Full Chapter Imagined Sovereignties The Power of The People and Other Myths of The Modern Age Kevin Olson PDF

Imagined Sovereignties The Power of
the People and Other Myths of the

Modern Age Kevin Olson
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/imagined-sovereignties-the-power-of-the-people-and-
other-myths-of-the-modern-age-kevin-olson/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
The Ring of Truth: And Other Myths of Sex and Jewelry

1st Edition Wendy Doniger
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-ring-of-truth-and-other-
myths-of-sex-and-jewelry-1st-edition-wendy-doniger/
Surviving the Machine Age: Intelligent Technology and

the Transformation of Human Work 1st Edition Kevin
Lagrandeur
https://textbookfull.com/product/surviving-the-machine-age-
intelligent-technology-and-the-transformation-of-human-work-1st-
edition-kevin-lagrandeur/
The spread of modern industry to the periphery since

1871 First Edition Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-spread-of-modern-industry-
to-the-periphery-since-1871-first-edition-kevin-hjortshoj-
orourke/
People Forests and Change Lessons from the Pacific

Northwest 1st Edition Deanne H. Olson
https://textbookfull.com/product/people-forests-and-change-
lessons-from-the-pacific-northwest-1st-edition-deanne-h-olson/
Ecology and power in the age of empire : Europe and the
transformation of the tropical world First Edition Ross
https://textbookfull.com/product/ecology-and-power-in-the-age-of-
empire-europe-and-the-transformation-of-the-tropical-world-first-
edition-ross/
Myths of Branding: A Brand is Just a Logo, and Other

Popular Misconceptions (Business Myths) 1st Edition
Simon Bailey
https://textbookfull.com/product/myths-of-branding-a-brand-is-
just-a-logo-and-other-popular-misconceptions-business-myths-1st-
edition-simon-bailey/
Only The Dead: The Persistence Of War In The Modern Age

Bear F. Braumoeller
https://textbookfull.com/product/only-the-dead-the-persistence-
of-war-in-the-modern-age-bear-f-braumoeller/
The Other Abyssinians The Northern Oromo and the

Creation of Modern Ethiopia 1855 1913 Brian J. Yates
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-other-abyssinians-the-
northern-oromo-and-the-creation-of-modern-
ethiopia-1855-1913-brian-j-yates/
The Pope and the professor : Pius IX, Ignaz von

Döllinger, and the quandary of the modern age Howard
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-pope-and-the-professor-pius-
ix-ignaz-von-dollinger-and-the-quandary-of-the-modern-age-howard/
Imagined Sovereignties
The Power of the People and Other Myths
of the Modern Age
KEVIN OLSON
University of California, Irvine
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York NY 10013
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107113237
© Kevin Olson 2016
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2016
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Olson, Kevin, author.
Title: Imagined sovereignties : the power of the people and other myths
of the modern age / Kevin Olson, University of California, Irvine.
Description: New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015051222 | ISBN 9781107113237 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Political participation – Social aspects. | Identity politics. |
Group identity – Political aspects. | Sovereignty.
Classification: LCC JF799.O54 2016 | DDC 323/.042–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015051222
ISBN 978-1-107-11323-7 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
Acknowledgments page ix
1. Imagining Politics 1
2. “Sovereignty Is an Artificial Soul”: Ernesto Laclau
and Benedict Anderson in Dialogue 18
3. How Do We Write a History of Normative Practices?:
Castoriadis, Taylor, Foucault 39
4. The Problem of the People in Enlightenment France:
A Short Genealogy of Political Collectivity 54
5. Chimeras of Political Identity: Intermediate Reflections
on the Pathways of Political Imagination 93
6. Sovereign Imaginaries of the Revolutionary Caribbean 110
7. Conscripted by Modernity?: Imagining Sovereignty
in the Wake of Colonialism 144
8. Imagining the Power of the People: Critical Reflections
on the Sovereignties of Our Time 167
Notes 183
Bibliography 203
Index 215
vii
Acknowledgments
I’m fortunate to have many talented and wonderful colleagues. My daily

conversations with Daniel Brunstetter, Kamal Sadiq, and Keith Topper have
contributed a great deal to my thinking about the themes in this book. I greatly
appreciate Jason Frank’s insightful comments on the manuscript, as well as
many other conversations along the way. I’d also like to thank the anonymous
reviewers for their mix of encouragement, rigor, and constructive criticism.
For valuable comments on various parts of the manuscript, conversation,
and advice, I’m very grateful to Amy Allen, Étienne Balibar, James Bohman,
Maeve Cooke, Joshua Dienstag, David Easton, Eva Erman, Sarah Farmer,
Raúl Fernández, Catherine Fisk, Nancy Fraser, Alexander Gelley, David Theo
Goldberg, Michael Hanchard, David Ingram, Arlene Keizer, Claire Kim,
Nikolas Kompridis, Colin Koopman, Cristina Lafont, Horacio Legras, Julia
Reinhard Lupton, James Martel, Lyle Massey, Bill Maurer, Kirstie McClure,
Sofia Näsström, Andrew Norris, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Carole Pateman,
Mark Poster, William Scheuerman, Ralph Shain, Timothy Tackett, Antonio
Vazquez-Arroyo, Brian Walker, and Christopher Zurn. Robert Dreesen at the
Cambridge University Press has been a joy to work with, and I’m very grate-
ful to him for sharing my enthusiasm for this work.
The Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine, is a won-
derful intellectual home and source of inspiration to think otherwise. Special
thanks to my colleagues in the Institute for their generous measures of stimula-
tion and provocation.
A small friend once asked what I do for a living. Grasping for an explana-
tion she might understand, I said “I write books.” She thought about this for a
second, then asked, “Picture books or chapter books?” This is a chapter book,
but it does have a couple of pictures. For permission to reproduce them, I’m
grateful to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Google Labs. Those insti-
tutions as well as the Archives Nationales de France and the Newberry Library
ix
x Acknowledgments
have my gratitude for access to their collections. Ghislaine and Olivier Taxy
deserve special thanks for their warm hospitality and friendship during my
time in Paris. Funding to pursue this project was provided by a Faculty Career
Development Award from the University of California, as well as grants from
the Critical Theory Institute, the Center in Law, Society, and Culture, and the
Council on Research, Computing, and Libraries at the University of California,
Irvine.
Above all, my warmest thanks to my extended family and friends for their
support and welcome distractions, especially my parents Richard and Florence
and my sisters Shannon and Mikaela. And finally, Ulrike is always my first
audience and most thoughtful interlocutor.
1
Imagining Politics
They turn the sovereign into a fantastic being made of interconnected pieces. It
is as if they built a man out of several bodies, one of which had eyes, another
had arms, another feet, and nothing more. . . . After having taken apart the social
body by means of a sleight-of-hand worthy of a carnival, they put the pieces back
together who knows how.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau1
This has been an era of Velvet Revolutions, Tea Parties, and Arab Springs.
Ever since the depolarization of the Cold War blocs in 1989, a series of widely
celebrated political events has played out across the globe, expanding the
scope of democracy, self-determination, and freedom. It has occurred most
recently in North Africa and the Middle East, where popular insurgencies
have won hard-fought victories against hard-line governments and entrenched
dictators. Although quite different from one another in culture, tactics, aims,
and circumstance, these upheavals share a family resemblance. They are all
seen as democratic movements based in some kind of popular unity and col-
lective action.
Meanwhile, restless energies have been at work in the United States as well.
The Tea Party movement has cut a large swath through American politics in
the early part of the century, seeking to liberate itself from the tyranny of a
“socialist” presidential administration. The massive capital backing this liber-
tarian insurgency is somewhat at odds with its claims to be a grassroots move-
ment. Perhaps to relieve these tensions, the movement operates in the name of
the patriotic values of the American founding. With similarly popular claims,
the Occupy Wall Street movement has mobilized against neoliberal corporate
finance and elite privilege. Framing itself as “the 99 percent,” this movement
wears the mantle of popular universalism in opposition to the “1 percent”
whose economic and political power require the power of the people as a coun-
tervailing opposition.
1
2 Imagined Sovereignties
Europe has its own concerns about the people and their powers. As the
financial crisis of the early millennium spread across the Atlantic, European
governments initiated unwise austerity programs that sparked widespread pro-
test. This mobilization has occurred at times under the banner of “the people of
Europe,” and at other times under the banners of component national peoples,
particularly those of Greece and Spain. It provokes broader questions about
the ambiguous sovereignty of the European Union: how can we conceive the
fragmented and multilayered structure of European politics – as well as the pro-
tests against it – as manifestations of popular power? Can there be a “people
of Europe” subtending the European Union, and if so, how does it relate to
various European peoples and their distinctive cultures? If one mobilizes in the
name of “the people” in Europe, which people is that, exactly?
While the power of the people often evokes images of mass marches, street
protests, Molotov cocktails against Soviet tanks, or the Rebel Alliance against
Imperial storm troopers, the idea has migrated into many other areas of con-
temporary society. In recent decades, it has become connected to ideas of con-
sumer choice in the marketplace through green consumer and ethical consumer
movements. This amounts to an extension of progressive politics into new
domains: boycotts, a politicization of consumption, attempts to reinject values
and politics into the economic sphere, and a denial of the boundary between
politics and the economy, all oriented toward bringing the economic sphere
under greater popular control.
At the same time, the increasing sophistication of the Internet has given the
power of the people new life as a postindustrial epistemic project. The prolif-
eration of wikis, blogs, and other forms of do-it-yourself new media amounts
to a de-expertization of knowledge and commentary. In this new world, mil-
lions of ordinary voices replace the centralized authority of a few officially
sanctioned ones. The novel practices that have sprung up around these new
technologies promise a grassroots revolution in the production and distribu-
tion of knowledge.
In all of these upheavals, we see the central importance of popular poli-
tics in the contemporary political scene. The power of the people is one of
the most cherished ideas of the modern political imagination. Over the course
of several centuries, it has provided the basis for countless political move-
ments and governmental formations: antimonarchical revolutions, anticolo-
nial rebellions, anti-imperial separations, postnationalist movements for ethnic
self-determination, and grassroots insurgencies and social movements of all
kinds. It continues to provide one of our favored notions of democratic sover-
eignty and popular politics. It underpins the normative force of democracy and
democratization, providing them with a kind of sanctity and taken-for-granted
rectitude in our political imagination. In this sense, popular politics enjoys a
presumption of goodness, and democratization is increasingly seen as a cure-all
to thorny geopolitical, religious, and ethnic problems.
Imagining Politics 3
The importance of popular politics has not been without ambivalence,

