"Something of popular sovereignty remains untranslatable, nontransferable, and even unsubstitutable, which is why it can both elect and dissolve regimes. As much as popular sovereignty legitimates parliamentary forms of power, it also retains the power to withdraw its support from those same forms when they prove to be illegitimate...In other words, the conditions of democratic rule depend finally on an exercise of popular sovereignty that is never fully contained or expressed by any particular democratic order, but which is the condition of its democratic character. This is an extraparliamentary power without which no parliament can function legitimately, and that threatens every parliament with dysfunction or even dissolution. We may again want to call it an “anarchist” interval or a permanent principle of revolution that resides within democratic orders, one that show up more or less both at moments of founding and moments of dissolution, but is also operative in the freedom of assembly itself." (Butler. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.)
