Democracy without People?

In Politics of Friendship Derrida characterises his extended discussion as a contribution to a genealogical deconstruction of the link that ties democracy to autochthony. In Rogues a few years later, he adds to this work by articulating what might be figured as an extensionist hypothesis, raising the question of ‘how far’ ‘the people of demo cracy’ is to be extended. Here, I read these two lines of problematisation alongside each other, seeing in each a certain decentring of the place of ‘people’ in the formation of democracy. Reading the later gesture for its potential to usher in a ‘more-than-human’ politics in view of anthropogenic climate change, I take recent efforts to develop a program of a multispecies, environmental justice as indicative of this impulse. At stake here is what Derrida characterises as an ambivalent logic of ‘fraternisation’ whose operation in theories of more-than-human politics I trace with reference to the Schmittian concept of the political. Driving the investigation from the beginning, however, is a more speculative question of what happens to the very idea of democracy when the place of ‘people’ is doubly decentred in this way. In what sense, moreover, could a deconstruction along these lines be engaged and still keep the old name of democracy?