PhD defence J. (Jamie) van der Klaauw

Brief summary:

In my work, I have tried to develop and rethink the concept of political representation, especially within a democratic context. As I understand it, the ultimate measure of any democracy is the people, and political representation in a democracy is therefore about the legitimation of rule through a general symbolic operation: ‘in the name of’. We accept procedures, policies, government, rule, and so on, only if we can understand how these elements are set up with our collective and individuated wellbeing in mind.

However, when contemporary democracies are criticized, it is mostly political representation that is at fault, becoming almost a ‘dirty word’. We often think democracy needs to be saved from representation. Either representation distorts the true will of the people or representation cannot be democratic at all, because it is an ‘elective aristocracy’.

My wager is that we shouldn’t dismiss representation as a political mode. Of course, political representation has practical tensions or paradoxes. But representation is vital for a modern political system that has to be grounded in the people – as per democracy – when it isn’t very clear who belongs to what people at all. Therefore, I argue that political representation is the way in which, we, the people, form ourselves, by depicting and speaking ourselves into existence as a political subject. To put it short: no representation, no democracy. Or even more so: no politics.