“A mask sounds the death knell,” from À Edgar Poe (1882) | Odilon Redon / Los Angeles County Museum of Art / Public Domain
The following lecture was first presented as part of the Memory Study Network conference “Routes and Roots: Migration, Memory, Transnationality” at the New School for Social Research Festival of Ideas, on April 16, 2026.
Let me begin with a proposition that may sound unsettling. Democracy does not disappear only when it is overthrown. Sometimes it survives—in form only. Institutions remain. Elections take place. Speeches are delivered. Flags are raised. And yet something essential is missing.
What remains is not democracy but its simulacrum.
Simulacrum, in this sense, is not the opposite of reality but the survival of form after its reference point has thinned or withdrawn. The term is often associated with Jean Baudrillard, where it names a world in which signs detach from reality. Here, I am interested in something slightly different: forms that persist after meaning thins.
In memory studies, we are accustomed to asking whether the past has been erased, distorted, or repressed. But perhaps we have not asked often enough whether the forms of memory themselves can survive without substance—whether they can continue to circulate long after their living reference has weakened. If they do, then what persists is no longer simply memory of the past but a form that continues to structure the present. And with it, the terms on which a shared world can be recognized—and on which democratic life depends.
Today I would like to consider the simulacrum not as a purely philosophical concept but as a political and mnemonic condition. Not only as illusion. Not only as deception. But as a fragile and ambiguous form—one that can both hollow out democracy and, paradoxically, preserve the possibility of its return.
Because not all simulacra are the same. Some are performances without reference—surfaces emptied of relation. But others are suspended forms—institutional grammars, civic vocabularies, or political practices that have lost their substance yet continue to linger.
These lingering forms may appear dormant, skeletal, reduced to ritual.And yet, under certain historical conditions, they can be reactivated.
Memory does not travel only as trauma or narrative. It also travels as form: an army in exile, a municipal council that no longer governs, a language detached from the identity that once weaponized it, a constitution remembered but not practiced. These are not simply remnants. They are forms in waiting.
And so, the question I want to pose today is this: When does a simulacrum mark erasure—and when does it mark latency? When does it hollow out democratic life—and when does it preserve the grammar of its possible return?
I will approach this question through three brief narratives: local self-government in post-communist Poland, armies in exile in Poland and South Africa, and the transformation of public space under regimes of silencing. My argument is simple: Simulacra can destroy political learning. But they can also carry it—across ruptures, across routes, across time.
The difference lies in whether forms remain closed performances or become sites of democratic reactivation.
If this still sounds abstract, let me make it concrete. In 1990, after the collapse of state socialism, Poland introduced a new system of self-government. It is often described as one of the great successes of the democratic transition. And yet local democracy did not emerge from nothing.
During the communist decades, municipal autonomy had been hollowed out. Authority was centralized; local councils existed largely as extensions of the party-state. The institutional form remained—councils, offices, administrative language—but the substance had thinned. One could say local governance survived as a simulacral form.
But here the distinction I am proposing becomes important. The form was not entirely empty; it had not disappeared. It persisted as memory—and after 1989, it began, slowly, to fill again.
Beneath the centralized state, there persisted a memory—not always explicit, not always institutional, but cultural—of territorial self-government from the interwar republic. People remembered the vocabulary: mayor, council, budget, district authority. These words had once referred to real political practice. What remained was not functioning democracy but a dormant grammar of it. And when decentralization became possible in 1990, that grammar could be reactivated.
The councils were no longer administrative shells. They became arenas of argument, budgetary decision, school repairs, street lighting—the unheroic routines of democratic life. In this case, the simulacrum did not mark erasure. It marked latency. The form had lingered long enough to be filled again with presence.
This example suggests something important. Simulacra are not always enemies of democracy; sometimes they are its carriers across rupture.
Forms do not travel only through institutions; they also travel through bodies. If local self-government preserved a dormant grammar of democratic procedure, armies in exile preserved something different: a grammar of collective endurance.
Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—from the Polish Legions organized by the greatest Polish romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz during the Spring of Nations to Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military arm of the African National Congress stationed across the borders with newly decolonized African States—exile did not dissolve political form but shifted it.
Uniforms, ranks, oaths, rituals, codes of discipline: These too survived outside the territory of the state. One could call this a simulacrum of sovereignty—an army without a state. But again, the distinction matters. Was it merely nostalgic imitation? Or was it a structure that allowed political continuity across rupture?
In exile, military formations became laboratories of political learning. They were not only instruments of war but schools of waiting—places where readiness itself became a moral virtue. Here the simulacrum thickens. It is no longer just an administrative shell. It is embodied, practiced, sustained.
The army in exile is a form without territory—but not without discipline, imagination, or memory.It remains oriented toward a place it cannot inhabit. And when return becomes possible, that preserved form does not disappear. It re-enters political life—sometimes productively, sometimes dangerously. This is the double edge of simulacra in democratic politics. Forms preserved across rupture can sustain democratic renewal. But they can also carry habits that sit uneasily within democratic pluralism. And it is here that the phenomenon becomes darker.
