 12.
4
For a short introduction to the ‘absent’ father of Obama see; B. Macintyre, ‘Barack Obama, John
McCain and the fathers who deserted them’, TimesOnline, 17 July 2008 . At
(http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article4346090.ece).
5
B. Obama, ‘Father’s Day Speech,’ Apostolic Church of God, Chicago, Illinois, United States, 15
June 2008. At (http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/27/obama.fathers.ay/index.html).
absence, why Obama turns to the ‘well-established’ figure(s) of fatherhood in the American
Tradition – the ‘Founding Fathers’ – most notably in his speech ‘A More Perfect Union’6?
Current discussions show democracy itself has become an illusive and ghost-like concept.
In his essay ‘On the Multiple Senses of Democracy’, Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “[I]t is impossible
simply to be ‘democrat’ without wondering about what this means.” 7 He discovers ‘being a
democrat’ implies is a responsibility; that is, he claims without an engagement into the very
meaning, the process of thinking and acting democratically is disrupted. Such a disruption, he
finds, has been triggered by ignorance. The ignorance relates to the very difficulties in defining
democracy. The Greek word demos translates to ‘people’ and kratia to ‘will’, so democracy is the
will of the people. Put differently, it is the political empowerment of a common. In the face of
the rupture of the (post)modern world, Nancy claims that “[u]ltimately, one no longer knows what
‘common’ and ‘political’ mean. That is what makes us perplexed about ‘democracy’.” 8 So what
do they mean? The political deals with power since the people is responsible for the ruling of
justice, whilst the common puts into play the people’s very existence and therefore has to do with
meaning. The play between power and meaning sets the stage for a responsible engagement with
what it means to be ‘democrat’, but it also complicates the engagement since, “[b]etween power
and meaning, there is proximity and distance.” 9 This is why to be a ‘democrat’ calls for “a new
form of man’s relation to himself, who would not know how to be ‘his own end’ (if that is the
foundation of ‘democracy’) without moving away from himself in order to move beyond.”10
I engage with how a ‘new form of man’s relation to himself’ might be expressed through
the ghosts of fathers. In his book A Bound Man, Shelby Steele describes Barack Obama’s
memoir, Dreams from My Father, as a ‘search-for-the-father’ story. These stories are also based
on the same basic play between meaning and power. Steele writes that the father “provide[s] for
our basic needs and interpret[s] for us the frightening world outside the family.” 11 This sounds
like democracy for Nancy. The father provides for needs. He is therefore in the position of
protection and power. The father also interprets. He is in the position of providing meaning for
the child – particularly the son. This relationship acts both as tutelage and an initiation for the
continuation of tradition, family name, etc. But why focus on this relationship? Is it adequate for
6
B. Obama, ‘A More Perfect Union,’ National Convention Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
United States, 13 March 2008. At (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23690567).
7
J.-L. Nancy, ‘On the Multiple Senses of Democracy’, in ed. M. McQuillan, The Politics of
Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy (London: Pluto Press, 2007), p. 43.
8
Nancy, ‘On the Multiple Senses of Democracy’, pp. 46-7.
9
Nancy, ‘On the Multiple Senses of Democracy’, p. 47.
10
Ibid.
11
S. Steele, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (New York:
Free Press, 2008), p. 19.
a theory of democracy? Does it not exclude a wide number of participants, namely women?
I do not want to deny the undemocratic implications of these questions; however, my
topic focuses on Obama and the discourse of ‘fathers’ dominating the current political context in
the United States. I turn to Derrida using deconstruction to unravel this phenomenon in order to
engage with the apparent presence of the ideological structure of the father and son relationship.
Derrida himself is weary about the familiarity and maleness enveloped in the inherited tradition
of democracy. He wonders,
is it possible to think and to implement democracy, what which would keep the old name
‘democracy’, while uprooting from it all these figures of friendship (philosophical and
religious) which prescribe fraternity: the family and the androcentric ethnic group? …where
it is not longer a matter of founding, but to open out to the future, or rather, to the ‘come’, of a
certain democracy?12
From these questions Derrida turns to understanding both democracy and inheritance as
perpetual engagement with those people, things, and ideas that came before in order to break with
the causal scheme of ‘passing down’ lineages associated with subjectivity based on the centrality
rather than the singularity of the self. The example of Obama serves to illustrate this precisely
through his lack of father demanding him to seek out his self.
Derrida ties inheritance to his very formulation of democracy as ‘to-come’. ‘Democracy-
to-come’ is best understood as an ethos. Derrida writes,
The idea of a promise is inscribed in the idea of a democracy: equality, freedom, freedom of
speech, freedom of the press – all these things are inscribed as promises within democracy.
Democracy is a promise. That is why it is a more historical concept of the political – it’s the
only concept of a regime or a political organization in which history, that is the endless
process of improvement and perfectibility, is inscribed in the concept. So it’s a historical
concept through and through, and that is why I call it ‘to come’.13
A promise, as a pledge, begins the engagement and the very subjectivity of democracy, but in its
formulation does not guarantee a final outcome. As an ethos democracy is the starting-point
rather than a substantive ideal to be striven for. The initiation through a promise engages a
certain formulation of responsibility; that is, it calls upon subjects to react through the
“determinations in given situations” when they are “called upon to account for the [or their]
decision.”14 Responsibility builds on responsiveness.
I find Derrida too wants to enact this notion of responsiveness when he links inheritance,
12
J. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London: Verso, 2005), p. 306.
13
J. Derrida, ‘Politics and friendship: A discussion with Jacques Derrida’, Center for Modern French
Thought, University of Sussex, 1 December 1997. At (www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/pol+fr.html).
14
A. J. Norval, ‘Hegemony after deconstruction: the consequences of undecidability’, Journal of
Political Ideologies 9, no. 2 (2004), 154.
deconstruction and democracy. He finds that they all “begin where the beginning divides,” 15 and
that we have a responsibility to respond to this division. 16 The division I want to explore is the
fixation on absent fathers at the expense of present mothers. I argue that a study of this division
through Derrida’s concept of inheritance not only extracts the male-dominated discourse
surrounding both inheritance and democracy, but through the extractions we as ‘democrats’ can
begin to cultivate a ‘new form of relation to ourselves’ in moving beyond naming ourselves as
democrats to enacting democratic subjectivity.
I begin by ‘prefacing inheritance.’ I give a close reading of two later Derridean texts:
Specters of Marx and The Gift of Death, respectively, in order to give a direct presentation of
Derrida’s formulation of inheritance. I structure this reading around the two axes of gift and
burden. Through my reading around these axes I am able to highlight how inheritance always
implies both a gift and a burden making inheritance a practice – as a struggle.
Then in chapter one, I intend to tease out an understanding of subjectivity based on an
interaction with ghosts. ‘Ghosts’ are apparitions that escape presence, because they are by
definition non-present, or past presences that return. By (re)turning to the ghost of Hamlet’s
father, I show how the non-representativeness of ghosts, through their very absences, disrupts the
“modern philosophical use of the word subject … as the subject of representation,” 17 leading to
what can be described as ‘a post-deconstructive subject’. At the end of this section, I apply the
structures of the self I find in Hamlet to Obama.
In chapter two I turn to concept of perfectibility in order to engage with the tensions
between meaning and power. First I give an analysis of perfectionism as a non-teleological
theory found in Derrida’s ‘democracy to come.’ From this analysis I give a reading of Obama’s
speech ‘A More Perfect Union’ to show the inherited tradition of perfectionism in the United
States. Then I turn to exemplarity found in Nietzsche as a way of understanding how fathers’
engage in the same play between meaning and power. I conclude the chapter with Obama’s own
15
Expanding on this idea Derrida writes: “Saying that to keep its Greek name, democracy, is an
affair of context, of rhetoric or of strategy, even of polemics … [but] one keeps this indefinite right
to the question, to criticism… to mark what is no longer a strategic affair: the limit between the
conditional … and the unconditional … the possibility and the duty for democracy itself to de-limit
itself. Democracy is the autos of deconstructive self-delimitation. Delimitation not only in the name
of a regulative idea and an indefinite perfectibility, but every time in the singular urgency of a here
and now.” Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, p. 105. Hence in engaging the genealogical
implications of democracy we do not level down democratic practices but engage with the multiple
ideas inherited along with the name ‘democracy’ that influence the way in which we act
democratically.
16
This is what Derrida means when we have a ‘call to responsibility.’ See Derrida, Specters of
Marx, p. 91-2.
17
S. Critchley, ‘Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity?’ in Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on
Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999), p. 50.
struggles with perfection through the image of his father linking perfectibility to the subjectivity
explored in the first chapter.
Before concluding I turn to a counter argument to perfectibility found in Derrida’s
concept of autoimmunity in chapter three. First I analyse how democracy is perpetually undoing
itself in its own promise to openness in the name of its survival. Then I turn to this same
phenomenon in the position between the father and the son. I conclude by connecting
autoimmunity with inheritance to emphasize the necessity and risk involved in practicing one’s
inheritance.
Prefacing Inheritance:
Between Gift and Burden18
For Derrida, what is at stake in democracy, especially in the democratic tradition of

