Oxímora. Revista Internacional de Ética y Política (Dec 2012)
CINCO TESIS DESDE EL PUEBLO OCULTO
Abstract
The present article enounces five thesis that combined offers a solid theory on popular democracy in a post-colonial world. First, it grips the paradoxical and exceptional place of the people as the foundation of legitimacy of a modernity that affirms itself in the exclusion of the people as constituent power, this will allow us to separate the two crucial concepts of people in modernity and identify that the authentic people of democracy is the “hidden” people, “the bare life” that law, in usurping popular sovereignty, suspends in a permanent state of exception. Onward, we rescue the concept of the people, through the principle of its potency/potentiality in order to achieve a true synthesis between constituent power and the sovereign that has been banned by modern law. The third phase establishes that any political or constitutional philosophy that does not have its starting point in the symbiotic relations between modernity and coloniality is superficial and empty and it’s decidedly on the side of methods of oppression and political suppression. It then goes on to demonstrate that in Latin-America, the concept of “Nation” has worked as an agent of social and political exclusion par excellence, and that far from having worked as a tool of emancipation and resistance it has been the concretion of domination and destruction of difference, henceforth it is in the nation where we should place the transformation of a colonialist project into a project of coloniality. Finally and after approaching democracy from the difference between the violence that creates law and the violence that preserves law, and after understanding sovereignty from constituent power and not from the constituted and having achieved the separation between “the principle of the order” and any “concrete order” we will reach the conclusion that given that democracy is the order of conflict, democracy is then the annulment of the conditions to govern and hence the only and authentic form of politics.
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