however. The democratization of the Soviet Empire has gone hand in hand
with the universalization of capitalism and the dismantling of the social
service apparatus of the old socialist states. Although the value of political
freedom seems unambiguous, citizens have borne substantial costs while the
new states figure out how to regulate freshly unleashed capitalist energies.
In several cases, the result has been a popular embrace of totalitarian and
corrupt governments.
Similarly, the democratic revolutions of the Arab Spring have been received
with some confusion in the developed West. Although popular politics has a
privileged status, it quickly acquires a bad taste for many observers when fla-
vored with religious fundamentalism. This hearkens back to an earlier genera-
tion of popular revolutions – in Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua, for example – that
were greeted with enthusiasm until they took a turn toward socialism. In all of
these cases, the power of the people has a strong sanctity, but at times it runs
afoul of other commitments due to dissonance among deeply held beliefs.
The power of the people displays similar tensions in domestic politics.
Because such ideas are built deeply into our common sense, they can also be
employed for cynical and instrumental purposes. Thus we see them being used
even where that use seems tortuous and strained. This happens, for example,
when popular politics is instrumentally appropriated in forms of “populism.”
As an electoral strategy, populism presumes or recognizes the power of the
people. It works by identifying a candidate or regime with popular interests
and tastes, borrowing the normativity of the people through association. This
borrowing can be as rich as claiming that a candidate is “of the people,” or
as thin as playing off the numerical superiority of the voting individuals who
would so identify themselves. In either case, the deep cultural currency and
indeterminate character of popular power allow it to be instrumentalized in
this way. This phenomenon provides a vivid demonstration that it is much eas-
ier to work with the cultural grain than against it, employing taken-for-granted
ideas to accomplish one’s ends. The power of the people can be pressed into
service as a form of justification, even when this produces considerable distor-
tion of the underlying ideas.
As different as these instances are, they share a common concern with the
power of the people as a standard of legitimate politics. The power of the
people tends to operate as a primary premise from which other conclusions
are drawn. It anchors other values by providing an initial point from which to
proceed. Yet, the events I have surveyed also give us some inkling of the ways
in which this ideal is troubled by tensions and problematics. It is quite unclear
why the power of the people deserves such unquestioning devotion and what
we might say by way of criticizing it. As a result, it tends to be immune from
scrutiny – or even worse, not seen as the kind of ideal one might think to ques-
tion. This removes some of the most important issues from the table: a whole
constellation of problems about what the power of the people is, how it can be
collectively exercised, and why it should be considered such a compelling ideal.
These lacunae make it all the more pressing to take a close look at the
power of the people. We need to achieve more clarity about its nuances, how
it is invoked, and when it is being employed cynically to promote other ends.
Popular politics is seen as simultaneously compelling and unproblematic, in
spite of its considerable tensions and problems. It is uncritically assumed,
indiscriminately used, diluted, and cynically twisted to a multitude of other
purposes. Seemingly any aspect of democratic society can be alleged as a mani-
festation of popular power, even those that are least democratic. The very ubiq-
uity of this idea drains it of meaning, dulls its critical edge, and diminishes its
rhetorical and normative force. It is worth asking exactly why we see the peo-
ple as having power, and whether it makes sense to export this ideal – by force
or otherwise – to the rest of the “nondemocratic” world. As we have recently
seen in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, one cannot simply adopt Western
European models without careful thought. To the extent that European liberal
democracy is a historically specific experiment, we need to ask probing ques-
tions about its conceptual heritage, its internal architecture, what is generaliz-
able and what is specific and limited.
In this book I will interrogate “the power of the people” as a dominant
concept for understanding popular politics. The critical challenge is to bring
this idea back into vivid attention while stripping away the calcified clichés and
associations that render it banal. We must recognize that such ideas structure
the political, award agency and authorization, determine the boundaries of the
possible, and valorize certain kinds of mobilizations. Thus it is important to
examine their nuances and tease out their different forms and variations.
This will be a story of magic, enchantment, and transformation. It tells of
the magic of having one’s beliefs become reality; the enchantment of conjur-
ing fictitious beings into active life; and the transformation of individuals into
collectivities and collectivities into sovereign entities. I bring this enchanted
world to light not to make it melt away in the harsh glare of critical scru-
tiny, however, but to better understand the ways in which it enchants us. By
rendering the familiar foreign, we gain critical perspective on something that
surrounds us every day. Because of its stature as a cornerstone of the Western
self-understanding, the power of the people has the potential to obscure as
much as it reveals. Indeed, there is a stark contrast between the overwhelm-
ing prevalence of this image and the degree to which we understand what it
actually means.
As a taken-for-granted account of the political, the power of the people
significantly forecloses detailed understandings of what is being proposed. Its
uncritical use can obscure other kinds of power and a variety of political ide-
als that may or may not fit under the heading of “democracy.” Indeed, one of
“the people’s” primary “powers” is justification: it tends to end conversations
rather than stimulate them. A properly critical view would disrupt such cynical
and strategic justifications, revealing hidden strategies of power by reopening
dialogue about what popular politics is and why. This line of criticism should
start with our favored concepts and most obviously intuitive metaphors. Only
by subjecting these received ideas to scrutiny, can we think in new and different
ways about popular politics and the cluster of concepts connected to it.
This project requires a better critical understanding of a whole host of
concepts in which normative force is attributed to collective identities. This
includes peoples, nations, crowds, masses, mobs, social movements, publics,
and dispersed networks of communication and opinion. It encompasses the
various powers, sovereignty, rectitude, or sanctified agency they are perceived
to have. It asks how we understand the normative force of social movements,
how such collectivities acquire normative force, and what kind of normative
force they acquire.
To some extent, this project requires a return to past languages and deploy-
ments. It is a recuperative enterprise, seeking to unearth ways of thinking that
we have forgotten and clear away paths not taken. At the same time, it is a
project of liberation. I will try to open up a space of indetermination in our
thinking about popular politics. This will be by means of revealing tensions
and problematics that have been there from the beginning. All of this has the
virtue of taking something that seems simple and obvious and revealing it to be
complex, unstable, and filled with tensions, problematics, and complications.
This effort of problematization will take the form of a simultaneously critical
and historical investigation. It brings important contemporary work on collec-
tive identity and political imaginaries into dialogue with the archives of popu-
lar politics. My studies here will probe a span of eighteenth-century-French
history, a period of Haitian history immediately before the Revolution, and
Haitian constitutional history in the nineteenth century. They are aimed at our
collective imagination: the way popular politics forms into political imaginar-
ies that set the terms of our political relations and constitute institutions and
practices. They reveal the processes through which political norms are created,
highlighting the unique, incomplete, and in-process character of political nor-
mativity. All of this emphasizes the pliability and plasticity of our notions of
popular power. By drawing out these details, I hope to disaggregate overly styl-
ized ideas about popular politics. My goal is to focus attention where the real
action is – our collective imaginaries and their sources – and to open up new
possibilities for imagining popular politics.
Folk Paradigms of Politics

Why do we believe in ideas like “the power of the people,” and what exactly
is it that we believe in? These ideas have become such a commonplace that we
forget they are creatures of our own invention. Even in an era when natural
rights and self-evident truths (“We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .”)
have been thoroughly discredited, the image of popular sovereignty retains a
tight hold on our collective imagination.
The power of the people functions as a folk paradigm of political belief. It
is a set of shared ideas about how politics ought to be conducted and on what
it ought to be based.2 Like other forms of socially current, culturally embed-
ded belief, it holds together in its own special way and circulates widely in
a relatively unquestioned matter. At times, such folk beliefs may go entirely
unrecognized because they are so thoroughly taken for granted. Yet they bind
our conduct, precisely because we find them so natural and true. In this sense,
such beliefs have an important function. They structure our relations with one
another, organize cooperative endeavors, and provide us with a shared body of
knowledge about the social world. These beliefs have both factual and norma-
tive content: they postulate a meaningful collectivity that we refer to as “the
people,” endowing it with particular forms of power.
To say that the power of the people is a shared and taken-for-granted idea
is not the same as saying that it is universally accepted or universally agreed
upon. Acceptance is a voluntaristic concept. It describes ideas that a given per-
son is willing to embrace after coming to understand them in a careful way.
My concern with ideas like the power of the people is rather the opposite: it
is not given careful attention or thematized for judgment. Instead, it is part of
the wallpaper of our shared world, something that we see without seeing. It is
so deeply embedded in our cultural common sense that it escapes notice. Even
when we do notice it, it is a commonplace that is immunized from careful scru-
tiny. It is not subject to acceptance or rational consideration because, for the
most part, it bypasses the channels of such consideration.
Neither is the power of the people universally agreed upon. There are people
who are aware of this idea and disagree with it. They fight an uphill battle,
however, in making their agreement known and arguing for it. They face the
challenge of bringing something to attention that, for most people, is invisible.
In contemporary democratic cultures we see the people as having power, and
that is the end of the story. Why would anyone need to discuss this further?
Even if they can successfully thematize these issues, such critics face a second
challenge: arguing against something that seems to be true. The naturalization
of the power of the people runs so deep that the burden of proof is much higher
to those who would oppose it, to the extent that their arguments even make
sense. If Sir Robert Filmer tried to persuade a contemporary audience that
kings have a natural sovereignty based on their shared descent from Adam,
while the supposed liberty of the people is unnatural, he would face baffled
incomprehension. There are people today, of course, who have ideas of natural
hierarchy and deny that the people possess any special authority. Their argu-
ments struggle for acceptance against the overwhelming, silent consensus of a
more pervasive set of commitments, however, that privilege notions of egali-
tarianism and popular power.
The power of the people is not alone in this character. It is one of a small
group of concepts that are deeply submerged in our cultural common sense and
have a foundational character in discourse and practice. Ideas like the freedom
of the market, individual autonomy, equality, and liberty are high on the list.
Like the power of the people, there is neither consensus about the particulars
of these ideas nor universal acceptance of them. What sets them apart is their
naturalization in our collective imaginaries. They circulate freely and often in
conflict with one another. They can be invoked at will, twisted and turned in
various ways, and put to many uses, often quite cynically. They are mobile cul-
tural fragments that travel independently of one another and are assembled in
a variety of ways. These elements form larger imaginary constellations, but in
an unfixed and sometimes contradictory way. They can coincide, cohere, and/
or clash with one another. One faces an uphill and counterintuitive battle to
argue against them, however. They are culturally entrenched in a rather nonra-
tional, unarticulated manner.
Because of their deeply situated, heavily naturalized character, such ideas
have a disproportionate influence on our politics. As a result, they merit close
attention. When certain items of belief become fixed points around which we
arrange the rest of our world, they take on a dogmatic character and occlude
critical insight. Our thinking about popular politics shows such tendencies in
at least four ways. These are not universal or always-present characteristics.
Rather, they are polymorphous and transposable elements, Leitmotive that
form recognizable tendencies in our thinking. We can refer to them as four
dogmas of popular politics.
1. Folk foundationalism. The idea of an independent, self-legitimating people,
nation, or community has an enormous hold on our thinking. Collectivities
like the people are often perceived to act with natural rectitude. When the
people take to the streets, when they declare their will in an election or voice a
consensual opinion, we hold them to be inherently correct. We see politics as
most rightfully conducted by groups like the people, and their actions in this
domain carry a moral weight not borne by individuals or institutions.
There is a strong naturalism in this kind of thinking. The power of the
people seems so natural that it often passes our attention unnoticed. It becomes
part of the largely unthematized, unreflexive, habitual thought and action that
routinize our everyday activities. The natural rectitude of the people is not an
explicitly held view. Rather, it is a diffuse orientation that confers a presump-
tion of correctness. This is largely an unreflective attitude, an unquestioned,
basic assumption, a form of taken-for-granted legitimacy. It has a character
of undeniability, so that one can go no deeper than this determination. It is a
freestanding, unchallengeable idea.
Something like this attitude undergirds democracy as a particular mani-
festation of the power of the people. It shows up, for instance, in many of
the areas I have just mentioned: revolutions against monarchies, rebellions
against colonial regimes, struggles against empires, and all kinds of other social
movements and political insurgencies. More prosaically, the judgment of a jury

or the weight of public opinion, when they are viewed as expressions of “the
will of the people” or “the voice of the people,” has a presumption of rectitude.
The same holds for international adventures that seek to impose democracy
or inculcate democratic values in a culture that does not possess them. The
reasons for such a move are not carefully articulated, because their value is
thought to be obvious and axiomatic.
Something similar holds in the academic domain. Democratic theory, for
instance, assumes the rectitude of democracy as an operative premise. Since
at least Robert Bellarmine and Francisco Suárez, various strands of Western
political culture have held that something underlies and legitimates democratic
politics. At different points in history this function was fulfilled by divine right,
natural law, or a contract built on natural freedom and rationality. It was held
to be independent of the state, in the sense that popular power institutes and
legitimizes government and continues to exist after government has been dis-
solved. Ideas of divine right and natural law have passed out of our cultural
frame of reference, yet residues of this way of thinking persist. We continue to
hold democracy as a natural solution to political problems and a natural evo-
lutionary trend in world politics. Even the more radical strands of democratic
theory often assume the rectitude of popular mobilizations and insurgencies,
focusing their attention on opening up new forms of the political and defend-
ing it against the ossifying tendencies of philosophical rationalism. This work,
like its more mainstream counterpart, tends to draw unreflectively on the deep
bases of popular politics in our culture. To the extent that this happens, it
amounts to an uncritical romanticization of popular politics rather than a criti-
cal interrogation of its potential.
Not only is the power of the people seen as having a freestanding natural
rectitude of its own, but that rectitude can also be used to justify other acts,
schemes, procedures, institutions, and practices. In these cases, it serves as a
normative foundation. This kind of foundationalism is often not explicit or
carefully worked out. On the contrary, the power of the people is used without
acknowledging that fact, calling it into question, or wondering whether such a
form of informal, folk justification is warranted. Thus, in many ways the folk
paradigm is crypto-foundational. It serves as an implicit, disguised, unrecog-
nized foundation. This can occur in a quite informal manner: through linkages
and associations that are implied, operate in symbolic ways, or form part of
our common sense about politics. In this manner, the natural rectitude of the
people is extended beyond the people itself. It is foundationalism of a sophis-
ticated and subtle sort, in which normative contents are subtly extended and
connected. Here the “foundation” does not function as a pediment that must
be solid before construction can proceed. It is more a kind of anchor, umbrella,
or post hoc rationalization for practices already under way. In this mode it
justifies all manner of things: popular uprisings, democratic reforms, principles
of openness and transparency in public policy, and so on.
Academics have not been immune to this tendency. Even while foundational
projects of all kinds have been discredited in recent decades, an undercurrent
of folk foundationalism persists in our political thinking. There have been an
increasing number of proposals to base human rights and social justice on
democracy. Following this path, a politics of human rights or a politics of
justice would draw on the natural rectitude of democracy, resolving norma-
tive problems that philosophers have not succeeded in resolving through other
means.3 That is not to say that such projects are misguided, only that they usu-
ally assume the normative rectitude of popular sovereignty as a starting point
on which other arguments can be based.
Like any form of dogmatism, the damages of folk foundationalism can be
reckoned in terms of its tendency to narrow and ossify our thinking. It occludes
a differentiated understanding of the various forms of popular politics and their
different concentrations and sources of normativity. When the power of the
people is taken as unproblematically foundational, we ignore the rich cultural
and ideational content of our ideas about popular politics, the way it has been
figured in so many diverse and colorful ways in the storytelling, myth, legend,
self-identity, memory, and imagination of Western societies. We blind ourselves
to the complexities of epistemology, culture, problematic authorization, and
self-constitution that are so characteristic of politics. To ignore these dimen-
sions is to leave ideas of politics profoundly depoliticized and misunderstood.
And yet, folk foundationalism has also become the basis for our most closely
held political beliefs. An operational assumption of this book, which I hope to
redeem as the discussion proceeds, is that folk foundationalism is both a critical
lacuna and the functioning normative basis of popular sovereignty. I will argue
that our most fundamental political ideals are built on this kind of thinking.
Therefore, constitutive tensions are structured into the very bases of democracy:
blindnesses about the political origins of these ideals, misunderstandings about
the assumptions made in granting normative status to popular politics, and
romanticization of popular politics that discourages close scrutiny.
2. Collective political identity. Popular politics is a politics of groups. These are
conceptualized in a variety of ways. They typically have a broad and nebulous
form, sometimes conceived universally (all of the people) and sometimes more
narrowly (the people of a particular domain, the common people, the suffering
people).
Against this background, it is clear that my focus on the power of the people
is shorthand for a whole family of related ideas. Other large, (quasi-) universal
collectivities are also a vital part of this discussion. The nation is the most cel-
ebrated of them. More specific movements and manifestations are also impor-
tant: crowds, mobs, protests, mobilizations. These smaller, localized groups
have a more ambiguous normative status. Crowds, masses, and mobs tend to
be viewed with suspicion if not alarm. However, they can be thought correct
if they represent a more oceanic collectivity. A crowd in itself has no particu-
lar normative sanctity in our imagination. When it represents “the people,”
however, it exemplifies something bigger and more important. Similarly, pro-