Modern power often works in a quieter register. It does not always destroy forms spectacularly. It erodes them administratively. Silencing, in this sense, is rarely theatrical. It is procedural: organizations are dissolved, publications are withdrawn, words are reclassified, permits are denied. People are banned. Nothing dramatic. No flames. No gunshots. And yet the effect is decisive. What disappears is not only speech but the conditions under which speech can be recognized as legitimate.
I remember the first time someone said to me, very calmly, “I was banned.”
I did not immediately understand what that meant. I was hearing this in post-apartheid South Africa, through the lens of my own Eastern European, post-communist experience. In my experience, bans applied to books—authors, texts that disappeared from circulation. Not to people. And yet, she, Mary, was there, speaking and present. What does it mean to be banned—and yet to stand before me?
I expected prison, exile, torture. Instead, I encountered something administrative. Mary was banned when she was a teenager because of the activities of parents, well known anti-apartheid activists and trade unionists. (Mary later became a political activist herself.) For Mary, banning meant: You may not attend public gatherings, you may not publish, you may not be quoted, you may not meet more than one person at a time, your name may not circulate. Silencing here is not an eruption of violence. It is the bureaucratic management of absence. Banning belongs to an intermediate zone—neither execution nor exile but the managed removal of a person from the field of appearance.
The legal form of the state remained intact. The state appears lawful, the banned person appears free, public life appears normal. Courts functioned, procedures were followed, files were stamped. The form of legality was preserved—while presence was hollowed out. That is simulacrum in action.
When I speak of simulacrum, I do not mean illusion. A simulacrum becomes politically significant only when someone recognizes the gap between form and life. The form of the state continues to function while its democratic reference has withdrawn—a structure that organizes appearance even as it empties the conditions of plurality. But plurality—what Hannah Arendt called the condition of appearance—has been administratively reorganized.
And what does banning do to memory? It interrupts transmission. Citation becomes impossible. Gathering becomes risky. Narrative fragments. Memory does not disappear; it becomes disarticulated and forced into private circulation. Paradoxically, banned individuals often became latent nodes of memory. Their absence itself acquired meaning.
Administrative silencing can unintentionally create reservoirs of dormant democratic memory. This logic is not unique to South Africa. Consider a different regime, a different continent—and yet a similar mechanism: In January 1968, the National Theatre in Warsaw staged its final performance of Forefathers’ Eve by Adam Mickiewicz. The authorities did not storm the stage or burn the building; they did not arrest the audience. They simply withdrew permission. Again, we see the same intermediate zone. Not destruction, not disappearance, but the reorganization of appearance.
The theatre building remained. The Ministry remained. The Party remained. What disappeared was the space of shared judgment. The state continued to speak in the name of the people; it preserved the vocabulary of representation. But the public sphere had become staged. Here simulacrum does not mean fake democracy. It means procedural continuity without democratic presence.
And yet—and this is crucial—these acts of silencing did not eliminate memory. They displaced it. Students gathered anyway, underground publications circulated, whispers traveled, and exile networks thickened. Administrative silencing often produces what we might call latent publicness—forms suspended but not extinguished. The question for democratic politics is whether such latent forms can be reactivated—whether suspension can become presence again.
Let me now turn to what I believe is at stake. If a simulacrum marks the preservation of form after its reference has thinned, then the question for democratic politics is not simply how to expose simulacra. It is how to move from simulacrum to presence.
Presence, as I understand it, is not metaphysical fullness. It is reactivation. It depends on capacities that cannot be legislated—the willingness to speak, to listen, to remain present to one another even when shared ground is uncertain. Through these capacities, a society may begin to repair its ability to imagine itself again as a “we”: when people appear to one another again as agents rather than as placeholders within a script, when a municipal council debate becomes actual disagreement, when a banned voice re-enters circulation, when a censored text becomes a shared reference point.
Presence is democratic practice as a way of life—and as a way of thinking. It is fragile. It requires rehearsal. It requires institutional space. It requires memory—not as nostalgia but as reference. Memory does not restore institutions; it restores the possibility of believing that institutions might once again carry meaning. In this sense, presence is close to what I described once as performative democracy—moments when democratic authority emerges through public action itself, even before institutions fully stabilize.
I’d like to end with a scene. In the early 1990s, shortly after the restoration of local self-government in Poland, municipal councils began to meet again—this time not as administrative extensions of the state but as elected bodies. In one small town—not a capital, not a site of heroic resistance—a newly elected council gathered in a drafty room above a former state office. The heating barely worked, the furniture was mismatched, and no one quite knew the procedures. Participants argued for three hours about street lighting.
One elderly man—who remembered the interwar years, who remembered what a village mayor once meant—kept insisting that this was not about lamps but about responsibility. A younger woman, recently returned from abroad, demanded transparency in the budgeting process. Someone else worried about whether they even had the authority to decide. It was awkward, procedural, halting. And yet something had shifted. The form that had existed before the war, then survived as memory, then lingered as a hollow administrative shell under communism, was being filled again—not with grandeur but with participation.
This is what I mean by the movement from simulacrum to presence. Democracy rarely returns with fanfare. It returns in meetings that run too long, in disagreements about small matters, in citizens who are uncertain—but who remain in the room.
I do not assume this movement is inevitable. Forms can remain hollow for generations. But the possibility remains.
