ABSTRACT
The aporia of ordinary language that Agamben positions at the heart of ‘the political meaning of the term people’ goes strangely unacknowledged in most theoretical discussions of popular sovereignty, even though these discussions generally construe the people as the very foundation of democratic legitimacy. In the familiar oppositions that govern most contemporary democratic theory – will and reason, legitimacy and legality, democracy and constitutionalism, majoritarianism and individual rights, the liberty of the Ancients and the liberty of the moderns – the people is usually equated with the first half of each pairing, and the theoretical difficulty is taken to be how best to reconcile the opposing logics. In what follows, I argue, through an exploration of speeches and essays by the radical American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, that we can learn important lessons about the peculiarities of democratic claims-making by understanding the people as a form of political subjectification enacted through the simultaneous claiming of the two poles Agamben describes: the people as both the legitimating ‘fount of all political power’ and that which lies beyond its authorizing claims. Unlike Agamben (2000, 35), however, I do not believe this internal division need culminate in a ‘biopolitical plan to produce a people without fracture’. To the contrary, Douglass’ speeches transmit an understanding of the people as a claim enacted by what Jacques Rancière (1998, 1-19) describes as ‘the part that has no part in the name of the whole’. My reading of Douglass is therefore inspired by Rancière’s (2004, 7) insight that ‘the fact that the people are internally divided is not … a scandal to be deplored … [so much as] the primary condition of the exercise of politics’. Douglass enacted this dissensus through his invocation of a rhetorical, a constitutional and a virtual ‘We, the People’.
