CATHERINE MACMILLAN
Looking for the Rogue: Democratic Autoimmunity in José Saramago’s Seeing
GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume IV, Number 01 (2021): 25-42

LOOKING FOR THE ROGUE: DEMOCRATIC AUTOIMMUNITY INJOSÉ SARAMAGO’S SEEING
Catherine MacMillan

Abstract
This paper explores José Saramago’s novel ‘Seeing’, which depicts an unnamed
country in crisis following a mass casting of blank votes, from the perspective of
Derrida’s concept of (democratic) autoimmunity. For Derrida, democracy is an
inherently aporetic concept, leaving democratic regimes potentially open to
renewal and reevaluation but also to self-destruction. Democratic governments
may, for instance, react to a (perceived) threat against democracy with measuresthat themselves undermine democracy, as in Derrida’s examples of Algeria in 1992
or the post-9/11 USA. The paper argues that a similar mechanism is underway in‘Seeing’, where the government restricts democracy, including declaring a state ofsiege and even carrying out a terrorist attack in the capital, in an attempt to protect
a democratic system which they perceive as being threatened by rogues in the formof the so-called ‘blankers’.

As Derrida suggests, the relationship between literature and democracy is an intimate, evensymbiotic one, so that: “There can be no literature without democracy and no democracy
without literature.” 1 In this sense, literary works cannot be created and published without
democratic openness and freedom of expression. Moreover, literature, with its “unconditionalright to call everything to account”2 plays a vital role in the discussion and questioning inherent
in and necessary to democracy, “in the most open (and doubtless itself to come) sense of
democracy.”3
From this perspective, the novels of José Saramago can be understood as actively
participating in the democratic process in that they are “interventions into society presenting
and debating ethico-political questions and problems,” effectively rendering them “a form of1

Jacques Derrida, Passions: An Oblique Offering: On the Name. Trans. David Wood (Stanford: Stanford UP,
1995), p. 28.
2
Zlatan Filipovic, “For a Future to Come: Derrida’s Democracy and the Right to Literature,” Journal of East/WestThought, Vol. 3, no 1, p. 13
3Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 32.

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political action.” 4 Saramago himself sees his writing as inseparable from his politicalinvolvement as a citizen:
As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved, it’s the citizen who changes
things. I can’t imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I’m a writer,
but I live in this world and my writing doesn’t exist on a separate level.5

This political involvement is perhaps most obvious in his later, more allegorical novels
such as Seeing (Ensaio sobre a Lucidez)6 or Blindness (Ensaio sobre a Cegueira)7; indeed bothof these “essays in novel form” explore the nature of “the political.”8 In this context Seeing, asequel to Blindness, questions and calls into account democracy itself.
Blindness, which depicts a country in the throes of an epidemic of white blindness,
focuses on the maintenance of human relationships in the context of the breakdown of the stateand “the smooth social function of civility, decency, law and order.” 9 Seeing is set in the sameunspecified country, which may or may not be Portugal, 10 four years after the end of theepidemic of white blindness and the restoration of democracy. Like Blindness, Seeing also deals
with what, in the novel, is frequently termed as an ‘epidemic’; not, this time, an epidemic ofwhite blindness but rather one of white paper, in the form of the mass casting of blank ballots.
Seeing opens on an election day in the capital, when, it later turns out, 70% of the voterscast blank votes. The election is repeated eight days later, in accordance with national law;however, this time the proportion of blank votes, at 83%, is even higher. The government, inwhat is supposedly an attempt to rescue the democratic system, accordingly declares a state ofsiege in the capital, reminiscent of the state of emergency in Blindness. Thus, the government
effectively abolishes the population’s democratic rights and freedoms, and attempts to trackdown the purported ringleader behind the ‘plague’ of the blank votes. On this basis, as exploredfurther below, this paper attempts to read Seeing in terms of Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity,
interpreting the novel as the story of a democratic government which, in the name of preserving
democracy, actually ends up destroying the very democracy it seeks to protect.
As Rancière points out, even as they seek to impose democracy on other countries
democratic governments “unrelentingly complain that democracy is ungovernable, that thedemocratic government is threatened by a mortal danger which is the excess of democratic

Carlo Salzani and Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte, “Introduction: Proteus the Philosopher or Reading Saramago as aLover of Wisdom,” in Carlo Salzani and Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte (eds.), Saramago’s Philosophical Heritage(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 6.
5Stephanie Merrit. “José Saramago Interview: Still a Street Fighting Man,” The Guardian, 30 April 2006,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/apr/30/fiction.features1
6
Literally, ‘An Essay on Lucidity’.
7
Literally, ‘An Essay on Blindness’.
8
Jim Jose, “A Brutal Blow against the Democratic Normality: Unlearning the Epistemology of the Political,”Social Identities, Vol 20, no.6 (2017), pp. 718-729.
9
Duncan McColl Chesney, “Re-Reading Saramago on Community – Blindness,” Critique: Studies inContemporary Fiction, vol. 62 no. 2 (2021), p. 221.
10
José Saramago, Seeing, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (London: Vintage, 2007), p. 81.
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life.”11 According to Rancière, there are two possible readings of this situation; the democracyin question may be a false one characterized by corruption, duplicity, and lies. Alternatively,
with reference to Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity, he notes that it may instead point to afundamental “difference inherent in the concept of democracy itself, a difference that prevents
democracy from being achieved as a form of government.” 12
A reading of the (un)democratic situation in Seeing from the first perspective describedabove would certainly seem to be apt, particularly given Saramago’s view that “People livewith the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it’s only the outward form of one. In
reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.” 13 Indeed, in her analysis of Seeing
Bernadino states that ‘Saramago’s interpretation of democracy is not a matter of doubting
democracy, but rather an utter disbelief in those that take power and use it to keep the machine
working, i.e. to maintain a status quo that perpetuates power in the hands of oligarchies.” 14
However, without discounting such an interpretation, there is little evidence in the novel
itself, despite the electorate’s mass rejection of the status quo, that the democracy in questionis especially corrupt before the phenomenon of the blank ballots. It is argued here, then, that
Seeing can also be understood from the second perspective described by Rancière above, thatof democracy as characterized by incommensurable differences and therefore unachievableas “democracy always carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction.” 15 The Prime
Minister in Seeing uses the same metaphor when he argues that the blank voting could propel
the country towards:
the ultimate disaster…the possibly definitive collapse of a political system which…carried within
it…in its vital nucleus, in the voting process itself, the seeds of its own destruction or, a no lessdisquieting hypothesis, a transition to something entirely new and unknown, so different that wewould probably have no place in it.16

