Rogues

Two Essays on Reason

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects French Stuff Philosophy

by Jacques Derrida,

Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas

Stanford University Press

Due/Published March 2005, 200 pages, paper

ISBN 0804749515

Rogues, published in France under the title Voyous, comprises two major lectures that Derrida delivered in 2002 investigating the foundations of the sovereignty of the nation-state. The term "État voyou" is the French equivalent of "rogue state," and it is this outlaw designation of certain countries by the leading global powers that Derrida rigorously and exhaustively examines.

Derrida examines the history of the concept of sovereignty, engaging with the work of Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, and others. Against this background, he delineates his understanding of "democracy to come," which he distinguishes clearly from any kind of regulating ideal or teleological horizon. The idea that democracy will always remain in the future is not a temporal notion. Rather, the phrase would name the coming of the unforeseeable other, the structure of an event beyond calculation and program. Derrida thus aligns this understanding of democracy with the logic he has worked out elsewhere. But it is not just political philosophy that is brought under deconstructive scrutiny here: Derrida provides unflinching and hard-hitting assessments of current political realities, and these essays are highly engaged with events of the post-9/11 world.

Series: Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics

"I need not say that this is an important book, where Derrida weighs in extensively and incisively on a world swept up in a war on terrorism. It will not comfort the ideologues of U.S. righteousness in waging that war; but neither will it discourage, on the contrary, truly democratic reflection on that world. It is a richly varied text, ranging widely in its references. It juxtaposes unflinching, hard-hitting assessments of current democratic realities with patient readings of contemporaries, as well as significant thinkers from the tradition. It is passionate, moving, philosophically rigorous, intellectually generous, politically courageous, remarkably inventive, and always original: a tour de force."--Peggy Kamuf, Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California