Derrida- Rogues

At the moment of confiding it to you, I am myself torn or split in two.
On the one hand, this double question would require us to inflect otherwise the very word question. It would impose itself at the very beginning of the game, and that is why I spoke without delay of an injunction and of the greatest force, of a force that will have won out over everything, and first of all over me, in the figure of a violent question, the question in the sense of an inquisitional torture where one is not only put in question but put to the question.
On the other hand, this double question has returned to torment me. It has made a return, turning around me, turning and returning, turning around me and turning me upside down, upsetting me, as if I were locked up in a tower unable to get around, unable to perceive or conceive the workings or turnings of a circular machine that does not work or turn just right.

In the end, if we try to return to the origin, we do not yet know what democracy will have meant nor what democracy is. For democracy does not present itself; it has not yet presented itself, but that will come. In the meantime, let's not stop using a word whose heritage is undeniable even if its meaning is still obscured, obfuscated, reserved. Neither the word nor the thing 'democracy' is yet presentable. We do not yet know what we have inherited; we are the legatees of this Greek word and what it assigns to us, enjoins us, bequeaths or leaves us, indeed delegates or leaves over to us. We are undeniably the heirs or legatees, the delegates, of this word, and we are saying 'we' here as the very legatees or delegates of this word that has been sent to us, addressed to us for centuries, and that we are always sending or putting off until later. There are, to be sure, claims or allegations of democracy everywhere 'we' are; but we ourselves do not know the meaning of this legacy, the mission, emission, or commission of this word or the legitimacy of this claim or allegation.

In its constitutive autoimmunity, in its vocation for hospitality, democracy has always wanted by turns and at the same time two incompatible things: it has wanted, on the one hand, to welcome only men, and on the condition that they be citizens, brothers, and compeers, excluding all the others, in particular bad citizens, rogues, noncitizens, and all sorts of unlike and unrecognizable others, and, on the other hand, at the same time or by turns, it has wanted to open itself up, to offer hospitality, to all those excluded. ... Rogues or degenerates are sometimes brothers, citizens, compeers.