Democracy and Justice : Reading Derrida in Istanbul

Philosophy and politics and theory and practice are neither separate nor separable for Derrida. The relationship between democracy and justice seems of unquestionable importance, with democracy and justice held in tension by deconstruction. This book explores the possibilities offered by Derrida’s work on democracy, in particular his reflections on the autoimmunity and aporetic structure of democracy for interpreting contemporary struggles over democracy in Turkey. If recent political upheavals in Turkey were as much about democracy as they were about justice, then a consideration of the aporias of Turkish democracy sheds light on the relationship between Derrida’s thought on democracy and justice.

This book explores the possibilities offered by Derrida’s work on democracy for interpreting contemporary struggles over democracy in Turkey.

The relationship between democracy and justice seems of unquestionable importance to Derrida, with democracy and justice held in tension by deconstruction. Agnes Czajka offers a qualified endorsement of a ‘just democracy’, grounded in the possibilities opened up by reading Derrida’s work on democracy together with his work on justice. She posits that one way of imagining democracy-to-come might be to imagine it as a ‘just democracy’, or one poised at the intersection of the aporia of democracy and the (non)imperative to justice. In the particular context of contemporary struggles over democracy in Turkey, she also explores what such comportment toward a just democracy (or a justice of/in democracy) might look like in the context of that ‘particular’ democracy.