freedom, is the lack official structural form. Freedom and democracy are understood in
formulations of practice, but do not present themselves formally. This is why democracy is
understood through voting, exercising the freedom of speech, and participating in political
demonstrations. Such an understanding is indebted to these very practices. Without them the
term ‘democrat’ would hold no meaning. In this section I explore another formulation of
democratic practice – ‘democracy as inheritance.’ I show that inheritance for Derrida provides
insight into what it means to be a ‘democrat’ since “a relation of indebtedness to the traditionality
which makes it possible to speak and think at all.” 19 And this relationship, “must involve if it is to
be worth its name, a moment of possible infidelity with respect to what it inherits.” 20 In order to
highlight this ‘moment of possible infidelity,’ I structure my reading of inheritance around the two
axes of gift and burden. In doing so, I argue that inheritance is a relation of freedom through
struggle and not tied to any particular process. Therefore in formulating democracy as
inheritance, democracy is more than a political regime or process.
P.1 Specters of Marx: Outlining Inheritance

In The Specters of Marx, Derrida takes on the task of invoking the remnant voices of
Marx that haunt contemporary political theory. He wants to address the vehement attempts to
purge social and political philosophy of the inherited traditions of Marxism by pledging an
18
An extended version of an analysis on Derrida’s concept of inheritance was submitted for
evaluation on 25 March 2008 for a seminar entitled ‘Research Seminar in Political Theory and
Methods’ at the University of Essex. The course was supervised by Aletta Norvall. The title of the
essay appeared as ‘Practicing Inheritance: Gift and Burden’.
19
G. Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 139.
20
Ibid.
engagement with Marxism is part of academic, as well as socio-political, responsibility. He
writes, “It will always be a fault not to read and reread and discuss Marx … and to go beyond
scholarly ‘reading’ or ‘discussion.’ It will be more and more a fault, a failing of theoretical,
philosophical, political responsibility.” 21 In order to escape such a flaw, Derrida establishes his
concept of inheritance.
What then is inheritance? And what are the problems Derrida associates with it? Derrida
writes, “An inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself. Its presumed unity,
if there is one, can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing. …one must filter, sift,
criticize, one must sort out several different possibilities that inhabit the same injunction. And
inhabit it in a contradictory fashion around a secret.” 22 In this very first description of
inheritance, Derrida emphasizes the difficulty one goes through when inheriting. He notes that
the ‘presumed unity’ of inheritance can only be found in ‘choosing’ one’s inheritance from its
own multiplicity; therefore ‘one must’ decipher his inheritance through ‘sifting’. The burden to
inherit, the ‘must’, is laid on us to ‘sort out’ the heterogeneous possibilities. But such a burden
opens up multiple possibilities for how we criticize, sort and sift. The act of inheriting is
therefore an activation of freedom and choice.
Such a notion of freedom is found in linking inheritance to a concept of secrecy. Derrida
argues, “If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call
for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. We
would be affected by it as by a cause – natural or genetic. One always inherits from a secret.” 23
Here Derrida shows that inheritance is not something straightforward and simple, but rather
heterogeneous. If an act of inheritance were straightforward then it would not be inheritance at
all. It would be a causal chain. Therefore the treasure, the gift, of inheritance lies in its own
secrecy.
From the call to ‘sift and sort’ to ‘readability’ Derrida points to the third major
characteristic of inheritance – inheritance as a task. He writes,
Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task. It remains before us just as unquestionably as
we are heirs of Marxism, even before wanting or refusing to be, and, like all inheritors, we
are in mourning. In mourning in particular for what is called Marxism. To be, this word in
which we earlier saw the word of the spirit, means, for the same reason, to inherit. All the
questions on the subject of being or of what is to be (or not to be) are questions of
inheritance. There is no backward-looking fervor in this reminder, no traditionalist flavor.
Reaction, reactionary, or reactive are but interpretations of the structure of inheritance. That
we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that
21
22
23
Ibid.
enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all
inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not.24
Here Derrida emphasizes that we have no choice but to inherit because we are called on to bear
witness to the tradition into which we were born. The burden is on us not to recognize that we
are heirs, but to recognize that ‘to be’ invokes our engagement with the questions of being and
thus questions of inheritance. This is the task that we are charged with as heirs.
Also, to be charged with a task necessarily implies responsibility. Derrida writes, “There
is no inheritance without a call to responsibility. An inheritance is always the reaffirmation of a
debt, but a critical, selective, and filtering reaffirmation, which is why we distinguished several
spirits [of Marx].”25 Here again Derrida stresses the burden that necessitates an active
engagement (‘filtering’). In concluding this outline of what Derrida means by inheritance found
in Specters of Marx, I find that the burden of inheritance lies in its being a task and a
responsibility, but that it is with the coupling of the plural and multifaceted dimension portrayed
by the different spirits and voices calling on us to inherit in which the gift of inheritance radically
opens up various possibilities.
P. 2 The Gift of Death: Inheriting Responsibly

