ROGUE DEMOCRACY AND THE HIDDEN GODingly to be one of the watershed events of recent—a highly relative term, to be sure—
American political history: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November
22, 1963. Of all the many reactions and discourses that emerged in response to that fateful
event, not the least memorable was the theory of a conspiracy possibly involving elements
of the state apparatus, above all its security agencies. It is in this connection that I first
encountered the termroguein a political context. At that time, however, it was used not
to stigmatize illegitimate foreign states but rather as a term for one aspect of what Colonel
L. Fletcher Prouty called, in a book of the same name,The Secret Team. Prouty, who from
1956 to 1963 served as liaison officer between the Department of Defense and the CIA,
became convinced that the murder of President Kennedy was the result of a coalition of
forces operating both within various defense, intelligence, and other governmental agen-
cies, and outside. The intra-governmental grouping he designated as a ‘‘secret team’’ not
merely because it operated in secret but because its secret operation was designed to
circumvent scrutiny and control through the representative and accountable organs of
the democratic state.^19
Whatever one may think of this notion of a ‘‘secret team’’ as responsible for the
assassination of President Kennedy (and perhaps other assassinations as well), Prouty’s
approach and his information, which reflected the experience of someone who had long
worked within and reflected upon the organizations he was analyzing, suggests that the
divisibility of sovereignty and of so-called sovereign states upon which Derrida insists
proceeds from their innermost elements and institutions, which are no more unified and
legitimate than are the states as a whole.
The fact is that long before the termroguewas used to delegitimize foreign states, it
was used to designate elements workingwithinthe domestic state apparatus butoutside
the official chain of command and control. In this perspective, it also seems appropriate
that the phraserogue elementsemerged in connection with the assassination of a chief of
state, for if, as Tocqueville put it, the people in American democracy are felt or expected
to ‘‘rule over the political world as God rules over the universe,’’ the public, visible elimi-
nation of the one political figure and office thatmanifeststhe unity of that people as a
whole, but also its accountability and possibility of self-transformation, stands as a chal-
lenge to the capacity of that people torule itself, or at least to rule itselfdemocratically.
As Plato already emphasized, the distinctive quality of democracy seems inseparable
from a certain form of manifestation, above all, a certain visibility. From this standpoint
it may be highly significant that the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas was
performed as a public and visible act. Reported by the media ‘‘live,’’ audible on radio and
visible on television—and subsequently viewed innumerable times on various recordings,
including the famous ‘‘Zapruder film,’’ the killing of this president established once and
for all, albeit in a complex and ambiguous manner, the political power both of what is
called ‘‘media coverage’’ and of obscure, unidentifiable—or at least unidentified—forces
acting outside of the established structures of accountability. The relation of the latter to
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