INTRODUCTIONMarrati) or with law. Rather, it is linked to a concept of ‘‘justice’’ that exceeds the Kantian
(or, for that matter, Rawlsian and Habermasian) regulative idea, while stopping short of
more emphatic ideals of salvation, both religious and this worldly.
In its full consequence, such a notion of a never-present—and, in a sense, nonpre-
sentable and no longer simply representational—‘‘democracy to come’’ cannot ‘‘ulti-
mately’’ be designated a ‘‘political regime,’’^143 as ‘‘democracy’’ had been in the Greco-
Christian and Latin world, with its theologico-political overdetermination of republican
sovereignty (and its monarchical, aristocratic, or otherwise oligarchical analogues). The
spread of this model across the world was from the outset amondialatinizationor ‘‘global-
atinization’’ (to use Samuel Weber’s felicitous translation), that is to say, a becoming
progressively Latin (or Greco-Roman-Christian) of the West and its spheres of domina-
tion. Indeed, as if conjuring up—and radically inverting—the early medieval theologico-
political construct of the ‘‘king’s two bodies,’’ Derrida reminds us that ‘‘the democratic,
having become consubstantially political in this Greco-Christian and globalatinizing tra-
dition, appears inseparable in the modernity following the Enlightenment from an ambig-
uous secularization (and secularization is always ambiguous in that it frees itself from the
religious, all the while remaining marked in its very concept by it, by the theological,
indeed, the onto-theological).’’^144 Not even a democracy always already still ‘‘to come’’
could fully escape that logic. It remains tied back to a legacy that it may not want to call
its own but that it cannot but somehow affirm and reaffirm, at least for some time still to
come. The preparation—ex negativo, as it were—for a democracy to come would involve
deconstructing the very pillar of the political, the concept of sovereignty, whose necessary
unsettling and no less inevitable reaffirmation form the poles between which deconstruct-
ive analysis and practice should oscillate, with ever-heightened vigilance.
Weber cites a telling passage from Derrida’s account of the ‘‘logic’’ of sovereignty, of
its internal constitution and demise, which argues that the present excesses of the Bush
administration—its disregard for international law,^145 its reserving for itself the privilege
of declaring other states to be ‘‘rogues’’ (‘‘outlaws,’’ ‘‘evil empires,’’ ‘‘renegade regimes,’’
etc.), and the lack of shame with which its high-level officials adopt a ‘‘double-speak’’ that
would make Orwell cringe^146 —reveal a general political, perhaps, a theologico-political
problem rather than just ineptitude on the part of one particular nation or current
administration:
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 sharing. It can only tend toward imperial hegemony.^147PAGE 6161.................16224$ INTR 10-13-06 12:34:23 PS