Absorption as Lawgiving, Lawgiving as Identity

In the second chapter of The Democratic Sublime Frank suggests that the centrality of popular assembly for Rousseau’s political theory has not been fully understood. In a novel reading Frank suggests that the silent assembly is both the source of democratic autonomy and its necessary condition of possibility. This reading centres around the problem of the lawgiver. Frank reimagines lawgiving as an ongoing aesthetic and sublime operation through which we come to act in democratic concert. Such an aesthetics conceives of the lawgiver as a sublime practice that stages the self-authorising of popular sovereignty as an ongoing operation. Despite my agreement with this reading, I suggest that democratic sovereignty formulated in this way sides with an identification with the general over the particular and as such fails to avoid the violence reproduced in any popular sovereignty which lays claim to total representation. I argue that for democratic communities to avoid such violence we need to push Frank’s account further beyond a re-enacted ‘peopling’ towards a process of unravelling whereby the community always undoes its own self-imposed generality.