tests, marches, and sit-ins are often seen as manifestations of the people, and in
those circumstances they bear a presumption of natural rectitude.
This raises important questions of identifying which collectivities matter
for politics. The size, composition, and other characteristics of a collectivity
are important determinants of whether it is recognized as rightfully exercising
some kind of popular power. The most universal and diffusely bounded col-
lectivities (peoples, nations) tend to be the ones whose rectitude is most easily
taken for granted. When the power of the people is manifested in the actions
of a smaller, more localized group, its significance becomes more problematic.
Scale clearly matters when it comes to the association between rectitude and
collective identity.
In this sense, universalism is an important trait of some collectivities and
a crucial part of their normative logic. It is, most generally, an ascription of
diffuse boundlessness to which we attribute a special status. Yet this is by no
means a simple matter. As Étienne Balibar has argued, political universalism is
complex and problematic.4 The very idea is subject to many different formu-
lations and connotations. As a result, the relation between universalism and
natural rectitude is by no means fixed or stable.
Political collectivities can be diffuse and imprecisely bounded in other ways
as well. Collectivities like publics are despatialized and do not have easily
established membership or location. Yet we attribute normative force to them
as well, in the form of “public opinion” or “the voice of the people.”
3. Revolutionism. Consider the following series of numbers: 1649, 1688, 1776,
1789, 1848, 1871, 1917, 1956, 1968, 1989. We are predisposed to look for a
mathematical relationship, yet something else stands out. We parse these num-
bers as a set of dates representing iconic punctuations in the fabric of “normal”
politics. The Eurocentrism of this list is problematic. Yet it also illustrates my
broader point, that we select particular, often iconic moments of political
exceptionality to represent the political in its purest form. These images of rev-
olution associate very specific forms of collective identity with ideas of natural
rectitude. They are the unstable, ineffable ones found in revolutionary mobili-
zations and insurgencies, typically crowds and mobs mobilized in protest. Here
we have an image of the people in the streets, demanding justice or opposing
authority. They act through a series of disruptions and forceful reorderings. In
this vision, the people come together to oppose institutionalized powers and
constitute new ones. Such images of dramatic conflict and outdoor assembly
are our most vivid representations of the power of the people. They are often
accorded special sanctity as “foundings” or “new beginnings.”
This aspect of the folk paradigm shows our collective attention to be par-
ticularly captivated by certain kinds of political phenomena, events, values,
and collectivities. It raises the question whether this is a result of the inherent
importance of those phenomena, or their vivid character. If the answer is the
latter, it signals a distortion in our thinking about politics. Political insurgency
takes many forms, the power of the people can manifest itself indoors as well
as in the streets, and not every assertion of popular power topples the govern-
ment and institutes a new order. Focusing too much on revolutionary change
can obscure the longer lines of continuity across eras, societies, and cultures.
From this perspective, we can see how the collective imaginary is often dis-
tracted by shiny objects while neglecting the everyday. Thinking about popular
politics as revolution causes us to lose sight of the ways in which it is deployed
in many less visible and dramatic ways in everyday life.
For all of these reasons, it is important not to privilege revolution in
our understanding of popular politics. In this sense I fully agree with Jason
Frank’s comment that we must “deflate the dramatically exceptional signifi-
cance of the founding moment while simultaneously infusing the democratic
everyday with the possibility of the extraordinary.”5 I would only add that
it is not just the exceptional significance of the founding moment that we
must deflate, but also the heroic character of armed conflict and the drama of
political upheaval. More useful is to examine moments of novelty and change
counterweighted by lines of continuity in all political processes, seeking, as
Frank put it so well, to discern what moments of the extraordinary infuse
daily politics.
I will argue this point while discussing two important revolutions in the
chapters to come. I will examine them within the broader context of their time,
showing that they are characteristic of longer-term material, political, and con-
ceptual changes. I will also argue, though, that such revolutions play an impor-
tant hermeneutic and interpretive role. They constitute ruptures in the fabric
of the everyday, problematizing mundane practices and forcing certain forms
of politics to the center of our attention. During such periods, normally unseen
aspects of the political imagination are thematized for discussion. Political
ideas and practices are open to interpretive scrutiny in ways that give us new
access to them. New ideas are articulated for public consideration, providing
glimpses into developing forms of thought. For all of these reasons, such peri-
ods of upheaval have a profound epistemic value, bringing into critical focus
phenomena so familiar that they normally pass unnoticed.
4. Westphalianism. A fourth tendency is somewhat at odds with the third.
Whereas revolutionism is oriented toward spontaneous, diffuse, and tempo-
rary manifestations of popular power, we also have an opposing tendency to
map popular power onto fixed territories, jurisdictions, and populations. With
a nod to the current discussions about the origins of the sovereign nation-state,
I will call this “Westphalianism.”6 It is the phenomenon of thinking about
popular politics as spatial, bounded, and localized in a particular territory.
The analogy is with the treaties ending the Thirty Years’ War, which allegedly
replaced the permeable and overlapping boundaries of medieval regimes with
defined territories, delineated borders, and mutual recognition of sovereignty.
Gone were the poorly defined, fluid political alignments of the Middle Ages;
in their place arose the modern, sovereign nation-state. The Westphalian ideal,
in Richard Falk’s compact phrase, is “a state-centric, sovereignty-oriented, ter-

ritorially bounded global order.”7
I am less interested in the historical particulars of this development than
the way it models certain ways of thinking about popular politics. Whatever
one might say about the origins of the modern nation-state system, what con-
cerns us here is its imaginary significance: the way it shapes our thinking about
sovereignties.
Westphalianism is a silent bias in our imagination of popular politics. It
frames the power of the people in particular and characteristic ways to recon-
cile collective identity and universalism. It provides conceptual means to talk
about the people as a potentially boundless collectivity that, nonetheless, has
particularity and meaningful agency. This is accomplished by mapping collec-
tive identities onto territory, space, and jurisdiction.
As a tendency of thought, Westphalianism implies that it is natural for
the power of the people to exist on a national scale. Departures are erup-
tions and corrections to this more pervasive order. Smaller- and larger-scale
manifestations of power are temporary deviations from the norm, which are
in need of stronger justification because they are not rooted in the order of
nation-states.
Spatial extension is the signature characteristic of the Westphalian imagi-
nary. Above all, the Westphalian system has become synonymous with the idea
apportioning sovereignty according to geographical territory. It uses a strong
notion of sovereignty that confers decisive, final authority over that territory.8
The feudal system of sovereignty existing before the modern nation-state was
importantly relational rather than spatial.9 The modern nation-state, in con-
trast, maps sovereignty directly onto space and consolidates its control over
that space.
While Westphalianism may have originated in an era of monarchies, it
influences our thinking about popular politics in many ways. Most strikingly,
it is the cornerstone of our modern conception of popular sovereignty. The
Westphalian mapping renders membership and jurisdiction spatially identical.
It allows a particular group to serve simultaneously as a sovereign people and
as subjects of the law. Through this form of spatial delimitation, the people are
subject only to laws that they have authored or consented to. Sovereignty can
thus take the form of self-rule. The power of the people is properly exercised
within a territorially defined sovereign state.
Wendy Brown argues that this kind of spatialization also makes possible a
kind of affective identification with a bounded, defined political community.10
She focuses on recent movements of securitization and wall-building that shore
up the psychic boundaries of the state for its citizens. A similar phenomenon
can be observed in Benedict Anderson’s account of nationalism. He cites maps
as a key form of representation that cause people to think of themselves as
belonging to a common nation.11 Here the nation is mapped, quite literally,
onto a state in a particularly Westphalian manner. The idea of a nation (one
of the principal collectivities in which the power of the people is expressed)

becomes implicitly spatial and Westphalian through this route.
Westphalianism leads to dogmatic thinking about popular politics in a num-
ber of ways. A defined territory provides a readymade way to delimit member-
ship in the polity, both in terms of political participation and subjection to
the law. It thus seems to solve problems of legitimacy, because the territorial
boundary creates a group of people who are simultaneously subject to the laws
and their authors. The flip side of this conceptual convenience, however, is a
set of tensions between democracy and territorially defined membership. These
become paradoxical when the two elements are brought together in attempts
to determine the limits of membership through democratic means.12
To the extent that the people is identified with the state, forms of popular
politics deployed on other scales are occluded from view and possibly delegiti-
mated. Westphalianism becomes a kind of conceptual trap in this case, one that
captures the imagination to such an extent that it limits our thinking. We see
the power of the people as underpinning the legitimacy of the state, and forget
the somewhat arbitrary character of that assignment. It is in this sense that the
fixity of Westphalianism competes with the spontaneity of revolutionism.
Westphalianism can also create other biases in our conception of sover-
eignty. Wendy Brown shows how it emphasizes ideas of sovereignty as control
at the expense of other conceptions like sovereignty as political action.13 By
focusing our attention on the sovereign control of borders and territory, it dis-
tracts attention from other ways of thinking about the people and its powers.
Problematizing Popular Politics

The four dogmas I have described shape the folk paradigm in various ways.
None is present all the time, and they can be found in varying association
with one another. At times they inflect our thought with misperceptions and
distortions: foundational or absolute claims, fixations on particular forms of
collective identity, conceptual blinders caused by territorial boundedness, or
a dogmatic belief in the fresh start of political revolutions. I call them dog-
mas not simply because they are largely fixed and unchallenged points in our
thinking, but because adherence to them lends one’s imagination a dogmatic
character, clinging to customary beliefs and practices in spite of their dysfunc-
tionality. I will problematize each of them in this book, showing how they limit
our political imagination and distort our understanding of our own political
inheritance. By exposing these unrecognized points of ossification, I hope to
open the imagination to a wide variety of other political alternatives.
The most profound blindnesses occur when we misrepresent popular poli-
tics to ourselves, when the psychic agendas at work cause us to misrecognize
or ignore the critical limitations of our thinking. Wendy Brown identifies such
a phenomenon in state sovereignty. She characterizes the roots of the problem
as “Declining protective capacities of the state, diluted nationhood, and the
increasing vulnerability of subjects everywhere to global economic vicissitudes

and transnational violence . . . .”14 For Brown, this picture of decreasing state
authority and diminished capacities is accompanied by anxieties that arise
from psychic identification of the self with the state, as well as more tangible
loss of sovereignty for subjects. This has resulted, she claims, in compensa-
tory movements to seal borders, build walls, and control illegal immigration.
These all appear as reactions to deeper anxieties. In this sense, many contem-
porary phenomena surrounding the symbolism of state sovereignty are driven
by desire, wish-fulfilment, frustration, and insecurity. Ultimately, Brown’s inter-
est turns on the symbolic construction and shoring up of state sovereignty,
particularly the ways it is manifested in fantasies and forms of wish-fulfilment
driven by deeper psychic needs.
It is at this abstract level that my project most clearly parallels Brown’s.
Popular politics, I will show, is traversed by all kinds of other agendas. For
example, I will trace the way eighteenth-century French discourse about the
power of the people is driven by an “incitement to discourse,” a deep-seated,
broadly social discomfort with conceptual problems in the project of popu-
lar sovereignty. I will argue that it has produced all kinds of chimerical
constructions – fabulous constructs of political identity that possess some kind
of sovereignty. In general, we will see that folk foundationalism often has a
fantastic character, both in its tendency to imagine things as we wish them to
be, and in its tendency to construct objects of the imagination that become very
real for us and have constituent force in our politics. Our shared imagination of
popular politics says much about our underlying desires, collective self-image,
and the cultural-historical processes through which they have developed.
The answer to dogmatic thinking about popular politics is a critical inves-
tigation of its forms and varieties. In this book I seek out some of the ways in
which such ideas become fixed in our consciousness and taken for granted as
features of our shared world. This is a book about the processes through which
we imagine political normativity. It tries to make visible the discursive, con-
ceptual, representational, and material bases of popular politics, asking how
we understand their critical, innovative, and liberatory potential. These forms
of normativity lie at the heart of many areas of contemporary interest. They
are central to the politics of exception, insurgency, constituent power, calls for
unconstrained political freedom, the noisy energy of social movements, and the
unruly assertion of antidemocratic revolutions. I will argue that these highly
valorized, often romanticized moments are much more of a mystery than we
usually think. They are products of an elaborate achievement in Western cul-
tures: the imagination of popular sovereignty as a political ideal.
The idea of normativity has a particular importance here. It refers to the
binding or obligatory character of our political ideas. Normative ideals imply a
sanctity, an aura of specialness that causes us to orient our behavior and beliefs
in the ways that they specify. As I have noted, notions of market freedom,
autonomy, liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty all have this character in
contemporary Western politics. We see them as having a kind of natural recti-

