A 'strange and paradoxical revolution' : Derrida's Law as Autoimmune

Lloyd, Christopher Edward (2025) A 'strange and paradoxical revolution' : Derrida's Law as Autoimmune. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

It is argued that autoimmunity was the last, great, master-concept of the Maghreb-French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. Beginning in the late 1980s, and continuing until the years prior to his death in 2004, autoimmunity emerged to become a focal point in Derrida’s later works. The concept accounted for the process by which an entity, phenomenon, or living being, was both preserved and radically altered – potentially even destroyed – by the same movement. Derrida illustrated that the social phenomena of democracy, religion, technology, community, and the ‘self,’ were all autoimmune. However, Derrida’s work made no comment on whether or not the social phenomenon of law was autoimmune. This thesis extends the trajectory of Derrida’s thought and argues that law is autoimmune. The argument for law’s autoimmunity is presented over three Chapters. Chapter I introduces and contextualises the ‘juridico-political’ concept of autoimmunity across five of Derrida’s key texts: The Politics of Friendship, Specters of Marx, ‘Faith and Knowledge,’ Rogues, and ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides.’ Chapter II then offers the thesis’ main argument for law’s autoimmunity, drawn from Derrida’s oeuvre, via four points: the anachronous and asymmetrical origins of law, the medium of writing which both preserves and alters the law’s fixity, the tripartite relationship between law, justice, and autoimmunity, and the law’s malleability contained in any given legal decision. Then, Chapter III illustrates the autoimmunity of law evident in the common law, within the judicial practice of ratio decidendi: the beating heart of the common law’s judicial reasoning is both the law’s guarantor of stasis and the harbinger of radical alterity. The thesis then concludes by arguing that an autoimmune law is a generative and positive social phenomenon, imbued with radical potential: ‘autoimmunity is not an absolute ill or evil. It enables an exposure to the other, to what and to who comes.’

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