Quotes 2017 #58

"Far from engaging in a philosophy of a subject, Michelet and Quinet think of the people in light of their problematic---for always deferred---identity. Rather than embodying a self-presence, the people either are ABOVE themselves---the people in the heroic state that establish themselves in the very invention of liberty---or they are BELOW themselves, when the experience of liberty threatens to revert into its opposite, namely servitude. In short, never coinciding with themselves, never equal to themselves, the people are simultaneously where they are manifest, and where they come to existence, confronted with the ordeal of an insurmountable self-discrepancy. A discrepancy that would wrongly be considered a shortcoming, for it is quite certainly by this deficiency, and by maintaining it, that the opportunities for an anti-authoritarian city are encountered."

Miguel Abensour, Democracy Against the State.