ROGUE DEMOCRACY AND THE HIDDEN GODresponse to that question has never been univocal. It can, as in Tocqueville’s interpreta-
tion of the American experience of ‘‘the people,’’ be understood as implying an instance
that is one and the same, which is to say, as ‘‘ipseity’’ (15 / 35). But it can be understood
differently, namely, as ‘‘the truth of the other,’’ as ‘‘heterogeneity,’’ as ‘‘anonymity,’’ as
indeterminate or indefinite. In French, these two options converge in the little wordun,
which can designate both the numberoneand also what in English is called theindefinite
article:aoran,anyone,and thusno one—no one in particular, no one definite, defined,
or definitively definable. Thus Derrida places great emphasis on the fact that Aristotle
describes the Prime Mover as both finite and indefinite at once: as ‘‘alife’’ rather than
simply as ‘‘life’’ in general—and yet at the same time, as a life ‘‘that exceeds that of
humans’’ insofar as it is lived ‘‘in a constant manner.’’ ‘‘A’’ life in this sense is thus neither
the life of an individual human being nor life in general. Its constancy can be read to
imply a certain overcoming of time and space as media of alteration. The life of the Prime
Mover would then constitute the life of the self, lifeasself-same. But Aristotle also seems
to retain the notion of an irreduciblesingularityat the very origin of life. At the origin of
life would be not just ‘‘life’’ as such, life in general, life that can be lived constantly, but
‘‘a life,’’ life in the singular, life that is finite: once and for all. The question of how these
two notions of ‘‘life’’ relate to one another constitutes one of the questions that in-
forms—or should one say ‘‘tortures’’?—Derrida’s discussion of democracy, and it also
suggests why he is eager to retain the possibility that it must be construed as ‘‘a concept
exceeding the juridical-political sphere’’ (35 / 59). If Derrida never mentions the notion
of the ‘‘biopolitical,’’ it is perhaps because this emphasis on ‘‘alife’’—on life in thesingu-
lar—is incompatible with the generalizing perspective of biopolitics.
Aristotle is, however, not the only writer mobilized by Derrida to offer an alternative
to Tocqueville’s description of the godlike character of the popular sovereign in American
democracy. It is striking, and perhaps not without a certain irony, that Derrida also turns
to the writer who many years before, inOn Grammatology, he had invoked to name the
‘‘age’’ that ‘‘deconstruction’’ was called upon to transcend: Rousseau. In this late text of
Derrida, Rousseau returns, but in a very different guise. In the chapter of theSocial Con-
tractdealing with democracy, Rousseau emphasizes, in a Platonic vein, how singularly
unsuited to human life democracy seems, above all because of its protean quality: ‘‘No
government tends more forcefully and continuously to change its form,’’ he observes.
And yet Rousseau does not conclude from this that democracy is simply to be disqualified
or dismissed as a form of government. Rather, he emphasizes the extraordinary demands
it places on those who would practice it: ‘‘It is under this constitution that the citizen
ought to arm himself with force and constancy, and to say each day of his life from the
bottom of his heart what a virtuous Palatine said in the Diet of Poland:Malo periculosam
libertatem quam quietum servitium[I prefer liberty fraught with danger to tranquil servi-
tude]’’ (75 / 110). This danger—which, as Derrida adds, often concerns ‘‘nothing less than
life itself,’’ leads Rousseau to conclude that ‘‘if there were a people of gods, it would
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