s0metim3s writes:

"Critique of Formal Democracy and Representation"

Alessandro Pandolfi

War is what allows the populist sovereign to realise the identification between poeple and sovereignty. War is the use by sovereignty of communication, what I call poverty: the fact of not having the option to subtract oneself form a mechanism where the will of all is immediately the will of the sovereign.

Sovereignty and multitude break this Janus but insist on the same points, and constitute the real. Our teachers told us that this relation is an absolute dualism, between command and the multitude the same tensions arise. Both from the side of command and of multitude we have exited representation (for all the reasons we know already). But why has the multitude exited from representation? There are reasons to believe the multitude is a non representative subject.

First, the multitude must be kept in political passivity and in productive activism, active in production and consumption. It is the most active subject ever conceived in the history materialist production. Second, the latitude of the multitude is unlimited. There is no political codified status to it. The political is all in production, as Virno says, and this makes political representation intolerable. Thirdly, disobedience has no relation to representaiton because it contests the fundamental law of sovereignty: the princile of political obligation. Fourthly exodus, we try and build new grammars, so how can we go to parliament and dislocate the issues of a political argument? It can only mean not accepting the very parliamentary representaiton itself. Fifthly the relation between norm and life: in the multitude the norm is no longer transcendent but rather it is life norm, the path life gives itself as it goes along. So how is this representable?

[The rest of the translation, by Arianna Bove, is here: Generations Online ]