In The Gift of Death Derrida is mainly concerned with moral and ethical responsibility in
the Western religious and philosophical traditions. Here he focuses on the relation between the
Platonic and Christian paradigms throughout the history of morality and politics. In order to
understand the contemporary political and ethical landscape that has shaped Europe, particularly
the inherited guilt and grief of the World Wars and the Holocaust, Derrida questions the limits of
the rational by interrogating the responsibility tied to granting or accepting death – whether
through sacrifice, murder, execution, suicide, or even war. This is what he refers to as the
‘European secret’.
So what is the relationship between inheritance, here Europe’s inheritance of democracy,
and the secret? Derrida illustrates this relationship through the metaphor of the gift – particularly
the gift of death. He engages with the giving and taking of death in order to stress the
complexities involved in the process of gift giving. He writes,
Because I cannot take death away from the other who can no more take it from me in return,
it remains for everyone to take his own death upon himself. Everyone must assume his own
death, that is to say the one thing in the world that no one else can either give or take: therein
resides freedom and responsibility. … Death would be this possibility of giving and taking
24
25
Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp. 91-2.
that actually exempts itself from the same realm of possibility that it institutes, namely, from
giving and taking.26
In replacing the word death with that of inheritance this quote becomes vastly familiar.
‘Everyone must assume his/her own inheritance’ it isn’t passed on by one person to another in a
seamless fashion, but it initiates the possibility of giving and taking. The burden of such a gift
(the given token of inheritance) would thus be such an assumption. Inheritance, much like death,
is the passing on (through memory and legacy).
Derrida also links this notion of inaccessibility of gifts to secrecy. He writes: “the gift
that is not a present, the gift of something that remains inaccessible, unpresentable, and as a
consequence secret. The event of this gift would link the essence without essence of the gift to
secrecy. For one might say that a gift that could be recognized as such in the light of day, a gift
destined for recognition, would immediately annul itself.”27 Again, this quotation is much like the
extract from Specters of Marx on the secret and inheritance. If a gift’s full meaning were
accessible it would cease to be a gift and erase all possibilities that a gift entails, so the burden of
the gift itself is tied to this notion of secrecy.
But what is a secret? Is it something completely private or can it be shared, such as a
shared inheritance? Derrida finds there is a paradox linked to the responsibility implied in the
burden of a secret.
For common sense, just as for philosophical reasoning, the most widely shared belief is that
responsibility is tied to the public and to the nonsecret, to the possibility and even the
necessity of accounting for one’s words and actions in front of others, or justifying and
owning but to them. …[however,] the absolute responsibility of my actions, to the extent that
such a responsibility remains mine, singularly so, something no one else can perform in my
place, instead implies secrecy.28
The paradox lies in the singularity of responsibility and the necessity of accountability, but also in
the impossibility to give an account of something that has been sworn in silence. The paradox
thus questions the very possibility of inheriting a secret since it cannot be transmitted from one
generation to another.
Derrida therefore must show how one is to engage an inheritance if it is understood as a
secret which cannot be transmitted. He finds that,
In this sense it [a secret] has no history. This untransmissibility of the highest passion, the
normal condition of a faith which is thus bound to secrecy, nevertheless dictates to us the
following: we must always start over. … Each generation must begin again to involve itself in
it without counting on the generation before. It thus describes the nonhistory of absolute
26
Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 44.
27
28
beginnings which are repeated, and the very historicity that presupposes a tradition to be
reinvented each step of the way, in this incessant repetition of the absolute beginning.29
Derrida finds a secret can be inherited and inheritance calls for an engagement with the secret as a
never-ending and rupturing beginning. With this link, the phrase ‘the secret of democracy’
implies an engagement with democracy’s relationship to time, particularly its openness to the
future with ties to the past found in Derrida’s formulation of ‘democracy-to-come’.
In conclusion, I choose these texts not because they fulfilled a quota of quotes addressing
inheritance, but because each is in itself an engagement with inheritance. Derrida takes on his
own advice and sifts through the historical layout of Marxism and Christian responsibility as a
way through which he himself engages with his inheritance as a European philosopher. In doing
so he takes on the enormous wealth inherited from these traditions along with the burden of
exposing their tensions and short-comings. What Derrida shows is how these tensions are forever
exposing themselves through the conjuring of ghosts that haunt all of our traditions. They are the
agents that mark the radical beginning of each inheritance. Just as in Hamlet with the forever
emerging and re-emerging of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, inheritance becomes, “A question of
repetition: [since] a spectre is always a revenant. One cannot control its coming and goings
because it begins by coming back.”30
Chapter 1 Voicing Subjectivity:

Hamlet and Obama
In this section I present a theory of subjectivity found in Derrida’s analysis of Hamlet as

the traumatic exposure to ghosts. 31 In turning to this analysis coupled with my own reading of
29
30
Derrida, The Specters of Marx, p. 11.
31
Subjectivity seems a strange place of analysis since, “Derrida’s work can be seen to mourn the
political subject as well as any political logic which is organized around the notion of subjectivity.”
See R. Beardsworth, ‘Deconstruction and Tradition’, Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology 26, no. 3 (1995), 281. This debate circles around much of French thinking since
structuralism, for those who denounce a determinate account of subjectivity based on consciousness,
self-consciousness, or reflection and naming of the ‘political’. But in denouncing a self-conscious
and deconstructing the metaphysics encompassing the term ‘political’, Derrida does not totally reject
a theory of subjectivity, rather he resituates it through the concept of mourning and indeterminacy.
Mourning for Derrida does not imply simply grieving something that has past – that is gone, that is
dead. Rather, “[m]ourning always follows trauma.” Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 97. It is the
excessive remnants from a traumatic event projected towards those very elements in life that if lost,
or already lost, would render us pain. (Derrida exemplifies such an emotion through friendship,
which he describes as ‘forever wounding’. To be a friend would result in a forever being mourned,
because without the mourning – the excess or remaining emotion – the act of friendship would loose
all salience. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, pp. 14 and 22.) Subjectivity itself is traumatic.
‘Subject’ derives from the Latin subjectum, which literally means ‘that which is thrown under’. In
his essay ‘Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity?’, Simon Critchley begins his exploration of the subject
Hamlet, I argue that a subject, namely Hamlet, comes to know himself through a move of
infidelity; that is, the subject is displaced through his non-identity to himself experienced in the
face of others. I conclude by turning to the similar experiences Obama shares with Hamlet to
show how a reading of Hamlet can help us understand the implications involved with having an
‘absent father.’ Before doing this, however, I first turn to Derrida’s understanding and
complications with the subject and subjectivity.
As Derrida explains, a post-deconstructive subject would be “a subject that would no
longer include the figure of mastery of self, or adequation of self, center and origin of the world,
etc. … but which would define the subject rather as the finite experience of non-identity to self,
as the underivable interpellation inasmuch as it comes from the other, from the trace of the
other.”32 Here I argue that a subject is best understood as self-creative, not in the sense that it is
original and therefore the originator of its being and actions, but that in the exposure and
necessary calling that comes from the traces of others a subject needs to respond creatively. This
is why, for Derrida, the Zusage (grant or pledge) becomes the point of determination for the
subject through responsibility33, namely his ability to respond to the pledge of the other. In this
section I turn to Hamlet to present three moments of post-deconstructive subjectivity linking this
notion of creativity to responsibility: the anticipation of the return of the Ghosts, the trauma the
return enacts, and calls or demands the Ghost(s) place on the subject.
1.1 Derrida and Hamlet

