ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the nexus of subjectivity and the political via Hannah Arendt's work on law and the legal constitution of a political order. For Arendt, the constitution is supposed to originate in participatory democratic practices, as well as to institute and integrate these practices into political decision-making. Legal institutions are, furthermore, efficacious insofar as they structure these practices. Rather than try to resolve the tension between power and violence, the chapter investigates how law can be violent and as such impede its own goal of organizing and stabilizing a political space. To do so, it turns to the question regarding the conception of artificiality that is operative in Arendt's discussion of nomos and lex. The chapter shows that nomos and lex entail distributions of violence that stratify societies into different groups, before suggesting that Arendt's attempt to identify an 'origin' for a political community that consists in pure action ignores the social differentiation under which action takes place.
