and so on, is not a straightforward competition or a relationship of mutual enablement
only.
Any politics is partly spatial, asserting a ground and taking something as
given, even if only temporarily. Yet, spatialisation not only limits openness and
temporality, it also makes them possible. The politics of constitutional democracy
cannot proceed as either closure or openness, as either depoliticisation or
politicisation, or as either constitutionalism or democracy. We therefore need a site of
contestation, but paradoxically it must at the same time be a non-site, a site that does
not spatialise and frame contestation. The site must also itself be at stake. The
ambition is to think this site as a point where constitutionalism and democracy are
articulated; a site or space whose identity is at once different from itself and deferred,
deterritorialised and temporalised. Honig provides an example of such a site with her
reference to the clause in the Canadian constitution ‘that allows provinces to opt out
of constitutionally binding decisions for five years’.
It is not a site that would stop
the vicious circularity or infinite regress of constitutional democracy. On the contrary,
without these there would be no constitutional democracy for the future. If there is a
motto for this deconstructive constitutional democratic politics it is this: keep open the
gap between constitutionalism and democracy.
One must, of course, resist the fetishisation of undecidability; it cannot
become a new ground. Likewise, the names I have given to the aporias in Habermas’s
texts – undecidability, iterability, différance – are ways of accounting for the aporias,
but they do not claim to be the last word, nor could they be. Like reading and
philosophising, constitutional democracy is ‘a bizarre, even opaque practice’ (LD
192).
44
Honig, ‘Dead Rights, Live Futures’, 801. Compare Derrida’s deconstruction of the khôra in Jacques
Derrida, ‘Khôra’, trans. Ian McLeod, in idem., On the Name (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1995).
45
Näsström, ‘What Globalization Overshadows’, 829; and Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox
(London: Verso, 2000).
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Convention