Hamlet’s character is tied up with his relationship to his late father. The play opens with
the reality that the late king is dead, but his spirit haunts the state of Denmark. The play begins
by the coming back of the Ghost. In this notion of ‘coming back’, I find my first argument for a
Derridean subject. Since ghosts come to us and haunt us, the self is not in a position of choice or
control. We cannot master the ghosts’ coming and going. We can only respond. Anticipation
therefore sets the scene of my discussion; that is, anticipating the ghosts. Derrida writes, “in
Hamlet … everything begins by the apparition of a specter. More precisely by the waiting for this
from the Latin subjectum. He explains the subject as; “that which is thrown under as a prior support
or more fundamental stratum upon which other qualities, such as predicates, accidents and attributes
may be based.” Critchley, ‘Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity?’, p. 50. The subject is the ground-zero
starting point that is bound to others through its exposure to the outside world into which it has been
‘thrown’. In being exposed in this manner, the subject is marked by an incompleteness to which
things – experiences, ideas, accidents – can attach. For Derrida, this incompleteness is maintained in
the traces of others. Inheritance combines these traces, and that is why I turn to inheritance and
inheriting ghosts as a formulation of a Derridean theory of subjectivity.
32
Derrida, quoted in S. Critchley, ‘Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity?’, p. 72.
33
Critchley, ‘Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity?’, p. 71.
apparition. The anticipation is at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated…. The revenant is
going to come.”34 The anticipation of the waiting to see stages the exit and return of the ghost,
yet this seeing is questioned from the start. The watchmen ask the scholar Horatio to join them in
order to bear witness to the very spectacle. In bearing witness, they want Horatio to “approve”
the former sighting.35 When the Ghost returns they demand Horatio to “speak to it”, 36 but in his
attempt the Ghost disappears. By the end of the scene, the ghost re-appears twice outside of any
attempt to control the disappearing and reappearing through speech or force. In the notion of
‘coming back’, the traditional scheme of cause and effect is disrupted. Self-mastery is a term
linked to an instrumental view of identity which follows cause and effect. This is why an
understanding of the subject as self-creative responds to Derrida’s notions of mourning, trauma,
and ‘time out of joint’, as they can do nothing but re-act to it.
The second position of subjectivity relates to the trauma enacted through the ‘coming
back’ of ghosts. Critchley writes:
[A] subject that is constituted through a self-relation that is experience in lack, where the self
is experience as the inassumable source of what is lacking from the ego – a melancholia,
then. But, this is a good thing. It is only because the subject is unconsciously constituted
through the trauma of contact with the real that we might have the audacity to speak of
goodness, transcendence, compassion, etc.37
Here the disruption of trauma and the affect of melancholia open up the space for actions such as
goodness, compassion, transcendence, and even responsibility. For Hamlet, it is the exposure to
his father’s ghost that pulls him out of a state of inactivity expressed in Act I, Scene II. The
reality of his father’s death and his mother’s hasty marriage to his uncle render Hamlet
melancholic, represented by his “inky cloak”. 38 In his mourning he states, “How weary, stale, flat
and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world!” 39 He feels alone. But in the very next
scene, the traumatic encounter with the ghost of his late father throws him into activity.
Derrida gives an account of such an encounter. He finds that when the ghost is in front of
34
35
“Marcellus: …Touching this dreaded sight twice seen of us. Therefore I have entreated him
[Horatio] along With us to watch the minutes of this night, That if again this apparition come, He
may approve our eyes and speak to it.” W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), Act 1, Scene, 1, Lines 25-9.
36
“Marcellus: Thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio.” Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 1, Line
42.
37
Critchley, ‘Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity?’, p. 195.
38
“Hamlet: … ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected
haviour of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shows of grief, That can denote me truly.”
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2, Lines 77-83.
39
us in its very being before us – that is, in coming (in time) before us – a decision can be made and
an event occurs. Derrida writes, “Since the future, then, since the past as absolute future, since
the non-knowledge and the non-advent of an event, or what remains to be: to do and to decide
(which is first of all, no doubt, the sense of the ‘to be or not to be’ of Hamlet – and of any
inheritor who, let us say, comes to swear before a ghost).” 40 The event here is Hamlet’s very
inheriting and assuming the lonely role of the ‘righter of wrongs’. Hamlet swears in secrecy to
the Ghost to “remember”41 his father’s spirit by remembering the tragic events of his death.
Hamlet takes on the responsibility of the pledge and is thus subjected to it. In his determination
to “set it [time] right”42, he also demands an allegiance with Horatio and Marcellus as his friends
to “never speak of this that you have seen.” 43 They too swear. The act and the secrecy are
performed through voice. The trauma experienced develops a connection between responsibility
and voice, which is the third and final position of subjectivity I want to explore.
In Hamlet, the tying of responsibility and voice resonates in the churchyard scene. This
scene also hinges on anticipation; on the anticipation of the deceased to be buried (“Whose
grave’s this, sirrah?”44). Unaware of the question’s consequences, Hamlet’s discovery of the
particular answer to this question is detoured by the run of a cunning tongue. He surrenders this
question and asks another; “How long hast thou been a grave-maker?” 45 In the gravedigger’s
response Hamlet finds his own subjectivity tied to the responsibility he owes to that which he
inherits as well as to those from whom he inherits, even beyond their actual or physical presence.
The gravedigger says, “Of all the days i’th’ year, I came to’t that day that our last king Hamlet
o’ercame Fortinbras.” Hamlet continues, “How long is that since?” And the gravedigger,
“Cannot you tell that? Every fool can tell that. It was the very day that young Hamlet was born –
he that was mad and sent into England.” 46 From this very injunction Hamlet comes to terms with
the ghosts of his past, from that of his father in the gravedigger’s mentioning of him, to his own
specter (the specter of his image as mad that was sent away to England where his madness made
no difference), to Yurick his old friend and playmate, to Alexander, to Caesar, and ultimately to
Ophelia. All these ghosts call to Hamlet. In the dialogue his affiliations to these ghosts interrupt
and renegotiate his own self because he is subjected to their memory.
40
41
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, Line 91.
42
“Hamlet: …The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”
43
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, Line 161.
44
45
46
This is what Derrida means by the statement that through inheritance we have a
responsibility “beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the
ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead.” 47 At this very juncture in the play,
Derrida’s notion of bearing responsibility “beyond all living present” results in a confession.
Derrida writes,
One does not, for all that bear any less of a responsibility, beginning at birth, even if it is only
the responsibility to repair an evil at the very moment in which no one can admit it except in
a self-confession that confess the other, as if that amounted to the same. Hamlet curses the
destiny that would have destined him to be the man of right … as if he were cursing the right
or the law itself that has made of him a righter of wrongs, the one who, like the right, can
only come after the crime, or simply after: that is, in a necessarily second generation,
originarily late and therefore destined to inherit. One never inherits without coming to terms
with some specter, and therefore with more that one specter. 48
A confession relates to the response-ability tying one subject to the other. In this particular case
the scene ends in Hamlet’s confession of his love for Ophelia. 49 Tragically the confession is
late.50 Hamlet’s ability to respond to Ophelia’s love could only happen after the damage was
done, only after she killed herself because of his former inability to confess his love. His
compassion to confess Ophelia’s madness stemming from her love for him marks and names him
not only the ‘righter of wrongs’ but the doer as well. The point being that the trauma – the reality
of Ophelia’s death – renders Hamlet compassionate, which is the ‘good’ Critchley denotes as
coming from the subject’s self relation to lack.
1.2 Hamlet and Obama

