The aristocrats of intelligence find that there are truths which should not be told to the people. As a revolutionary socialist, and a sworn enemy of all aristocracies and all tutelage, i believe on the contrary that the people must be told everything. There is no other way to restore to them their full liberty.
Mikhail Bakunin
The delegation through which one person gives power, as the saying goes, to another, the transference of power through which a mandator authorizes a mandatary to sign on his behalf, to act on his behalf, to speak on his behalf, and gives him the power of a proxy, in other words the plena potentia agendi, full power to act for him, is a complex act which deserves some reflection. The plenipotentiary, minister, mandatary, delegate, spokesperson, deputy or member of parliament is a person who has a mandate, a commission or a power of proxy, to represent - an extraordinarily polysemic word - in other words, to show and throw into relief the interests of a person or a group. But if it is true that to delegate is to entrust a function or a mission to someone, by transmitting one’s power to him, the question arises as to how the delegate can have power over the person who gives him power. When the act of delegation is performed by a single person in favour of a single person, things are relatively clear. But when a single person is entrusted with the powers of a whole crowd of people, that person can be invested with a power which transcends each of the individuals who delegate him. And, thereby, he can be as it were an incarnation of that sort of transcendence of the social that the Durkheimians have frequently pointed out.
But that is not the whole truth, and the relation of delegation risks concealing the truth of the relation of representation and the paradox of the situations in which a group can exist only by delegation to an individual person - the general secretary, the Pope, etc. - who can act as a moral person, that is, as a substitute for the group. In all these cases (following the formula established by canon lawyers, 'the Church is the Pope’), in appearance (he group creates the man who speaks in its place and in its name - to put it that way is to think in terms of delegation - whereas in reality it is more or less just as true to say that it is the spokesperson who creates the group. It is because the representative exists, because he represents (symbolic action), that the group that is represented and symbolized exists and that in return it gives existence to its representative as the representative of a group. One can see in this circular relation the root of the illusion which results in the fact that, ultimately, the spokesperson may appear, even in his own eyes, as causa sui, since he is the cause of that which produces his power, since the group which makes of him someone invested with powers would not exist -or at least, would not exist fully, as a represented group - if he were not there to incarnate it.
This sort of original circle of representation has been concealed: it has been replaced by hundreds of questions, the commonest of them being the question of the 'awakening of consciousness'. The question of political fetishism has been concealed, as has the process through which individuals constitute themselves (or are constituted) as a group but at the same lime lose control over the group in and through which they are constituted. There is a sort of antinomy inherent in the political sphere which stems from the fact that individuals - and this is all the more true the more they are deprived -cannot constitute themselves (or be constituted) as a group, that is, as a force capable of making itself heard, of speaking and being heard, unless they dispossess themselves in favour of a spokesperson. One must always risk political alienation in order to escape from political alienation. (In reality, this antinomy really exists only for the dominated. One might say, for the sake of simplicity, that the dominant always exist, whereas the dominated exist only if they mobilize or avail themselves of instruments of representation. Except perhaps in the times of restoration which follow great crises, it is in the interests of the dominant to leave things alone, to allow agents, who need merely to be responsible in order to be rational and reproduce the established order, to pursue their independent and isolated strategies.)
