ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the potential place of representation in agonistic theories of democracy. It describes that the models of the representation developed by democratic theorists sympathetic to the concerns of post-foundational political thought, particularly the "politics of presence". Post-foundational thinkers approach representative democracy with some trepidation. Representation is at best problematic for post-foundational theories of democracy. Democratic regimes might utilize the surplus of meaning produced by hegemony to keep open the possibility of change and transformation, and it is this possibility for shifting the boundaries of community, identity, and meaning that distinguish democratic politics from others. The chapter explains that agonistic democrats need not reject institutional representation if its function is reconceived in a manner consistent with post-foundational insights into the co-constitutive character of state and society. And those agonistic suspicions of representation derive from the tendency to accept uncritically a standard model of representation their own theoretical insights should instead transform.