Here I want to draw some parallels between Prince Hamlet and Barack Obama, who both
have an absent father. Obama only met his father once when he was ten years old and living with
his mother’s parents in Hawaii.51 He recounts this visit and other recollections in his memoir
Dreams from My Father. In the introduction Obama finds himself held in anticipation much like
at the opening of Hamlet. He notes that he intended for a very different account. An intellectual
47
Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. xix.
48
49
“Hamlet: I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum – What wilt thou do for her?” Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5, Scene, 1, Lines 259-61.
50
The culmination of the three moments of subjectivity I discuss here – ‘coming back’, trauma,
voicing responsibility – only culminate retrospectively. This is what Aletta Norval means by “The
formulation of a democratic subject relies upon a set of practices being drawn together
retroactively.” A. J. Norval, Aversive Democracy: Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic
Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 183.
51
B. Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Three Rivers
Press, 2004), pp. 62-71.
exploration into affirmative action and Afrocentrism was the plan, but when he sat down and
started to write, “[d]istant voices appeared, and ebbed, and then appeared again. I remembered
the stories that my mother and her parents told me as a child, the stories of a family trying to
explain itself.”52 Notice how these distant voices are the ghosts of his inheritance – the very
ghosts of his father – and they too are calling to Obama to change course. They are beyond his
control, subjecting him to listen, to engage.
The second position explored in the above section deals with the trauma experienced in
the face of ghosts and the melancholia it produces. For Obama, the trauma created by the ghost
of his father is linked to his skin, his very race. During his years in high school, Obama began to
confront his race and with it confront racism. He remembers visiting a friend of his
Grandfather’s, an old black poet named Frank, to discuss his grandmother’s fear of black men.
Frank says: “…your grandma’s right to be scared. … She understands that black people have a
reason to hate.”53 After hearing this reality, Obama leaves Frank’s house. Walking to his car he
recalls, “The earth shook under my feet, ready to crack open at any moment. I stopped, trying to
steady myself, and knew for the first time that I was utterly alone.” 54 Here Obama, like Hamlet,
realizes the debt he bears from his inheritance of being black; that is, that racism is real and even
for his grandparents who have raised a racial grandson. From this painful realization he turns to
engage with his black inheritance, striving to endure 55, and even to right the mistakes of his
father’s truncated past.56
Coming to the third, and final, position of subjectivity, the moment of voice and
responsibility, brings Obama to Kenya. Interestingly enough in Dreams for My Father, this
moment also occurs in a graveyard. After listening to his father’s stepmother recount the stories
of his great-grandfather, of his father’s true mother, of his very birthright, Obama visited his
52
Obama, Dreams from My Father, pp. xiii-xiv.
53
Obama, Dreams from My Father, p. 91.
54
Ibid.
55
In speaking to a friend about the resentment he feels when he confronts the difficulties involved in
making a difference combating racism. His friend points out that the struggle is not just about him,
about his needs and his fears. After this criticism he notes she was saying “You might be locked into
a world not of your own making … but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have
responsibilities.” Obama, Dreams from My Father, p. 112. Here the responsibility for Obama is like
Hamlet’s, to set history right and make strides to overcome the disruptions caused by racism.
56
In the realization of his father’s downfall, which I discuss in the next chapter, Obama notes
“Where once I’d felt the need to live up to his expectations, I now felt as if I had to make up for all
his mistakes.” Obama, Dreams from My Father, p. 227. Here this also resembles Hamlet in that
Hamlet’s father’s mistake was that he took his sins with him to his grave and was now trapped in
purgatory (“No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head.”
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, Lines 78-9), and in swearing to ‘remember’ him, Hamlet
pledges to right the ‘time out of joint’.
father’s grave. He writes, “I dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow
tile. Oh, Father, I cried. There was no shame in your confusion. Just as there had been no shame
in your father’s before you. No shame in the fear, or in the fear of his father before him. There
was only shame in the silence fear had produced. It was the silence that betrayed us.” 57 Just like
Hamlet’s weeping for Ophelia, Obama weeps for his father and forgives him for not being there
for him. At the same time he takes on his own responsibility for not engaging himself. He
recognizes his own betrayal of silence that for a time resulted in resentment. This is why he
vows, in Derridean fashion, that “in the conversation itself, in the joining of voices, I find myself
modestly encouraged, believing that so long as the questions are still being asked, what binds us
together might somehow, ultimately, prevail.”58
Chapter 2 Perfectibility and Inheritance
Much like the opening of Hamlet, a similar anticipation is haunting the American
political scene at this very point in time – the 2008 Presidential Election. Citizens of the United
States and citizens of the world are anticipating the outcome of an election which on the one-side
promising “hope” and “change” and the other promising “strength” and “leadership.” Much like
the Ghost in Hamlet, “the one who says ‘I am they Father’s Spirit’ [who] can only be taken at his
word,”59 the candidates too can only bet taken at their word – at their very promising. So what
are they promising? They are promising improvement, whether that improvement comes from
‘difference’ or whether it comes from ‘stability’. These candidates too rely on the coming back,
the revenant, of ghosts, calling on the legends of the ‘American Dream’ or the successes of JFK
in order to make their interpretation of improvement stronger, more desirable, even more perfect.
In this section, I turn to this concept of perfecting. I argue that by linking up
perfectibility and inheritance perfectionism produces a non-teleological cultivation of meaning
for democratic subjectivity as opposed to an establishment of substantial authority dedicated to a
final outcome. First I give a general account of perfectionism in Derrida’s ‘democracy to come’
before turning to the moment of perfectibility in democratic subjectivity as appealing to
exemplarity. I use Barack Obama’s own struggles with perfection through the image of his father
as an example of this process. But before turning to this relationship, I must turn to this notion of
perfectibility presented as a process of improvement.
57
58
59
2.1 A Perfectibility ‘to-come’
In A Theory of Justice John Rawls defines perfectionism as a teleological theory. He
takes this definition from Nietzsche’s account of perfection found in great men like Socrates and
Goethe.60 He concludes the sole goal of perfectionism is to direct “society to arrange institutions
and to define the duties and obligations of individuals so as to maximize the achievement of
human excellence, in art, in science and in culture.” 61 This leads him to reject a principle of
perfection as conflicting with his own principle of equal moral worth found in the first principle
of justice.62 The incompatibility of perfection with equality renders perfectionism, for Rawls,
undemocratic. This is because, for Rawls, the principle of equality in democracy is
homogeneous. The first principle of justice denotes this character as each individual is entitled to
an equal scheme of basic rights based on a compatibility of similarity with the liberties of
others.63
Derrida, however, wants “to think out an equality that would not be homogeneous, that
would take heterogeneity, infinite singularity, infinite alterity into account.” 64 This is why his
perfectibility is thought of as processual, 65 as opposed to procedural.66 Derrida’s thought process
resides in his understanding of democracy as an ethical relationship addressing the singularity of
60
J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 325.
61
Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 285-86.
62
The first principle of justice states; “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive
scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others.” Rawls, A
Theory of Justice, p. 53.
63
For a short explanation of this principle see; V. Lemm, ‘Is Nietzsche a Perfectionist? Rawls,
Cavell, and the Politics of Culture in Nietzsche’s “Schopenhauer as Educator”’, Journal of Nietzsche
Studies 34 (2007), 23 n. 11.
64
J. Derrida, ‘Politics and Friendship’, in E. Rottenberg (ed. and trans.), Negotiations: Interventions
and Interviews, 1971-2001 (Standford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 179.
65
See D. Owen, ‘Democracy, perfectionism and “undetermined messianic hope”’, in L. Nagl and C.
Mouffe (eds.), The Legacy of Wittgenstein: Pragmatism or Deconstruction (Oxford: Peter Lang,
2001), pp. 139-56.
66
Since Rawls is dedicated to understanding democracy through principles in A Theory of Justice –
the principle of justice, a principle of equality – this leads him into an understanding of democracy in
Political Liberalism as designed around public reason as procedural; that is, we follow certain laws
and principles from the nature of reason itself. Rawls writes, “our exercise of political power is
proper and hence justifiable only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials
of which all citizens may reasonably be expected to endorse in a the light of principles and ideals
acceptable to them as reasonable and rational.” J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993), p. 217. Hence, Rawls grounds his theory of reciprocity through
reasonableness as a procedure, a rule of law, rather than through an exposure to the other in its
absolute singularity. I think that this procedural reliance actually comes from A Theory of Justice in
the first place. The principles of right and justice bind democracy into a limited domain and that is
why Rawls cannot accept perfection in principle, but rather limits perfection to the principle of free
association. Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 289.
others ‘beyond all living present’ residing in its very condition of ‘to-come’. 67 The
undeterminedness of the to-come implies that there is no finality to the ethos, because a final
goal, like a perfect procedure, denies the singularity of others. Perfectibility, rather, advances the
subject’s position of unlimited responsibility to the singularity of the other. 68 Therefore it links
democracy to democratic subjectivity based on responsibility rather than the political subjectivity
based on reciprocal exchange as in Rawls; that is, through ‘acting democratically’ the subject
engages in a responsiveness to the singularity of others rather than demanding equality through
the universal principle of justice. This is why Derrida finds neither the motif of equality nor
responsibility to be reconcilable with subjective identity because it is “de-responsibilizing or
bound, in any case, to limit ethico-political responsibility in the order of calculable law.” 69
Perfectibility, for Derrida, is linked to responsibility not found in the liberal idea of moral self-
perfection, limited to the private sphere and calculable principles, rather in the self-creative
process of responsiveness to the encounter with the others as primary and unavoidable.
It is this very notion of perfectibility that exists in the Declaration of Independence. On
18 March 2008 in Philadelphia, Barack Obama turns to the promise of perfectibility found in the
phrase ‘A More Perfect Union’. In the speech Obama addresses the issues surrounding the racial
divide as an inherited dynamic in the history of the United States. What is to be noted is not that
an African American male running for president can be or is talking about the debt of slavery and
its consequences, but that he directly links the debt of slavery as a marker from which the
problems plaguing the different communities within the American tradition can be re-addressed.
Obama takes up the task to embark on the journey as established by the Founders in creating and
developing a ‘more perfect union.’ He highlights the duality and contingency of the American
tradition as aligned through a single promise – “this union may never be perfect, but generation
after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.”70
Some inside and outside the United States find this promise to be utopian. Such
67
Democracy-to-come is an ethos as promise in which “the opening of this gap between the infinite
promise (always untenable at least for the reason that it calls for the infinite respect of the singularity
and infinite alterity of the other as much as for the respect of the countable, calculable, subjectal
equality between anonymous singularities) and the determined, necessary, but also necessarily
inadequate forms of what has to be measured against this promise. To this extent, the effectivity or
actuality of the democratic promise … will always keep within it, and it must do so, this absolutely
undetermined messianic hope at its heart, this eschatological relation to the to-come of an event and
singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated.” Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 65.
68
From this understanding, Derrida does not present an internal link between perfectionism and
democracy like Stanley Cavell. For an explanation of this difference see; Owen, ‘Democracy,
perfectionism and “undetermined messianic hope”’, p. 152.
69
Derrida, ‘Politics and Friendship’, p. 179.
70
promising, however, is not necessarily utopian because, as the statement suggests ‘more’ perfect
not perfect. Nor is it an anti-utopian ideal in that it does not promise anything at all. Rather it
can be best described as a post-utopian ideal that promises potential (and at the same time failure)
deferred to the future. He turns to the history of American diversity and presents a non-
homogeneous connection found in equality in saying “we may have different stories, but we hold
common hopes.”71 These common hopes are those expressed in the inheritance of the American
Dream; “that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we
all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for our children and our
grandchildren.”72 What is particular about Obama’s take on this legacy is not that it is
universalizing, but in the very particularities of struggling for this promise people falter and get
left behind. He shows this by pointing to those who have been disenchanted by the
unattainability of the dream. He turns to the disenchanted black community as represented
through his former pastor in saying, “for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and
racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of
Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone
away; nor have the anger and the bitterness of those years”. 73 Obama notes this anger is real and
it has real implications; however he wants to insist that division will not heal the wounds of a
racially divided past therefore “we have no choice [but to work together] if we are to continue on
the path of a more perfect union.”74 This means the path of the African American community is
not to be held hostage by the reality of an unfulfilled promise, but in “embracing the burdens of
our past without becoming victims of our past”75 the ‘to-come’, very promise itself, is maintained.
2.2 Fathers as Exemplars

