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ROGUE DEMOCRACY AND THE HIDDEN GOD

made to justify violations of the very international law to which the term seems to appeal.
In other words, the use of the term to designate and condemn an enemy actually describes
the user. Derrida by no means disagrees with this account, but he does find something
decisive missing in it: the link between rogue states and the concept of legitimate political
sovereignty itself:

It is not a criticism of these courageous works to wish for a more fully developed

political argument [pense ́e], especially with regard to the history, structure, and

‘‘logic’’ of the concept of sovereignty. This ‘‘logic’’ would make it clear that, a priori,

the states that are able or are in a state to make war on rogue states are themselves,

in their most legitimate sovereignty, rogue states abusing their power. As soon as there

is sovereignty, there is abuse of power and a rogue state. Abuse is the law of use; it is

the law itself, the ‘‘logic’’ of a sovereignty that can reign only by not sharing. More

precisely, since it never succeeds in doing this except in a critical, precarious, and

unstable fashion, sovereignty can onlytend, for a limited time, to reign without shar-

ing. It can only tend toward imperial hegemony. (102 / 145–46)

This, of course, assumes a very general account of sovereignty. But even without going
into the question in detail, much of what has happened in the few years since Derrida
pronounced these words argues for their plausibility. Sovereignty seeks to transcend time,
as well as language, insofar as both require it to partition and share, to divide and compro-
mise its unity and integrity—in short, tocomposewith alterity, rather than simplyimpose
itself upon it.
It is therefore fitting that Derrida mobilizes precisely the media that such sovereignty
seeks to absorb and to neutralize: language and time, in his account of the specific histori-
cal conditions leading up to the emergence of the word roguein American political
discourse.
The background for this situation, Derrida asserts, lies in the fact that today the
international institution founded after the Second World War to adjudicate conflicts be-
tween nations, the United Nations, no longer provides the United States with a reliable
majority, neither in its General Assembly nor in its Security Council, both of which are
required to legitimate the use of force between member nations. Without this majority,
the United States is no longer entirely sovereign in its ability to use force to regulate
international conflicts. However, the United Nations Charter does allow for one signifi-
cant exception—and exceptions to such founding charters are almost always signifi-
cant—to the authority invested in the Security Council, and through it the United
Nations, to adjudicate conflicts and prohibit the use of force: the right of individual states
to self-defense, a right preserved in Article 51 of the UN Charter. This article, which
constitutes ‘‘the only exception to the recommendation made to all states not to resort to
force’’ in the settling of international conflicts, would, in the perspective developed by

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