ABSTRACT
Legitimation of political belief always proceeds as a rationalisation of the irrational and a translation of the complicated and ruptured world of social conventions and prejudices into the clinically clean and ordered world of rational argument. The process of rationalisation is a legitimation strategy, the goal of which is the codification of legitimate political structures. The legitimation of law occurs in a horizontal communication between the legal system and its environment, as is made manifest in the strategy of political dissent. The legitimation force of authenticity is extraordinary, yet legitimation itself is a process of the transformation of authenticity into a highly structured political reality. The politics and strategy of dissent is a vitally important case study of how the problem of the legitimacy of law and political domination is transformed into the performative framework and how the plurality and dynamics of legitimation fictions must go beyond the framework of legality.
