ABSTRACT
According to the French philosopher Claude Lefort, democracy circles around ‘le lieu vide du pouvoir’ (Lefort 1986, 27). This metaphor is supposed to convey that a democratic regime somehow disarms political power by making vain the struggle for definitive victory. Democracy institutionalizes the division of political power as a provisional arrangement of society, to which no one is entitled by virtue of ontological credentials. I will investigate this thesis in some detail, bearing out its complexity. Thus I attempt to deepen our understanding of an agonistic account of law, which otherwise would remain perhaps just another variation on the theme of social contract theory.
