Terror, torture and democratic autoimmunity

Shortly before his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida provocatively suggested that the greatest problem confronting contemporary democracy is that 'the alternative to democracy can always be represented as a democratic alternative'. This article analyses the manner in which certain manifestly anti-democratic practices, like terror and torture, come to be taken up in defense of democracies as a result of what Derrida calls democracy's 'autoimmune' tendencies.