Review Essay: Addressing the People

Abstract

As a figure of political thought, the people remain enigmatic. Consider the distinction between constituting and constituted power. For European theorists of democratic constitutionalism, the people create the political order by constituting themselves as a unified body that then wills the order into existence. This implies a paradoxical relation in which the people already exist and are united before the constitution brings them into being as a legal entity. Moreover, if popular sovereignty presupposes that state action is guided by the unified will of the people, how do we square that presupposition with the sociological diversity of people in their daily lives? And what does this difference between people, in all of their complexity, and the people, as a political concept, mean for arguments about the legitimacy of democratic institutions and processes? Who exactly are the mysterious people that democratic institutions or politicians claim to represent and how do they represent an entity that never seems to be fully present in space or time, yet is necessary for the constitution of a democratic political order? These problems are familiar to democratic political theorists. Recent politico-philosophical debates about the relation between sovereignty and biopolitics have raised them again with renewed urgency. Giorgio Agamben (1998), for instance, has addressed the semantic ambiguity (page 177) around the people, noting that in modern European languages the term refers to the complex of citizens as a unitary political body ... and the members of the lower classes (page 176). For Agamben, the terminological confusion is indicative of the central paradox of sovereignty's own claim to totalization. Although the first sense of the people promises a self-legislating citizenry that is unified across time and within specific political jurisdictions, this image is interrupted by the second sense of the people as the fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies (page 177). Given Agamben's insistence that exclusion of our biological existence is the condition of possibility for any and every sovereign order, this suggests that even democratic states founded on popular sovereignty remain haunted by the ontological relation between sovereignty and bare life. Although a number of critical scholars have been justifiably circumspect with regard to Agamben's historico-philosophical (page 10) analysis of sovereignty, (1) highlighting its depoliticizing tendencies and its lack of attention to the diverse ways in which the people are both constituted and abandoned under historically and geographically specific conditions (see, for instance, Coleman and Grove, 2009; Ranciere, 2004a), if his analysis of the paradoxes around the people is correct it does not bode well for even the most democratic political institutions. Both Paulina Ochoa Espejo's The Time of Popular Sovereignty and Jacques Ranciere's two volumes of newly translated essays from the 1970s and 1980s, Staging the People: The Proletariat and His Double and The Intellectual and His People: Staging the People Volume 2, attempt to rethink a democratic politics that remains grounded in the people without being ensnared in the paradoxes of popular sovereignty. Responding to a similar set of theoretical concerns, however, they mark out radically different visions of democratic politics. Whereas Ochoa Espejo draws on philosophical vitalism and process philosophy to articulate a conception of the people as a process that can nonetheless legitimate democratic institutions, Ranciere examines the people as a name for processes of subjectivization by which the excluded stage a properly political dispute over the configuration of political and social order. Although both scholars conceptualize the people in processual terms, for Ochoa Espejo such a conception reinforces the democratic state's ability to rule, whereas for Ranciere it creates a gap in constituted political orders that continually makes equality visible. …