In this light, Seeing can arguably be read as a satirical meditation on the potentiallyquasi-suicidal nature of democracy itself. As Jose, for instance, notes, for Saramago“totalitarianism is already lurking in the heart of representative democracy insofar as everincreasing invocations of state power in the name of the people are its preferred solutions tocrises.”17 On this basis, this paper attempts to explore Seeing through a discussion of Derrida’s
concept of autoimmunity, which he describes as “that strange behavior where a living being, inquasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against

Jacques Rancière, “Should Democracy Come? Ethics and Politics in Derrida,” in Pheng Cheah and Suzanne
Guerlac (eds.), Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham, Duke University Press, 2009), p. 275.
12
Ibid, p. 275.
13
Stephanie Merrit, “José Saramago Interview.”
14
Ligia Bernardino, ‘The Threshold of Democracy in José Saramago’s Seeing’. Gragoatá Niterói, Vol. 23 No. 45(2018), p. 331.
15
Alex Thomson, “What’s to Become of ‘Democracy to Come’?,” Postmodern Culture, vol. 15 no. 3, 2005.
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.505/15.3thomson.html
16
José Saramago, Seeing, pp. 162-167.
17
Jim Jose, “A Brutal Blow,” p. 727.
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its own immunity.”18 Although Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity is broad in scope – indeed
he extends it to “life in general”19 – he uses autoimmunity largely to refer to “deconstruction in
the political realm.”20
In this framework, primarily in Rogues (Voyous) which was published just a year before
21
Seeing, Derrida emphasizes the autoimmune nature of democracy,22 which derives from thefundamental semantic undecidability inherent in the term democracy itself. As discussed further
in the following section, autoimmunity here refers to a threat to democracy, a quasi-suicidal
drive, which comes from within democracy itself.23 24 Interestingly, in a 2004 article, Saramago
also suggests that democracy is in the process of committing a kind of autoimmune suicide:“Western democracy has entered a phase of retrograde transformation that it cannot halt andwill foreseeably bring about its negation. No one need take responsibility for killing it: it iscommitting suicide.”25
Autoimmunity, then, refers to “an enemy which is not external: it is not a virus orbacteria’; it is, rather, ‘an internal enemy.” 26 27 28 In the case of democratic autoimmunity,
18

Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 100.
19
Ibid, p. 187; on the relation of Derrida’s view of immunity and autoimmunity to “life-affirmation” see Rossen
Roussev, “Feminism, Deconstruction, and Literary Criticism: A Deconstructive Feminist Reading of Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s Novel The Scarlet Letter with the Help of Alice Jardine and Jacques Derrida,” Global Conversations:
An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture, Vol. 4 (2021), more particularly, pp. 68-69,
81.
20
Dimitris Vadoulakis, “Autoimmunities: Derrida, Democracy and Political Theology,” Research in
Phenomenology, Vol. 48, No.1 (2018), p. 30; for an application of Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity to politicalevents in literature see Yasemin Karaağaç, “Hostility, Hospitality, and Autoimmunity in Kadare’s The Fall of The
Stone City,” Global Conversations: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture, Vol. 4(2021), pp. 11ff, 20ff.
21
In this regard, these works can be understood at least in part as a response to 9/11 and the ensuing events,
including the USA’s curtailing of civil liberties and the so-called ‘war on terror’, which was arguably also an
important influence on Saramago’s Seeing.
22
Importantly, democracy for Derrida generally refers not only to a particular form of government but to a wholepolitical culture including equality, rights, freedom of speech, protection of minorities from majority oppression.
(Alex Thomson, “What’s to Become of ‘Democracy to Come’?,” p. 5).
23Alex Thomson, “What’s to Become of ‘Democracy to Come’?,” p. 3.
24
Importantly, however, as will be discussed in the following section, autoimmunity can be an opportunity as well
as a threat.
25
José Saramago, ”The Least Bad System is in Need of Change: Reinventing Democracy,” Le Monde
Diplomatique, 17 August 2004, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27/070.html
26
Dimitris Vadoulakis, “Autoimmunities,” p. 29.
27
While autoimmunity is a medical term, Derrida justifies his use of the term in the political context byunderscoring that immunity was originally a political/juridical term which was borrowed into the medical
vocabulary. As Derrida points out, the word ‘immunity’ derives from the Latin munus, referring to the common
community. Thus, to be immune (immunis), is therefore to be ‘freed or exempted from the charges, the service,
the taxes, the obligations’ of a community; it is still used in a similar sense today in the context of parliamentary
or diplomatic immunity. [Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limitsof Reason Alone,” in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (eds.), Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1998), p. 72].
28
While autoimmune disease in medicine refers to a situation where the immune system attacks the body, however,autoimmunity for Derrida also involves the immune system attacking itself. Derrida’s autoimmunity, can then

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Derrida, writing in the era of the USA’s so-called ‘war on terror’,29 represents this figure ofinternal enmity as “the rogue or voyou.”30 However, for Derrida it is never entirely clear whothese enemies of democracy are, as “the worst enemies of democratic freedom can, by aplausible rhetorical simulacrum…present themselves as staunch democrats,” 31 while, as is
discussed further below, every democratic state is (potentially) a rogue state, so there are (no)more rogue states. In this context, then, this article undertakes a (perhaps impossible) search
for the internal enemies of democracy, the rogue(s) or voyou(s), in Seeing.
Derrida and Democratic Autoimmunity
For Derrida, democracy, ever since its ancient Athenian origins, has been a “concept that isinadequate to itself, a word hollowed out in its center by a vertiginous semantic abyss.”32 This
semantic indeterminacy enables the term democracy to be appropriated by many different typesof government, as is perhaps underscored by the wide variety of regimes that today callthemselves democratic. While this openness or ‘hospitality’ which is characteristic of
democracy can potentially prove an opportunity for self-perfection, it also risks leaving
democracy vulnerable to those who wish to put it to an end.33 Indeed Derrida argues that no
enemy of democracy today, at least outside the Islamic world,34 can refuse to call himself ademocrat,35 so that even “Le Pen and his followers now present themselves as respectable andirreproachable democrats.” 36 Thus, “the great question of modern parliamentary andrepresentative democracy, perhaps of all democracy, is that the alternative to democracy canalways be represented as a democratic alternation.”37 38
In this sense, the figure of the internal enemy is crucial in understanding democracy’s
autoimmune tendencies. This enemy does not necessarily have to be a ‘real’ enemy; rather it isa figure who is incommensurable with ipseity’ and which “regulates the discourses about
power, violence and force.” 39 Indeed rogues (voyous) themselves are internal enemies
represented as “rebels, agitators and insurgents.” However, labelling someone (or a state) as arogue is “never neutral, but always a performative judgment, an accusation, or an interpellation.

