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HENT DE VRIES

In other words, no geopolitical dominance can last; it is unstable for structural reasons,
internal to the very concept and practice of sovereignty. As Weber writes, ‘‘Sovereignty,’’
in its purported universality and indivisibility—its near apophatic or mystically postulated
‘‘silence,’’ as Derrida says, or its ‘‘empty signifier,’’ as Laclau would add—‘‘seeks to tran-
scend time, as well as language, insofar as both require it to partition and share, to divide
and compromise its unity and integrity—in short, tocomposewith alterity, rather than
simplyimposeitself upon it’’ (p. 387). Where sovereignty is defined, as in the Charter of
the United Nations (a ‘‘super-sovereign,’’ in Schmittian terms), as the ‘‘exception to the
recommendation made to all states not to resort to force,’’ namely, to resort to the sus-
pension of law only for the sake of self-defense in international conflict, that is, where a
threat to the nation-state’s survival that could not otherwise be eliminated is perceived
(or construed), a similar logic of self-deconstruction takes place. A price is inevitably paid
for the transition from legitimacy to sheer power—not just de facto, because of the resis-
tance of things and peoples, but for reasons based on the aporetic nature of the concept
of sovereignty—and ultimately of democracy—itself. In Derrida’s words: ‘‘The paradox—
always the same—is that sovereignty is incompatible with universality, even as it is ap-
pealed to by every concept of international, and thus universal or universalizable—and
thus democratic—law.’’^148
Such a conception of sovereignty, Derrida and Weber recall, has deep theological and
monotheistic roots, as indicated by Alexis de Tocqueville’s statement, inDemocracy in
America, 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’’ (p. 392). Could one imagine an auto-deconstruction of the theologico-
political parallel to the one just observed in the concept and practice of sovereignty? Are
these notions—and hence also God, the people, and their structural analogues—aporetic,
plural, no longer coinciding with themselves, no longer what they claimed or seemed,
namely, one, simple, and indivisible?
Building on his recentTargets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinkingand
the final chapters ofTheatricality as Medium,^149 Weber discusses the ways in which Der-
rida, drawing on Aristotle, invents a vocabulary to prepare for an alternative view of
democracy, positing a concept of ‘‘life’’ and ‘‘living together’’ that is irreducible to com-
mon understandings of bio-politics, while ‘‘exceeding the juridico-political sphere,’’ ‘‘be-
yond government and democratic sovereignty.’’ Furthermore, returning to Rousseau,
Derrida invokes this author’s reference to a ‘‘people of gods,’’ which, if it existed, ‘‘would
govern itself democratically,’’ by contrast to Tocqueville’s metaphor of the ‘‘people-as-
God,’’ in the singular (pp. 393–94). Democracy would thus have to be reconceived in
light of a ‘‘plural divinity,’’ thereby breaking away from a long monopolar theologico-
political tradition resting upon an impossible—a silent, mystical, apophatic, empty—
postulation of sovereignty in terms of unity and indivisibility. Weber concludes his essay
by considering that this would imply a reorientation of a certain culture of visibility and

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