The Aesthetic Meanings of Political Representation: Mandate and Incarnation

What is political representation? This question does not have a univocal answer, as representation is a word with many different meanings. The English word representation (but same is for the French word représentation) can be alternatively used to refer to the representation of a drama play or a movie, the representation of economic interests or the political role of an elected representative. Relying on the work of theorists of representation such as Hanna Pitkin and Hasso Hofmann, the paper analyses the role of aesthetics in two specific semantic definitions of representation that have been historically crucial for political representation: mandate and incarnation. For Hofmann, representation as mandate looks at the representative mechanism as a vector of identity in which there has to be likeness of views and/or wills between a represented and a representative (what the medieval Italian legal theorists called personarum identitas, an identity of personalities). In contrast, representation as incarnation (for example in its medieval form of Identity Representation) entails the idea that the relation between representative and represented must be rooted in a complex symbolic relation (that is modelled on the theological doctrine of the Trinity). The act of incarnation is based on an original represented that is invisible but, at the same time, must pervade the representative through the process of representation. Mandate and incarnation present two different meanings that are based on a different interpretation of the act of ‘making present’. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the role of these two different meanings, and their corresponding aesthetic theories, in the contemporary debate on democratic representation.