Derrida and the American Death-Machine

Gateway to the apocalypse

Photo taken by the author in Tehran

Ali-Mohammad Mohajer Nasser employs Jacques Derrida’s philosophy to examine how the American-led liberal order has deconstructed itself through its own claims and contradictions.

August 1, 2026. Washington has issued a security advisory urging all American citizens to leave West Asia. Multiple news agencies report that the United States and Israel are preparing a large-scale assault on Iran’s energy and power infrastructure. From the other side, indications of Tehran’s readiness for a severe retaliatory strike grow louder. Neo-conservative media in America gleefully speak of an “age of candles” descending upon our region. The arena of politics and war increasingly resembles Russian roulette. The United States—which long presented itself as the defender of the post-World War II legal order—now openly and without pretense threatens war crimes. The Zionist regime, delighted by the enmity between Muslims and Christians, prepares itself for fresh infamy in the annals of crimes against humanity. Netanyahu, emboldened by his government’s recently successful security operation against Spain, appears eager to claim credit for persuading America to unleash a regional apocalypse.

America, with its vast network of elite think tanks and diplomatic academies, now reduces its message to Iran to a single imperative: die, or we will kill you. It is as though this two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old power can no longer speak even English, its vocabulary having collapsed into compulsion, force, death, and the threat of annihilation. This is the terminal language of liberal democracy itself—the very polity that was once heralded as the culmination of human progress, the final stage of civilizational evolution. The same power that claimed to ground its international order on human rights and human dignity now stands naked, its universalist pretensions revealed as a veil for something far more primitive. Any critical mind must now reckon with the legacy of a tradition—humanism, Enlightenment, liberalism—that has given birth to this monster.

War does not begin with missiles alone. Sometimes the first detonation is a detonation of language. When the destruction of a country’s vital infrastructure is proposed not even as a last resort, but as a routine option in political and media analysis, something deeper than a military threat is unfolding. Words themselves can redraw the boundaries of what it means to be human. The post-war international order rested on the claim that even war must be governed by rules. The Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law were founded on the principle that a distinction must be preserved between military targets and civilian life—that human suffering must never be reduced to an instrument of policy. In practice, these principles have been violated countless times: Vietnam, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Gaza. Yet the very existence of these rules was an acknowledgment that raw power alone cannot constitute legitimacy.

But when the destruction of a nation’s power grid—upon which the daily existence of millions depends—enters the ordinary vocabulary of politics, the question is no longer merely whether such an act is compatible with international law. A larger question, laced with bitter irony, emerges: what has become of that very order which claimed to have been constructed for the very purpose of restraining war? Did such an order ever truly exist?

This question leads us into the dark territory of deconstruction—a domain where we confront not merely the violation of a law, but the self-destruction of the law’s own discursive foundation. Jacques Derrida taught us that every text—and every legal-political order is a text—is built upon différance: meaning and legitimacy derive from the exclusion of the “other” and the suppression of internal contradictions. Yet precisely at the moment when a system claims full “presence” and final foundation, that very excluded “other” returns to destabilize its foundations.

The liberal post-war order rested on a sacred binary: “us”—the civilized, rule-bound—against “them”—the savage, lawless. The Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, the Kantian promise of “democratic peace”—all were designed to draw a clear line between legitimate war (defensive or humanitarian) and illegitimate war (aggressive and barbaric). But today, America—as the plenipotentiary representative of this order—openly presents the bombing of vital civilian infrastructure as a “routine option.” The binary collapses: America is no longer the law-giving civilized power; it has become the pure lawless savage. What meaningful difference remains between America’s threat of war crimes and ISIS’s threat of genocide? Both speak the language of pure death. ISIS, at least, was candid. But America, with the same mouth that speaks of “human rights,” speaks of an “age of candles” descending upon our region. This contradiction so thoroughly dissolves the boundary between “civilized” and “savage” that no metaphysical “presence” of the Good remains.

Derrida spoke of rature—the under-erasure—where a word is crossed out yet remains legible, signaling that its “presence” is impossible. The story of the American order is precisely such a permanent under-erasure: they preserve the UN Charter and human rights as the “over-writing” (the surface text) to maintain the image of a “rule-bound power,” but beneath it, with every bomb and every paralyzing sanction, they inscribe “raw power” that cancels that very surface text. Today, this under-erasure has become so pronounced that the original text—law itself—is no longer legible. When the Pentagon describes the targeting of schools and hospitals as “less than five percent calculation error,” we are no longer facing legal justification but rather a mathematical calculus of death. This is precisely what Derrida called the “violence of the archē”—violence enacted not to establish justice, but to prove the existence of power itself, each time it loses legitimacy, through repeated “re-founding” that perpetually postpones legitimacy.

