The Specters of Radical Democracy: Policing and the Conspiratorial Politics of Rogues in Jacques Derrida and Saidiya Hartman

Abstract

Radical democratic theory has often presented democracy as the break with policing. I explore a different way of thinking together policing and democracy, not as always oppositional forms of politics but as an impure combination. Policing is the shadow of American democracy that continues to haunt it even when supposedly legitimated by democratic decisions or banished outside the sphere of democratic contestation. By reading Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida on the specters of policing alongside Saidiya Hartman’s “wayward” as the criminalized specters of both police and democracy, I argue that challenging policing means not the public actions of radical democracy but the secretive and conspiratorial politics of rogues who have no desire to belong to democracy at all.