imply both a quasi-suicidal self-destruction and a lack of protection from the Other which, like unconditional
hospitality, may potentially prove to be a risk or an opportunity.
29
During this period, the US frequently referred to states which it perceived as promoting terrorism or as enemiesof democracy as ‘rogue states’, a term which was translated into French as ‘états voyous’.
30
Dimitris Vadoulakis, “Autoimmunities,” p. 29.
31
Jacques Derrida. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford. Stanford University Press, 2005).
32
Jacques Derrida. Rogues, p. 7.
33
Samir Haddad, “Derrida and Democracy at Risk,” Contretemps: An Online Journal of Philosophy 4 (2004), p.
33.
34
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 2.
35
Alex Thomson, “What’s to Become of ‘Democracy to Come,?,” p. 5.
36Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 30.
37
Emphasis in the original.
38
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, pp. 30-31.
39
Dimitris Vadoulakis, “Autoimmunities,” pp. 33-34.

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To judge someone to be voyou is to “place them outside the law and to ally yourself with thelaw.”40 41
Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity can thus be understood as part of the attempt tocounter the “forgetting of stasis” which lies at the heart of democracy. 42 43 As has beensuggested, then, the “semantic abyss” or stasis inherent in the concept of democracy potentiallyharbors the seeds of its own autoimmune destruction. In other words, democracy contains
internal tensions or challenges to its ipseity, including, and perhaps most notably, those between
democracy and sovereignty, and between freedom and equality.
Regarding the demos, a key tension is that between inclusivity and exclusivity; any
attempt to define the demos on the grounds of demographic or geographic conditions is
ultimately exclusionary, so that “one electoral law is always at the same time more and lessdemocratic than another.”44 Related to this, democracy contains a tension between freedom,defined as “unconditional, indivisible, heterogenous to calculation and to measure,” andequality; thus “Derrida points to a primary suspension of freedom within the very concept of
democracy.” 45 Aristotle’s solution to this quandary was that each equal participant should
govern in turn; this is translated, in modern terms, into the democratic election.46 47 However,
the election clearly implies a compromise, as liberty is limited in a cyclical fashion in order tosafeguard equality, so that the two goals of equality and freedom are never completely fulfilled,
at least not simultaneously:
liberty and equality are only reconcilable in a roundabout and alternative manner, in alternance; theabsolute freedom of a finite being (it is of this finitude that we speak here) is equally divisible[partageable] only in the space-time of a taking-in-turns.48

In these turns, freedom risks not only being suspended but even destroyed so that, forinstance, fascist and totalitarian governments can (and have been) elected; moreover, as is
discussed further below, the democratic process can be suspended by the government itself inthe name of protecting democracy.49
A related autoimmune “aporetic embrace” 50 is that between democracy andsovereignty, the relationship between which is “mutually inseperable and incompatible” as both“appear unconditional.”51 For Derrida, “a pure sovereignty is indivisible or it is not at all”; it40

Jacques Derrida, Rogues, pp. 64-65.
Alex Thomson, “What’s to Become of ‘Democracy to Come’?,” p. 5.
42
Dimitris Vadoulakis, “Autoimmunities,” pp. 34-35.
43
Dimitris Vadoulakis emphasizes that this stasis, or civil strife, is etymologically inherent in the term democracy
itself. He bases this on Laroux’s insight that the kratos in democracy signifies not only rule but also struggle.
44
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, pp. 35-37
45
Pheng Cheah, “The Untimely Secret of Democracy,” in Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (eds.), Derrida andthe Time of the Political (Durham, Duke University Press, 2009), p. 78.
46
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 46.
47
Samir Haddad, “Derrida and Democracy at Risk,” p. 33.
48
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, pp. 46-47.
49
Pheng Cheah, “The Untimely Secret of Democracy,” p. 78.
50
Ibid., p. 88.
51
Ibid., p. 87.
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can be understood in terms of Schmittian political theology in that it associates force, power
and violence with “the right of the strongest, and then justifies force in the name of the healthand the protection of the polity.” 52 Democracy, then, needs sovereignty in order to ruleeffectively; however, in the process it also closes off and essentializes the demos:
In its very institution, and in the instant proper to it, the act of sovereignty must and can, by force,put an end in a single, indivisible stroke to the endless discussion. This act is an event, as silent as it
is instantaneous, without any thickness of time, even if it seems to come by way of a shared language
and even a performative language that it just as soon exceeds.53

