°Populi
Speaking of populism, a fragment of a draft on a fragment on politics:
Nancy writes that “our entire history” seems to show that the empty figure of the citizen is persistently turned over to the identifications of the subject. And, he adds, “democracy without identification” would “be without any demos or kratein of its own” (1997:108). Subject and citizen represent—as Nancy will insist in the second fragment on ‘politics’ (1997)—“two postures of the claim to sovereignty and the institution of community.” The citizen folds into the “politics of the modern subject”, as the “laicised theology, or if one prefers, a romanticised theology, of the ‘people’, ‘history’, and ‘humanity’.” Nancy emphasises that it is “the word people” which marks the turn of the citizen—who otherwise circulates as “a mobile complex of rights”—toward the theological ground of the subject. He asks, and goes on to answer in the affirmative, whether the citizen and subject “are not in an intimate solidarity or connivance.”
