Absolutist Democracy,Homo Sacer and the Resistance of Bare Life

Abstract

The pathologies or aberrations of democracy demand critical analysis and the growing incidents of human rights violation and the repressive mechanisms of statecraft/marketocracy in the name of democracy call for a radical reformulation of existing democratic paradigms. Democracy in its existing avatar is flawed and it needs some restructuring or philosophic radicalisation. Continental thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida have betrayed similar concerns about the current oppressive trends in democracy. In the post-9/11 world, Derrida had talked about the Democratie a venir or the coordinates of future democracy-to-come and the Habermasian praxis of deliberative democracy also envisions an ideal emancipatory discourse of enlightened public sphere and participatory democracy which is empowering and averse to the mechanisms of neo-capital. This article argues that Arundhati Roy’s angst against the comprador nature of Indian democracy has theoretical and philosophic support from the contemporary continental ethico-political philosophy of later Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. Agamben’s notion of Homo Sacer and Bare Life and Derrida’s outcry against autoimmunity and absolutist totalitarian democracy are similar to Roy’s concern about the ‘demon-crazy’.