In this sense, sovereignty betrays the universality of democracy, so that “as soon as there
is sovereignty, there is abuse of power and a rogue state”; 54 in other words, every state,democratic or otherwise, is potentially a rogue state. Moreover, as soon as sovereignty begins
to justify itself, as it must do in a democracy, it is no longer pure and itself undergoes an
autoimmune de(con)struction: “the autoimmunity with which sovereignty at once sovereignly
affects and cruelly infects itself.”55
However, the autoimmune openness of democracy, while potentially destructive, canalso provide an opportunity for criticism and renewal. As Derrida notes, “autoimmunity is not
an absolute ill or evil. It enables an exposure to the other, to what and who comes.”56 This
openness is linked to the fact that democracy “is the only system, the only constitutional
paradigm, in which, in principle, one has or assumes the right to criticize everything publicly,
including the idea of democracy, its concept, its history and its name.”57 From this perspective,
democracy’s autoimmunity thus contains a chance or promise, opening democracy up to change
and reinscription, in the form of the ‘democracy-to-come’.
Indeed, for Derrida, there is a promise, a historical inheritance, inscribed in the concept
of democracy itself: “equality, freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press.” However,this promise of an authentic democracy “is never embodied in what we call democracy,”58 andindeed will never exist as a “past, present or future regime”59 as it will always be characterized
by an autoimmune indeterminacy:
it will always remain aporetic in its structure (force without force, incalculable singularity andcalculable equality, commensurability and incommensurability, heteronomy and autonomy,
indivisible sovereignty and divisible or shared sovereignty, an empty name, a despairing
messianicity or a messianicity in despair, and so on).60
Dimitris Vadoulakis, “Autoimmunities,” p. 35.
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 10.
54
Ibid., p. 145.
55
Ibid., p. 109.
56
Ibid., p. 152.
57
Ibid., p. 87.
58
Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, “Politics and Friendship: A Discussion with
Jacques Derrida,” 1997.
http://www.dariaroithmayr.com/pdfs/assignments/Politics%20and%20Friendship.pdf
59Michael Naas, “‘One Nation . . . Indivisible’: Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity of Democracy and theSovereignty of God,” Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 36 (2006), p. 40.
60
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.86.
52
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Derrida’s concept of the democracy to come is not, then, a Kantian regulative idea;
rather, it can be likened to “the khora of the political.”61 Thus, importantly, the ‘to come’ of
democracy to come does not simply refer to “a future democracy correcting or improving theactual conditions of the so-called democracies.” Instead, the ‘to come’ here refers to a promise,
duty or injunction “that is ‘to come’ immediately.”62 Moreover, the democracy to come is notnecessarily a regime; democracy is “not confined to the political in the classical sense,” or to
citizenship or the nation state. It can, instead, refer to any experience characterized by openness
to and respect for the Other, equality and justice.63
This (relatively) optimistic view of democratic autoimmunity in the form of thedemocracy to come is arguably prevalent in Politics of Friendship. However, Derrida’semphasis appears to switch to the pervertibility of democratic autoimmunity in Rogues,64 65 sothat we can ‘not only criticize, we can restrict democracy in the name of democracy.”66 In otherwords, in Rogues Derrida argues that threats to democracy can come from democratic
governments themselves, who may put democracy at risk through curtailing democratic rights
and freedoms, particularly in situations where democracy is already under attack. 67 A key
question, therefore, for Derrida is whether a democracy must “leave free and in a position to
exercise power those who risk mounting an assault on democratic freedoms.”68
In this context, Derrida cites the example of the 1992 Algerian election which wascancelled by the government due to fears that a popular radical Islamist party, the Islamic
Salvation Front (FSI), would abolish democracy if it came to power. In the face of this threat
the government decided “in a sovereign fashion to suspend, at least provisionally, democracy
for its own good, so as to take care of it, so as to immunize it against a much worse and very
likely assault.”69 In this sense, the suspension of the election is autoimmune, a “suicide in orderto prevent a murder.”70 Thus, as Johnson notes:
Algerian democracy effectively ‘secreted’ its own auto-antibodies, in the forms of both antidemocratic (Algerian) martial law and anti-democratic (Islamist) revolutionary violence, eachasserting some right to the claims of democratic legitimacy.71

Another important example is that of the US government’s response to the 9/11 terrorist
attacks. In his interview with Borradori, which took place shortly after the attacks, Derrida
61

Ibid., p. 82.
Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, “Politics and Friendship.”
63
Ibid.
64
Leigh M. Johnson, “Terror, Torture and Democratic Autoimmunity,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 38
No. 1 (2012), p. 112.
65
Alex Thomson, “What’s to Become of ‘Democracy to Come?’,” p. 1.
66
Marguerite La Caze, “Terrorism and Trauma: Negotiating Derridean ‘Autoimmunity’,” Philosophy and Social
Criticism, Vol. 37, No. 5 (2011), p. 610.
67
Samir Haddad, “Derrida and Democracy at Risk,” p. 29.
68
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p.34.
69
Ibid., p. 33.
70
Alex Thomson, ‘What’s to Become of ‘Democracy to Come?’,” p. 1
71
Leigh Johnson. “Terror, Torture and Democratic Autoimmunity,” p. 113.
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discusses these events in terms of autoimmunity.72 What we have here is that governments suchas that of the US fight against what they see as forces that are attacking what they value – a
relatively stable, orderly, and open society underscored by democracy, freedom, and the rule oflaw. However, arguably, in attacking these terrorist forces, they are themselves destroying thevery values that they were seeking to uphold through attacks on privacy, human rights andpersonal freedom. In this sense, then, Derrida notes that, in the context of its supposed “war”
with so-called “rogue states” the US, together with its allies, itself behaved like a rogue state.73
Going Rogue? The Autoimmunity of Democracy in Seeing
As mentioned above, Seeing opens in a polling booth on a stormy day when very few people
have, as yet, left their homes to vote. In an uncanny (un)foreshadowing of the mass casting ofblank votes, the supposed abstention is considered a threat to the democratic system; however,commentators note that the capital city seems to set a good example for the rest of the country:
just when the spectre of an abstention on a scale unparalleled in the history of our democracy had
seemed to be posing a great threat to the stability not just of the regime but, even more seriously, ofthe system itself… As for the three parties involved in the election, the parties on the right, in the
middle and on the left, they…issued congratulatory statements in which…they affirmed that
democracy had every reason to celebrate.74

Despite the eventual turnout, however, the election day ends with a shock when it isrevealed that seventy percent of the votes cast were blank. The blank vote is not a literary
invention on Saramago’s part; in his adopted country of Spain, for instance, they are formallycounted and accepted. It is important to emphasize here that a blank vote is not an abstention,
so that “what is at stake is neither a nulling nor a voiding, and certainly not not-voting.”75 Thisdifference is pointed out by Saramago himself in an interview:
Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you’re sayingthat you understand your responsibility, you have a political conscience and you came to vote, but
you don’t agree with any of the existing parties and this is the only way you have of saying so.76

