From constituent power to co-instituent resistance

insights from Negri and Arendt

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.1590/2179-8966/2025/93374

This article, drawing on the reflections of Antonio Negri and Hannah Arendt, discusses constituent power and resistance in the face of the crisis and instability of constitutional democracies. Negri and Arendt represent two distinct and thought-provoking attempts in political philosophy to conceive the relationship between constituent power and constituted powers, based on the premise that no synthesis exists between the two (nor between democracy and constitutionalism). In other words, it is a relationship that is internal, but not resolved in a synthesis. Constituent power and resistance—or constituent power as resistance—are concepts and practices that must be activated in contexts of attacks on constitutional democracies. It is from this perspective that the relevance of the discussion presented in this article emerges. The article is organized into three parts: the first presents the arguments of Arendt and Negri concerning constituent power and the necessity (or not) of its accommodation within a legal form; the second part, starting from the idea of constituent power as resistance, engages with and against Arendt and Negri to shift the theoretical reflection toward events and their contingencies, in order to rearrange the category of constituent power as a "power to" rather than a "power over." In the third part, the article offers some examples of resistance as collective action that exercises the "power to" and not the "power over"—more specifically, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic under the Bolsonaro’s administration.