Constituent Power, Constituent Rights: Thinking Rights with Spinoza and Negri

While the concept of constituent power is central to democratic and radical political theory, its correlate— constituent rights —remains largely unexamined. This paper proposes a systematic theorization of constituent rights by revisiting Antonio Negri’s concept of constituent power through the lens of Baruch Spinoza’s principle of ius sive potentia (right or power). Although Negri draws extensively on Spinoza to conceptualize constituent power as an immanent and productive force, he leaves underdeveloped the parallel notion of rights as equally constituent. I argue that if power is irreducible and inalienable in Spinoza’s metaphysics, so too are rights. The concept of constituent rights, then, resists the foreclosure and enclosure imposed by juridico-political orders, and thereby also points us toward the existence of rights in immanent practices, regardless of their legal recognition or institutionalization.