DISSENT AS A SOURCE AND VANISHING POINT FOR LAW

Abstract

The political and ideological function of law is nourished by dissent as "feeling differently," which thus becomes a category of the pre-conceptual order. Dissent as origin introduces, by structure, the undecidable nature of law and democracy. It is their source and their vanishing point. The dissensual modality constitutes the cement of a critical democratic law that: epochally determines which bodies are excluded and which are not; that legitimizes hegemonies while enabling counter-hegemonies; and that provides the logos while silencing it. The word democracy, so harassed today by authoritarianism, conformism, reflexive emptiness, and the automation of desire, suffers from a conceptual overload, which can connect it both with popular movements and with dramatically authoritarian strategies. This reinforces our ethical responsibility to seek its last and indispensable layer of meaning, which, from our perspective, is given by dissent, that "feeling different" that nourishes the political function of law. Our questions about the category of dissent respond to a growing concern about a power that has become hegemonic, undermining and diluting its resistant vein. Thematizing dissent (resistance, demand, protest) means returning to power and law the agonistic interplay essential for the development of their democratic power.