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THE SO-CALLEO/SElF-SAYING PEOPLE JEA -Luc NA CY - Tran lated (rom French by Richard Calichman The social contra t, and the sovereignty that it produces Or cr at ,provides the solution to the insolvable problem (it therefore does not provide the solution.•.) of a self-presence that the multitude retains au ide of any presentilbl and sui-presentable self. The people can only ay /fto itself as a so· al/edf elfsaying (SOi..cJisanti people. The ubjed f nunciation enunciates itself as subject of the enunciated (of the declaration, as this will then forth b th cas for alJ the "rights of manN), but its real presence is attendant upon the execution of the content of the enunciated: the people will apl>ear wh n the prin ipl s of the constitution take e((cct, ince it is the constitution thaI can litutes the people. ~ t the constitution only constilut them as subject of its enunciated, leaving them missing as subj t of the enun iation. The instituted people lack the instituting people, unles it be the reverse. In all ways, sovereignty as self-institution or self-declaration exceeds or la ~ itself. The ·sovereign people· are therefore nothing less than the exemplary form of th subje t as excess and/or lack of self. But th knowledge of this lacking exc properly creates the people as subject. Not being themselves, the people make th mselves into law (they make themselv inlO law or remain silent). The (anta mati elf(the self of the one and only God) makes itself the symbolic and a tual law. The "we" knows itself as a population of equals without regard for the collective or individual ego. Thu the conlra t which tabli h sovereignty TRA E 4---\ 25 1 l e an· Lu Nancy as nothing (to use Bataille's word). that is to say, as the re of the people, the res publica as person/nobody (personnel in both senses of this word - this contract represents the assumption of contact without any tran gression of the gap. That is why equals are not on of a father, but orothers in the precise sense that the Gr ek phraler never was a bl ad brother (ade/pho Jbut rather a member of a clan·like and religious brotherhood. One objects to the sovereign people wh n eith r they are in ffective or in the throes of lotalitariani m. In facl, they ar su pended between nothing and everything. But to oppose them, as isdone today by a certain left - the multitude being formed in mobile and hart-lived councils, in soviets that remain outside of power - is to send them at on,ce toward nothing and everything. The contract as an unrel ieved respon ibility for contact con ist in making the people omething. This is what the Third Estate first demanded. But now as then, Ihi phrase mu I not b understood w ith re ignalion or qualification. The people demand to be neither nothing nor everything, but something, that is to say, Ihe rcaI of being.with. the real of "u • which preced~ every 1without making itself any 1 , and which thusopens the pace of the public thing that no identity supports, neither national nor sovereign, being the only realt nsion of the people toward itself insofar as this tension consti tutes its being, undiscoverable a presence or entity. The oxymoronsof the cone pt(s) of the people repre nt the concretene of their reality (contact and contract are the form of thi con retene ). Th people cannot be fou nded or proved; they exist, the factuality of COl1tact au 1$ to this while the ideality of the contract con titu\~ its truth, whid1 i given precisely in the non-resolution of contact in interiority, naturality or figurality, as well as the non-resolution of the contract in any founding origin. This can be shown by the name or noun "people: For if "people" here implies an undiscoverable concept, this is because this common noun shOUld. according to the expectation modeled upon theocracy, be resolved in a proper noun. When Rousseau says, " If there were a people of God, they would be governed democratically. A government so perfect does not suit men,'" he says two things at once: on the one hand, government a self-regulation (whi h for that matter is no longer "gov rnm nl,· II he say) i not po ible for men, but on the...

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