Betraying “Representation”. Or the king has not yet been guillotined. Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault’s radical critique of juridical-contractual “democracy”

Abstract

The political concept of (indirect) “representation” and the juridical concept of “person” mutually support each other in a reciprocal co-determination. The task that modern philosophers carried out in the philosophical-political field was twofold: while they built a “science of the State”, they built a concept of “subject of law” (or “juridical person”), that is, a very specific mode of production of human subjectivation. Thus, they supported and justified both one mode of social organization (the State) and one mode of production of human subjectivation (the citizen, who became a “free” salaried worker and consumer). The present work aims to investigate the concepts of (indirect) “democracy” and “representation” as they were produced by the modern juridical-contractual conception, especially the one expressed in the more “classical” texts of social and politics philosophy: in them, everything is captured and integrated into a grid of contractual and fiduciary relationships (of power) —whose formula is do ut des (formula of the exchange)—; a grid that reduces the ‘people’ to the status of a formless mass (the “multitude” or “populace”) incapable of direct, active and collective self-government (selfemancipation), and therefore, to a rejection of direct democracy. We will cross this analysis with Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of current democracy and the position of representation and dirigisme.