Testing the Limits of Democratic Performance: Macron’s “Jupiterian” Temptation

• In Event: Performing Political Representation

Abstract

With the emergence of right-wing populists like Trump and Bolsonaro, staging strong leaders” in egocentric and masculinist ways seems to have become a popular tool of political performance. Such leaders symbolize embodiment of power and of the people they want to represent. The unease that the democratic public sphere experiences with such figures is not without reason. Embodiment representation is a risk for democracy. It is well known from absolutism when the representative becomes the sovereign but also characterizes totalitarianism. In contrast, modern democratic representation is normatively grounded on disembodiment. However, looking closer at democratic performances, a grey zone between embodiment and disembodiment representation becomes visible. Emanuel Macron’s first presidential victory celebration in France is a good example. Before election, Macron expressed his inclination towards the “Jupiterian” power of the president. In his victory in 2017 this claim was not stated verbally, but rather through Macron’s body, building a strong contrast to his democratic statement to “serve France”.
According to Claude Lefort, modern democracy established a new “dispositif symbolique” based on the principle of popular sovereignty (Lefort 1986). After the 18th Century revolutions, popular sovereignty replaced the absolute sovereignty of the monarch and power came to be represented as belonging to each member of the demos (and could not therefore be embodied by a person anymore). This prevents power from embodiment exactly because democratic power belongs to everyone, forcing power to be represented as an empty space (Lefort 1988). Further, democracy recognizes itself as a social-historical form that changes with society. Consequently, representation cannot be fixed, but needs to be open for such changes. It becomes clear that representative claims now need to be negotiated (Saward 2006). In contrast, totalitarianism embraced embodiment, inverting political representation (Pitkin 1967) such that the representative no longer represents the people, but rather the people represent the leader. Semiotically speaking, in embodiment the sign (the leader) becomes the referent (the sovereign people) of representation. This is key for the understanding of “strong leader’s” performances and a tool for analysing mixed body performances.
Although Lefort helps to elucidate the difficulties of performing democracy, he does not provide a response to the problem he discovers: How can the body of political representatives perform democratically? I propose to investigate the effects of disembodiment by exploring the staging requirements for body performances of democratic roles (Parkinson 2015) by examining body performances normatively, theatrically and medially. It goes without saying that this attempt assumes the constructivist perspective (among others: Disch 2019; Fossen 2019). The paper explores the limits of democratic performances by focusing on the case of Macron. I argue that “pure” democratic performances of a disembodied power are very rare and perhaps impossible since the physical body of representatives and their images always invite to personal identification of power. Therefore, democratic body performances tend to involve a degree of embodiment. Macron’s victory celebration shows how embodiment can be mixed with democratic representation and how symbolically it tests the limits of democracy.

Author

• Paula Diehl, University of Kiel