请翻译成通顺、自然、准确的汉语，But isn’t there any other line of thought capable of appreciating the radicalness of constituent power without drowning it in the philistinism of traditional juridical theory? In attempting an answer, we start from a particular conviction (which we will try to confirm historically and construct theoretically throughout this work) that the truth of constituent power is not what can be attributed to it, in any way whatsoever, by the concept of sovereignty. It cannot be so, because constituent power is not only, obviously, an emanation of constituted power, but it is not even the institution of constituted power. It is, rather, an act of choice, the precise determination that opens a horizon, the radical apparatus of something that does not yet exist, and whose conditions of existence imply that the creative act does not lose its characteristics in the act of creating. When constituent power sets in motion the constituent process, every determination is free and remains free. On the contrary, sovereignty presents itself as a fixing of constituent power, and therefore as its ter-mination, as the exhaustion of the freedom that constituent power carries: oboedientia facit auctoritatem. No, the phrase “expression of strength” can never mean “institution of power.”
But at the very moment when strength gets instituted it ceases being strength and thus declares itself as never having been such. There is only one correct (and paradoxical) condition for a definition of sovereignty linked to that of constituent power: that it exists as the praxis of a constitutive act, renewed in freedom, organized in the continuity of a free praxis. But this contradicts the entire tradition of the concept of sovereignty and all its possible meanings. Consequently, the concept of sovereignty and that of constitutive power stand in absolute opposition. We can thus conclude that if an independent way of developing the concept of constituent power exists, it has excluded any reference to the concept of sovereignty. It relies, rather, on the basis of constituent power itself and tries to unravel from this and nothing else every constitutional consequence.
Let’s try once again to measure the density of the concept by comparing it to other theoretical positions. We can begin with a crucial and irreducible claim: when strength is institutionalized, it is necessarily negated. By this claim we open a polemic with institutionalism, and in particular with the most sophisticated forms it has assumed in recent times.74 Breaking with Arendt’s Heideggerian ambiguities, the institutionalism of the contemporary supporters of the “invention of the social” or of the “model of the polis” does not come closer but, rather, grows more distant from the radicalness of the concept. Indeed, the organic continuity of the institutional process in this case relies on a purely ideological basis — as if the most sacred principles and fundamental rights could lay claim to historical causality and ontological effectiveness and were not instead made real by the same crisis that, by embodying them, makes them great and important. This, however, is not the point. We must instead make clear that constituent power, from the perspective of its orig- inary radicalness, cannot be conceived satisfactorily as a formal process of the constitution of freedom. It is not an elan vital that realizes itself in institutionality;75 it is not an act that, by determining itself, becomes more and more actual;76 neither is it a fusion of wills that like a superheated metal congeals in a constitutional figure.77 In other words, beyond the apologetic banalities of contemporary institutionalism, any philosophy that even heroically has an institutionalist outcome must be refused if we want to grasp the strength of the constituent principle. This is because in the constitutive act there is never any vertical and totalitarian dimension. The active elements are, rather, resistance and desire, an ethical impulse and a constructive passion, an articulation of the sense of the insufficiency of existence and a deeply vigorous reaction to an unbearable absence of being.
In these elements strength takes shape as constituent power: not to seek institutionality but to construct more being—ethical being, social being, community.78 Once again we discover the extremely close and profound link between constituent power and democracy. The desire for community is the spirit and soul of constituent power — the desire for a community that is as thoroughly real as it is absent, the trajectory and motor of a movement whose essential determination is the demand of being, repeated, pressing on an absence.79 “What is potent can be and not be.”80
Here we have rediscovered the relation between constituent power and absolute procedure. Rediscovering this relationship, after considering how many substantial offenses and mystifications have been imposed on it, allows us to reflect with new eyes on the originary radicalness of the concept. What does constituent power mean if its essence cannot be reduced to constituted power but must, rather, be grasped in its originary productivity? It means, first of all, the establishment of a continuous relationship between constituent power and revolution, an intimate and circular relation such that where there is constituent power there is also revolution. Neither constituent power nor revolution has ever come to an end when they have been internally connected. This notion takes us back to the historical origins of the concept of constituent power. The term was probably introduced for the first time during the American Revolution,81 but it belongs to the development of Renaissance political thought from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries as an ontological notion of the formative capacity of historical movement.82 Even when the idea of revolution appears to be subjected to the power of the stars or to the necessity of the Polybian cycle of political regimes — “I have seen in the revolution a circular motion”83 — even then it constitutes “le fond mobile de la science humaine,” the foundation of the new science that constitutes history.84
After 1789, revolution and constituent power step on to the great stage of history and modern thought as indissoluble characteristics of transformative human activity. When we speak of revolution, we speak of constituent power.
Figures of rebellion, resistance, transformation, creation, the construction of time (accelerated, programmed, extended time), and the invention of law are bound together in this synthesis. Revolution is necessary, as necessary as the human need to be moral, to constitute oneself ethically, to free body and mind from slavery, and constituent power is the means toward this end.85
From this point of view the relation between revolution and law, between revolution and constitution becomes a continuum on which what exceeds the rational is represented by revolution. The law and the constitution follow constituent power: constituent power gives rationality and substance to the law.86 Constituent power stands as a revolutionary extension of the human capacity to construct history, as a fundamental act of innovation, and therefore as absolute procedure. The process started by constituent power never stops. The question is not to limit constituent power, but to make it unlimited. The only possible concept of constitution is that of revolution: precisely, constituent power as absolute and unlimited procedure. Condorcet comes near this concept when, in 1793, he defines the “loi revolutionnaire” as “that law that starts, accelerates, and rules the course of the revolution,” thus understanding that the law gives shape to the temporal flux of the revolution and actively designs itself on its modality.87 The Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1793 repeats this concept when it regards citizens’ rights as active in the constitutional schema and recognizes in this activity the motor of social democracy.88 The Marquis de Sade is in perfect agreement when, with far-sighted cruelty, he incites his readers to that “necessary insurrection in which the republican constantly holds the government of which he is member.”89 In this context it is not surprising that in 1789, in the midst of the counterrevolutionary campaign, Immanuel Kant proposed considering the revolution as an educational process and as a cultural action with extensive and profound effects on the whole human environment, a process that constitutes the “commonality of ends.”90