ROGUE DEMOCRACY AND THE HIDDEN GODand the same, then the plurality of rogue states also announces the disappearance or
irrelevance at least of the term as a political concept, if not of the behavior it stigmatizes.
From this situation, Derrida draws the aporetical conclusion: ‘‘There are thus only
rogue states. Potentially or actually,’’ but also that preciselybecausethere are always
‘‘more’’ rogue states, there will soon beno morerogue states, since the difference between
legitimate and rogue states will have collapsed into a sovereignty that by its nature refuses
to be shared, to recognize anything outside of itself—and thus is in essence ‘‘roguish.’’ All
of this is condensed in the French phrase that provides the title of the penultimate chapter:
‘‘Plus d’E ́tats voyous,’’ which, depending on how it is pronounced, can mean either ‘‘more
rogue states’’ (the finalsis pronounced) or ‘‘rogue statesno more’’ (the finalsis mute),
but which, therefore, when written, can, and in this case does, mean both at once. Rogu-
ishness, as Derrida interprets it, is rooted in nothing other than the structure of sover-
eignty itself—of sovereigntyasa structureoftheself. Sovereignty, without which law is
unthinkable, must place itself outside the law, for reasons that the following passage from
Roguesassociates with its relation to language, or rather, to silence:
Unavowable silence, denegation: that is the always unapparent essence of sovereignty.... A pure sovereignty is indivisible or it is not at all, as all the theoreticians of
sovereignty have rightly recognized and that is what links it to the decisionist excep-
tionality spoken of by Schmitt. This indivisibility excludes it in principle from being
shared, from time and from language.... As soon as I speak to the other, I submit
to the law of giving reason(s), I share a virtually universalizable medium, I divide my
authority, even in the most performative language, which always requires another
language in order to lay claim to some convention. The paradox—always the
same—is that sovereignty is incompatible with universality even as it is appealed to
by every concept of international, and thus universal or universalizable—and thus
democratic—law. (101 / 144)^11
This ‘‘silence’’ that belongs to the ‘‘essence of sovereignty’’ does not, Derrida clarifies,
mean that sovereignty cannot speak—it speaks all the time—but rather that its discourse
lacks meaning (sens). The use of the termrogue stateis an exemplary instance of this lack
of sense and of its historical dynamics. It seeks, by negation and by demarcation, to
invest the nonrogue, sovereign ‘‘superpower’’ with meaning and legitimacy. But in its
own tendency to ignore established international and domestic legal traditions—whether
in its endorsement of preemptive warfare as a principle of foreign policy or in its suspen-
sion of habeas corpus with respect to the ‘‘terrorist suspects’’ imprisoned at Guanta ́namo
as a principle of domestic policy (of ‘‘homeland security’’)—the democratic superpower
increasingly resembles that which it seeks to oppose as its mortal enemy, the ‘‘terrorists’’
or ‘‘rogue states.’’ This has to do, Derrida insists, not simply with the specific set of
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