SAMUEL WEBERbrightly colored (poikilon) garment.... The same attribute defines at once the vivid colors
and the diversity, a changing, variable, whimsical character, complicated, sometimes ob-
scure, ambiguous. Like the fanning wheel [la roue ́] of a peacock, which women find so
irresistible’’ (26 / 43). Derrida insists on the importance of the feminine quality that Plato
attributes to democracy, a quality that he both associates with desire and also mistrusts;
such femininity diverges from the masculine, patriarchal, and fraternal perspective that
will dominate theories of democracy and politics throughout most of the history of West-
ern thought.^16
This masculine, patriarchal, and fraternal perspective is linked, according to Derrida,
to the conception of sovereignty as intrinsically indivisible, including the sovereignty of
the people. A famous passage from Tocqueville’sDemocracy in Americapoints to the
theological origins of such a perspective. In summing up his impression of the distinctive-
ness of American democracy as he experienced it in the 1830s, Tocqueville concludes that:
‘‘The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is
the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it’’
(14 / 34). Tocqueville’s comparison of ‘‘the people’’ ruling over the ‘‘American political
world’’ with God ruling the universe suggests that this popular-democratic notion of
sovereignty, even in its most secular appearance, retains a strong theological and mono-
theistic character. Derrida contrasts this monotheistic perspective—God as One and the
Same—with a Greek precursor, Aristotle’s conception of the Prime Mover (to proton
kinoun), which, although itself neither moving nor moved, sets everything else into mo-
tion. It is, he notes, ‘‘a motion of return to self, a circular motion.’’ And yet, Derrida
adds, the circular motion of self-return initiated by the Prime Mover is associated by
Aristotle with ‘‘a desire. God, the pure actuality of the Prime Mover, is at once erogenous
and thinkable.’’ He is desirable as ‘‘thought thinking thought [he ̄noe ̄sis noe ̄seo ̄s noe ̄sis]’’
(Metaphysics, 12.1072a-b, 1074b; 15 / 35).^17 The movement initiated by the unmoved
Prime Moverdesiresto come full circle as the return of thought to itself—thought think-
ing thought. Thinking is thus defined as a movement by which the self, through a process
of self-reflection, takes ‘‘pleasure in the self,’’ which is to say, in the ability tostay the
sameover time and space and thus to be—that is,to remain—one and the same.
To the extent, then, that ‘‘democracy’’ always implies some degree of self-
determination and of popular sovereignty, it is informed by what Derrida designates as
‘‘ipseity’’ or ‘‘ipsocracy,’’^18 as rule of theself-same. Over what does this self rule? Over
everythingother,to be sure, not merely in the form of beings or entities, but even more
in that oftimeandspaceas media of proliferation, dissemination, and alteration, and over
languageas medium of sharing and partitioning. The self rules by asserting its unity and
unicity asone-self,as a self that stays the same over time, through space, and throughout
languages—in the image of a God construed as One and the Same.
This is not the only way in which the uniqueness of the one can be conceived, how-
ever. If, as Derrida observes, democracy always involves a ‘‘question of number,’’ the
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