The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (SPEP)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CLAUDE LEFORT

Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

Founding Editor

General Editor

James M. Edie

†

Anthony J. Steinbock

Associate Editor

John McCumber

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CLAUDE LEFORT Interpreting the Political

Bernard Flynn

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois 60208-4170 Copyright © 2005 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2005. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 0-8101-2105-0 (cloth) ISBN 0-8101-2106-9 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Flynn, Bernard. The philosophy of Claude Lefort : interpreting the political / Bernard Flynn. p. cm. — (Northwestern University studies in phenomenology & existential philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8101-2105-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8101-2106-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Lefort, Claude. 2. Political science—Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series. JC261.L46F59 2005 320'.092—dc22 2005015238 o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

For Annie

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Abbreviations Selected Bibliography of Claude Lefort

xi xiii xxxi xxxiii

Part 1. Lefort as Reader of Machiavelli 1

The Prince

5

2

The Discourses

40

3

Machiavelli: The Practice of Interpretation

59

Part 2. Lefort on Premodernity 4

Premodernity

5

European Premodernity

83 100

Part 3. Lefort on Modernity 6

Modernity and Revolution

131

7

Modernity and Law

150

8

Modernity and Rights

164

9

Modernity and Ideology

185

Part 4. Lefort on Totalitarianism 10

Totalitarianism as “Measures Taken”

195

11

Totalitarianism as Regime

207

12

The Fate of the Concept of Totalitarianism after the Fall

233

Conclusion

271

Bibliography

275

Index

279

Acknowledgments

Without the extraordinary work of Judith Walz, this book would never have materialized. Her incisive understanding of the text enabled her to clarify many parts of it. Our many intense and animated discussions together helped me to reformulate a number of my interpretations of the oeuvre of Claude Lefort. I thank her deeply for her unconditional devotion to the creation of this book.

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Introduction

What is it that recommends the work of a philosopher for our consideration? There was a time when the only consideration would have been whether the work were true, whether it represented reality as it is in itself. Evoking Aquinas’s definition of truth, we could question whether the work contains a correspondence between intellect and thing. However, in our epoch few authors would claim such status for their work, and even fewer readers would demand it. This is not because all of us have suddenly adopted some sort of wholesale relativism which would efface the very opposition between truth and falsity; rather, it is because many of us have come to view truth, particularly the truth of the human world, as being deeply implicated in history and temporality. We have come to regard the work of the philosopher as a labor of interpretation and to consider this act itself as deeply implicated in the reality of what it hopes to decipher. Goethe said that, for him, reading a work of Kant was like walking into an illuminated room. Likewise for us, what we seek in a philosophical work is illumination. We do not look for eternal truths but wish to discover something we had not known before, or perhaps had known in a confused manner whereby it remained latent, to use Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor, “as a storm is latent in the dark clouds overhead, or the figure of a ship in the inarticulate perception of ‘something’ on the beach.” We have become suspicious of a philosophy that promises to explain everything. Although we ceaselessly draw sustenance from the work of Hegel, few of us are inclined to accept the entire “system.” We have become more modest in our expectations, less inclined to believe that “only the whole is true.” We are generally content, not to say happy, if we come away from a work of philosophy with the conviction that we have seen something not before visible, thought something not heretofore given to thought, and especially so if that something is of particular importance. What aspect of the world, and our experience of it, does the work of Claude Lefort endeavor to illuminate, and why are we in need of this illumination now? From its very beginning his work has set for itself the task of interpreting the political life of modern society; as we shall see, this task does not exclude either ontological or epistemological issues. The prexiii

