Out of time: does popular sovereignty contain emancipatory remainders?

Critical dissections of neoliberalism’s de-democratizing effects are ubiquitous today, both in the academy and in para-academic popular venues. Inès Valdez’s Democracy and Empire (2023) is a bracing rejoinder to this tendency and a welcome respite from its propensity to ‘mourn a form of popular politics that both lacked a radical critique of capitalism and related despotically to racial others’ (p. 58). My aim in these comments is to further radicalize Valdez’s criticisms. Shorn of their attachment to national elite projects of exploitation and imperial domination, I argue, appeals to popular sovereignty lose whatever force they once had. In a postcolonial world, in which the climate crisis, resource wars, and the world historical event of mass migration mark everything, calls for collective self-determination evaporate into a moral fog that obscures our vision without giving us any force by which to carry emancipatory projects forward.