As Vanhoutte notes, critics have often compared the blank voters in Seeing to Melville’s
character Bartleby the Scrivener who answers every question with ‘I would prefer not to’. In
Derrida dissects that this autoimmune response occurs into three overlapping ‘moments’. The first ‘moment’ iswhen the USA is attacked by terrorists who were at least partly ‘home grown’ within its own borders. The second
moment is one of traumatic repression of the events, which allows the trauma itself to be regenerated, sparking
fear of a future, and even worse, traumatic terrorist attack. The third moment is that responding to terrorism byattacking so-called ‘rogue states’, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, in turn provides legitimation for further terrorist
attacks. (Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, pp. 85-172); (La Caze, “Terrorism and Trauma.”pp. 606-608).
73
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 112.
74
José Saramago, Seeing, p. 15.
75
Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte, “Bye Bye Bartleby and Hello Seeing, or On the Silence and the Actualization to Do …
Not,” in Carlo Salzani and Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte (eds.), Saramago’s Philosophical Heritage (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018), pp. 241.
76
Stephanie Merrit, “José Saramago Interview.”
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his ‘non-action and non-refusal’ Bartleby has become, for many political philosophers, asymbol of the power of passive resistance.77 Žižek, for instance, states that “José Saramago’s
novel Seeing can effectively be perceived as a mental experiment in Bartlebian politics.” 78
However, Vanhoutte points out that the blank votes in Seeing cannot easily be read a la Bartleby
as a “non act that intends to counter a frail but possibly oppressive political regime”79 because,
as has already been suggested, the blank voters are actively taking part in the democratic process
so that “the action undertaken by the population of the former capital … consists of positive
action.” 80 Indeed, then, the blank votes can be understood as a “refusal to refuse toparticipate.”81
Thus, rather than a rejection of democracy itself, the phenomenon of the blank ballots
in Seeing can be better read, as Saramago himself indicates, as a protest against the available
candidates and parties, those of the left, the middle, and the right. In this sense, the blank voters’decision can perhaps be understood in terms of democracy’s inherent openness as a system that“welcomes in itself, in its very concept, that expression of autoimmunity called the right to selfcritique and perfectibility.”82
However, the government in Seeing, the party on the right, portrays and perhaps
perceives the blank votes as a threat to the democratic system. In consequence, it decides toimpose a state of emergency on the country in order to counter what the Prime Minister
describes as “a brutal blow against the democratic normality.”83 Later, the defense minister
denounces the blank voters as terrorists; “what we are facing is terrorism pure andunadulterated; it may wear different faces and expressions but it is, essentially, the samething.” 84 The supposed enemy, then is an internal one, the most terrifying kind, as Derrida
points out: “The worst, most effective terrorism… is the one that installs or recalls an interior
threat at home and recalls that the enemy is also always lodged on the inside of the system it
violates and terrorizes.”85
Nevertheless, it is not so much the fact that blank ballots have been cast that bothers thegovernment – this is, in fact, legal in the unnamed country – but it is rather the sheer quantityof the blank votes that supposedly poses a threat to the democratic system:
the sole crime of these people was to cast blank ballots, it would be of little importance if only theusual ones had done it, but there were plenty, there were too much, almost all of them, what does itmatter that it is your inalienable right if you are told that such a right has to be used in homeopathic
doses, drop by drop, you cannot walk around with a full bowl overflowing with blank ballots.86

Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte, “Bye Bye Bartleby,” p. 236.
Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 180.
79
Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte, “Bye Bye Bartleby,” p. 234.
80
Ibid., p. 241.
81
Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte, “Only the country of the blind will have a king. On Žižek’s non-lucid reading ofSaramago’s Essay on Lucidity [Seeing],” International Journal of Žižek Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2013), p. 7.
82
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 187.
83
José Saramago, Seeing, p. 27.
84
Ibid., p. 32.
85
Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, p. 188.
86
José Saramago, Seeing, p. 56.
77
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The government decides to call a second election; in the meantime, it begins an attempt
to gather intelligence on the motives behind the blank ballots by monitoring the polling stations
and recording the voters’ conversations in the hope of tracking down a purported ringleader.
However, as Zivin emphasizes, due to an unhappy mixture of human and technological error,“the more the police record and analyze the conversations of voters, hoping to identify a guilty
party responsible for the voting conspiracy, the more their efforts prove futile.”87
In this context, in an “echo of Guantánamo Bay,”88 500 people are arrested at random
to be interrogated further, submitted to lie detectors and possibly torture. Although there are no
actual torture scenes in the novel, the narrator suggests the hypothetical possibility of the useof torture by the government; 89 “Were this innocent man to be interrogated tomorrow, we
tremble at the mere thought of what could happen to him...”90 Far from being an anathema to
democratic states, however, Johnson argues that torture, together with terrorism, is an inherent
component of democracy, as borne out by democracy’s autoimmune tendency to secure itself
even at the cost of using “anti-democratic” methods such as torture.91
In the second election, an even larger 83% of the votes turn out to be blank. In thiscontext, the President describes the blank votes as a “modern-day black death” (or rather, theprime corrects him, a “blank death”) threatening the “stability of the democratic system, notsimply, not merely, of one country, this country, but of the entire planet.”92 In the aftermath ofthe disastrous election results, the government lifts the nation-wide state of emergency but
declares an even harsher state of siege in the capital alone, where the blank voting has occurred.
Thus, it is the capital city which is, effectively, declared rogue or voyou, an enemy of thedemocratic system. Indeed, as Derrida points out, there is an intimate connection between thevoyou, originally a Parisian term, and the capital; “the voyou milieu is first of all themunicipality, the polis, the city, indeed the capital city. And when one speaks of voyous, thepolice are never very far away.”93
However, during the discussions preceding the imposition of a state of siege on thecapital, the Minister of the Interior perceptively notes an important semantic difficulty:
We all know that siege means blockade or encirclement, isn’t that right…Therefore declaring a stateof siege is tantamount to saying that the country’s capital is besieged, blockaded or encircled by anenemy, when the truth is that the enemy, if I may call it that, is not outside but inside.94

