SAMUEL WEBERgovern itself democratically. So perfect a government is not suited to humans’’ (75 / 110).
Rousseau’s ‘‘people ofgods’’ contrasts sharply with Tocqueville’s people-as-God, namely,
as the One God, the God that is One and the Same. Rousseau, by contrast, sees not the
One God but ‘‘gods’’ in the plural as defining the kind of ‘‘people’’ required by ‘‘democ-
racy,’’ which is difficult to come by, being ‘‘not suited to men.’’ Or, one is tempted to
add, not suited to those ‘‘men’’ who see themselves as created in the image of God, of the
One God as a Self that strives to stay the Same.
Rousseau’s emphasis on the plurality of gods supposed and demanded by democracy
leads Derrida to reflect on how this alters the very notion of the divine, and with it, of
the sovereignty it informs:
Thisplus d’un—more than one—that then affects the wordgods, the dissemination
by which it is literally taken into account (the gods, yes, but how many, and will they
be as equal as they are free?), thismore than one[plus d’un] announces democracy,
or at least some democracy, beyond government and democratic sovereignty. This
‘‘more than one’’ affects God with divisibility precisely there where sovereignty, that
is, force,cracy, does not suffer division, where the force of the One God, single and
sovereign... will have been called single, one and indivisible by all those who have
analyzed sovereignty, from Plato and Aristotle to Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau. (75 /
110)Thus, with the same formulation that disqualifies democracy as a political regime or
government ill-suited for humans, Rousseau, by associating it with a plural divinity,
breaks with the tradition of political discourse that from Plato and Aristotle to Schmitt
insists on the indispensable unity and indivisibility of the sovereign. Democracy, as a
regime of ‘‘gods’’ rather than of men, is called into question as a regime at all.
If, then, the essence of sovereignty has traditionally been construed on the basis of a
force that isindivisible, and if democracy has generally been construed as ‘‘a government
of number, of the greatest number’’ (76 / 111), the question posed by the formulation of
Rousseau concerns that which makes number great: Is it the indivisible individuality of
the One as the basic unit of all numerical calculation? Or is it a singular and irreducible
divisibility that makes each and every number always more—and less—than itself, more
and less than one—and thus not so much a number as an indefinite article?
Could this also be why the wordroguesis set in the plural in Derrida’s title? And
could it be that this plurality also affects its link to the state, as in the phraserogue state?
What of rogueswithinthe state, subverting its stability and dislocating its unity? Could
the emergence of the wordrogueas a political term be a symptom of such irrepressible
disunity?
I, at any rate, have a very different memory of my first encounter with this word in
political discourse. For me, it is forever associated with what in retrospect appears increas-
PAGE 394394.................16224$ CH20 10-13-06 12:35:58 PS