Momentos constituyentes: paradojas y poder popular en los Estados Unidos de América posrevolucionarios

Democratic theorists have often avoided the question of who legitimately makes up the authorising "people," yet this question haunts all theories of democracy and continually vivifies democratic practice. Determining who constitutes the people is an inescapable yet democratically unanswerable dilemma. It is not a question the people can personally decide because the very question subverts the premises of its resolution. The paradox of plural authorization reveals the people to be best understood as a political claim, a process of political subjectification taken up and navigated in different democratic contexts. In the United States, contested power claims to speak on the people's behalf derive from a constitutive surplus inherited from the revolutionary era, from the fact that since the Revolution, the people have been at once enacted through representation and in excess of any particular representation. The postrevolutionary authority of the vox populi derives from its continually renewed but never fully realised reference to the sovereign people beyond representation and legitimacy. Beyond the law, the spirit beyond the letter, and the Word beyond the words. This essay examines the historical emergence of this democratic surplus in the revolutionary period and how it enabled a subsequent history of "constituent moments", moments when the underauthorized—imposters, radicals, self-created entities—seize the mantle of authorization, changing the inherited rules of authorization in the process. In these small dramas of authoritarianism, political claims that speak in the people's name are felicitous, even as they explicitly break from the established procedures or rules for representing the popular voice.