Another way to understand this notion of perfectibility is found in Nietzsche’s term
exemplar. It is from this term that Rawls’s deducts perfectionism to be anti-democratic, “since it
supposes that we subordinate the design of our lives and of our political institutions to enable the
‘highest specimens’ to achieve their ends.” 76 This deduction hinges on the translation of the
German exemplar to ‘specimen’ rather than its English cognate ‘exemplar’. In his essay
‘Nietzsche’s Perfectionism’, James Conant notes the translation invokes a “biologistic reading” of
71
Ibid.
72
Ibid.
73
Ibid.
74
Ibid.
75
Ibid.
76
Norval, Aversive Democracy, p. 192.
the term that “particularly jars in Rawls’s version … especially against the background of
Nietzsche’s appropriation by the Nazis.” 77 Conant, instead, wants to allude to the genealogy and
genealogical implications tied to using the English cognate of ‘examplar’ in order to draw out the
more democratic inheritance of perfectionism found in the relationship between a student and his
teacher.
The democratic inheritance that Conant refers to is the cultivation of self. As Norval
summarizes Conant’s exploration into the genealogy of ‘exemplar’, she writes, “For Nietzsche,
the educative role of the exemplar – the fact that it discloses my concealed but higher self – can
only be fulfilled if something or someone is both related, similar to us (exemplarity is a mark of
this) and different from us (exemplariness is an indicator of inessential difference).” 78 Therefore,
the position of educator oscillates between proximity and distance. The proximity is found in the
similarity the subject wants to emulate, and the distance presented through the ‘otherness’ of the
exemplar to whom one emulates. This oscillation is experienced traumatically in Conant’s
reading of Nietzsche since the emulation only presents itself in the confrontation to the educator 79
who unsettles us.80
The ‘unsettling’ for Conant proceeds from the face-to-face encounter with those others
who trigger “impersonal shame in you.”81 Such an encounter seems consistent with the
formulation of subjectivity presented in the previous chapter, but is there not an example of this
found in the Christian tradition of following Christ – the discipleship? Here deconstruction itself
might be uneasy with this example as it emphasizes “a certain experience of the emancipatory
promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without
religion, even a messianic without messianism.” 82 The kind of perfection presented by Conant,
however, does not conflict Derrida but is rather consistent with the ‘unsettling’ that provokes a
“cultivation of democratic renewal.”83 Perhaps, in a Derridean fashion, the exemplar should be
remembered not as perfect or Christ-like but singular. From this point I turn to Barack Obama’s
own struggles with perfection, particularly the perfect image of his father, in order to explain
what I mean by this.
77
J. Conant, ‘Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator’, in R. Schacht
(ed.), Nietzsche’s Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 192.
78
79
Conant, ‘Nietzsche’s Perfectionism’, p. 202.
80
Conant borrows this phrase from Emerson. See Conant, ‘Nietzsche’s Perfectionism’, p. 208.
81
Conant, ‘Nietzsche’s Perfectionism’, pp. 205-6.
82
83
For a more detailed reading of how this happens in Conant see: Norval, Aversive Democracy, p.
208.
In his memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama describes the image of his father created
in his absence. He writes, “All my life I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had
sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own.
The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader – my father had been all those
things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never
been present to foil the image.”84 The image he had of his father was that of perfection. He was a
model provider of meaning, an un-soiled thing to which he could aspire. His father was his
exemplar. But this image he had was the Rawlsian use of the translation of exemplar to
‘specimen’ – a distant, biological figure of achievement. By maintaining the distance Obama
took advantage of detachment and at times railed against this exemplar, such as when he recoiled
from the ‘ideal’ student and “learned not to care.”85
So what brought him back to a state of caring? One point of reference could be made
from the explanation of his father’s weaknesses and failures he received from his half-sister
Auma. In learning the foils of his father, Obama recalls, “Now, as I sat in the glow of a single
light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, [the inflated image of his father] vanished.
Replaced by … what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To
think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost!” 86 But it is the reality
of his father’s humanity, his very singularity, that sets free Obama’s subjectivity, when he writes,
“The king is overthrown, I thought. The emerald curtain is pulled aside … I can do what I damn
well please. For what man, if not my father, has the power to tell me otherwise? Whatever I do,
it seems, I won’t do much worse than he did.”87
To conclude, in the picture of Obama’s father being rendered human and limited shatters
the illusion of the father as presented by Steele. This is what he calls a moment of ‘initiation’. 88
The image is shattered and Obama is left alone, but this solitude is liberating. Steele writes, “Yes,
his [father’s image] fall into reality leaves him alone, but even so, the company is better. And
there is the consolation of a surprising irony: the father who gave him so little, in the end gave
him the best gift a father can give: authority over his own life.” 89 In the fall, the distance created
provides Obama with a perspective from which to emulate and ameliorate. Obama enacts the
Nietzschean ‘following’ of an exemplar, which “is not a matter of following in someone’s
84
85
86
87
Obama, Dreams from My Father, pp. 220-21.
88
Steele, A Bound Man, p. 19.
89
Steele, A Bound Man, p. 24.
footsteps … but of regarding someone as an exemplary instance of … ‘faithfully following in
one’s own footsteps’.”90 His father, even in his absence, is still the exemplar he follows not by
following in his father’s footsteps – even though he too went to Harvard just like his father – but
in turning to his inheritance, his father’s history. Thus he learns to faithfully follow in his own
footsteps.
Chapter 3 Autoimmunity and Inheritance
In The Present Age, Soren Kierkegaard presents a description of how the relationship
between a father and son looses all meaning when authority is no longer respected. He writes;
A father no longer curses his son in anger, using his parental authority, nor does a son defy his
father, a conflict which might end in the inwardness of forgiveness; on the contrary, their
relationship is irreproachable, for it is really in process of ceasing to exist, since they are no
longer related to one another within the relationship; in fact it has become a problem in which
the two partners observe each other as in a game, instead of having any relation to each other,
and they note down each others remarks instead of showing a firm devotion.91
They become partners in a game. What happens between partners, better known as opponents, in
a game situation? They start to create strategies in order to defend, diffuse, attack or avoid.
Democracy also acts this way under pressure. In the name of ‘defense’ a democracy has the
tendency to establish undemocratic practices in order to ‘save’ democracy itself. This is Derrida’s
concept of autoimmunity – “the contradictory process in which a self puts a partial end to itself in
order to live on.”92
Throughout this essay I have been trying to maintain the tension between meaning and
power as a fundamental paradox in democracy, and particularly in democratic subjectivity. In this
section I develop a counter argument to the potentiality of this being maintained through turning
to Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity and how democracy itself is perpetually undoing the
paradox. Derrida describes autoimmunity as “that strange behavior where a living being, in
quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its
‘own’ immunity.”93 This is exactly what is at stake in eliminating the protective element of the
father-figure; that is, in removing the father’s position of authority as provider of basic needs.
Removing this position is not only about removing a position of power, but a position of meaning
as well. Like in the ‘search-for-father-stories’ explored by Steele in A Bound Man, a child can
also become bound to the resentment he feels towards that very figure it lacks. I turn to Obama’s
90
Conant, ‘Nietzsche’s Perfectionism’, p. 206.
91
S. Kierkegaard, The Present Age, trans. A. Dru (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 44-5.
92
S. Haddad, ‘Derrida and democracy at risk’, Contretemps 4 (2004), 30.
93
G. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques
Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), p. 94.
‘Father’s day speech’ in order to illustrate this point. First, however, I elaborate on the tension
between democracy’s perfectibility and its survival.
3.1 Perfectibility and Autoimmunity

