SAMUEL WEBERpolicies pursued by a particular American administration but with the claim of sover-
eignty itself to be indivisible and self-identical:
To confer sense or meaning on sovereignty, to justify it, to find a reason for it, is
already to compromise its decisive exceptionality, to subject it to rules, to a code of
law, to some general law, to concepts. It is thus to divide it, to subject it to partition-
ing, to participation, to being shared. And [this] is to turn sovereignty against itself,
to compromise its immunity. This happens as soon as one speaks of it.... But since
this happens all the time, pure sovereignty does not exist; it is always in the process
of positing itself by refuting itself, by denying or disavowing itself; it is always in the
process of auto-immunizing itself, of betraying itself by betraying the democracy that
nonetheless can never do without it. (101 / 144)Sovereignty, which seeks to be above language and time, finds itself caught up in both as
media of alteration and transformation that it seeks to appropriate as media of self-
positing and self-preservation.
If, then, the ambiguous quality of roguishness proceeds from what can be called the
aporia of sovereignty, in which the claim to a certain universality—or, at least, to a certain
superiority—undercuts the constitutive and aporetical claim that the sovereign is indivisi-
bly self-same, then ‘‘democracy,’’ by associating the notion of ‘‘sovereignty’’ with some-
thing called the ‘‘people’’—thedemos—sets the stage on which what Derrida calls ‘‘auto-
immunization’’ begins to play itself out.
Without being able to delve here into the intricacies of the idea of ‘‘auto-immunity’’
as it emerges in the later writings of Derrida—Michael Naas has written a remarkable
text on the subject, in which he describes ‘‘auto-immunity’’ as ‘‘the last iteration’’ of
‘‘deconstruction’’ itself^12 —I will note only that it continues a line of thought that goes
back to his early writings on Husserl, in particularSpeech and Phenomenon, where Derrida
deconstructed the Husserlian notion of ‘‘auto-affection,’’ thus introducing a concern with
the notion of the ‘‘self ’’—autos—and the related but distinct concepts of ‘‘sameness’’
and ‘‘ego’’ that was to remain throughout his writings and indeed to assume increasing
importance over the years.^13 The shift, however, from the philosophical notion of ‘‘auto-
affection’’—the mind speaking to itself without the intermediary of anything exterior or
other, whether temporal, corporeal, or linguistic—to that of ‘‘auto-immunity,’’ borrowed
from the life sciences, recenters Derrida’s discourse around the process by which the
‘‘self,’’ in seeking to ‘‘protect’’ itself against external dangers, tends to weaken its own
defenses and thus to debilitate or even destroy that which it is seeking to safeguard. One
example of the auto-immune tendency of democracy that Derrida discusses inRoguesis
the suspension of the Algerian elections of 1992 by the ruling party, the FLN, after it had
won only 15 seats in the first round against 188 that went to its opponent, the Islamic
Salvation Front (FIS). Reacting to this election result, the FLN outlawed the FIS, impris-
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