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ceding sentence contains words and phrases—for example, “political” and “modern society”—the meanings of which are by no means uncontested. For the moment we shall leave to one side the particular inflection that Lefort gives to these terms. That we are in need of such illumination would appear to be obvious. Indeed, Aristotle tells us that in one respect the discourse on the political is the most important because it determines what other forms of thought will be able to flourish within the polis. Beginning in ancient Greece, the form and dynamic of our political life has been an object of extreme fascination for philosophers. Few of the great philosophers (Descartes is an exception) have not written at least one tract on the political. And yet in June 1999 Pierre Manent can begin his Report to the Library of Congress on “The Fate and Meaning of Political Philosophy in Our Century” as follows: Commissioned to speak of political philosophy, I am confronted with an unexpected difficulty: not an overflowing wealth of materials, but on the contrary a singular dearth of them. It could even be said without paradox that our century has witnessed the disappearance, or withering away, of political philosophy. An old-fashioned empirical proof of this statement is easy to produce: certainly no Hegel, no Marx, even no Comte, has lived in our century, able to convey to the few and the many alike the powerful vision of our social and political statics and dynamics. However highly we might think of the philosophical capacities and results of Heidegger, Bergson, Whitehead or Wittgenstein, none of us would consider any one of them for his contribution to political philosophy.1

Manent is not alone in recognizing the contemporary dearth of political philosophy. Hannah Arendt, a thinker with whom Lefort entertains a relationship both appreciative and critical, notes that modernity has given us social philosophies and philosophies of history but has not produced any political philosophies. Leo Strauss has pointed out that we seem incapable of understanding, or even of translating, the Greek word politeia, which was the basic unit of thought for ancient political reflection. Both Arendt and Strauss have each respectively offered reasons for this curious absence. For Arendt the main reason for the lack of political philosophy is the domination by the life processes whereby labor, having left the shadowy confines of the home, becomes public in the form of the “rise of the social.” This metabolism with nature has effaced the place of action which had previously been the object of political philosophy; it has imposed a process-like character on the space of freedom. For Strauss, on the other hand, it is the effacement of Nature by History and the dominance of political science with its commitment to being “value-free” that have erased

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the question of the “regime,” his translation of politeia. According to the ancients, the basic question of political philosophy is, “What type of regime best promotes the excellence of its citizens?” Lefort likewise deplores the absence of political philosophy and offers his own explanations for it, a theme to which we shall return both in this introduction and in more detail within the body of the text. At this point I can imagine some readers throwing up their hands and tearing out their hair, saying, “A lack of political philosophy! We are besieged by political philosophy. It is ubiquitous. All our discourses have become politicized from head to toe. Far from needing more political philosophy, we need a rest from it.” But the question is, “Do we have a surfeit of political philosophy, or a politicized philosophy?” In the June 15, 1998, issue of the New York Review of Books, Mark Lilla, in an unfriendly review of Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship, puts his finger on a phenomenon that is not limited to the work of Derrida or for that matter to French philosophy in general, namely, the politicized extension of concepts that are drawn from ontological or epistemological reflection.2 This politicization of philosophical concepts goes hand in hand with a total disinterest in political phenomena: the nature of the state, the forms of bureaucracy, totalitarianism, democracy, and so forth.3 Permit me to offer some examples, which certainly do not do justice to the complexity and philosophical interest of the thinkers referred to, but nonetheless do bring to light the phenomenon under consideration, that is to say, the politicization of philosophical concepts. In a brilliant reading of the first section of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Derrida shows that Husserl, try as he might, is incapable of realizing his announced intention of rigorously separating an indicative sign which points to a meaning from an expressive sign which bears its meaning within itself. In the process of his reading of Husserl, Derrida develops the concept, itself a kind of counterconcept, of differance. The inability to distinguish in pronunciation between a and e shows the irreducibility of writing to speech. In subsequent years he produces some of the most interesting and challenging readings of certain figures in the history of philosophy, focusing his attention upon the relationship, in their texts, of speech and writing. Nonetheless chided by critics, including Foucault, that his philosophy consisted of a “worldless textualism” and also that it lacked any political dimension, Derrida, on the basis of the notion of differance, proceeds from his reading of Husserl to forge a sense of a temporal deferral expanded to the point that it ultimately connects with the notion of messianism, although without a Messiah. He goes on to develop a theory of law (“The Force of Law”) which does not make any distinction between the operations of law in a monarchy, a democracy, or a totalitarian regime; a political theory (The Specters

