Andro Kitus

Legitimacy is a concept that has been largely forgotten by the deconstructive discourse on law and politics. This article seeks, on the one hand, to reassess the role of legitimacy in deconstruction and, on the other hand, to bring deconstructive thinking to bear on the concept of legitimacy. By re-reading Derrida’s “Declarations of Independence” through the lenses of his later texts on sovereignty and (counter)signature, it is argued that, rather than being deconstructible, legitimacy is deconstructing any self-founding of law and power. As such, legitimacy functions not as an evaluative concept of law and order but as a constantly insisting demand that facilitates the principles of responsibility and responsiveness.

The article revisits the theory of hegemony of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and shows how a normative injunction, which according to Laclau is not compatible with the hegemonic logic, is not only possible but a necessary condition for hegemony to function. The article claims that the path to demonstrate this involves rethinking the relationship between the theory of hegemony and Derridean deconstruction. Following criticisms that the theory of hegemony overlooks the aporetic nature of Derridean undecidability that it nevertheless relies upon, the hegemonic logic is submitted to a deconstructive reading, which reveals an internal aporia in it. It is further argued that the unaccounted aporia in the logic of hegemony explains the theory’s inability to satisfactorily account for its essential theoretical underpinning, the radical exclusion. However, the article also demonstrates that the aporia does not destroy hegemonic logic but, instead, supplements it by a normative dimension, by a demand of opening to the other as other.