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others to cultivate whatever internal resources lay beyond, rather than within, the structural
determinants of contemporary political despair.
Conclusion
The founding acts Zhang alludes to here, then, are both ongoing across time and
dispersed across space. For these reasons, such founding can be read into everyday political
action, but it warns against the reverse possibility of interpolating everyday political action into
founding acts. Emphasizing circularity or the already-there as a means of assuaging founding‘s
paradoxes would dissolve all possibility of true founding: what generates and motivates sagely
founding is not the sages‘ intuitive manipulation of commonly shared principles or ideas, but
their critical distance from those ideas. Zhang‘s response to the paradoxes of founding therefore
can be said to bank on both innovation and continuity; it refuses to accept as a goal or a premise
the impossibly autonomous self, but it insists that individual interventions in political life—those
actions that both found political regimes and sustain them—can and must lie beyond the
predictable margins of an established political community and its set of habits. Founding is a
process that, while never existing apart from a socially constructed milieu mutually constituted
by both institutions and individuals, remains irreducibly individual.
This is not to say that conflating or at least interpellating the acts that found a regime with
the acts that sustain it does not perform an important service; for one, it helps agonistic theorists
like Honig and Pitkin resist attempts by liberal social contract theorists to confine debates over
justice, rights, social change and the like to theoretical realms removed from real and ongoing
political contestation (Turner Forthcoming, 4). This particular interpretation of ―founding‖
Convention