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of Marx) which wishes to revitalize some of the most improbable concepts in the Marxist tradition, namely, the Internationale and so forth; and a politics of friendship (The Politics of Friendship) which would try to illuminate the political on the basis of the experience of friendship and hospitality.4 And finally, at least in appearance, he attempts to do nothing less concrete than to elaborate an immigration policy. All this is accomplished without an analysis of any historical or political event, any revolution, any reflection on the fall of the Soviet bloc, any thought on the rise and fall of Fascism, or on the nature of modernity, and so forth. To follow Derrida uncritically in all this, it would be necessary to believe that he had discovered the key to the intelligibility of all forms of human existence, a key which would render historical analysis dispensable. Continuing our examination of the politicalization of philosophical concepts, we turn to Sartre’s thought, particularly his article “The Transcendence of the Ego,” in which he elaborates a critical interpretation of Husserl’s concept of the “transcendental ego.” He claims that the Ego’s opacity, that is, its excess of Being over Appearance, is incompatible with the most radical implications of Husserl’s own theory of intentionality; then he proceeds to equate consciousness, the “for-itself,” with the negating activity which is borne on the inert Being of “the in-itself.” It would seem that such a theory of consciousness would be compatible with absolutely any political belief; nevertheless, through a series of astonishing metamorphoses which begin with his What Is Literature? and continue through his biographies of literary figures such as Baudelaire, Genet, and Flaubert, finally culminating in his Critique of Dialectical Reason,5 Sartre claims to have shown that this conception of consciousness somehow entails a commitment to Marxism as “the unsurpassable philosophy of our time.” In his declining years, this leads him to the grotesque concept of anarco-Maoism and the “Cause of the People.” In this thought, we also see a politicized philosophy that does not deal with historical events or institutions except occasionally for the purpose of illustration. In 1934 Levinas published an article entitled “Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de Hitlerism.” 6 Although extremely interesting in its own right, this article nonetheless exhibits the same tendency, that is, it attempts to render political phenomena intelligible merely in terms of the history of ideas; it does this without presenting any political or historical analysis whatsoever. In brief, Levinas argues that the essence of Western man is his liberty to transcend his enchainment to the past and to the body. According to him, Judaism accomplishes this by the act of forgiveness; by means of this act man transcends his insertion in time in such a manner that the present moment would be only a continuation of the past. Then through repentance and pardon “he can discover at each in-

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stant his nudity at the first day of creation.”7 Christianity accomplishes this transcendence through the drama of salvation and the reception of grace. Levinas then argues that the tradition of secular philosophy effects this transcendence of time and the body by means of the concept of Reason, which has the capacity to transcend the temporal and the bodily. For him modernity, particularly Marxism, annuls the project of transcendence; the relative distinction and conflict between the self and the impersonal body is abolished to become one of Identity. He writes, “The mysterious voice of blood, the call of heredity and the past, for which the body serves as the enigmatic vehicle, lose their nature as problems submitted to the solution of a sovereign free self. . . . The essence of man is no longer his liberty, but a type of enchainment.” 8 It is this enchainment to the body that leads to racism. Readers of Levinas’s subsequent works will discover that he is claiming that Hitlerism is the victory of the il y a, which is to say, the faceless gods which constitute an ineluctable dimension of human experience. In this reading, Nazism is not a historical phenomenon at all; rather it is the upsurgence of a fundamental dimension of human experience. As Levinas argues, “it is the power of an elementary force.” 9 If this were so, why did it happen in Germany and why in the 1930s? Can Nazism be understood by combining some reflections on the history of ideas with the phenomenology of certain human experiences, for example, pain, insomnia, and so forth? Contrast this approach with that of Arendt’s detailed historical and sociological analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism.10 Now let us consider the writings of Habermas, a thinker who has made very significant contributions to our understanding of modernity and whose work we shall frequently turn to in order to show both its coincidence with and its divergence from the thought of Lefort. At this time, I will simply note the extent to which Habermas attempts to derive a theory of history from an analysis of meaning and from the elementary fact of human communication. In his early writings, his notion of the “ideal speech situation” is linked to a quasi-transcendental species interest in a liberation from the systemic distortions which preclude the formation of a rational consensus. In his later work, he claims that the notion of communicative rationality is the basis of a liberal polity; he argues that the understanding of any proposition entails a judgment of the truth or falsity of the validity claim that it bears within itself. In the early writings, ideology, which reflected the different distributions of power, was the basis of the systematic distortion of communication; whereas in the later work, it is the domination of purposeful rationality, namely, the cannibalization of the life world by technical rationality, that is the object of his critique. In this thought as well, the problem seems to be: “Can so much be derived from so little?” In Habermas’s philosophy, there is also a distinct

