Iroquois and the Athenians

The fundamental political gesture is the representation of the constitution of political community. The most fruitful avenue for philosophical exploration of this gesture is the discourses that sustain actual, empirical political communities, in this case, Iroquoia and Athens.The Iroquois and the Athenians attempts to construct an alternative to both the mythology of the social contract and the relativism of postmodern critics. It does so by exploring the logic of originary withdrawal at work in classical Iroquois and Athenian political practices. By starting with the traces of material discourses and with their repetition, these resources help philosophy cultivate a ',new' understanding of political necessity and of a political transcendental. Employing the term ',transcendental' in its Kantian sense as ',the condition of the possibility,' we suggest that in the place of a mythical reference to a state of nature or an act of the founding fathers, the true condition for the possibility of political legitimacy is the sense in which the political emerges only at the site of the withdrawal of nature which it is the work of the political act itself to produce.