ABSTRACT

Central concepts for constitutional law and theory, such as sovereignty, legality and belonging, have continued to be thought, taught and professed with very little – if any – attention paid to their historical construction, ideological weight and semantic luggage. The memorial, symbolic and ultimately legal practices through which postwar liberalism, state-communism or post-communist transitions have tried to address this resistant material discursive dimension within the body of the law have been extremely scarce and generally inaccurate. At this stage the peculiar historical context in which the affirmation of the primacy of the legal form occurred as well as the subsequent paradoxes it entails should be emphasised. As such, the apparent liminal character of the exception and of exceptional measures within the constitutional body of rules is brought to the fore as the authentic site of sovereign power – that is, indissociably connected to the law and state.