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lack of analysis of the different forms of political organization, that is, of what Lefort will call regimes. In my opinion, most readers of Habermas would agree that the historical event which fueled his intellectual and political activity was the rise of German Fascism. His rationalism is a constant vigilance against any sort of return of the mythological dimensions of Fascism. Given this starting point, it is remarkable that nowhere in his work is there any detailed analysis of Fascism; it is simply characterized as a regression to myth, whereas its characteristically modern dimension is ignored. Turning our attention to the thought of Deleuze and Guartari, we observe that they derive an ultra-left political theory from a critical reflection on Freud’s conception of the Oedipal complex along with a reflection upon the de-totalizing character of libido. One could go on and on, but we will end here. Our point is not to diminish the above thinkers on any level including the political; rather it is to insist that what Lefort is doing is fundamentally different. His is a political philosophy born from a reflection on political experience and a consideration of the forms of political life; it is not the construction of a political theory by means of an extrapolation from an ontological or linguistic category, which is not to say that his thought is empirical, since he is neither a sociologist nor an historian. Lefort’s work emerges from, and remains deeply intertwined with, the phenomenological tradition; though it bears within itself an ontological dimension, his reflections on the political are not engendered from categories taken from elsewhere. Granting that his work is different from the thinkers referred to above, why does it have a claim on our attention and why now? Perhaps those of us who have studied in what, for lack of a better term, is called “Continental Philosophy” are a bit like Isabelle Archer in Henry James’s novel Portrait of a Lady. Recall that Isabel arrives in Europe from Albany, New York, a city where James himself was brought up. She is a free-spirited and intelligent woman who is fascinated, perhaps mesmerized, by the “old world” with its historical depth of culture and its sophisticated manners; for her it is a stark contrast to the “straightforward” brashness of upstate New York which is displayed by her unsuccessful suitor Caspar Goodwood. Isabel is conned, “snookered,” by the “old world,” whereas her traveling companion is spared a similar fate due to her roughened skepticism; the declining nobility that Isabel falls for are not perceived by Henrietta Stackpole as the repository of ancient culture but rather as a lot of “lazy loafers who should get some jobs.” Permit me to shift to an autobiographical mode in order to clarify my Jamesian reflection. As a graduate student I, like many others, divided my time between reading the works of Heidegger and going to meetings

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and demonstrations of the movement against the Vietnam War. Absurdly I called Lyndon Johnson a “Fascist,” which he clearly was not. At the same time I managed to forget, or perhaps to foreclose, the fact that Heidegger was a Fascist. We read Being and Time but we did not read The Self-Assertion of the German University; also, while reading the Introduction to Metaphysics, we somehow managed to overlook the obviously totalitarian implications of this work. My point is certainly not to dismiss Heidegger’s philosophy as the expression of a Fascist sensibility, which for me is not at all the case; clearly he is one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century. Likewise I read Sartre but failed to notice the illiberal and antidemocratic character of his “philosophy of freedom.” While studying the Marxist tradition, particularly Lukacs, we did not thematically question the relationship of his texts to Soviet totalitarianism nor his active complicity with Stalinism. Not for a moment do I regret studying these thinkers; nonetheless, what I learned did not come without a price, and this is the Isabel Archer dimension of my story, that is, the sense of “being conned.” The apocalyptic dimension of these philosophies of history effected a kind of desensitization to the virtues of a functioning democracy which is not a democracy “yet to come.” I do not think I was alone in being “snookered.” Richard Rorty in his book Achieving Our Century11 arrives at a similar conclusion, though from a different perspective; he argues that the transformation of America’s democratic-reformist left into the “cultural left” was fueled by the “mostly apocalyptic French and German philosophy.”12 His response to this “captivation of politics by philosophy” is an attempt to disjoin politics from any type of philosophy whatsoever; he envisions an “enlightenment politics without enlightenment philosophy.” This is certainly not the direction that Lefort’s thought will take; nonetheless, Rorty’s evocation of both Emerson and Whitman, although not characters in Lefort’s universe of discourse, is not irrelevant in terms of this Introduction to the thought of Lefort. The role played by these poets in Rorty’s writing is that of evoking an experience of democracy; not democracy as the instanciation or the institutionalization of a certain number of ideas taken from John Locke or elsewhere, but rather a lived experience of the dissolution of the markers of certainty that characterized the ancien régime. Although he never addresses it directly, it is “lived experience” which is of central importance in the work of Lefort. In his thought, there is not, on the one hand, “experience” and, on the other, theories or philosophies “about experience”; rather, there is an intertwining of the quintessential experience of an epoch with the texts of those authors who are most sensitive to the novel dimensions of the experiences of a given time and place. As we shall see in the chapter entitled “Machiavelli: Thoughts on Interpretation,” Lefort claims that to interpret a text is to be