tude, so we draw on them to justify other ideas and to make other arguments
without feeling the need to dig any deeper about the reasons that one might
find them so compelling. This compelling character is their normative force.
In this book, I am concerned with the normativity of popular politics – the
question of why we find grassroots mobilizations, popular movements, and the
power of the people so compelling. I do not believe that the reasons for this
are rigorously rational. They were not laid out in some definitive treatise in a
self-consistent, deductive manner, persuading us to adopt them because of their
compelling logic. Rather, the normative bases of popular politics are products
of long cultural and historical processes within a broader field of practice.
I will take this as an interpretive premise for the moment, but coming chapters
will bear it out quite clearly.
The questions I have raised cannot be answered at the level of abstraction at
which political theory usually functions. If the normative bases of politics are not
(purely) philosophical, they cannot be specified in a purely philosophical way.
Instead, they must be traced out within particular cultural and historical contexts.
This historical thesis will chart my course in the pages to come. I will follow a
line of practice starting at the end of the age of monarchy. It is formed around
a set of chronic and chafing problems about sovereignty. This line of problema-
tization has two interlocking foci: the normative problem of who is entitled to
be sovereign, and the socio-ontological problem of who could wield sovereign
agency. Put another way, the problematic is simultaneously about normativity
and collectivity, and especially about the conjunction of the two. If we cannot say
that this ensemble of ideas is the product of a linear, rational argument, we must
consider other ways of accounting for its shared and binding character.
The Archive of Popular Politics

To make the historical argument I have just sketched, I will tap into the
rich archive of discourse, thought, and practice about popular politics. My
approach will be broadly genealogical, in the sense that I am interested in
problematizing our ideas about politics and revealing their complexity and
indeterminate character. I will not offer a complete history of the power of the
people, but will examine several exemplary points in its development. These
moments are chosen to elucidate features of our contemporary thinking. To do
this I will combine the kind of conceptual argumentation practiced in political
theory with careful interpretation of often marginalized and ignored archival
resources. The result is a hybridized genealogy, one that combines focused his-
torical investigation and theoretical argumentation.
I will look to Michel Foucault for inspiration in the broad outlines of this
project, particularly his insights about problematization as a way of reveal-
ing tensions within a set of practices. Since Foucault was never a theorist of
the imaginary or collectivity, though, I will turn to others for help. Cornelius
Castoriadis and Charles Taylor provide insights about the political imagina-
tion; and Ernesto Laclau and Benedict Anderson have much to say about the
formation of collective identities. By emphasizing the contingent and problem-
atic character of popular politics, I join sympathetic allies like Étienne Balibar,
Jason Frank, Bonnie Honig, and Paulina Ochoa Espejo. My intervention fol-
lows a different path from their work, however, by focusing specifically on the
taken-for-grantedness of our ideas of popular power and moving that phenom-
enon to center stage as an object of investigation and problematization.
This approach poses different challenges than those faced by Foucault in
his studies of the human sciences, “total institutions,” and practices of the self.
I will focus greater attention on the material dimensions of political practice,
particularly where tensions occur between materiality and discourse. I will also
travel a considerably different path from Foucault by developing a historically
differentiated conception of political imagination, highlighting the normative
dimensions of the power of the people and showing how political ideals arise
out of various problematics and practices. This provides insights about the col-
lective character of norm-creation as part of the routine social, political, and
intellectual life that constitutes a society’s political imaginaries. This attention
to issues of collective identity, shared imaginaries, and normative force pro-
vides a more critically acute account of the power of the people.
After considering these theoretical and methodological challenges in detail
in Chapters 2 and 3, I will turn to the archive of popular politics for much of
the remainder of the book. I will examine three key points of inflection in this
history. The first, detailed in Chapter 4, is a forty-year period of intellectual
and constitutional history in eighteenth-century France (1755–1795). That
period spans a varied history of political regimes and modalities: enlighten-
ment, absolutist monarchy, revolution, and republic. I will argue that long lines
of cultural and conceptual continuity connect these events and reveal common
problematics at work. The second moment, the topic of Chapter 6, examines a
period of political ferment before the Haitian Revolution (1780s). This other
great revolution of the eighteenth century provides us with an excellent view
of political imaginaries under development and in conflict. The third moment,
detailed in Chapter 7, is a period of Haitian constitutionalism for forty years
after the Revolution (1804–1843). Taken with Chapter 6, these events pro-
vide a snapshot of the revolutionary Caribbean from the 1780s to the 1840s.
I begin when Haiti was still a French colony named Saint-Domingue and trace
the development of Haitian political thought and culture all the way to its
somewhat troubled postcolonial form in the mid-nineteenth century. Here we
see some striking innovations in political thinking, including a repurposing of
French Revolutionary doctrines to support rebellion against France.
I will use these moments as a way of drawing out important themes and
developing a conceptual vocabulary for studying the normative foundations
of popular politics in all of its diversity. This is not an exhaustive account, but
an attempt to develop our thinking through engagement with specific practices
and events. In this regard, I will argue that a very well-known example, the cel-
ebrated political culture of eighteenth-century France, is often misunderstood,
while a relatively untapped archive, the one documenting Haitian colonization
and independence, has much to teach us.
My attraction to France and Haiti lies partly in the simultaneous connec-
tions and contrasts between them. In the eighteenth century, this metropole
and its crown-jewel colony were like a pair of binary stars: each exerted a
powerful gravitational force on the other and made the other wobble in its
orbit. They were distant yet profoundly interrelated. Examining them together
allows me to make a number of important points about popular power and
the imagination of politics in a specifically modern, global, and postcolonial
context. It teaches us much about the simultaneous distance and similarity
between metropolitan Europe and the colonial Caribbean.
Enlightenment France was the originary site of a powerful strand of mod-
ern political thought, based on a nascent form of French republicanism.
I will show that this project was full of tensions that were never satisfac-
torily resolved. Here we see French politicians and thinkers trying to cope
with problems of sovereignty and popular unity at the close of the Age of
Kings. I believe that their very lack of resolution provided some of the energy
that pushed that project forward. At the same time, Haiti highlights other
contradictions that resulted when this heritage was deployed in conjunction
with slavery and colonialism. The substantial ideological divisions leading
up to the Haitian Revolution reveal problematics located at the intersection
of slavery, race, and coloniality. Later, the complicated relations between a
French colonial past and an unstable political present come together in Haiti’s
postcolonial constitutional history. Here Haitian legislators try to stabilize a
postcolonial order and deal with divisive problems of race, class, and nativity.
Their efforts show us much about the interplay between colony and metro-
pole, the migration of concepts from one to the other, and, ultimately, the
paths of political imagination after colonialism. They reveal different sources
and forms of political modernity. These dynamics have been noted by others,
particularly Charles Mills and Laurent Dubois, but we still have further to go
in appreciating the tense interconnections and psychic difficulties that resulted
from being a democrat and a colonist at the same time.15 I will focus on the
way these problems have shaped our understanding of the normative bases of
popular politics.
In sum, France and Haiti provide a complex, nuanced archive for studying
the ways in which popular powers are imagined. Traces of our contemporary
imaginaries can be found in the laws, documents, and practices of these earlier
times. In the course of articulating specific forms of sovereignty, they embody
more abstract forms of thinking about popular politics, ones that are still with
us today in forceful, constitutive, and problematic ways.
2
“Sovereignty Is an Artificial Soul”

Ernesto Laclau and Benedict Anderson in Dialogue
For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH,

or STATE (in Latin CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater
stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was
intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and
motion to the whole body.
–Thomas Hobbes1
The well-known frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan speaks volumes

about the image of sovereignty that dominates our contemporary political
imaginaries. A well-groomed monarch stands up to his waist in a rolling rural
landscape. He holds the symbols of his office in his hands: a crozier on one
side, a sword on the other. This sovereign rules his flock like a shepherd, but
with a clear monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Everything seems in order
until one notices his garment. What appears at first to be nobbly wool is in fact
no garment at all: the monarch, on closer examination, is made of people.
This is an image of the composition of sovereignty. It vividly illustrates
Hobbes’s contractarianism, in which the sovereign derives his absolute power
from an initial contract among the people.2 The sovereign is “made” of
his subjects in the sense that he draws legitimacy from their agreement. As
Hobbes famously described it, this sovereign rules a commonwealth that is
but an artificial man, “in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving
life and motion to the whole body. . . .” The commonwealth has various man-
like characteristics – acting with the agency and judgment of one man – but on
closer examination, that unity is revealed to be the product of elaborate artifice.
This image is rich beyond the bounds of Hobbes’s conception of monarchy.
We can execute a conceptual change of perspective, reversing the metaphorical
relation between parts and the whole. The gestalt shift produces a rather dif-
ferent view of sovereignty. Rather than seeing a monarch made of people, we
now see a people forming a collective whole that metaphorically takes on the
18
“Sovereignty Is an Artificial Soul” 19
shape of a person. Such a people cannot literally become a single individual,

