Key Derrida Concepts in Political Theory

Jacques Derrida’s concepts, rooted in deconstruction, challenge fixed meanings and power structures in politics, emphasizing instability, ethics, and undecidability. These ideas critique sovereignty, democracy, and binaries like law/force, applying to UPSC topics in postmodernism and political ideologies. Below is a curated list of core concepts with political relevance, definitions, and examples.

• Différance: Combines difference (spatial) and deferral (temporal), showing meaning in political signs (e.g., “sovereignty”) never fully present but traces exclusions like the “other” in state identity.
• Deconstruction: Method exposing binary hierarchies (e.g., law/violence, presence/absence) in political texts; reverses then displaces them to reveal interdependence, as in state repression of “force”.
• Autoimmunity: Political systems self-undermine; democracy excludes non-citizens while claiming universality, or rights attack sovereignty they depend on.
• Sovereignty: Not absolute but contaminated by what it excludes (e.g., animality, outsiders); deconstructed via ethics, linking to “democracy to come”.
• Hospitality: Antinomy between unconditional welcome (ethics itself) and conditional limits (politics); critiques borders and citizenship in global democracy.
• Democracy to Come: Messianic future openness beyond present sovereign states; affirms justice amid aporias, not utopian arrival.
• Undecidability/Ipseity: Decisions require affirming instability (e.g., self/other in migration); politics demands responsibility without guarantees.
• Iterability: Signs repeat with alterity, destabilizing fixed ideologies; enables rights as provisional, challenging eternal political truths.

These concepts feature in questions on postmodern critiques of modernity or ideology deconstruction. Pair différance with metanarratives (Lyotard) or autoimmunity with Indian federalism’s self-limits. For 10/15 markers: Explain via binaries in Article 370 debates (union/state).