Founding Acts. Serdar Tekin

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СКАЧАТЬ they are suggestive of the fact that no institution can completely close on itself and fully colonize performative speech. The groundless beginning of the political community involves the seeds of its own destabilization and hence the very possibility of politics.³⁵

      In Derrida’s view the danger resides elsewhere: acts of foundation are prone to cover their own tracks. The retroactive production of authority, by way of an extraordinary performative creating the conditions of its own felicity, draws a mantle over the groundless beginning of the political community, thereby keeping out of sight the foundational deficit of legitimacy. One is tempted to recall Edmund Burke here. “There is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all governments,” he suggested once, “time, in the origin of most governments, has thrown this mysterious veil over them; prudence and discretion make it necessary to throw something of the same drapery over more recent foundations.”³⁶ The oscillation between constative and performative modes of speech, which structures the Declaration of Independence in Derrida’s reading, is a symptom of this hiding operation. Speaking as if “the people” are already present as a sovereign entity, the Declaration helps disguise the fact that independence is produced performatively and that “the people” arrives only after the fact.³⁷

      Rethinking Rousseau’s Paradox: William Connolly and Bonnie Honig

      Among contemporary political theorists, William Connolly is arguably the most persistent and meticulous reader of Rousseau’s paradox of founding.³⁸ He has repeatedly revisited this version of the paradox with a view to unpacking its implications for democratic theory, and offered a prolific interpretation that has been developed and fleshed out in various directions by others. On the one hand, Connolly celebrates Rousseau for identifying and articulating the paradox of founding; on the other hand, he observes that “Rousseau then conceals the legacy of this paradox in the operation of the general will after it has been founded by the creative intervention of a wise legislator.”³⁹ Like Derrida, Connolly too thinks that there is a hiding operation going on. What sort of “legacy” is at stake here and how is it concealed?

      According to Connolly, the paradox of founding is never truly resolved. Despite Rousseau’s artful efforts to imagine the lawgiver as a non-authoritarian authority who would not jeopardize the future autonomy of the people, what lurks behind the figure of the lawgiver is in the end an “element of arbitrariness that cannot be eliminated from political life.”⁴⁰ This element of arbitrariness has both a conceptual and a historical side. Conceptually, the invocation of the lawgiver designates an unavoidable “impurity” inherent to the ideals of general will and popular sovereignty. There is no self-sufficient practice of political autonomy that is not inhabited by its own other, by some sort of heteronomous element that enables the exercise of popular sovereignty while remaining unaccountable in view of its normative aspirations. Hence, Connolly concludes that “the very structure of sovereignty compromises the integrity and coherence idealists of democratic sovereignty demand.”⁴¹ Historically, in real-world political foundings, this “impurity” refers us, among other things, to the less than salutary practices including the repression of certain voices, the formation of hegemonic political identities, and the use of techniques for ensuring allegiance without consensus—all of which Connolly treats under the rubric of founding violence.

      Connolly’s central claim is that, once the political community is established, the legacy of this founding violence has to be concealed for the general will to function as a regulative ideal. Rousseau conceals it through his imagery of the lawgiver. The office of the lawgiver has no place in the constitution; he can move the people without forcing them; he is most likely a foreigner who has no reason to stay in the republic once the task of foundation is accomplished, and so on.⁴² Imagining the lawgiver this way, Rousseau wants to get his readers to infer that the heteronomous intervention of the lawgiver would not compromise the hoped-for autonomy of the people, and that the paradox of founding is to be overcome without leaving behind troubling traces. In actual polities, the legacy of founding violence is concealed by the hegemonic political identity which treats it as having no actual hold on the current operations of the general will, “as if, for instance … the systematic violence against indigenous inhabitants in the founding of the United States carries no continuing effects into the present”—the paradox of founding thereby dissolves into “the politics of forgetting.”⁴³ Insofar as not only what we remember but also and perhaps more significantly what we forget is constitutive of who we are, the symbolic authority of founding moments originates as much from what is left to oblivion as from what is memorable.⁴⁴

      Following on from Connolly’s work, Bonnie Honig also holds that Rousseau’s paradox remains ultimately unresolved. And yet, in her view, “nor is it just concealed, as Connolly argues, by way of unacknowledged, foundational violence in Rousseau.”⁴⁵ Rather, in every effort Rousseau makes to solve the paradox of founding, it moves on to another register and defies resolution. Rousseau introduces the figure of the lawgiver because the people are considered to be not yet enlightened enough. They are not yet capable of forming and exercising the general will on their own. Nevertheless, Honig draws attention to the fact that the lawgiver and the people are dependent on each other from the very beginning: for the lawgiver to accomplish the task of foundation properly, he must be recognized by the people as a “true lawgiver” in the first place. “The lawgiver may offer to found a people, he may even attempt to shape them, but in the end it is up to the people themselves to accept or reject his advances. They may be dependent on his good offices, but he is no less dependent on their good opinion.”⁴⁶ Once this interdependence is acknowledged, however, the paradox moves on to a new register. Instead of asking how a people who is not yet shaped or educated by good laws can themselves make them, one would ask now (as Rousseau himself actually did) how a people who is not yet enlightened by the lawgiver can distinguish between a true lawgiver and an impersonator, a charlatan?⁴⁷

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