Why the People To Come Will Not, and Must Not, Be Sovereign: Notes on a Political and Mathematical Puzzle

摘要

This article attempts to find the thought and discourse for a “people” that does not coincide with either a theatrical assembly or a numerical result and being. In order to enable this search, the article conducts a series of historico-philosophical inquiries that allow certain irreducible disjunctions between the relation of the source of sovereignty and the locus of power's exercise to surface. These inquiries pertain to medieval political theology, baroque kingship and its paradoxical passion, the objective inscription of a “constituted” people during the French Revolution and its incessant subjective indiscernment by the revolutionary upsurges themselves. For these disjunctive analyses the article invents and inserts a periodic motif that resonates between them. This is the motif of the “event”, the event of a people to come. The proposition being tested here is not that an event-property can be predicated of a people to come but that the event is the minimal and weak generic potentiality of a maximal and saturated idea and name — the people. The political part of the puzzle is how to constitute this “weakness”. The mathematical part is how to count it. The subjective side to this test of thought is how to demand this weakness as weakness, to demand its existence to come.