Thus, of course, the use of the term siege in this situation is more appropriate than theinterior minister lets on; it is the government itself, rather than the inhabitants of the capital,
which turns out to be the chief enemy of democracy, the main voyou. However, from theErin Zivin “Seeing and Saying: Towards an Ethics of Truth in José Saramago’s "Ensaio sobre a Lucidez,” SubStanceVol. 41, No. 1(2012), p. 112.
88
Maria Aristodemou, “Democracy or Your Life! Knowledge, Ignorance and the Politics of Atheism inSaramago’s Blindness and Seeing,” Law, Culture and the Humanities, Vol. 9 No. 1 (2011), p. 175.
89
Erin Zivin, “Seeing and Saying,” p. 112.
90
José Saramago, Seeing, p. 23.
91
Leigh Johnson, “Terror, Torture and Democratic Autoimmunity,” p. 107.
92
José Saramago, Seeing, p. 51.
93
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 66.
94
José Saramago, Seeing, p. 52.
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government’s perspective the rogues are clearly the blank voters. In an attempt to persuade thesupposed rogues, “the degenerates, delinquents and subversives who had cast the blank votesof the error of their ways,” the state of siege is “proper… not merely for show,” including “acurfew, the closure of theatres and cinemas, constant army patrols, a prohibition on gatheringsof more than five people, and an absolute ban on anyone entering or leaving the city.” 95
Realizing that, as its offices are in the capital, the government itself will be among the besieged,
it decides to relocate out of the city, along with the army and the police. The Prime Minister
portrays the plan as a “painful” remedy for a “fatal” disease;96 as Saramago’s narrator points
out, from the government’s perspective the exodus was,a flight from the virus that had attacked the majority of the capital’s inhabitants, and given that theworst is always waiting just behind the door, might well end up infecting all the remaining
inhabitants and even, who knows, the whole country.97

The ‘worst’ here is reminiscent of Derrida’s concept of ‘the worst to come’, a virtual or
future trauma not only resulting from a past event but compounded by “the undeniable fear orapprehension of a threat that is worse and still to come.”98 For Derrida, such a virtual trauma
underscored the USA’s autoimmune (over) reaction to the events of 9/11, and was deepened
further by the realization that the threat was no longer an external and easily identifiable one.99
The same is arguably true of the government’s overreaction to the supposed threat posed by theblank ballots in Seeing, framed not only as a menace to democracy in the country but
worldwide, “the tip of the iceberg of a gigantic, global destabilization plot.”100
As the Prime Minister declares the siege, he justifies the government’s measures as
responding to the (supposed) threat to national security posed by “the action taken by organizedsubversive groups who had repeatedly obstructed the people’s right to vote.”101 Here, then, thegovernment asserts its sovereignty, which Derrida defines as the indivisible and absolute“power to give, to make, but also to suspend the law; it is the exceptional right to place oneself
above right, the right to non-right.” 102 Indeed, the Minister of Defense, for instance, views
democratic rights not as inalienable but as something which must be ‘deserved’ and therefore
suspendable: “Rights are not abstractions…people either deserve rights or they don’t, and thesepeople don’t, anything else is just so much empty talk.”103
Although the government asserts its sovereignty ostensibly in the name of democracy,
in doing so it constrains the democratic freedom of the demos. Moreover, the immunity, theabsolute nature of sovereignty is also destroyed the moment the government seeks to justify
itself, which it must do, at least in a democratic system:

95

José Saramago, Seeing, pp. 50-51.
Ibid., p. 66.
97
Ibid., p.67.
98
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, pp. 104-105.
99
Ibid., p. 106.
100
José Saramago, Seeing, p. 32.
101
Ibid., p. 57.
102
Jacques Derrida . The Beast and the Sovereign (Vol. 1). (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2011), p. 16.
103
José Saramago, Seeing, p. 53.
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To confer sense or meaning on sovereignty, to justify it, to find a reason for it, is already tocompromise its deciding exceptionality … to compromise its immunity… But since this happens all
the time, pure sovereignty does not exist … it is always in the process of autoimmunizing itself, ofbetraying itself by betraying the democracy that nonetheless can never do without it.104

In Seeing, too, the government’s sovereignty turns out to be far from indivisible andabsolute, despite the siege conditions it imposes on the capital. This is indicated by the fact thatit has to justify its imposition of the state of exception not only to the nation but also to the‘international community’, which it does in the name of protecting democracy. Faced with thecontinued peaceful coexistence of the city’s inhabitants, however, the government seeks to tostir up unrest in the capital, using ‘agents provocateurs’ to create “the kind of unstablesituations which might justify, in the eyes of the so-called international community…the movefrom a state of siege to a state of war.”105
The state of siege imposed by the government is, then, increasingly brutal, trampling on
the democratic rights and freedoms of the capital’s inhabitants until, as Bernardino notes, they
seem almost to be reduced to “bare life” in Agamben’s terms.106 Thus “what looked like ademocratic regime rapidly becomes a dictatorship” so that “democracy becomes a farce, a mereword through which the Government imposes a state of siege.”107
In this sense, as a suspension of democracy carried out in the name of protecting
democracy, the situation in Seeing can perhaps be compared with Derrida’s examples of theAlgerian government’s postponement of democratic elections “in order to save a democracy
threatened by the sworn enemies of democracy,”108 or the USA’s infringement of democratic
rights and freedoms following the 9/11 attacks.109 However, as has been discussed above, it isvery unlikely that the blank voters in Saramago’s novel ever really wished to overthrow thedemocratic system, a system in which, as has been discussed above, they actively participated.
Moreover, no evidence is uncovered, despite the government’s best efforts, that the blank ballot
phenomenon was a co-ordinated action headed by some terrorist group.
The government’s (over)reaction in Seeing goes beyond its imposition of the state ofsiege and its use of propaganda when it actually carries out a terrorist attack in the capital. Thisact of terrorism, the planting of a bomb in the former capital city’s main overground metro
station which ends up killing more than 30 people, is undertaken in an attempt to foment unrest
among the populace against a supposed terrorist group behind the blank voters. 110 As wasarguably the case of the USA in the wake of 9/11, the government in Seeing employs “terrorism… in the service of ‘securing’ the very democratic principles that ostensibly prohibit thosepractices.”111 As Johnson argues, the relationship between democracy and terror is an intimate

