Turn by Turn

Im-possibility and Democracy ‘to Come’ in Derrida’s Rogues

Résumé

It seemed as if the time for Derrida’s reflections on sovereignty, democracy and the morality behind the belief that “force ‘trumps’ law” especially as it unfolded in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason had come and passed. Delivered as two lectures in the summer of 2002, in the interval between the aftermath of 9/11 and the impending invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies in 2003, Rogues claims for its theme, as Derrida announces in the first lecture, “democracy in America, or, more precisely, democracy and America […].”And yet, almost twenty-three years after its publication, this critical text that contains Derrida’s most intricate analysis of the enigmatic phrase ‘democracy to come’ has taken on a new significance. Pretexted on wars, refugee and border crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, terror attacks and the forceful return of the so-called “Rogue States,” democracies around the world, including most recently democracy in America, have experienced a resurgence of what Derrida in the preface of Rogues calls the “old-new enigma” of sovereignty. Furthermore, the transformation of the space of democracy itself – the public sphere – by intensifying globalization and new technologies has brought the very question of democracy back to the forefront of political and philosophical discourse.