American political language today is thoroughly permeated by Derridean différance: its words never arrive at a final meaning. “Negotiation” means “ultimatum.” “Deterrence” means “economic genocide.” “Regional order” means “managed chaos.” In this endless play of signifiers, the threat itself has become a self-referential performance. Trump and Hegseth share bombing footage and boast: “More is coming!” This is no longer a political statement; it is a tragic joke played with people’s blood. When war is reduced to comedy and spectacle, order itself is reduced to gesture—and a gesture, however lethal, can no longer be taken seriously as a global norm, for it has confessed, from the outset, to its own nihilism.

Yet this enemy “gesture” is not the end of the matter; it is rather the point of departure for the autopoiesis of war. War, contrary to conventional understanding, does not obey the logic of its initiator. War is an autopoietic system: at the very moment when the enemy believes that threat and spectacle (the quantity of pressure) have achieved their political purpose, a new quality suddenly emerges from that very pressure—something that was anticipated in no Pentagon calculation, no Netanyahu fantasy. The dialectical rule of the transition from quantity to quality—which Schmitt called “thoroughly political”—comes into effect here: it is not the quantity of death that determines the outcome, but the qualitative leap in the will of the besieged that transforms the very field of enmity into something unanticipated. This new quality may take the form of a boomerang against the West itself: enmity pushed to the point where space and geography become uninhabitable for the other. Iran’s own retaliatory doctrine—strikes on Persian Gulf energy infrastructure, on cities of the Zionist regime—is a reminder that the autopoiesis of war described here spares no party its own logic.

Derrida believed that deconstruction is not destruction, but rather the opening of a new path for the “other.” But in the case of the American order, this deconstruction amounts to the construction of its own coffin. When a legal-political system becomes so contaminated by its “other” (violence, racism, monopolistic interests) that it can no longer distinguish itself from that other, the system has been emptied of its own metaphysics.

Derrida already named this moment. In “Force of Law,” he argued that no legal order is founded on reason—it is founded on a decision that cannot justify itself, what he called, after Kierkegaard, the madness of decision. Deconstruction does not deny this. It exposes it. The liberal order survived as long as its founding violence stayed hidden beneath a legible surface text — the Charter, the Conventions, the language of rights. That surface text has now failed. It no longer hides the violence beneath it; it barely gestures at it. What remains is the violence alone, unconcealed. Schmitt is not a break from Derrida here. He is what is left when Derrida’s own logic is followed to its end without flinching.

America, by threatening an “age of candles” and the destruction of infrastructure, explicitly declares that “civilian life” possesses no independent being in its eyes, but is merely a standing reserve (Bestand) for political pressure. This is no longer a “legal violation” or a “discursive contradiction.” This is the declaration of an existential state of exception (Ausnahmezustand) by a power that has freed itself from any “political distinction between friend and enemy” and has entered into an absolute enmity (absolute Feindschaft). At this point, “discourse critique” is no longer useful; the issue becomes the identification of the enemy and the existential decision. But this confession itself is the greatest of defeats, because it has stepped out of the “tent of global order” and stands in the desert of naked nihilism. In the desert, no one issues orders; all are both hunter and hunted. And a lawless hunter, however well-armed, can no longer claim the role of a moral teacher to the world. This is no small lesson for a world in which there are multiple nuclear-weapon states.

So, to answer the opening question: the American order did exist, but not as an established truth—rather as a founding myth. And today, this myth is so entangled with its own contradictions—genocide in Gaza, the threat of war crimes against Iran, the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo—that it has lost any foundation for its own lawfulness. This order can be dismissed—not out of arrogance, but out of a philosophical recognition of its collapse. To take a collapsed order seriously would be the true folly. It has removed itself from the orbit of collective political rationality through its own sheer will—a will to death. From now on, any dialogue with it is no longer a dialogue between two subjects, but rather a dialogue between a living human and a death-machine.

But even a death-machine may prove impotent before a sudden existential decision. Derrida taught us not to believe in “presence”; but Schmitt teaches us that in the moment of legal collapse, it is decision that creates presence. When the collapse of law is universally acknowledged, resolute men, armed with the appropriate instruments of their will, rise to make that decision. At that hour, who can offer them liberal lectures on human rights, the Geneva Conventions, and the laws of humanitarian war—lectures directed at their conduct toward Israelis and Americans? The question answers itself within the heart of the situation—a situation that has suspended all antecedent abstract ethics.