Therefore, exercising power communicatively — as democracy demands — violates the very nature of undivided sovereign power.

Now, finally, let us go to one of the most recent of Derrida’s writings, to his 2002 “The Reason of the Strongest,” the first essay in the book called Rogues. There Derrida is discussing the United Nations, which he says combines the two principles of Western political thought: sovereignty and democracy. But, “democracy and sovereignty are at the same time, but also by turns, inseparable and in contradiction with one another” (Rogues, p. 100). Democracy and sovereignty contradict one another in