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persons who can act together; otherwise, political action undertaken in the name or under the
auspices of the community becomes imposing or coercive, precisely that which by definition it
cannot be.
The act of a literal founding, on this account, appears violent and impositional, and so too
do the political actions in a mature regime that may mimic it. William Connolly warns that the
violence of a literal founding threatens to recur throughout democratic practice—in the form of
―a series of cruelties, dangers, and violences in the present that need to be addressed‖ (Connolly
1995, 137)—and can only be brought under control by a community understood to exist in
perpetuity, rather than deliberately constructed in a moment of spontaneity or force. Similar
wariness about the impositions of unilateral action prompts Hannah Arendt to look to mutual
promise-making as a self-constituting method of community formation, a move which
reinterprets polity-establishment as itself bound up with ongoing political practices rather than
episodic events (Arendt 1965). Her solution, like Connolly‘s, presumes a community—in this
particular case, one that already understands the political meaning and force of promising, and
engages in the practice regularly.
Rather than see these presumptions about already-existing communities as illogical,
however, Bonnie Honig argues that their very lack of foundation gestures toward—and helps to
further pry open—the gaps between performative capacity and transcendental referent that,
according to Jacques Derrida, is a structural foundation of all utterances (Honig 1991, 105).
These irresolvable gaps allow Honig to transform the moment of founding into a story about
everyday resistances to authority that, on her account, ironically figure as constitutive practices
of authorization (111). Others join Honig in insisting that legitimacy is not only the primary, but
the only problem of founding, because ―it would not be a problem to create an illegitimate
Convention