ROGUE DEMOCRACY AND THE HIDDEN GODoned, tortured, and often murdered its leaders, adherents, and sympathizers, and thus
ushered in a bloody civil war. Given the highly undemocratic character of the FLN, even
if it was ‘‘elected’’ prior to 1992, this example strikes me as unfortunate and not entirely
appropriate. A better one, or at least one closer to home, would be measures such as ‘‘The
Patriot Act,’’ the suspension of habeas corpus, domestic surveillance without due process,
and other policies of the current American government, which are justified as necessary
to safeguard the ‘‘homeland.’’^14 But since such measures, which restrict individual liber-
ties, do not affect the electoral mechanism, which today is widely presented as and consid-
ered to be the single most important institution identified with ‘‘democracy,’’ they attract
less attention—and indignation. Similarly, the structure of the electoral process itself, its
increasing dependency upon private financing, is also an issue that receives little attention
from the public—not surprisingly, given that the media which largely shape that attention
are themselves part and parcel of the problem.
However this may be, the specificity of the example given by Derrida can obscure the
more general tendency that he is concerned to emphasize, which resides in the particular
propensity of democracy toward autoimmunity: ‘‘Democracy has always been suicidal,
and if there is a to-come for it, it is only on condition of construing otherwise life, and the
force of life’’ (33 / 57).^15 This tendency does not, therefore, depend simply on a particular
government or its policies, however suicidal they may seem. At the core of this propensity
is the difficulty of determining the nature of sovereignty in democracy. Rule of the people,
liberty and equality—these notions have historically imposed themselves in regard to
democracy and yet also have proved difficult to reconcile with one another in a coherent
synthesis. Sovereignty, for instance, is traditionally understood as indivisible, whereas
democratic sovereignty, expressed in some sort of elective process, entails rotation and
alternation—but always understood as a ‘‘return of and to the self ’’ (10 / 30). Similarly,
freedom tends to be construed as an element of self-determination, once again implying
the power of a sovereign subject to say, ‘‘I can.’’ Thus, the notion of the ‘‘self ’’ as an
autonomous instance tends to inform most conceptions of democracy. And yet at the
same time, an examination of certain discourses on democracy reveals something very
different: not a determinate self or subject at the core of democracy but an irreducible
alterity.
In analyzing a number of passages from Plato and Aristotle, Tocqueville and Rous-
seau, Derrida retraces certain aspects of this unstable and even aporetical configuration.
On the one hand, at the very beginning of Western philosophy, there is the Platonic
distrust of a regime that not only confounds liberty with license,eleutheria with exousia,
but also discovers ‘‘indetermination and undecidability in the very concept of democracy’’
(25 / 47). Reviewing the discussion of democracy in theRepublic, Derrida points to Plato’s
emphasis on its seductive power to fascinate, which in turn is associated with its phenom-
enal multiplicity: ‘‘Democracyseems.. .the most beautiful (kalliste ̄), the most seductive
of constitutions (politeio ̄n; Republic, 557c). Its beauty resembles that of a multi- and
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