I want to explore the relationship between autoimmunity and perfectibility as democratic
tendencies. In Aversive Democracy, Aletta Norval explains that “autoimmunity refers to the
possibility of democracy perfecting itself (through the right to auto-critique) [and] is inseparable
from its fragility (its openness also exposes it to the ‘threat’ of those wishing to put it to an end,
from within).”94 It is through democracy’s very lack of form, its very hospitality that offers itself
up to chance and threat. Such ‘chance’ is embodied in the very promises of ‘democracy to come’
– the right to autocritique and perfectibility. This is why “Democracy contains within it the
possibility of welcoming an undemocratic regime, and inviting (and to some extent encouraging)
terrorist attacks, as well as the possibility of producing another attack against itself in an attempt
to divert these threats.”95 Through democracy’s constitutive incompleteness exemplified through
perfectibility and openness, it can destroy its very promise by attempting to protect it.
This incompleteness is further developed by Derrida in his use of the French verb
‘renvoi’, the sending off or to the other and putting off, adjournment. Derrida says in Rogues,
This double renvoi … is an autoimmune necessity inscribed right onto … democracy, right
onto the concept of a democracy without concept, a democracy devoid of sameness and
ipseity, a democracy whose concept remains free, like a disengaged clutch, freewheeling, in
the free play of its indetermination; it is inscribed right onto this thing or this cause that,
precisely under the name of democracy, it is never properly what it is, never itself.96
The verb refers both to a spatial and temporal delay as a re-sending, a sending away, a sending
back to the source, and a sending on. Spatially, autoimmunity acts as a protective reflex to
democracy’s own hospitality in that it sends domestic enemies into exile. And temporally,
autoimmunity acts as a detouring mechanism that puts off democratic practices, such as elections,
in order to wait for safer times, or times more hospitable to perfecting.
In the American context, this is exactly what was inscribed in the justification for the
continuation of slavery. The Founding Fathers decided to allow for the continuation (albeit
temporarily) of slavery in order for the constitutional convention to progress and the founding of
the American Democracy to form.97 They put aside the implications of immorality and inequality,
94
95
Haddad, ‘Derrida and democracy at risk’, 37.
96
J. Derrida, Rogues. Two Essays on Reason, trans. P. A. Brault and M. Nass (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 36-7.
97
both democratic opponents, in order for the democratic promise as an establishment of a free and
independent United States (from England) to endure. But what needs to be understood is by
keeping slavery to the remote areas of the south, predominately on plantations, the spatial
dimension to autoimmunity reinforced the temporal. Through this distancing the traumatic
experience of slavery, for the most part, continued to not engage the white Americans’
subjectivity, resulting in the continuation of segregation upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the
1986 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537.
Since autoimmunity is tied to the promise of democracy through hospitality and
perfectibility, how then can it be negotiated? Derrida finds this to be a challenge for a
‘democrat’. He writes;
I have to accept if I offer unconditional hospitality that the Other may ruin my own space or
impose his or her own culture or his or her own language. That’s the problem: hospitality
should be neither assimilation, acculturaltion, nor simply the occupation of my space by the
Other. That’s why it has to be negotiated at every instant, and the decision for hospitality, the
best rule for this negotiation, has to be invented at every second with all the risks involved,
and it is very risky.98
It is up to the democratic subject to continue the risky business of negotiation, even at his or her
own expense. What is to be remembered is that for the continuation of the tension between
democracy as a site of political power and a site of meaning an open space for hospitality towards
the absolute singularity of the other must be maintained for the ability to respond to the demands
of their singularity to be possible; put differently, to be able to listen to the voices of the ghosts
who call to us.
3.2 Protecting Fathers