but in the political imagination they form one will and one indivisible agency.
In this inverted view, conceptions of popular sovereignty – ones Hobbes would
reject – endow the people with properties usually attributed to individual sov-
ereigns. Like the older monarchical tradition, such formulations of “popular”
sovereignty take their force from the idea of free action by a unitary will. They
simply scale this notion of individual self-determination up to a macrosocial
level, endowing the idea of “the people” with the same kind of normative force
possessed by an individual sovereign. When we look at the frontispiece from
this angle, we see the aggregation of the people into a collective macrosubject,
one capable of ruling just like a single person.
This reversed reading of Hobbes’s image graphically illustrates a great para-
dox of popular sovereignty. The warrant of sovereignty had previously been
located in the King’s body. Regardless of the problems with this idea, which we
know were many, it had the advantage of representing sovereignty and agency
at the same physical locus.3 The King, as a unitary agent, was sovereign over
himself and his subjects. This materialist conception of sovereignty became
quite strained, however, when it was transposed unto the populace. Now there
was no clear locus of agency, no self-determining entity that could unify agency
and sovereignty. As a result, attempts to do so became increasingly analogical
and metaphorical – and in this case, fictive and representational.
Over the next several chapters, I will argue that the strained character of
ideas like “the power of the people” arises from the fact that the people is not
a naturally occurring entity, but an object of epistemic and political creation.
It works as a representational fiction, encouraging citizens to imagine them-
selves as members of a collective with a unitary political will. In spite of its
imaginary character, however, this “artificial man” does describe an important
aspect of the modern political imaginary. We treat the artificial man of the
modern-day imaginary as having an artificial soul just like Hobbes’s sover-
eign. We see collective political identities like the people as having important
powers. This idea of the people has been put forward as a source of popular
sovereignty in a long political tradition stretching back at least to republican
strands of the Enlightenment, if not to seventeenth-century England and even
before.
Many forms of collectivity have political valences. Crowds, multitudes,
mobs, and masses have public manifestations and political effects.4 In spite of
their public and political import, however, these forms of collectivity are rarely
thought of in positive terms. They connote danger, chaos, and lack of coher-
ent direction. In contrast, peoples, publics, and nations stand in a much more
favorable light. They are forms of collective identity seen as endowed with
collective power and sovereign self-direction. But why? Why are some forms
of collective identity cherished while others are feared? To answer this ques-
tion, it is worth considering some of the ways in which sovereignty and col-
lective identity have been associated. It is not at all obvious what connection
ought to hold between the two. It is neither clear which collective identities
should be important for politics, nor which ones can be attributed normative
significance.
Consider, for instance, Hobbes’s characterization of sovereignty as an “arti-
ficial soul.” It is no accident that he chooses this metaphor. The soul is a mysti-
cal entity that is nowhere present, yet serves enormous explanatory functions.
Indeed, Hobbes is quite hostile to the idea in its theological deployment, which
he characterizes as “the Ghosts of men deceased.”5 Yet he uses the soul in
this explanatory role for political purposes, with similar problems. Hobbes
devotes a great deal of attention to the formation of collectivities – the bases
of contract that form the “artificial man” – but he does little to show how this
contractual construct would then exhibit sovereignty. The artificial soul fulfills
this function with little explanation.
There are clear reasons why Hobbes needs to rely on a rhetorical short-
cut of this sort. His social ontology is built around instrumentally calculating
individuals. It is quite difficult, from this standpoint, to show how such indi-
viduals could come together to constitute a collectivity with the kind of moral
or normative force that amounts to sovereignty. Contract is too thin a basis:
it constitutes collectivity, but only as an aggregation of self-interested prefer-
ences. What is lacking is a form of collectivity that could bear a normative
status. An account of some shared basis for norms and practices, for instance,
might fill this function. It would breathe normative life into a collectivity,
explaining how it could take on an intentional unity that allows it to determine
its own fate. Without such a middle term, Hobbes’s conception remains quite
“artificial,” unable to provide a plausible explanation for the transition from
atomized individuals to collective sovereignty.
These insights open up a whole set of questions about folk foundational-
ism and other uncritical views of popular politics. In this chapter I will ask
how well some of our best theories interrogate such unreflective approaches
to politics. I will examine two influential ways of assembling the artificial man
of the people: those of Ernesto Laclau and Benedict Anderson. Both views
take seriously insights like Hobbes’s, that the commonwealth is an artificial
entity whose origins and inner workings require explanation. They represent
an approach to political identity that sees peoples as a product of stories, nar-
ration, symbolic representation, cultural politics, political mobilization, insur-
gencies, and discursive claims. These views share a commitment to showing
that collective identities like “the people” are complex products of social,
political, and linguistic construction. Under this broad rubric, though, Laclau
and Anderson diverge in important ways. Their differences lie in productive
contrast, revealing symmetrical shortcomings in their efforts to conceptualize
political collectivity. Each provides critical leverage against dogmatic thinking
about popular politics, but ultimately encounters problems of his own. These
problems tell us a great deal about the ways in which the artificial man of the
people has an artificial soul.
Populist Reason
Ernesto Laclau delivers a jolt to dogmatic thinking about popular politics. He
emphasizes the highly constructed and politicized character of peoples while
describing the psychological dimensions of the ways they are imagined. Laclau’s
view of popular politics is strongly inflected by a critique of collective identities.
He thinks of them as important but misleading reifications. A “people,” from
his perspective, is not a determinate collectivity but a form of representation.
It refers to a set of linguistic and political acts that are unified into a seemingly
substantial collectivity through great effort. Collective identities are artificial,
incomplete, and fragile achievements rather than naturally existing entities.
From this perspective, the processes that construct identity tell us more about
politics than do the identities themselves. Laclau views peoples as constructed
through processes of linguistic unification. They are complex assemblages of
speech acts – political demands levied against some institutional authority.
Such demands are unified by creating relations of equivalence among them.
Each will have particular, individual features that other demands do not share.
Within an antagonistic political environment, however, similarities can be con-
structed across such differences. They are created by showing that an array of
demands is opposed to a common adversary. Unification relies on this shared
structural position toward a common power, displacing thicker, more substan-
tive similarities in content or agenda.6
The adversary shared by a given set of demands is itself linguistically consti-
tuted. It is an object of description, that against which a set of demands stands
because it has failed to satisfy them. This antagonism is a necessary struc-
tural feature of unification.7 It creates the conditions under which demands
can be constructed as sharing common features and thereby unified in their
commonality.
Laclau says that this process of unification is started by connecting a set
of demands to some common first demand. This provides a shared core that
allows each subsequent demand to be connected to the chain. A demand can
serve this function only when it is drained of meaning, however, remaining only
as a name. Such an empty signifier has no inherent limits in what it can signify;
it can therefore stand for all other demands in the chain. In this way, the empty
signifier becomes the name for an entire series of unified demands.8
The most important part of this process is the one in which a set of demands,
unified by association with an empty signifier, comes to be understood as the
identity of a group. Specifically, this form of unification allows the empty sig-
nifier to be seen as a popular identity. Laclau describes this as the “moment
of crystallization that constitutes the ‘people’ of populism.”9 This identity,
understood as popular in character, then becomes a node around which fur-
ther demands can be unified. Laclau’s characterization of popular politics as
“populism” is not accidental. Because of the instrumental nature of popular
politics in his view, populism and popular politics are indistinguishable. This
characterization has the advantage of elucidating important forms of populist

politics, but it has the corresponding drawback of leaving many other things
out of view.
Laclau notes that as more and more demands are unified, the identity of the
whole becomes more and more diffuse. The similarity between unified demands
is increasingly diluted by the differences remaining between them. One way to
overcome this centrifugal tendency is to identify an emerging people with a
political leader.10 In this way the name unifying a movement is associated with
a personality rather than a demand. The Peronists, named after Juan Perón,
are one of his favorite examples.11 Since the name of a chain of demands is an
empty signifier, this personalization of a chain of demands is in character with
other forms of popular collectivity. The name of a collectivity could take the
name of a person just as well as it could be named for any other demand. The
difference, Laclau notes, is that a person provides a particularly powerful and
stable form of identification around which a broader identity can form.
Here it is tempting to flesh out the reasoning behind Laclau’s observations
a bit further. Presumably this sort of discursive solidification is powerful not
just because it furnishes a name, but because of the charismatic associations
with the actual person. These traits could be appealing precisely because they
embody the person-ness of a single agent. Such a substitution could appear
to resolve, in a symbolic sense, some of the problems with popular identities
I described above. A collectivity does not have the unity and agency that an
individual has; by unifying a popular movement around a person’s name, the
collectivity symbolically adopts some of the unity of the individual’s identity.
This strategy uses a kind of linguistic legerdemain to resolve the problem
of replacing the king with a more diffuse collectivity. If we think of the col-
lectivity as centered around a person, it could appear to have some of the
missing characteristics of royal agency. This, of course, would be a conceptual
crutch rather than an actual solution; but in that sense it would be consis-
tent with Laclau’s treatment of popular politics as a linguistically constructed
phenomenon.
One of the most potent characteristics of Laclau’s view is the way it captures
the ambiguous and changing character of political identities. For him, identi-
ties are formed in a complex field of intersecting and shifting antagonisms.12
Demands can be incorporated into more than one identity, so their political
meaning becomes equivocal. Groups cease to have identity as soon as their
demands are satisfied, because they lose the antagonistic basis of that iden-
tity. As a result, peoples are never fully consolidated, always under political
negotiation, and asserted strategically in an attempt to pursue various aims.
They are, as Laclau puts it, hegemonic articulations, ones aimed at consolidat-
ing identity and enacting political goals against the background of a changing
political landscape.
Laclau’s great insight is to transpose questions of collective political iden-
tity into the realm of signification and representation. He shares the vision
of Hobbes’s frontispiece in this regard but radicalizes it even a step further.

Hobbes prefaced Leviathan with a trompe-l’oeil illustration of a sovereign
who, on closer inspection, is made of people. Laclau describes a people that,
on closer inspection, is made of . . . words. Like Hobbes’s image of the sover-
eign, Laclau’s notion of the people is a thoroughly constructed one. It is built
from political demands – literally, words. Laclau goes quite a bit further than
Hobbes in this sense, because for him the people form a composite entity made
of components very different in type from the whole to which they belong.
Laclau’s view poses considerable challenges for dogmatic thinking about
popular politics. It frames collective identities as constructs all the way down.
Both the antagonistic enemy and the features shared by a chain of unified
demands are products of linguistic construction. Collective identities, built
on this basis, are products of artifice. In this sense, the entire political field
is discursively constructed. It is thus much less tempting to attribute founda-
tional significance to popular politics. This view undermines foundationalism
by de-essentializing identity and pushing processes to the fore. The politics of
identity now occupies our attention.
A great advantage of this view is the way it virtualizes political identity.
Laclau describes unified sets of demands that are attributed peoplehood only
secondarily and with some effort. He shows how identities are consolidated
through politics, yet remain pliable and subject to change. By emphasizing the
contingent and political character of collective identity formation, Laclau’s
work undermines naturalized conceptions of the people and uncritical notions
of collective identity. It views identities as in process, unstable, yet having polit-
ical agency. Thus it does not assume unity and agency, nor does it dismiss col-
lective identity as a fiction. This view highlights the plasticity and portability
of popular politics. It is a phenomenon that can crop up in many different
guises in many different arenas. In the specific form that Laclau refers to as
populism, which is to say, as a discursively mobilized instrumentality, there can
be leftist populisms, fascist populisms, conservative populisms, and so on, all
claiming the power of the people in spite of their radically different demands
and agendas.
These same features of Laclau’s account also despatialize collective identity
in important ways. If identity is built by unifying demands, it has no particular
spatiality. The only requirement is that the component demands are seen as
opposed to a common foe, not that they are articulated within any location,
domain, or jurisdiction. As a result, a “people” has no particular physical loca-
tion. This poses a substantial challenge to Westphalian thinking by making it
impossible to map the people onto specific territories.
Laclau’s view also has an admirable epistemic sophistication. The politics
of identity is understood through a careful dissection of the rhetorical and
political processes that give rise to it. This is a linguistic turn of a subtle kind,
one that encompasses many different elements: discursive acts, the politics of
claims-making, psychic drives, signifiers, names, unfulfilled desires, political
antagonisms, and collective identities. Laclau pulls this material together in

an elegant picture of the identity-constituting effects of words. He shows how
ideas and words can take on real force, shaping forms of political member-
ship and collective agency. The glue that holds these elements together is the
epistemic element itself: the account Laclau gives of how forms of speech can
constitute identity.
Finally, it is worth noting the subtle displacement of normativity in this
view. Identities that coalesce out of unified demands form from a particular set
of viewpoints, constructed against a common opposition. Yet these identities
represent themselves as “popular,” thus as “peoples,” framing their collectivity
as universal when it is partial and sectarian.13 Laclau says this is both a charac-
teristic feature of peoplehood and a characteristic fiction. No people can have
a universal character, because a group that is all-inclusive and identical with an
entire society is a fiction or counterfactual goal, never a real possibility. Groups
can only ever be parts of this more idealized totality.
This insight has profound consequences. It implies that no people can truly
represent an entire society. Moreover, any claim of this type is, on Laclau’s
terms, mistaken or duplicitous. Universal identities and claims made on their
behalf are false universalities.14 No political movement can represent the claims
and interests of society as a whole, and anything calling itself “the people” is
a partisan collectivity masquerading as a universal. It is no surprise, then, that
Laclau’s references to the “people” are always suspended between quotation
marks.
While revealing the overreaching character of claims about the people,
Laclau further deflates these claims in important ways. He executes a change
of perspective that views the people as part of the more general phenomenon
of a discursive-popular politics. Without remarking on the importance of this
change, he problematizes the special normative status that is often attributed
to collective identities. For Laclau, peoples are an interesting phenomenon that
occurs within discursive politics, rather than sacred or natural imperatives to
be honored. This corrective reminds us to view the normative force of collec-
tive identities as an important subject of scrutiny rather than something we can
take at face value. It problematizes tendencies to attribute a natural rectitude
to the people.
In spite of its rich insights, Laclau’s paradigm-shifting view also has some
significant limitations. It is, as I noted earlier, limited by the instrumentality it
attributes to popular politics. By equating popular politics with the more nar-
row and derivative phenomenon of populism, it either rules out of bounds or
fails to consider other ways in which the people might have power.
In an important sense, Laclau’s dissolution of identity also goes too far. He
is so concerned to avoid hypostatizing identities and render them fluid that he
verges on dissolving political subjects entirely. Demands are Laclau’s primary
units of analysis, and his emphasis is linguistic through and through. How these
elements relate to human subjects is somewhat less clear, however. Demands
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
yhteenliittyvästä perspektiivistä eikä tulevaisuuden koleasta
sarastuksesta, vaan elävät aurinkoisessa, suloisessa nykyisyydessä.
Nyt me rakastamme toisiamme; nyt omaamme toisemme; nyt

olemme nuoria, voimakkaita tunteissamme, rohkeita mieleltämme.
Nykyisyyden hetket välkkyvät niin voimakkain loistein etteivät ne
kalpene vanhuuden etäisimpinäkään päivinä.
Olen polvistunut hurmaavasta kiitollisuudesta siksi, että hän on

sanonut rakastavansa minua, siksi, että hän on käyttänyt juuri tätä
suurta sanaa, jonka edestä itse ajatuskin väistyy kuin sitovan valon
edestä, ja jota väreilevät huulet vain kuiskien lausuvat; jonka edessä
me vaistomaisesti suljemme silmämme, siksi että katsettamme, jota
taivaan salama häikäsee, samalla kohtaa intohimon tuli.
Kun kesäillat pitenivät, istuimme mekin kauvemmin keskustellen.
Olimme molemmat yksin maailmassa. Emäntäni oli matkustanut

