Imploding Singularities: For a Critique of Autoimmunity as Political Future1

Abstract

This paper traces the resilience of Orientalist representations in contemporary political and popular cultural constructions of space and time. Derrida's deconstruction of universalist notions of space and time enables a challenge to these mechanisms. However, our contemporary political era in the context of the war between terrorisms is marked by an implosion of the Enlightenment concept of universal space and time and the attempt to negate multiple spacetimes. In this sense, Derrida's concept of autoimmunity appears to be a necessary theoretical tool in reading our political future in relation to wars between state and other terrorisms.