Итог полностью

I am going to take an example from the most humdrum and ordinary sphere of politics, that which we see in front of us every day. I am doing this so as to make myself understood but also at the risk of being understood too easily, with that sort of common half-understanding which is the principal obstacle to true understanding. The difficulty, in sociology, is to manage to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood. Thai is why you sometimes have to begin with the most difficult things in order to understand the easier things properly. That brings me to my example: during the events of May 1968, we saw the emergence of a certain M. Bayet who, throughout those famous ‘days’, continued to speak on behalf of agrees in his capacity as president of the Societe des agr^s. a society which, at least at that time, had practically no base. There we have a typical case of usurpation with a person who makes other people believe (but who? the press, al least, which recognizes and knows only spokespersons, condemning everyone else to their ’personal opinions') that he has ‘behind him’ a group by virtue of the fact that he can speak in their name, in his capacity as a ‘moral

person', without being contradicted by anyone. (Here we reach the limits: the fewer supporters he has, the more protected he may be from contradiction, the absence of any contradiction demonstrating in fact the absence of supporters.) What can be done against someone like that? You can protest publicly, or you can draw up a petition. When members of the Communist Party want to get rid of their Politburo, they are relegated to the serial, to recurrence, to the status of isolated individuals who have to find a spokesperson for themselves, then an office, then a group in order io get rid of the spokesperson, the office and the group. (This is what most movements, and in particular socialist movements, have always denounced as the capital sin - namely, ‘factionalism’.) In other words, what can one do to combat the usurpation of authorized spokespersons? There are, of course, individual solutions against all the ways of being crushed by the collective: ‘exit and voice’, as Albert Hirschman says, in other words, leaving or protesting. But one may also establish another organization. If you look at newspapers of the period, you will see that, around 20 May 1968, another Societe des agrees appeared, with a general secretary, a seal, an office, etc. There's no escaping it.

So delegation - this sort of originary act of constitution tn both the philosophical and political senses of the word - is an act of magic which enables what was merely a collection of several persons, a series of juxtaposed individuals, to exist in the form of a fictitious person, a corporatio, a body, a mystical body incarnated in a social body, which itself transcends the biological bodies which compose it ('corpus corporatum in corpore corporaio').

'The only way [for men| to erect such a Common Power ... is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will: which is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or Assembly of men, to beare their Person; and every one to ownc. and acknowledge himselfe to he Author of whatsoever he that so beareth their Person, shall Act. or cause to be Acted, in those things which concerne the Common Peace and Safetie.'* In this passage from Leviathan, in which Hobbes describes the 'Generation of a Commonwealth', one can read one of the clearest and most concise formulations of the theory of unifying representation- the multitude of isolated individuals accedes to the status of a moral person when it finds, in the unified representation of its diversity given to it by its representative, the constitutive image of its unity; in other words, the multitude constitutes itself as a unity by recognizing itself in its unique representative.² Hobbes

is repeating or developing the doctrine of ‘corporation’ elaborated by thirteenth-century canonists, especially with regard to the Church, insisting only on the unifying effect which results from the uniqueness of the representative, being understood both as a plenipotentiary and as a symbol of the group, corpus unum of which he is the visible incarnation or. better, the manifestation in effigy.'¹

The Self-Consecration of the Delegate