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open to “the world” that the text reveals to the reader. In his study of Machiavelli, there is much “close reading” and textual subtlety which he pursues in order to sensitize us to what Machiavelli had seen, that is, a new experience of the transcendence of power which involves its having become anonymous and disengaged from relations of personal dependence. It is certainly not my claim that there is something “American” about the experience of democracy; if this were the case, it would be absurd to evoke Lefort as an interpreter of this experience. My point is that the philosophers in the tradition referred to as “Continental Philosophy” have not by and large been particularly sensitive to the defining experience of modern democracy. Arendt took the next step and claimed that philosophers as such, except for a few, have been blind, if not downright antagonistic, to the “experience of the political.” While not going that far, Lefort does note a strange disjunction between the subtlety in the domain of certain discourses and a kind of heavy-handedness when it concerns political thought. In his article “The Question of Democracy,” speaking to a group of philosophers who were, more or less, close to the thought of Derrida, he writes, What surprises me is that most of those who ought to be best-equipped to undertake it because of both their intellectual temperament, a temperament which inclines them to break with dogmatic beliefs, and their philosophical culture which encourages their desire to find some meaning behind the events, confused as it may be, which take place in our world, they who might be expected to have become sufficiently disenchanted with the dominant ideologies so as to want to discern the preconditions for the development of freedom, or at last to shed some light on the obstacles that stand in its way, are and remain stubbornly blind to the political.13

According to Lefort, the philosophers of the Enlightenment misrecognized the novel dimension of modernity in virtue of their atomism and constructivism, whereas he is suspicious that “post-Enlightenment” philosophy, which is to say loosely that philosophy descending from the tradition of Romanticism and Heidegger harbors a rejection of the fragmenting of society which he claims to be coincident with modernity itself. Thus he argues that these thinkers reject modernity as such. He is equally critical of any “nostalgia for Greece or any utopian longing for a society delivered from division and conflict which would exist on the hither side of ‘alienation.’” Returning to our question, “Why Lefort now?” let us pose a further

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question: “What was the most important political event in the twentieth century?” It was, I believe, the rise and fall of totalitarian movements, with perhaps the only serious contender being the decolonization of the “Third World.” However, much of this occurred in the wake of the Second World War, which was of course itself a product of totalitarianism. Arguably Lefort is one of the few political philosophers, together with Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, and a small number of others, who have elaborated a plausible interpretation of the totalitarian phenomenon. Many who should have known better claimed that Fascism was merely the “open dictatorship” of the most reactionary elements of finance capitalism and that the USSR was a struggling socialist state. Although Lefort’s writings on totalitarianism occupy an important place in his work and constitute a sufficient reason for it to claim our attention, nonetheless it would be a mistake to think of his thought primarily in terms of having elaborated a conception of totalitarianism, as it would be regarding the thought of both Arendt and Aron. Lefort, in the process of interpreting the phenomenon of totalitarianism, has created a political philosophy which deals with the same concerns as those addressed by classical political philosophy; it is a political thought that has been engendered out of a prolonged reflection on political phenomena. In the body of the book we will address the itinerary of Lefort’s thought in some detail, so at this time a very brief sketch will serve our purposes. As a young man Lefort was a Marxist, a Trotskyist; during the Second World War he joined one of the French currents of Trotskyism, which is to say, at no point was he seduced by the image of the Soviet Union. The Trotskyists claimed that the October Revolution had given birth to a workers’ state. According to them, after the death of Lenin and the exile of Trotsky the workers’ state, while remaining a workers’ state, had been colonized by the bureaucracy led by Stalin; they argued that it was a workers’ state with a bureaucratic deformation. It was Lefort’s questioning of this notion of the “workers’ state” which prompted him to break with the Trotskyists. Rejecting this conception he, along with Cornelius Castoriadis among others, formed the group Socialisme ou Barbarie, a group which, while remaining small and outside the orbit of real power, did nonetheless attract many who would later become important figures in the postwar intellectual world of France; for example, the French psychoanalysts Laplanche and Pontalis, also Lyotard and others. Lefort left the group in the early 1960s over a dispute concerning French politics. Merleau-Ponty was Lefort’s teacher at the Lycée and the two later became friends. Under the direction of Raymond Aron, Lefort wrote his thesis on Machiavelli. That a Marxist would be attracted to the work of Machiavelli is not anomalous: Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian

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Communist Party, wrote his The Modern Prince as an extrapolation of Machiavelli’s The Prince. The points of convergence between Machiavelli and Marx are striking: Both reject either a theological or a moral foundation for the political; both also elaborate a realism in the analysis of political forces; and more important, both share the conception of a class struggle. The basis for the initial attraction of Lefort, the young Marxist, to the thought of Machiavelli does not matter; in the end the lasting effect that this attraction had on his thought was not the convergence between Marx and Machiavelli but rather the divergence. Both agreed that the conflict of classes is what lies at the foundation of society. Marx argues that in precapitalist society the struggle is over the division of a surplus, namely, what is produced over and above what is necessary for sustenance; whereas in capitalist societies, the struggle is over the division of surplus value, that is, the difference between the use value and the exchange value of labor. In his thought, there is to be a resolution of the class struggle, a struggle which has served as the motor force of all heretofore existing human history; this resolution is, of course, the Communist classless society. Machiavelli, by contrast, argues that the conflict is between two dispositions, which is to say, two desires: “to oppress” and “not to be oppressed.” Each is the determinate negation of the other. It is not a struggle over “something.” It cannot be resolved; it can only be renegotiated. The influence of Machiavelli on the thought of Lefort is quite complex; nevertheless, if one were to select one aspect of this “influence” as the most important, it would be the notion that society is always and everywhere torn by inner conflict. The elimination or resolution of conflict is not only impossible but also undesirable. In Heraclitus’s thought, “war is both father and king of all”; in Fragment Twenty-Five, he tells us that when Homer prays that all conflict cease, he is demanding the end of the world. In Lefort’s thought, the elimination of conflict is impossible; nonetheless, the desire for, and the phantasm of, its elimination will play a central role in his conception of totalitarianism. After having been Merleau-Ponty’s student and friend, Lefort became the editor of the posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible and The Prose of the World. As was the case with the thought of Machiavelli, but here even more so, the traces of Lefort’s encounter with MerleauPonty are ubiquitous. It is not a question of picking some aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking that have remained within Lefort’s thought, but rather a question of the continuation of a philosophical sensibility. A red thread that runs through Merleau-Ponty’s writing from beginning to end is the problematization of the opposition between subject and object. In the Structure of Behavior, arguing against behaviorism in psychology and biology, Merleau-Ponty explores the ontological status of the gestalt which

