6/21/2023 0 Comments Presentify reviews![]() It found visible expression in the funerals of French and English kings and was conceptually formulated by sixteenth-century jurists. This sense of the term, in English as well as French, is inseparable from the political theory analyzed by Ernst Kantorowicz in The King’s Two Bodies. This definition of representation is derived from the old, material meaning of “representation,” understood as an effigy which replaces the king’s body on his funeral bed. In a legal and political register, to represent can also mean “to hold someone’s place, to be in possession of their authority.” Hence the twofold definition of representatives as someone who represents, in a public office, an absent person who is supposed to occupy it and someone who, for an inheritance, is summoned in the place of individuals whose rights have been bestowed upon him. To represent is to convey something indirectly through words and gestures, figures and signs: enigmas, emblems, fables, and allegories. The Dictionnaire de la langue française (Dictionary of the French Language) published by Furetière in 1690 indentified two apparently contradictory families of meaning for the word “representation.” It defined the word as follows: “Representation: an image that brings to mind and memory absent objects and which paints them as they are.” In this first meaning, representation displays an absent object (a thing, concept, or person) by replacing it with an “image” that adequately represents it. (Yves Sintomer) Presenting an Absent Object This approach also makes it possible to examine, following Ricœur, the way in which the historical sciences (and the social and human sciences more generally) contribute to representing the very reality they are committed to studying. It helps to transform power relationships into symbolic relationships, reinforcing what Bourdieu calls “symbolic domination.”īy recognizing the analytical distinctions between the various meanings of “ representation,” Chartier brings to light a number of conceptual short circuits (when authors unconsciously play on several distinct registers), “un-thought” meanings (when a meaning is neglected), and rich semantic correlations (such as when “representation-mandate” is coupled with “representation-embodiment”). Such activity makes a decisive contribution to power’s legitimacy, well beyond elections. In old regime societies as in modern representative democracies, those who embody central authority are necessarily called upon to display it before the public they are supposed to represent, particularly through ritualized (and usually sexualized) behavior. ![]() The emphasis on “representation” in the sense of putting someone who is present on public display (a sense that one still finds in contemporary French, as in: “ elle est toujours en representation ”-“she’s always on stage”) has important consequences for political analysis. Drawing on the work of the French philosopher, historian, semiologist, and art critic, Chartier demonstrates the reductive character of the view that representation consists primarily in making something that is absent present-an position shared by philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida, as well as political theorists such as Carl Schmitt and Hanna Pitkin. The second text, “The Powers and Limits of Representation,” was published after Louis Marin’s death. By resituating “mentalities” within the broader concept of representation, Chartier emphasized the performative effects of the world pictures that individuals and groups create for themselves, questioned the relationship between the production of images and other aspects of the work of representation, and overcame the sterile dichotomy between social history and the history of “mentalities.” The first, “The World as Representation,” published in Annales in 1989, had a major impact and contributed to changing the traditional perspective of the history of mentalities. It is a synthesis of Chartier’s previous writings on the question of representation, including two texts in particular. ![]() ![]() This article is a reprint of a lecture delivered on Novembefore the seminar of the workgroup on “Political Representation: History, Theory, and Contemporary Transformations” of the Association française de science politique (the French Association of Political Science).
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