pois ja hänen vanha palvelijansa lähti joka päivä, annettuaan minulle
päivällistä, tyttärensä luokse, toiseen kaupunginosaan. Hän oli
iloinen saadessaan mennä, ja minun puolestani sai hän niin
mielellään, niin mielellään olla poissa.
Pienen puutarhatilkun ympärillä törröttivät talot liidutuin, sokein

ikkunasilmin; minun ikkunani ainoastaan oli puhdas ja avonainen ja
hänen ikkunansa oli osaksi kirjojen peitossa.
Koko päivän työskentelin ja uneksin — uneksin ja harmittelin

hulluuttani, kun rakastin. — Mutta iltasin tuli hän luokseni ja kertoi
päivänsä kokemuksista, ja unelmat ja harmit katosivat ja jälelle jäi
ihana tieto siitä, että nykyhetki oli minun.
Oli niin helppoa puhella ensi aikoina, ajatukset tulivat niin
täyteläisen rikkaina. Mutta vähitellen kävivät välihetket pitkiksi ja
painostaviksi. Alussa olivat ne olleet niin valoisia kuin varhainen ilta,
mutta nyt kun ne kestivät kauvemmin, pysähtyivät ajatukseni, ja
hänen katseensa kävi synkäksi ja miettiväksi.
Pieni oka painautuu sydämeeni ja pistää, kun muistan, että minä

välihetken katkaisin sinä iltana, jolloin sireenit tuoksuivat
väkevämmin kuin muulloin ja ilma oli lämmin.
»Sanokaa minulle,» virkoin nopeasti, kun pitkä vaitiolo oli nostanut

hänen kasvoilleen tumman ilmeen. »Miksi olette niin synkän
näköinen? Sanokaa se minulle? Olemmehan ystävät?»
Sanani herättivät myrskyn, jonka hillitsemätöntä vauhtia en olisi

odottanut.
»Ystävät?» sanoi hän hiljaisella tukahutetulla äänellä. »Ei! Emme

koskaan ystäviä! Minä rakastan sinua, minä rakastan sinua!»
Hän veti minut tiukasti luoksensa ja aivan kuin hurmaantuneena

omista sanoistaan, toisti hän ne lukemattomat kerrat, kietoen
käsivartensa lujasti hartiani ympäri ja painaen huulensa poskilleni.
Päivät, jotka seurasivat, eivät olleet pitkiä. Aamusta iltaan

suunnittelin vastaista yhteiselämäämme. Kuinka voisin varjella
itseäni ja häntä tottumuksen velvollisuudelta? Kuinka suojelisinkaan
yhdyselämäämme? Me työskentelisimme kumpikin tahollamme ja
kun hän tulisi kotiin, väsyneenä ja liikutettuna vaikeuksista, joita hän
maailmassa kohtaisi, kertoisi minun syleilyni hänelle, että minun
luonani löytyi sydänrauhaa ja lempeyttä, minun luonani kodin
lämmittävää, tyynnyttävää lepoa.
Joka aamu sain häneltä kirjeen:
»Tulethan illalla alas, niinkuin ennenkin, rakkaani?» — Ja minä

tulin.
Eikö minun olisi pitänyt niin tehdä? Onko hän voittanut minut liian
helposti? En tiedä; sen tiedän vaan, etten ole voinut enkä tahtonut
toimia toisin. Hän yksin hallitsee sydäntäni; en tahdo teeskennellä en
ole sitä hänelle sanonut, mutta olen tullut hänen luoksensa penkille,
sireenipensaston juurelle.
Ja hän on sanonut, ettei kukaan ole ollut niin hyvä hänelle, kuin
minä; ettei kukaan nainen ole niin suloinen, niin viisas kuin minä, ja
ennen kaikkea, että hän rakastaa minua.
Hymyillen olen ajatellut, että samoja sanoja lausuvat kaikki miehet

naisille, joita he ihailevat, mutta hymyilyn ohessa on jonkinlainen
mielipahakin tuntunut.
»Sinä olet viisaampi, kuin muut naiset: sinä et ole toisten naisten
kaltainen», sanovat he ja ilmaisevat vaan täten, kuinka ala-arvoisina
he ylipäänsä naisia pitävät.
Mutta turhamainen sydän iloitsee kuitenkin jokaisesta hellästä

sanasta.
Ja kuitenkaan ei parhain ole sanoissa: se on äänen sävyssä,

katseessa, siinä selittämättömässä, joka meitä ympäröitsee ja joka
minulle sanoo, että ainakin tänä hetkenä olen hänelle kaikki.
Naisten tapaan kysyn, kun hän kauvan on istunut ääneti, käsi

ympärilläni:
»Mitä ajattelet? Minuako? Kaikkeako?» ja saan aina saman
vastauksen:
»En ajattele mitään, tunnen vaan. Tunnen olentosi läheisyyttä,

tuota suloisuutta, että me kaksi olemme yhdessä.»
Ja minä saatan vain painaa pääni hänen rintaansa ja tuntea, että

maailma ei voi minulle suurempaa onnea tarjota.
Maljakkoni on täynnä primuloita; älkööt ne liian pian kuihtuko!
Heinäkuu.
Kaksikymmentä pitkää kesäpäivää häiritsemättömässä onnessa!

Eikö minun tule olla iloinen, että elämä on tarjonnut niin paljon?
Kun kaksikymmentä päivää on kulunut, täytyy meidän erota;

hänen pitää matkustaa.
Hänellä ei ole isää, ei äitiä eikä sisaruksia. Sen verran tiedän,

vaan en muuta hänen elämänsä ulkonaisista piirteistä. Minä aavistan
hänen mielipiteitään monissa asioissa, luulen, että hänellä on
järkähtämätön tahto, mutta itse asiassa en tunne miestä, jota
rakastan.
Hän sitävastoin — ah, hän saa tietää jokaisen ajatuksen

sielussani, minulla ei ole mitään salattavaa enkä ole mitään
salannut. Hän on herrani. Hän sanoo toisinaan, että olen arka ja
kylmä, ja se on totta; mutta sekin johtuu toivosta olla hänelle
mieleen. Hän ei haluaisi, että antaisin hyväilyjä tai hyviä sanojakaan
enemmän, kuin mitä hän haluaisi.
Siinä suhteessa on hän sellaisen miehekkyyden perikuva, joka itse

tahtoo tahtoa, eikä hän siis vastaa haaveellisia kuvittelultani.
Olin nimittäin kuvitellut miestä, joka ymmärtäisi ja ehkäpä myöskin

heltyisi siitä, että nainen antaisi hänelle enemmän rakkautta, kuin
mitä hän pyytäisi, mutta sellainen mies ei ole armaani.
No niin, hänen tulisi matkustaa, ja minä olisin sillä aikaa

sukulaisissani maalla. — Mieluimmin olisin minä jäänyt huoneeseeni
ja puutarhaani; mutta, kuinka yksinäinen ihminen onkaan, aina pitää
arkimaailma lukemattomilla kahlehtivilla tempuilla hänestä kiinni, ja
minä läksin, jottei kukaan kummeksisi miksi yksin olisin kaupungin
pölyssä.
Mutta päivät olivat pitkät, yöt pitemmät ja epäilyksien

katkeroittamat.
Muistelin nyt, että kaikkien niitten hellien sanojen joukossa, joita

hän minulle oli sanonut, ei milloinkaan ollut pienintäkään viittausta
yhteisestä tulevaisuudestamme. — Alituista hellyyttä, sydämellistä
rakkautta, mutta tämä aina vaan nykyhetkeksi, ja se sai alussa
minunkin uskomaan että tämä oli kaikki.
Itkin pitkinä, valoisina kesäöinä, jolloin epäluulo ja luottamus

keskenään kamppailivat, ja väsynein ajatuksin nukahdin
aamupuoleen, alkaakseni seuraavana iltana kamppailuni uudelleen.
Kun erosimme, olimme sopineet, että kymmenen päivän päästä

tapaisimme toisemme jälleen sopessamme, joka minulle oli paratiisin
yrttitarha, siksi että me kaksi olimme yksin siellä. Ja me kohtasimme
toisemme, mutta kuinka?
Hänen otsansa oli poimuissa, huulet puserretut kapeaksi viivaksi

ja katse oli ilman lämpöä. Ja minä tiesin itsestäni, että epäluulo väijyi
silmissäni, jotka eivät uskaltaneet kohdata hänen katsettaan.
Pitkän aikaa seisoimme ääneti vastatusten, sitten kiedoin itkien

käteni hänen kaulaansa ja painoin pääni hänen rintaansa. — Hän ei
kysynyt, miksi itkin, puristi minua vain rintaansa, silitti tukkaani ja
kuiskasi yksinäisiä, helliä sanoja.
Mutta tämän kohtaamisen jälkeen tiesin ja tunsin minä, että hän

soljui pois luotani — pian — ja ettei minulla olisi oikeutta eikä tahtoa
pidättää häntä. — Ja tieto tästä kypsytti myöskin erään päätöksen
minussa.
Niistä käsityksistä, joita kasvatus oli minuun istuttanut n.k.

naisellisesta arvokkuudesta, olin jo osittain vapautunut, ja
viimeisenkin kiinnipitämisen halun itkin pois hänen sylissään.
En koskaan vaatisi porvarillisia oikeuksia rakkauteni vastineeksi!

Sen tulisi olla vapaan lahjan. Eihän rakastaminen ole ainoastaan
puoleensa vetämistä, vaan myöskin uskollisuudessa pysymistä!
Jollei hän tätä ymmärtäisi, pitäisi minun koettaa olla suvaitsevainen
— niinkuin sitä tulee olla rakasta ystävää kohtaan, jolla on toinen
usko.
Keskikesän ja purppuranpunaisten ruusujen kuukauden viime

päivinä oli ilma tukahuttava ja kuuma; pian loppuisi tuoksu ja lämpö.
Hänen katseensa etsi minun katsettani arkana ja kysyvänä, ja minä
tunsin, kuinka hän taisteli irroittaakseen minut sydämestään ja
elämästään. Hän kyllä tulisi taistelussa voittamaan, sen tiesin, ja
ääni minussa huusi: »Miksi, miksi?» Mutta mitään kysymystä ei tullut
huulieni yli, köyhän ylpeänä vaikenin.
Nyt tapahtui aina, kun iltasin erosimme, että hän kiitti minua
hyvyydestäni (hän ei olisi sitä tehnyt, jos hän olisi katsonut itsellään
olevan oikeutta siihen) ja hän pidätti minua ja sanoi hyvää yötänsä
niin hellästi — — toivoinpa melkein, että olisin ollut hänelle
vähemmän rakas. Hänen olisi silloin ollut helpompi sanoa eroa
tuottavat sanansa.
Mutta hetkiseksi vain saatoin kohota niin epäitsekkäisiin

mietelmiin; seuraavana hetkenä katsoin lohdutukseksi sitä, että hän
piti minusta juuri niin intohimoisesti, kuin hän piti.
Kun nyt kirjoittelen tätä, muistelen kaihomielin erästä tapausta,

joka säilyy elämäni kultaisimpana muistona.
Ensi kertaa oli hän kanssani meillä ja minun huoneessani. En

tiedä mikä häneen niin vaikutti, kun hän katseli ympärilleen siellä,
mutta hänet valtasi liikutus, jota hän ei voinut hillitä.
Hän oli polvillaan edessäni, tarttui minuun kylmin, vapisevin käsin,

huulten lausuessa katkonaisia, pyytävää rakkautta, rukoilevaa
valitusta ja vakuutuksia sisältäviä sanoja.
Olen ylpeä, että hän rakastaa minua juuri niin, mutta minuun koski
ja minua pelotti nähdä väkevää heikkona ja että hän niin oli
unohtanut kaiken muun maailmassa, paitsi minut ja tunteensa. — Ja
vapisevalla säälillä annoin hänelle sen ainoan, mitä saatoin antaa —
viileitä, arkoja hyväilyjä, tyynnyttääkseni hänen rajusti liikutettua
mieltänsä.
Elokuu.
Niin tuli emäntäni kotiin, ja hillitseminen, johon hänen läsnäolonsa

meidät pakotti, oli hyvä meille molemmille.
Seurasi nyt muutaman viikon rauha, jolloin kolmannen henkilön

läsnäolo — henkilön, joka lempeänä ja hiljaisesti, mutta eräänlaisella
uteliaalla mielenkiinnolla tarkkasi meitä — sai meidät palauttamaan
ensi aikojemme puheliaan ystävyyssuhteemme, jonka hauskuutta
nyt enensi tieto siitä, että sanojen takana piili niin paljon
sydämellisyyttä ja yksimielisyyttä.
Kumminkaan en tuskin tunniksikaan unohtanut, että isku sattuisi,

eroamisen raskas portti tulisi sulkeutumaan välillemme.
Eikä hänkään sitä unohtanut. — Jos hän näinä päivinä puhuikin

paljon enemmän, kuin mitä tapansa oli juodessaan kanssamme
teetä puutarhassa iltaisin, niin tapahtui se sen vuoksi, että hän tahtoi
antaa minulle mukaani — erottuamme — niin paljon kuin suinkin
olemustaan muistoksi.
Vaikeata oli pidättää kysymystä: »Kuinka kauan?» joka piili

jokaisessa väreilevässä sydämeni tykinnässä, mutta minä kestin
sen, ja nykyisyys, tuo kiitävä, tuskinpa olemassa-oleva, koska se on
jo poissa, kun siihen yrittää tarttua, sai suoda minulle harhaonnensa.
Elokuun lopussa.
Tänään on elämäni sammunut, onneni murskaantunut! Hän on
matkustanut ja tuntuu, kuin kaikki tunteeni olisivat kuoleentuneet ja
jäätyneet.
Pääni on kylmä ja selvä. Muistan hänen jokaisen sanansa,

niinkuin en koskaan ennen ole voinut muistaa ja jonka vuoksi en ole
voinutkaan antaa minkäänlaista kokonaiskuvaa keskusteluistamme.
Päivällisaikaan sain häneltä kirjeen, lyhyen, niinkuin ennenkin.
»Tule alas puutarhaan kello neljä. Minun täytyy puhua kanssasi.

