Maxim van Asseldonk

The recent decades have witnessed a proliferation of theorising about borders. Having moved away from the positivist paradigm that views borders as static ‘lines in the sand’, a myriad of different conceptualisations of borders and their modes of operation and appearance have emerged: bordering, borderscapes, and border zones are just some of the more common ones. This paper intends to contribute to this conceptual debate on border studies by focusing on the critical potential of the concepts of community and immunity to understand (de)bordering processes. Specifically, we argue that the concept of appropriation can be illuminating to analyse and critique practices of bordering. To that end, we draw on the works of Jean-Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito. Both agree that community – human coexistence – is not an object and therefore cannot be appropriated. Esposito takes this further by exposing the logic of immunity, by means of which the order deemed to be ‘Ours’ is meant to be protected from the disorder represented by an Other. Immunisation thus attempts to appropriate an inappropriable identity. We argue that b/ordering is exemplary of this logic, and that therefore the concepts offered by Nancy and Esposito can be highly valuable in critiquing such practices of b/ordering. Ultimately, drawing on both thinkers, we argue that such efforts are self-defeating. B/ordering attempts to enclose a supposed identity to protect ‘us’, but in so doing the ‘us’ becomes owned by this supposed identity rather than vice versa. Immunity, Esposito specifies, eliminates community, and therefore ultimately so does b/ordering.

Modern thinking about democracy is largely governed by the concept of constituent power. Some versions of the concept of constituent power, however, remain haunted by the spectre of totalitarianism. In this article, I outline an alternative view of the identity of the people whose constituent power generates democratic authority. Broadly speaking, constituent power signifies the idea that all political authority, including that of the constitution, must find its source in some idea of ‘the people’, whose authority is never exhausted by constituted power. The deficiency I seek to address is that of asking who the people is to whom any claim of authority refers, while avoiding the pitfalls of totalitarianism. I show the most famous totalitarian view of constituent power – advanced by Carl Schmitt – to be not only politically unsavoury but also ontologically unjustified. To outline my alternative view, I draw on Jacques Derrida’s concept of just decisions to argue that the undecidable inaugurates collective responsibility by demanding a response. This suggests a view of ‘the people’ as a doing rather than a being. I conclude by showing how this avoids totalitarian views of popular sovereignty by demonstrating its congruency with Claude Lefort’s democratic theory as opposed to totalitarianism.

Who or what is the collective entity known to democracy as the demos? Different arguments abound, but radical democrats frequently critique liberal democrats for continuing to reify the demos, thereby stifling its agency. They often conclude that, ontologically, the demos does not exist. But how could an entity that does not exist nonetheless act? It is not always clear what the alternatives would entail. In this paper, I suggest interpreting the demos as a prefigurative category. I argue, in short, that the demos exists only insofar as collective agents act as if they are the demos.

The political philosophy of radical democracy has made innumerable invaluable contributions to theories of democracy. However, while radical democrats tend to focus on the political, a cogent and comprehensive framework of law appropriate to radical democracy has only recently been begun to be developed. Interpreting the vast tradition of radical democracy to be based at least on the fundamental tenets of radical equality, anti-foundationalism, and to a lesser extent conflict, this paper argues that the oft-forgotten work of the American legal philosopher Robert Cover may provide critical resources for a radical democratic theory of law. According to Cover, every agent living under law is embedded, or embeds themselves, within a nomos or normative universe. From this nomos legal texts become imbued with widely different meanings, many of which will be mutually incompatible. Cover’s legal anarchism, moreover, gives way to the argument that no agent or institution has a particularly privileged view of the ‘correct’ law. Accordingly, every legal texts gives rise to a proliferation of normative universes which due to their mutual incompatibility will eventually come into conflict with one another. This paper shows that Cover’s normative commitments are highly congruent with those professed by many radical democrats, and that therefore Cover’s legal philosophy furnishes a fruitful basis on which to further theorise a framework of radical democratic or agonistic law that incorporates struggle while remaining committed to equality and disavowing of any determinate foundations.