The materiality of political jurisprudence

Political jurisprudence provides a reconstruction of the enabling conditions of public law and a methodology for the study of its meaning. This article offers a critical appraisal of political jurisprudence by understanding this approach as a further development in informal conceptions of modern constitutionalism. However, while praising the concrete aspects of right ordering at the core of political jurisprudence, this article claims that by neglecting material processes of subjectivation (and their impact in the determination of ultimate political aims), political jurisprudence betrays a residue of unintended formalism. In the last section, the article proposes, as a remedy for this deficit of materiality, to take up the idea of the material constitution as the starting point for constitutional analysis