Rakas lapseni, voinetko antaa anteeksi?»
En tiedä miten aika kului. — Luulenpa polvillani rukoilleeni

Jumalaa auttamaan itseäni ja muistan, että kyyneleeni vuotivat
herkeämättä ja ilman nyyhkytyksiä.
Varmaankin olin kalpea, kun hänet kohtasin, sillä kun hän näki
minut, peitti hän kädellään hetkeksi silmänsä, kuin tahtoisi hän
karttaa tuskallista näkyä. — Sitten syleili hän minua ja suuteli. Hänen
huulensa olivat kylmät; kuoleentunut oli kaikki ihanuus, joka meitä oli
lämmittänyt; oli niin kuolonhiljaista ympärillämme.
Ja sitten alkoi hän puhua. Hänen äänensä tuntui pakotetulta ja

sanat tulivat lyhyinä ja katkonaisina.
»Työni täällä on päättynyt.» sanoi hän. »Minun tulee matkustaa —

matkustan tänä iltana.»
»Matkustatko?» kysyin minä. Kesken syvintä hiljaisuutta kuulin

juoksevan veden ääntä, se lirisi ja kohisi korvissani ja pauhun takaa
kuului oma ääneni heikosti etäältä.
Ääretön minuutti kului, ennenkuin hän vastasi. — Niin, kuinka se
oli hänelle vaikeata, mutta kieleni ei totellut tahtoani antaakseni
sanan lohdutukseksi.
»Sinä et voi minua seurata — — olen sidottu toiseen» — — Hän

vei minut sireenimajan penkille, missä niin usein olimme istuneet.
Pidellen jääkylmää kättäni omassaan puhui hän nopeasti: »Sinä et
voi sitä ymmärtää, mutta niin se on — olen usein aikonut puhua
tästä — — — jo aikaa sitten — mutta en ole voinut. — Minä rakastan
sinua.»
»Sinä — rakastat — minua?» Kuivat huuleni antoivat sanoilleni

kovemman soinnun, kuin mitä tahdoin, mutta en voinut niitä pidättää.
»Niin, minä rakastan sinua,» toisti hän. »Luuletko sinä, että

janoinen mies, jolla on vaivalloinen tie edessään, voisi olla juomatta
tien ohessa olevasta lähteestä vaan siitä syystä, että pelkäisi sen
hämmentyvän? Sinä tulit vastaani niin terveenä ja älykkäänä; minun
täytyi virkistää itseäni sinun raittiilla olemuksellasi, en voinut muuta.
— Tahdon kertoa sinulle kappaleen äärettömän tavallista historiaa,
tuomitse minut sitten. Tiedät, että olen yksin, köyhä olen aina ollut.
Vähäinen omaisuuteni riitti tuskinpa ensi lukuvuosiksikaan. — Asuin
erään lesken luona, jolla oli yksi ainoa tytär. Heidän hyvyyttään
yksinäistä kohtaan täytyy minun aina kiitollisuudella tunnustaa.
»Siitä on nyt kuhmut seitsemän vuotta, jolloin kiitollisuudesta, jota

silloin luulin rakastumiseksi, sidoin tyttären kohtalon omaani.»
Hän vaikeni. En voinut vielä mitään sanoa, kehotin vaan

päännyökkäyksellä häntä jatkamaan.
»Pian huomasin, miten asian laita oli,» jatkoi hän, »mutta hän oli
saanut sanani; en tuntenut vetovoimaa kehenkään toiseen naiseen,
ennenkuin sinä laskit lumipisarasi ikkunanlaudalleni ja sitten
empimättä lahjoitit seurasi minulle kevätiltaisin.»
»Sinun olisi pitänyt sanoa se minulle silloin.» ääntelin minä, »olisi

ollut helppoa alussa.» — Voi miten oli vaikeata puhua: minun täytyi
työntää tavut yksitellen.
»Luuletko, että meille olisi käynyt toisin silloin?» vastasi hän,

»minä en sitä usko — vaan kyllä vaikeammaksi tuskat myöskin
sinulle — ja sitäpaitsi unohdin minä hänet ja kaiken muun, siksi
kunnes — kunnes. — Muistatko sitä päivää, jolloin sanoin sinulle,
ettemme koskaan voisi olla ystäviä?»
— — Vedin käteni hänen kädestään eikä hän yrittänyt saada sitä

takaisin. Hetkisen istuimme molemmat ääneti; sitten nöyrryin tomuun
asti.
»Ja tahdotko nyt lähteä takaisin hänen luokseen? Täytyykö sinun

täytyykö sinun jättää minut?»
Hän kumarsi päätään syvästi, kun hän vastasi:
»Hän on saanut sanani — hän ei ymmärrä, että tahdon päästä

vapaaksi — hän on odottanut seitsemän vuotta. — Älä katso
minuun.» jatkoi hän kiihkeästi, en voi kestää katsettasi.
»Kaikki on niin sietämättömän häpeällistä, niin äitelän

jokapäiväistä — hän on antanut minulle rahaa lukujani varten —
kirjojani varten, jotka olivat ainoa intohimoni, ennenkuin löysin sinut.
Minun täytyy ne maksaa.»
Toisen kerran oli hän polvillaan jalkojeni juuressa; ensi kerran
intohimon ihanassa huumauksessa; toisen kerran katumuksen
tekijänä, pää sylissäni, jotta peittyisi häpeän puna.
Ja toisen kerran olin voimaton.
Intohimon harkitsemattomaan pyyntöön en tahtonut suostua;

polttavaa häpeätä en voinut lieventää. Nyt, niinkuin silloinkin, saatoin
vaan hiljaa sivellä hänen tukkaansa ja poskeansa ja säälien odottaa,
kunnes mielenkuohu asettuisi.
Kesti kauvan, ennenkuin hän nosti päätään. Yhäti polvillaan, sanoi

hän sitten:
»Sinä tiedät nyt että menen kurjuutta kohti. Voitko antaa minulle
anteeksi, että anastin itselleni muutamia onnellisia sekunteja?»
En voinut vastata, sillä juuri silloin olisi vastaukseni tullut

katkeraksi, nuhtelevaksi. Ja mitä se olisi hyödyttänyt? Hänen
päätöstään ei vastaukseni kumminkaan koskaan voisi muuttaa.
Hän nousi.
»Kohta on aika erota ja minä pyydän sinua vaan muistamaan —».

Ääni petti, mutta hetkisen kuluttua jatkoi hän: »pyydän sinua
muistamaan, että olet ollut minulle rakkain maailmassa. Sinä et ole
voinut käsittää tunteitani, niin luulen, sinä olet aina ollut kylmä ja
hillitty. — Minun lohdutukseni on, että ehkäpä sinä pian unohdat —»
Tätä en voinut kestää, kohotin vastustaen käteni ja kuiskasin:
»En ole tätä ansainnut; se on hirveätä.»

Hänelle varmaankin selvisi, että hän oli tehnyt vääryyttä minulle, ja
hän näki, kuinka kärsin, sillä äkkiä oli hän taas luonani ja painoi
pääni hellästi niinkuin ennenkin povelleen.
»Ei, ei», sanoi hän, suudellen minua nopeasti, »olin luonnoton,

sinä olet aina ollut vaan hyvä, eikä minulla ole oikeutta sanoa muuta
kuin anteeksi ja taas anteeksi.»
Kirkonkello löi viisi kumeata lyöntiä, ja me ponnahdimme

pelästyneinä erillemme.
Hän astui askeleen taapäin ja sanoi jäykästi:
»Minun täytyy mennä: vaadin liikoja, kun pyysin, että nyt jo voisit
antaa minulle anteeksi. — Mutta sano minulle ystävällinen sana
ennen kuin eroamme —». Äänensä oli tuskallinen. »Anna minun
viedä mukaani toisellainen muisto jäähyväisistämme — En saata
nähdä kalpeita kasvojasi ja jähmettynyttä ilmettä sinun ennen niin
lempeissä silmissäsi — —»
Silloin katosi sekä heikkouteni että arkuuteni. Kärsimysten

synnyttämä innostus pelasti minut hetken tuskista. Kiedoin käteni
hänen kaulaansa ja suutelin monta kertaa hänen rakkaita, älykkäitä
silmiään, jotka sulkeutuivat suudelmistani.
»Mitä sanoisin?» kuiskasin hiljaa. »Minä rakastan sinua, minä

rakastan sinua —»
Sinä hetkenä olisin melkein voinut toivottaa hänelle valoisata

elämää, mutta sehän olisi ollut pilaa.
»Mene nyt,» lisäsin minä, »nyt saatan antaa sinun mennä.»

Hän suuteli, sanaakaan sanomatta, käsiäni ja meni.
Tulin huoneeseeni. Tuntui siltä, kuin kaikki tämä olisi kohdannut

jotakuta toista, niin vähän minä tunsin. Ja vielä nytkin tätä
kirjoittaessani, kun uusi päivä on koittanut, en tajua itsestäni
enempää, kuin jos olisin täysin jäätynyt.
Kaikki on niin kylmää, selkeätä ja läpinäkyvän tyhjää — — Ei löydy

niin mitään koko avarassa maailmassa.
Syyskuu.
Minulle on sanottu, että on olemassa hermo, joka on niin tärkeä,

että pieninkin kosketus siihen tuottaa häiriötä elimistön toimintaan, ja
jos se joutuu kovaan puserrukseen, taukoo sydän lyömästä, keuhkot
elämää tuottavaa ilmaa imemästä. Katse käy sameaksi ja aivot
työskentelevät umpimähkään.
Niin oli minun laitani monta päivää hänen lähtönsä jälkeen.
Voi niitä pitkiä, mustia öitä, jolloin katkera epätoivo ahdisti sydäntä,
jolloin kyyneleet vaan polttivat, tuottamatta apua.
Puhutaan kyynelten lohdusta, kyynelten virkistyksestä.
Sillä tarkoitettanee — kyyneleitä, millä kuollutta itketään.
Mutta ken suree sitä, joka on poispyyhitty, hävitetty omasta

elämästä, hänelle ei löydy katkerampaa tuskaa kuin yksinäiset
kuumat kyyneleet, jotka polttavat ja kuivettavat mielen ja kärventävät
tyysten kaikki hyvät tunteet.
Vasta aamulla vaivuin hetkiseksi raskaaseen horrostilaan ja koko

päivänä oli vainen yksi ainoa valoisampi hetki.
Kun heräsin, en ensin tiennyt muuta kuin että aurinko paistoi ja

kukkia oli maljakossa.
Mutta seuraavassa hetkessä tuli tuska taas painostavana ja siitä

oli mahdoton päästä — ja se lamautti kokonaan toimintatahtoni.
Ja päivät olivat niin pitkiä, pitkiä!
On niin väsyttävää kärsiä, väsyttävää tuntea; niin sanomattoman

väsyttävää kaihota ja kummeksia, kun vastausta ei kuulu ja kaiho ei
mitään auta.
En uskaltanut katsoa hänen ikkunaansa. Kerran yritin, ja vieläkin

kauhistun muistellessani hurjia ajatuksiani elämiseni
mahdottomuudesta ja sitä tuskaa, joka painoi minut maahan
rukoilemaan ihme-työtä, jota ennen leikilläni olin sanonut toivovani,
mutta jota nyt en kuitenkaan uskonut tapahtuvaksi.
Toisinaan olen sydämessäni äärettömän katkera häntä kohtaan,

joka anasti itselleen rakkauteni ja sitten jätti minut.
Vaan en kauvaa. Kesken kurjuutta tunnen selvästi, kuinka on

parempi tuhlaten lahjoittaa pois olemuksensa parhaan aarteen, kuin
ettei koskaan tulisikaan tilaisuuteen lahjoittamaan.
Kurja kiusaus hiipii myöskin usein mieleeni. — Olisihan voinut

tarjota hänelle ne rahat — jotka hän oli velkaa sille toiselle —
Parempi mikä hyvänsä, kuin olla ilman häntä. Parempi jos olisin
rukoillut häntä, ettei hän jättäisi minua, olisin kiusannut, houkutellut
häntä, olisin antanut hänelle kaikki, silloin olisi hänen ollut pakko
jäädä luokseni.
Mutta kun hän kertoi minulle kohtalostansa, ei pälkähtänyt

mieleenikään ostaa hänet vapaaksi, ja se vaisto oli oikea.
Rahavelka olisi kyllä voinut tulla korvatuksi, mutta seitsemän

vuoden uskollista hellyyttä ja kärsivällistä luottavaa odotusta ei
koskaan voisi kullalla maksaa.
Kysymykset ja mietteet risteilevät yksitoikkoisessa kiertokulussa.