This is exactly what Obama is doing in regards to his father. After receiving the news of
his father’s death, Obama recalls that “I felt no pain, only the vague sense of an opportunity
lost.”99 After the coming of his sister and her bringing more (past) news of his father’s life he
heard his father’s voice calling to him, calling to his responsibility to his color – “You do not
work hard enough, Barry. You must help your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!” 100
Before that night, this voice was untainted, but in its very tarnishing by the reality of his father’s
own struggles, Obama decided to do better – “I won’t do much worse than he did.” 101 Perhaps
98
J. Derrida, ‘Politics and friendship: A discussion with Jacques Derrida’, Center for Modern French
Thought, University of Sussex, 1 December 1997. At (www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/pol+fr.html).
99
100
101
this is why he himself calls to fathers, reminding them “that responsibility does not end at
conception.”102 Obama is not distant from reality, however, in placing himself as an exemplar in
the specimen formulation – distant and objective. He admits his own imperfections as a father,
“wishing that I could be home for my girls and my wife more than I am right now,” 103 but realizes
that in his absence he can still set an example of compassion and excellence for his children.
To conclude I would like to return to the notion of auto-immunity and its implications for
democracy. The use of auto-immunity to diagnose democracy at risks “commits us to a picture in
which democracy is fundamentally structured around a notion of defense, and this may not be the
kind of democracy that ought to be endorsed.”104 How then should we use autoimmunity? I think
it could be a useful term in the continuation of an understanding of democracy as ‘democracy as
inheritance.’ What I mean by this is that through an ongoing engagement with the chance and the
threat we inherit in this thing called democracy, as democratic subjects we can find the freedom
promised by democracy through our responsibility to our inheritance, and to our parents – and all
those who are ‘beyond all living present’ and simply beyond.
I recently visited the International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool. In the exhibition
they had many quotes on the walls from ex-slaves, abolitionists, black and white activists alike
but there was one quote from an anonymous contributor that particularly struck my attention. It
reads, “I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.” This is exactly what is at stake in
democracy, its very own autoimmune system. That is that perfect states, that of democracy and
freedom, come with a warning signal. If they are to be realized they will indefinitely be unstable.
But the question remains – isn’t that instability worth while? Isn’t this the very ‘audacity of
hope’ as ascribed by Obama, and Derrida alike, in any promise, particularly that of democracy?
Conclusion
To conclude I want to turn back to the concept of inheritance. Samir Haddad describes
the formula ‘democracy as inheritance’ as; “a treasure …[whose] wealth lies not in the
prescriptions it give[s] us on how to be democratic, but in precisely that lack of prescription that
Derrida argues must be part of every legacy.” 105 If ‘democracy as inheritance’ does not tell us
‘how to be democratic’ and my whole project has been driven towards what it means to be
democratic, my discussion might seem unwarranted. But that is simply not the case as my goal is
not a practical one. It is existential – not how but what does it mean to be a ‘democrat’. In
102
B. Obama, ‘Father’s Day Speech,’ Apostolic Church of God, Chicago, Illinois, United States, 15
103
Ibid.
104
Haddad, ‘Derrida and democracy at risk’, 40.
105
S. Haddad, ‘Inheriting Democracy to Come’, Theory & Event 8, no. 1 (2005), para. 39.
positioning my argument for inheritance as a practice of democratic subjectivity, I animate rather
than anticipate the ghosts that invoke the subject.
This is why I turn to Hamlet. In discussing the student movements of 1968 in Mexico,
Bruno Bosteels writes, “Hamlet’s cursed cause, to right the wrong of a time out of joint, would
also have been the ideal of the student movement: not to let justice haunt the country as an
intangible ghost but, on the contrary, to animate the spectre so as to break the wrongs of a
truncated modernity.”106 Derrida’s strict position of maintaining democracy as promise found in
the ‘to-come’ opens up space for movement and engagement much in the same manner. On 28
August 2008 at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Barack Obama also calls for the
animation of the promise found in the American tradition. He says;
it is that American spirit - that American promise - that pushes us forward even when the path
is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on
what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend. That promise is our
greatest inheritance. It's a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a
promise that you make to yours - a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and
pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the
ballot.107
Here Obama points to the very fact that American history is tainted with undemocratic
tendencies, but those tendencies are negotiated by the inherited promise of perfectibility and a
unity through difference. Put differently, the causes of suffrage and freedom enacted the promise
inspiring the people to reach for more. It is the proximity of the peoples bound together in pursuit
of a distant promise creating the democratic ethos. This ethos is between an articulated will and
an understanding of a common – the very spirit of democracy.
Derrida finds this spirit in the idea of friendship. In The Politics of Friendship he writes,
“A friend is the person who loves before being the person who is loved: he who loves before
being beloved … a condition of possibility (theoretical chain) and held in a pledge, a promise, an
alliance (performative chain).”108 According to Derrida this condition of possibility held in the
verbal promise of ‘I love you’ takes the logic of a gift. This logic “calls friendship back to non-
reciprocity, to dissymmetry or to disproportion, to the impossibility of a return to offered or
received hospitality; in short, it calls friendship back to the irreducible precedence of the other.” 109
A friend marks his friend by naming him ‘friend’, calling to his own particular singularity, and
106
B. Bosteels, ‘Mexico 1968’, Radical Philosophy, 149 (2008), 5.
107
B. Obama, ‘The American Promise,’ Democratic National Convention, Denver, Colorado, United
States, 28 August 2008 At (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/28/barack-obama-democratic-
c_n_122224.html).
108
Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, p. 9.
109
Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, p. 63.
order to sustain the love that liberates friends the singularity cannot be jeopardized through a
demand for reciprocation. The power is suspended but present through the pledge. The meaning
is suspended but present through the possibility of reciprocation. This is why, in friendship the
democratic play between meaning and power for Nancy holds in its aporetic nature by not calling
for substitution or infusion of the one with the other.
In democratic theory, if we cling too much to one of these two tensions, meaning or
power, and too little to the other, undemocratic relationships might form and resentment builds.
This is exactly what Obama realizes about his relationship with his father. Looking back to when
he visited his father’s grave in Kenya and wept, he articulates an absolving afterword. He writes,
“The silence killed your [his father’s] faith. And for lack of faith you clung to both too much and
too little of your past. Too much of its rigidness, its suspicions, its male cruelties.” 110 The lack of
faith here can be interpretted as faith in the self, faith in others, or simply faith in the spirit of
openness – the very spirit of democracy. In writing his memoir, Obama avoids this same
problem. At the start he mentions the realization of the marginalization of his mother in the
project. She died of cancer before she had the opportunity to see the book finalized. He writes:
“I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a
different book – less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the
single constant of my life.”111 But a meditation on the absent parent is exactly what Obama needs
in order to animate the specter of his own subjectivity and responsibility. He realizes that he
needs to sift through his past, his legacy in order to learn to follow his own footsteps to becoming
a better father, a better man, and to ensure that his daughters, and other daughers, sisters, and
mothers, are part of that dialogue.
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Ghost of Our Fathers: Jacques Derrida and Barack Obama Discussing Inheritance

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Ghosts of Our Fathers:

Jacques Derrida and Barack Obama Discussing Inheritance

Ghost: I am thy father’s spirit,

For Derrida, what is at stake in democracy, especially in the democratic tradition of

P.1 Specters of Marx: Outlining Inheritance

P. 2 The Gift of Death: Inheriting Responsibly

Chapter 1 Voicing Subjectivity:

In this section I present a theory of subjectivity found in Derrida’s analysis of Hamlet as

1.1 Derrida and Hamlet

1.2 Hamlet and Obama

Chapter 2 Perfectibility and Inheritance

2.2 Fathers as Exemplars

Chapter 3 Autoimmunity and Inheritance

3.1 Perfectibility and Autoimmunity

3.2 Protecting Fathers

Bosteels, B., ‘Mexico 1968’, Radical Philosophy, 149 (2008), 5-11.

Conant, J., ‘Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator’, in R. Schacht

Critchley, S., ‘Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity?’ in Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on

Haddad, S., ‘Derrida and democracy at risk’, Contretemps 4 (2004), 29-44.

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