Итог полностью

It is the process of delegation which, because it is forgotten and ignored, becomes the source of political alienation. Delegates and ministers, in the sense of ministers of religion or ministers of state, are, according to Marx's formula about fetishism, among those •products of the human brain [which] appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own'. Political fetishes are people, things, beings, which seem to owe to themselves alone an existence that social agents have given to them; those who create the delegate adore their own creature. Political idolatry consists precisely in the fact that the value which resides in the political personality, that product of men’s brains, appears as a mysterious objective property of the person, a charm, charisma: the ministerium appears as a mysterium. Here again I could quote Marx, cunt grano salts, of course, since his analyses of fetishism were clearly - and quite justifiably - not meant to explain political fetishism. Marx said, in the same famous passage: ‘Value does not wear a statement of what it is written on its own brow.' That is the very definition of charisma, that sort of power which seems to be its own source. Charisma, in Weber’s definition, is that fe ne sais quot' which is its own foundation - gift, grace, mana. etc.

Thus, delegation is the act by which a group undertakes to constitute itself by endowing itself with that set of things which create groups, in other words, a permanent office and party officials, a bureau in all senses of the word, and first of all in the sense of a bureaucratic mode of organization, with its own seal, acronym, signature, delegation of signature, official rubber-stamp, etc. (as in the case of the Politburo). The group exists when it has provided itself with a permanent organ of representation endowed with the plena potentia agendi and the sigilium authenticum, and is thus capable of substituting itself (to speak for somebody is to speak in their place) for the serial group, made up of separated and isolated individuals, in a slate of constant renewal, being able to act and speak only for themselves. The second act of delegation, which is far better concealed and to which I will have to return, is the act by which the social reality thus constituted, the Party, the Church, etc., mandates an individual. 1 use the term ‘bureaucratic mandate’ on purpose, to refer to the secretary (bureau or office goes together well with secretary), the minister, the general secretary, etc. It is no longer the mandator who chooses his delegate, but the bureau which mandates a plenipotentiary. I will be exploring this sort of black box: first, the transition from atomistic subjects to the bureau, and second, the transition from the bureau to the secretary. To analyse

these two mechanisms, we have a paradigm: that of the Church. The Church, and through it each of its members, possesses the 'monopoly of the legitimate manipulation of the goods of salvation’. Delegation in this case is the act by which the Church (and not mere believers) delegates to the minister the power to act in its place.