Minä alan ja lopetan samalla tavalla, päivät pääksytysten.
Hän ei rakasta tuota toista; minun kanssani olisi hän voinut tulla
onnelliseksi, ajattelen ensin — mutta sitten:
Onko kenelläkään oikeutta tulla onnelliseksi rikotun lupauksen

kautta?
Voipiko sitä tullakaan onnelliseksi, kun saavuttaa onnensa toisen

onnen kustannuksella? Ei, mutta nyt olen minä onneton, tuo toinen
saavuttaa onnensa minun ja hänen kustannuksella. Voipiko siis tuo
toinenkaan tulla onnelliseksi?
Eikö hänen olisi pitänyt esittää asia hänelle ja antaa hänen

päättää? — — Ei, ei, seitsemän vuoden uskollisuus ja miehen sana
painavat toisessa vaakalaudassa, minun onneni toisessa, ja se ei voi
nousta niitten tasalle.
Sydämeni lemmitty, tee niinkuin muutkin. Syö, juo, tee

velvollisuutesi, ajattele vähän äläkä tunne mitään; toimita lapsia
itsellesi ja kuole!
Ja kuitenkaan en saata muuta luulla, kuin että sinä vuosien

vieriessä jäät yhä enemmän yksin. Minä näen sinut yksin
lukuhuoneessasi; älykkäät silmäsi ovat väsyneet ja sinä nojaat pääsi
kättäsi vasten.
Ehkä muistelet minua joskus, sillä unohtaa et sinä minua voi, olen
siksi paljon rakastanut sinua.
Tiedän kyllä, että suruni kerran tyyntyy, ehkä piankin; tiedän, että
ihminen unohtaa jo ennenkuin tahtookaan. Tiedän, että elämä tuo
mukanaan monenlaisia velvollisuuksia, monenlaisia hommia, kunnes
vanhuuden tautinen hämäryys viimein päättyy lepoon.
Tiedän edelleen, että monet, jotka ovat tulleet yhteen rakkaudesta,

eroavat vihassa ja että vieläkin useammat pysyvät yhdessä
tottumuksesta ja veltosta välinpitämättömyydestä. Tiedän, kuinka
vähän aikaa lemmen intohimo kestää, tiedän sen; tiedän tuon
kaiken; — mutta mitä se auttaa, kun tunteet ovat nuorekkaat ja
haavaa kirveltää?
Lokakuu.
Huokausten kuukausi.
Sade pärskyi ikkunoihin ja virtasi ränneistä ja katoilta; ei

ainoatakaan häiritsevää auringonsädettä näkynyt leikkimässä lattian
valkeilla laudoilla. — Olen ollut sairas ja emäntäni on hoitanut minua
näppärän keijukaisen tavoin. Aavistiko hän syyn tautiini, sitä en
tiedä: emme puhuneet siitä. Julkisesti kutsuttiin sitä influensaksi.
Olen jälleen ollut pystyssä muutaman päivän. — Puutarhan

viimeinen kukka on lasissa vierelläni: se on märkä ja paleltunut
orvokki, jossa enää on tuskin mitään jälellä kesäistä tuoksua ja eloa.
Eilen menin päättävästi ikkunaan. Vastapäätä olivat uutimet

lasketut alas, kukaan ei siellä asunut. Näin edessäni tuon tyhjän
huoneen, ilman kirjoja, ilman papereita, huonekalut jäykästi seiniä
myöten — ilman häntä!
Kyyneleeni vuotivat, mutta en enää rukoillut saada häntä jälleen

nähdä, en enää rukoillut onnea.
Huolimatta toiveista, haluista ja kaipuista kulkee elämä säädettyä

rataa. Se oli minun kohtaloni, että hänen tiensä koskettaisi minun
tietäni.
En viipynyt kauvaa ikkunan ääressä, vaan menin takaisin

nojatuoliini pesän luo, jossa tuli räiskyi ja lämmitti. Kirkas liekki
tervehti minua niin lämpimästi tullessani ikkunan kylmyydestä, ja
ensi kertaa kesän jälkeen tunsin vähäistä mielihyvän tunnetta. Se oli
vaan heikko heijastus häviämättömästä elämänhalusta, joka
intohimossa nousee huippuunsa ja joka ei sammu, ennenkuin sielun
ja ruumiin tuskat ovat hävittäneet kaikki fyysilliset voimat.
Päivemmällä tuli minua tervehtimään naimisissa oleva

ystävättäreni ja nuori rouva, jolla oli odottava katse.
Ystävättäreni tukeva kukkeus muistutti daaliata, jonka

säännöllinen, kehittynyt kukanterä on porvarillisen hyvinvoinnin
perikuva. Hän säälitteli minua, sanoi että näytin kalpealta ja että
lepäsin niin heikkona tuolissani. Ilahuttaaksensa minua kertoi hän
hullunkurisia tapauksia kodistaan ja lastenkamarista.
Toinen istui aivan ääneti vieressä; hänellä ei ollut sellaisia

kokemuksia, ja kun katsoin häneen, huomasin, että odottavaa
katsetta ei enää ollutkaan, vaan että silmät sumenivat, kun tuli
lastenkamarista puhe. Hän oli siis toivonut lasta — niin, niin, — —
olihan se kyllä parasta, mutta aivan samaa en tosin ajatellut, kun
ensikerran hänet näin.
Raikkaan lumen tuoksu tuli toisen nuoren iloisen naisen mukana

huoneeni riutuvaan ilmastoon. Se sai minut väsyneesti
kummastelemaan, kannattiko todella kärsiä niin paljon, kun voisi
ottaa sattumalta itselleen miehen ja tulla tyytyväiseksi, niinkuin hän.
— Voisihan siis elämä muodostua siedettäväksi kylläkin, jos vaan
ottaisi sen, mitä tarjolla oli, eikä antaisi niin paljon, että itse köyhtyisi.
Voipiko minusta koskaan tulla niin maailman viisasta?
En tiedä.
Marraskuu.
Emäntäni, täti Agnetan luona on vieras ja juuri tänään on hän

kukitetuin lausein sanonut minulle, että tuo vieras sopisi niin hyvin
mieheksi minulle — minulle, joka tänään olen sanomalehdestä
lukenut kihlausilmotuksen, jossa armaani nimi oli toisen rinnalla —!
Voi sinua, elämän surkea komediia!
Nyt tahtoo täti Agneta olla regissöörinäni ja järjestää minulle sen
onnen, jota kaipaan. Luulenpa, että hän ihan tarkoituksella on
pyytänyt kunnon veljenpoikansa luoksensa siksi aikaa, kun tämä
oleskelee täällä puhumassa lääkäreitten kanssa huonoista pää- ja
käsivarsihermoistaan.
Hän on ollut täällä jo parisen viikkoa, on tyyni ja hiljainen keski-

ikäinen virkamies, silmät surumielisen hyväntahtoiset. —
Keskinkertainen mitä lukuihin ja matkustuksiin tulee. — Kun hän on
tunnin kuluttanut lääkärin odotushuoneessa ja sitten viisi minuuttia
saanut sähköä, käyttää hän loput aikaansa huvittaaksensa itseänsä
ja meitä, perusteellisesti ja raskaasti, sillä sellainen hän on.
Aina kun emme seuraa häntä ulos, jää tuo kunnon pormestari
kotiin ja pitää meille uskollisesti seuraa.
Toisinaan iltasin, kun päivä on huvituksissa kulunut, olen ihmetellyt

itseäni, että olen voinut laskea leikkiä ja nauraa. Olen hävennyt sitä
puhtaasti eläimellistä elämänhalua, joka kiiltoa nostaa silmiin ja
ruusuja poskille. — Mutta syvimmällä syvyydessä piilee kuitenkin
oma todellinen minäni, joka suree ja katselee väsyneen halveksivasti
ja veltolla hämmästyksellä tuota vale-iloa.
Joulukuu.
Kummallinen maailma!
Hiljattain näin armaani naimailmotuksen — purin hampaani yhteen

ja tukehutin tuskanhuudon. Ja samana päivänä kysyi minulta toinen

Full Chapter Imagined Sovereignties The Power of The People and Other Myths of The Modern Age Kevin Olson PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Full Chapter Imagined Sovereignties The Power of The People and Other Myths of The Modern Age Kevin Olson PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Imagined Sovereignties The Power of

the People and Other Myths of the

The Ring of Truth: And Other Myths of Sex and Jewelry

Surviving the Machine Age: Intelligent Technology and

The spread of modern industry to the periphery since

People Forests and Change Lessons from the Pacific

Myths of Branding: A Brand is Just a Logo, and Other

Only The Dead: The Persistence Of War In The Modern Age

The Other Abyssinians The Northern Oromo and the

The Pope and the professor : Pius IX, Ignaz von

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

I’m fortunate to have many talented and wonderful colleagues. My daily

The importance of popular politics has not been without ambivalence,

Folk Paradigms of Politics

movements and political insurgencies. More prosaically, the judgment of a jury

however, it exemplifies something bigger and more important. Similarly, pro-

in Richard Falk’s compact phrase, is “a state-centric, sovereignty-oriented, ter-

of the principal collectivities in which the power of the people is expressed)

Problematizing Popular Politics

increasing vulnerability of subjects everywhere to global economic vicissitudes

contemporary Western politics. We see them as having a kind of natural recti-

The Archive of Popular Politics

“Sovereignty Is an Artificial Soul”

For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH,

The well-known frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan speaks volumes

shape of a person. Such a people cannot literally become a single individual,

characterization has the advantage of elucidating important forms of populist

of Hobbes’s frontispiece in this regard but radicalizes it even a step further.

antagonisms, and collective identities. Laclau pulls this material together in

Nyt me rakastamme toisiamme; nyt omaamme toisemme; nyt

Olen polvistunut hurmaavasta kiitollisuudesta siksi, että hän on

Kun kesäillat pitenivät, istuimme mekin kauvemmin keskustellen.

Olimme molemmat yksin maailmassa. Emäntäni oli matkustanut

Pienen puutarhatilkun ympärillä törröttivät talot liidutuin, sokein

Koko päivän työskentelin ja uneksin — uneksin ja harmittelin

Pieni oka painautuu sydämeeni ja pistää, kun muistan, että minä

»Sanokaa minulle,» virkoin nopeasti, kun pitkä vaitiolo oli nostanut

Sanani herättivät myrskyn, jonka hillitsemätöntä vauhtia en olisi

»Ystävät?» sanoi hän hiljaisella tukahutetulla äänellä. »Ei! Emme

Hän veti minut tiukasti luoksensa ja aivan kuin hurmaantuneena

Päivät, jotka seurasivat, eivät olleet pitkiä. Aamusta iltaan

»Tulethan illalla alas, niinkuin ennenkin, rakkaani?» — Ja minä

Hymyillen olen ajatellut, että samoja sanoja lausuvat kaikki miehet

Mutta turhamainen sydän iloitsee kuitenkin jokaisesta hellästä

Ja kuitenkaan ei parhain ole sanoissa: se on äänen sävyssä,

Naisten tapaan kysyn, kun hän kauvan on istunut ääneti, käsi

»En ajattele mitään, tunnen vaan. Tunnen olentosi läheisyyttä,

Ja minä saatan vain painaa pääni hänen rintaansa ja tuntea, että

Maljakkoni on täynnä primuloita; älkööt ne liian pian kuihtuko!

Kaksikymmentä pitkää kesäpäivää häiritsemättömässä onnessa!

Kun kaksikymmentä päivää on kulunut, täytyy meidän erota;

Hänellä ei ole isää, ei äitiä eikä sisaruksia. Sen verran tiedän,

Hän sitävastoin — ah, hän saa tietää jokaisen ajatuksen

Siinä suhteessa on hän sellaisen miehekkyyden perikuva, joka itse

Olin nimittäin kuvitellut miestä, joka ymmärtäisi ja ehkäpä myöskin

No niin, hänen tulisi matkustaa, ja minä olisin sillä aikaa

Mutta päivät olivat pitkät, yöt pitemmät ja epäilyksien

Muistelin nyt, että kaikkien niitten hellien sanojen joukossa, joita

Itkin pitkinä, valoisina kesäöinä, jolloin epäluulo ja luottamus

Kun erosimme, olimme sopineet, että kymmenen päivän päästä

Hänen otsansa oli poimuissa, huulet puserretut kapeaksi viivaksi

Pitkän aikaa seisoimme ääneti vastatusten, sitten kiedoin itkien

Mutta tämän kohtaamisen jälkeen tiesin ja tunsin minä, että hän