ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of law in conditioning the emergence of political agency. Using the work of Jacques Rancière, it argues political agency materializes from the fragmentations, gaps, and lapses in political identity wherein the demos is shown to differ from its circumscription within legally authorized categories. Juxtaposing Rancière’s insight with the work of Jacques Derrida, however, it maintains that political agency, necessarily arising within spatiotemporal dimensions, calcifies into an operable disposition only at its own undoing. As in the case of justice, political agency threatens to unravel through its entry into meaning; that is, through the inevitable repossession of disruptive acts and speech as mere signifiers of political resistance. This chapter draws upon Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the sovereign exception to navigate the contrapuntal but generative discordances between Rancière and Derrida’s accounts of agency. Whereas for Rancière an individual’s mode of political existence shifts from “subject” to “agent” through an experience of self-differentiation, for Derrida the individual can neither pause nor repose in self-differentiation. What remains at stake for both thinkers is the continued dialecticism of political positions, identities, and postures opened by the very heterogeneity that threatens their disassembly. As witnessed in Agamben’s figure of the homo sacer, the conditions of political agency depend upon repeated failure rather than lasting success, upon a dynamic short-circuit that illustrates law’s inability to arrest agency within boundaries of legal intelligibility. In this sense, political agency’s strength is its collapse, so long as that collapse remains an unending praxis out of which subsequent challenges to concretized political identities can issue. The irruption of heterogeneity makes visible the spatial and temporal dimensions in which self-differentiation occurs and recurs, newly repeated but never halting in some finalized, teleological form. It is there, in the ultimate restlessness and un-decidability of political agency, that political agency possibly, or rather (im)possibly occurs.
