Founding Acts. Serdar Tekin
identities, and the use of techniques for ensuring allegiance without consensus—all of which Connolly treats under the rubric of founding violence.
Connolly’s central claim is that, once the political community is established, the legacy of this founding violence has to be concealed for the general will to function as a regulative ideal. Rousseau conceals it through his imagery of the lawgiver. The office of the lawgiver has no place in the constitution; he can move the people without forcing them; he is most likely a foreigner who has no reason to stay in the republic once the task of foundation is accomplished, and so on.42 Imagining the lawgiver this way, Rousseau wants to get his readers to infer that the heteronomous intervention of the lawgiver would not compromise the hoped-for autonomy of the people, and that the paradox of founding is to be overcome without leaving behind troubling traces. In actual polities, the legacy of founding violence is concealed by the hegemonic political identity which treats it as having no actual hold on the current operations of the general will, “as if, for instance … the systematic violence against indigenous inhabitants in the founding of the United States carries no continuing effects into the present”—the paradox of founding thereby dissolves into “the politics of forgetting.”43 Insofar as not only what we remember but also and perhaps more significantly what we forget is constitutive of who we are, the symbolic authority of founding moments originates as much from what is left to oblivion as from what is memorable.44
Following on from Connolly’s work, Bonnie Honig also holds that Rousseau’s paradox remains ultimately unresolved. And yet, in her view, “nor is it just concealed, as Connolly argues, by way of unacknowledged, foundational violence in Rousseau.”45 Rather, in every effort Rousseau makes to solve the paradox of founding, it moves on to another register and defies resolution. Rousseau introduces the figure of the lawgiver because the people are considered to be not yet enlightened enough. They are not yet capable of forming and exercising the general will on their own. Nevertheless, Honig draws attention to the fact that the lawgiver and the people are dependent on each other from the very beginning: for the lawgiver to accomplish the task of foundation properly, he must be recognized by the people as a “true lawgiver” in the first place. “The lawgiver may offer to found a people, he may even attempt to shape them, but in the end it is up to the people themselves to accept or reject his advances. They may be dependent on his good offices, but he is no less dependent on their good opinion.”46 Once this interdependence is acknowledged, however, the paradox moves on to a new register. Instead of asking how a people who is not yet shaped or educated by good laws can themselves make them, one would ask now (as Rousseau himself actually did) how a people who is not yet enlightened by the lawgiver can distinguish between a true lawgiver and an impersonator, a charlatan?47
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