Khmer Rouge

The Khmer Rouge appears in the book not as the subject of a full political history but as a sharply defined example of secretive authority. The regime’s handling of its own structure—making inquiry into state power a crime and referring to leaders anonymously—supports the author’s argument that power can treat its own operations as an illicit secret rather than expose them to public account.

Historical Reference

The book identifies the Khmer Rouge as the regime in Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979. It invokes the regime in a comparison with Sparta, where the ruling class’s authority was sustained by practices that made its position appear both dominant and, in a sense, illegal. The comparison is structural: the point is not that the two societies were historically identical, but that both illustrate authority entangled with secrecy and transgression.

Secrecy and the Structure of Authority

Under the Khmer Rouge, asking how state power was organized was considered a crime. The leaders were referred to anonymously as “Brother No. i,” “Brother No. 2,” and so on; the text identifies the first designation parenthetically with Pol Pot. Anonymity here is more than a concealment of individual names: it marks the regime’s organization of authority as something that could not safely be investigated openly.

Theoretical Significance

The example helps the book articulate a broader claim about power: attempts to establish authority as pure and orderly can reproduce an obscene excess that the official order disavows. The Khmer Rouge is presented as an extreme case in which the structure of power itself was placed beyond legitimate inquiry. The book then extends the problem beyond authoritarian regimes, arguing that the disappearance of an overt Master in Western democracies does not necessarily abolish domination; control may persist in less visible, disavowed forms.