104

Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 101.
José Saramago, Seeing, p. 61.
106
Ligia Bernardino, “The Threshold of Democracy,” p. 321.
107
Ibid., p.321.
108
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 35.
109
Ibid., p. 40.
110
José Saramago, Seeing, pp. 112-116.
111
Leigh Johnson. “Terror, Torture and Democratic Autoimmunity,” p. 107.
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one, as can be borne out by a glance at the history of modern democracy, one of the founding
moments of which was Robespierre’s Reign of Terror.112
As Derrida puts forward, then, “‘murderous’ attacks from the outside of democracy and‘suicidal’ attacks from within it are quite often indistinguishable.”113 In Seeing, public opinion
regarding who actually carried out the terrorist attack is mixed. A minority of newspapers andsome of the city dwellers do suspect that the government is behind the attack, including theleader of the city council who resigns as a result. However, the majority of newspapers blame
the attack on “some terrorist group with some link to the insurrection by the blankers.”114
What is striking, despite the state of siege and the terrorist attack, is that the government
does not succeed in stirring up violence among the inhabitants of the capital. While there is ademonstration following the bombing, it is a peaceful one, resembling a display of mourning
more than a protest march. The demonstration does, however, provoke many who voted for theparty on the right to seek to leave the city. When they attempt to do so, the government
persuades them that it is their patriotic duty to return to the city in the name of defending
democracy; the Prime Minister instructs the Interior Minister to,tell them that all those who voted for the parties who built the current political system, including,inevitably, the party in the middle, our direct competitor, constitute the first line of defense of all
democratic institutions.115

Even when the would-be refugees return to the city, the expected conflict between themand their largely ‘blanker’ neighbors does not break out; instead there is solidarity, as the latter
help the returnees to carry their belongings home, including the “tea service … the silver platter… the painting and …grandpa.”116 Indeed, despite the suspension of the law and the absenceof governing authorities in the capital, life in the city continues to function much as before, withpeople paying their rent, food still available in the supermarkets, and even the refuse continuing
to be collected.117
Bernardino, for instance, attributes the extraordinary show of solidarity among thecapital’s inhabitants to their experiences four years earlier during the plague of white blindness
depicted in Blindness, which has taught them to look for new ways of living together insociety.118 In Blindness, despite the failure of the state and the return to a quasi-Hobbesian ‘stateof nature’ in the city, the small yet motley group led by the ophthalmologist’s wife, the only
character to maintain her sight during the epidemic, develops a sense of solidarity andbelonging. This is, however, based not on a shared identity but, as McColl Chesney explains,112

Ibid., p. 116.
Ibid., p. 111.
114
José Saramago, Seeing, p. 117.
115
Ibid., p. 138.
116
Ibid., p. 132.
117
Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte, “Bye Bye Bartleby,” p. 240.
118
Ligia Bernardino, “The Threshold of Democracy,” p. 331.
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on “fundamental, ethical values” such as “generosity and altruism, dignity and self-respect,
trust and responsibility, respect for others and for the dead.”119 120
The peaceful cohabitation and solidarity among the inhabitants of the capital in Seeing
does not, however, provoke any softening in the government’s approach. Indeed, in its
desperation to uncover a rogue organization behind the blank ballots, the government fixates
upon the figure of the ophthalmologist’s wife who, as noted above, was a key character in
Blindness. In that novel, mysteriously immune to the white blindness, she commits a murder inthe chaotic context of the epidemic, killing the ringleader of a gang who raped and exploited
the other inhabitants of the quarantine hospital before leading her group to safety. In Seeing,
four years after the end of the plague of white blindness, a member of the group she helped
ultimately betrays her by writing an anonymous letter to the government suggesting that she
may be the ringleader behind the blank ballots. This accusation is based on a mysterious andillogical connection between the enigma of her immunity to the blindness epidemic and themystery of the blank ballots.121
Despite this extremely flimsy ‘evidence’ the government, in its desperation to uncovera supposed plot behind the blank votes, seizes on the accusation, imagining the doctor’s wife
to be the leader, the chief rogue, of what Derrida calls a voyoucracy, a kind of state within thestate:
a corrupt and corrupting power of the Street, an illegal and outlaw power that brings together into avoyoucratic regime, and thus into an organized and more or less clandestine form, into a virtualstate, all those who represent a principle of disorder …of plotting and conspiracy, of premeditatedoffensiveness or offenses against public order.122

The government consequently sends a police team, a superintendent accompanied by aninspector and a sergeant, into the city to interrogate the woman and her acquaintances. In thiscontext, the ophthalmologist’s wife herself ironically points out to the police superintendent
just how ridiculous these assertations are:
And I am to blame for what happened … And how did I get the capital’s majority of the population
to cast blank ballots, putting flyers under their doors, by midnight prayers and witchcraft, by
spreading a chemical product in the water supply network, by promising each person the first prizein the lottery, or by spending what my husband earns in his office to buy votes.123

Although the doctor’s wife has effectively become “a kind of public enemy number
one,”124 it gradually becomes clear to the superintendent that no proof whatsoever linking her
to a terrorist organization behind the blank ballots is forthcoming; neither is there any evidence
that such an organization exists. Following a conversation with the Minister of the Interior, who
Duncan McColl Chesney, “Re-Reading Saramago on Community – Blindness,” Critique: Studies inContemporary Fiction, Vol. 62 No.2 (2021), pp. 213.
120
Ibid., p. 213.
121
José Saramago, Seeing, pp. 171-172.
122
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 66.
123
José Saramago, Seeing, p. 237.
124
Ibid., p. 298.
119

