Founders and Re-founders: Struggles of Self-authorized Representation

• Published in: Constellations (Oxford, England) Vol. 22; no. 4; pp. 500 - 513
• Main Author: Brito Vieira, Mónica
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01-12-2015
• Subjects: Citizens; Democracy; Political philosophy; Political representation; Political science theories; Politics; Representation; Theory
• ISSN: 1351-0487; 1467-8675
• DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12178

Typically, democratic theory considers the people to be the source of political legitimacy. However, there is widespread disagreement about what kind of entity the people is. If the people is taken to be an empirical reality or an organized corporate body, we run into a series of paradoxes, since it would seem that the people would both have to constitute itself, and to have been constituted, before it could act as the agent of its own constitution. This logical circularity lies at the heart of the so-called paradox of democratic self-constitution, whereby the democratic subject being posited is conceived as both the cause and effect of action, and it is commonly thought to imply that the people cannot be constituted democratically. In this article I challenge this conclusion. The assumption on which my argument stands is that the people is best understood as a political claim. By this I mean that the people does not exist except through representative claims which, rather than originating in the people, participate in the constitution of the political subject for which they purport to speak. The argument that follows from this is twofold. First, I maintain that it is not possible to either understand or practically initiate democratic foundings except through self-authorized claims of representation appealing to an extra-legal source of authority, that is, a prefigured people, constructed around a particular claim to what should be common. Second, I contend that self-authorized claims to a prefigured people that are performed to and retroactively validated by the existing people can open up opportunities for the people to self-constitute democratically.