The article aims to respond to a series of problems related to the inclusion of socially marginalised groups in public debates. Among those problems, the article focusses on the mechanisms which contribute to make such groups invisible for the others attending the same public debate. The argument doesn’t consist in suggesting new inclusion procedures but in extending the critical and emancipatory project of French pragmatist theory by a theory of political representation which is based on the combination of two approaches: a form of descriptive representation founded on the semiotic model of index and the social activity of presenting a representation.