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Looking for the Rogue: Democratic Autoimmunity in José Saramago’s Seeingorders him to create evidence against her, the superintendent has a crisis of faith.125 When the
Minister of the Interior informs him that the newspapers will soon publish an exposé of theconspiracy, the superintendent responds by giving a newspaper his own version of the facts,
which is later published before the government confiscates all copies of the report and shuts
down the newspaper.
The novel ends with the shooting of the superintendent, followed by that of the doctor’swife, a heroic savior figure in Blindness,126 127 and her dog Constant, the “dog of tears,” who“unleashed a terrifying howl” as his mistress is shot.128 Thus, the novel ends on a particularly
depressing note as, as Rollason points out, with “the disappearance of the last lucid woman,
totalitarianism may yet install itself in the hearts and minds of a whole dehumanizedpopulation.”129
The howling of Constant, the only character to be named in the entire novel, is also
important here. As Salzani and Vanhoutte argue, dogs play a key role in Saramago’s fiction,
often acting as an almost supernatural guide to the human characters. This is particularly trueof Constant who, as the only seeing character apart from the doctor’s wife in Blindness, literally
acts as a guide dog to the blind characters. 130 In addition dogs often play a vital part inSaramago’s social critique; their howling, in particular, denotes a pacific revolt which can belikened to that of the blank voters.131 The shots, along with Constant’s howl, are overheard,
significantly, by two blind men; the novel ends with the following exchange between them:“Did you hear something, Three shots, replied another blind man. But there was a dog howling
too, It’s stopped now, that must have been the third shot, Good, I hate to hear dogs howl.”132
133

Thus, Constant’s death, and the cessation of his howl, can perhaps be understood as thesilencing of pacific political protest, as represented by the blank voters in the novel, as thedefeat of lucidity by blindness. However, the death of the howling dog connects to the epigraphof the novel, “Let’s howl, said the dog,” which Saramago explains as follows: “We are thedogs, and it’s time that we start howling.”134

Jim Jose, “A Brutal Blow,” p.724.
Christopher Rollason, “How Totalitarianism Begins at Home: Saramago and Orwell,” in Mark Sabine andAdriana Alves de Paula Martins (eds.), Dialogue with Saramago: Essays in comparative literature (Manchester:
University of Manchester, 2006), p. 16., http://yatrarollason.info/files/SaramagoandOrwell.pdf
127
Jim Jose, “A Brutal Blow,” p. 726.
128
José Saramago, Seeing, p. 307.
129
Christopher Rollason, “How Totalitarianism Begins at Home,” p. 16.
130
Carlo Salzani and Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte, “Saramago’s Dogs: For an Inclusive Humanism,” in Carlo Salzani
and Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte (eds.), Saramago’s Philosophical Heritage (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p.
196.
131
Ibid., p. 197.
132
José Saramago, Seeing, p. 307.
133
The meaning of the blind man’s hatred of howling dogs is, however, ambiguous, as Jose notes: it is unclear
whether the blind man is someone who hates dogs, or, alternatively, if he is simply relieved to see the suffering ofa fellow creature come to an end. (“A Brutal Blow,” p. 728).
134
Carlo Salzani and Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte, “Saramago’s Dogs”, p 197.
125
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Conclusion
In contrast to Blindness, Seeing ends on an apparently pessimistic, even depressing, note.135 In
its response to a perceived threat to democracy, the government attacks the very rights andfreedoms associated with that democracy, resorting to ‘arch-authoritarian’ means including theimposition of a “state of siege, censorship, espionage, arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention,
bombs planted by government agents.”136 In other words, in its pursuit of the supposed rogue
behind the blank ballots, the state, in its crushing of the population’s democratic rights andfreedoms, effectively itself becomes a rogue state. This culminates in the killing of the doctor’swife, the superintendent, and the dog Constant, three characters who arguably represent
political ‘lucidity’.
Despite the government’s authoritarian turn and the less than optimistic end of thenovel, however, the message of Seeing is perhaps not entirely a hopeless one, as several
commentators including, for example, Jose, 137 Vanhoutte, 138 or Bernardino, 139 have pointed
out. Although the novel ends with the death of the three ‘lucid’ characters, many other ‘lucid’
men and women, characters “who have seen the light”140 remain alive. These are, of course, theblank voters and, more broadly, the ‘ordinary’ inhabitants of the capital city.
Far from either simply being indifferent to or rejecting democracy outright, the blankvoters demonstrate a desire to question, and presumably to improve, the democratic system. In
this sense, the voters’ action can perhaps be understood in the context of the opportunity
provided by democratic autoimmunity in the form of the democracy to come. Rather than someideal future regime, Derrida describes the democracy to come as “a militant and interminable
political critique” which protests against “every political abuse, every rhetoric that would
present as a present or existing democracy, as a de facto democracy.”141 In this sense, then,“even a state that appears to be drawing rapidly away from democracy may in fact be exposing
itself even more to the possibility of what remains to come.”142
This is reflected in the extraordinary solidarity shown by the population of the capital
who, regardless of how they voted in the elections, live together in peaceful cooperation despite
the government’s attempts to stir up unrest among them. In this sense, these city dwellers
perhaps come closer to fulfilling the promise of democracy, which for Derrida can refer “to any
kind of experience in which there is equality, justice, equity, respect for the singularity of the
Other at work.”143 than any so-called democratic regime. While the ending of Seeing, like thedemocracy to come, is left open,144 a glimmer of hope, a promise, remains amidst the ruins ofa rogue state. This hope, reflected in the city dwellers’ search for a more truly democratic wayof life, is also passed on to the reader as an exhortation to take up the howl of the dead dog
Jim Jose, “A Brutal Blow,” p. 726.
Christopher Rollason, “How Totalitarianism Begins at Home,” p. 15.
137
Jim Jose, “A Brutal Blow,” p. 726.
138
Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte, “Bye Bye Bartleby,” p. 240.
139
Ligia Bernardino, “The Threshold of Democracy,” p. 331.
140
Jim Jose, “A Brutal Blow,” p. 728.
141
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, p. 86.
142
Alex Thomson, “What’s to Become of ‘Democracy to Come’?,” p. 7.
143
Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, “Politics and Friendship.”144
Jim Jose, “A Brutal Blow”, p. 728.
135
136

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Constant, to question and challenge the democratic regimes we live in, to respond to theinjunction of the democracy to come. In Saramago’s words,
It’s not a question of replacing one government with another, or others. It’s a question of putting
democracy, authentic democracy, at the heart of the discussion, of refounding the concept based on
people’s real needs, and of searching for a way to avoid a collapse which buries the yearning forliberty and dignity, makes the human being more vulnerable and leads him to the precipice.145

José Saramago, “Refundar la Democracia. Entrevista,” Sin Permiso, 2 February 2005,
https://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/refundar-la-democracia-entrevista
145

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