Unity Vs. Plurality: When Representative Claims Collide

As Jan-Werner Müller has outlined, populists claim that they – and only they – represent “the people”. However, when populist and democratic “representative claims “ collide, the conflict seems not to be just between unity and plurality, between a homogeneous “people” and a diverse population, or between simplicity and complexity. Moreover, there is a profound asymmetry at work that is grounded in the different relations that these two claims have to aesthetic and rhetorical representation. Whereas the populist representation has a long tradition of symbolic figures and schemes of making the ethnos visible, the representation of the demos seems to be almost aporetic.