The procedures of care – COVID-19 intervention in the process of reconstructing the meaning of political representation in Poland

Since 2015, pro-government media in Poland has been proposing the new understanding of political representation in the light of the government “politics of care”. The idea of linking concepts of “political representation” with “care” breaks with the assumptions of Hanna Pitkin (1967), who did not recognize care as an authentic form of political representation. Clearly, for the ruling Law and Justice “care” means something very different from Pitkin’s description or the individual principle of ethical development as clarified by Carol Gilligan (1982). Rather, it is a central point in a hegemonic strategy that ties into a single discursive structure supporters of increased welfare, extensive state projects, and the revival of national pride (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). On the level of party politics, what the government describes as the historic empowerment of the people, its liberal critics see as downgrading of political representation to a form of ideological cover for the network of political patronage (Markowski, 2016). The debate announces an epistemic cut, the rejection of a specific project of political representation that arose as a dialectical reaction to the "ontology of socialism" (Staniszkis, 1989). The introduced "procedures of care" had the power to both reconstruct the political scene - a new division into solidary and liberal Poland - and change the rules of political subjectivization. The scope of this power, however, has changed with the onset of the pandemic. In my paper, I will try to analyse the interference of COVID-19 in the process of reconstructing the assumptions of what is political representation in Poland. I will undertake this task in the spirit of the structural turn in representation theory, but I will not use the influential theoretical framework of Michel Saward as I share some "normative concerns" regarding the applicability of his work in some cases (Saward, 2010; Severs 2020). Instead, I want to use deconstruction as a method of discourse analysis, proposing a new form of "clôtural reading" of the discourse of care in Poland (Critchley, 1992; Thomassen, 2010). I will try to analyse the ethical consequences of the government's attempt to extend the existing politics of care to health politics. I will try to show that analysis of the worrisome rise in support for the far-right groups, which openly undermines the very reality of the pandemic, cannot be separated from the problem of representing historically disadvantaged groups, which has been instrumentalized but not resolved. I believe the pandemic has exposed the necessity to reread political representation as a form of meeting the Other in need. However, in order to avoid the problem of rewriting the theory of representation in the language of patriarchy (through the ontology of logocentrism), my work will be based on my field research of "clients" of the Municipal Social Assistance Center in Wrocław (Poland). I hope that in this way I will be able to hear their voice and underline the need to take into account the ethical perspective not only in the process of implementing political representation, but also in its research.