"Personation" and the Division of Labor

Abstract

“Person” is as strange as it is a familiar name for what each and everybody is at the end of the day, underlying whatever else he or she may be. Though remarking it has by now become something of a cliché, it remains remarkable that we have taken this name from the Latin persona, a word that meant “mask” in its original application. No one thread connects all the acts of translation by which persona passes from one language to another and from one to another sort of use (from the theatrical to the grammatical to the legal to the theological to the psychological).1 Sometimes the extension of the meaning of the word is accomplished by means of the suppression of the etymological sense, as in the landmark episode in which Boethius redefines person as an “individual substance of a rational nature.”2 Sometimes it is accomplished by means of a radical restoration of that sense, as in Hobbes, for whom the word in its original, theatrical sense perfectly properly names the sort of representation that is happening in the relationship between the sovereign and his subjects. In the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the common law marriage of the psycho-theological and the juridical-theatrical ways of universalizing “person” is officially recognized (not only does everyone have a right to legal personhood, a uniform thing, but everyone has what amounts to a right to the “free and full development