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undermines the ontology of the “great object” by showing that the gestalt is something that exists for a subject rather than as a “thing in itself”; thus he approaches the threshold of transcendental philosophy. In The Phenomenology of Perception, the status of the subject for whom the gestalt appears is, in its turn, problematized; and with the same gesture so, too, is the adequacy of transcendental philosophy, including transcendental phenomenology.14 This “subject” is not a subject that can hold “the world” at the terminus of its intentional glance; rather, it is a subject steeped in Being. The Visible and the Invisible continues and radicalizes this critique of the sovereign epistemological subject. In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wrote that we should not say “I perceive” but rather that “one perceives through me”; the anonymous body is the true subject of perception. In The Visible and the Invisible, he argues that it is not my body that perceives; rather, my body is built around the perceptions which dawn through it. The body is a fold in the flesh of the sensible; it is the place of a chiasm in which the sensible and the sensate cross. It is not a substantial self-identical being but a being that exists by a divergence (écart) from itself; its identity is always deferred, that is, “short-circuited” at the last moment. Between this notion of the body as nonidentical with itself and the idea of the ineluctable conflictual character of society, there is what Max Weber calls a “selective affinity,” by which he means that it is not a relation of logical entailment but one of mutual attraction. These two notions condense in Lefort’s conception of the body politic. In his book Liberty before Liberalism, Quentin Skinner admonishes us to remember that the “body politic” is only a metaphor.15 In his universe of discourse, it is either “only a metaphor” or it is evidence of a commitment to an “organicist metaphysics” with all its troubling and ominous connotations. In Lefort’s thought, this experience of the “body politic” indicates no commitment whatsoever to any form of organism; according to him, the political image of the body is historically specific; during the period of monarchical rule is when a society begins to view itself in terms of a body. In the Report given to the Library of Congress cited above, Pierre Manent draws our attention to the fact that the “body” in the expression “body politic” is not simply a metaphor; in fact he asks, “Indeed, how better to define the premodern order?” If one were to look for one synthetic trait that would characterize premodernity, it would be defined as an order founded on filiation. Everyone’s place was in principle determined by her or his birth; both one’s name and one’s estate were determined through inheritance. In this society there were only families, poor or rich, common or noble, and each was governed by the “head of the family.” This is in contradistinction to ancient cities where all the heads of families were roughly equal politically and thus participated in the same “public space.” West-

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ern premodern society had no public space in the ancient sense; rather, what was considered to be public was the family, which meant that the logic of filiation and paternity, that is, the same representation of human ties and bonds, circulated throughout the whole society. Manent concludes by arguing that “ultimately what was public, e.g., what was sacred, was the person of the King, that is, the King’s body.” He also points out that it would be a mistake to equate the notion of “body” with the notion of “organism.” In organic political theory, each part is subordinated to the whole, whereas in a phenomenologically orientated one, the whole does not subordinate its parts but is present in each of them. The latter way of thinking is not of the order of biology but of the order of representation. In Lefort’s thought, there is another respect in which the notion of “body politic” is not connected to either a romantic or an organic conception of the state, that is, a conception of the state conceived of as an organism. These conceptions of the state are posited by theorists who are attempting to understand the nature of the state, whereas Lefort argues that the unification of the realm by means of the image of the body with the king as its head, which is a secularization of the mystical body of Christ, is an image produced by society itself and therefore it is not a theoretical predication which could be either true or false. This image that society produces is a symbolically efficacious one that brings about the unity of the realm; it engenders the unity of a society in a manner similar to the way in which Merleau-Ponty’s “corporal schema” gives a quasi-unity to the body. In this thought, the notion of “body politic” is certainly not “only a metaphor”; rather, it is a representation of power. In Lefort’s thought, power can function only as represented; thus we see that political power and its representation are inseparable. Using the work of both Kantorowicz and Michelet, he depicts the unity of premodern society through the image of the king’s body. Lefort argues that the political revolutions that ushered in modernity did so by the killing of the king, both his body of nature and his body of grace. In the premodern ancien régime, the king’s body played the role of mediator between the sensible and the supersensible, that is, the point of intersection between the visible and the invisible; his body incarnated society’s identity. Modernity, according to Lefort, is the disincarnation of society, since there is no figure which would incarnate society’s identity and mark the point at which it would be a society linked to “another place,” that is, to God or the supersensible world or to what Nietzsche ironically called “the true world.” It is essential to note that while “the figure of the king” is effaced, the place which he occupied still remains; it remains as an “empty place.” This symbolically empty place precludes a modern society’s closing in on itself; there remains a dimension of the po-

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litical which makes a gesture in the direction of the Other, but this is an Other that must remain without determination. At this point, I must try to forestall a possible misinterpretation: It must be emphasized that this is not a political form of negative theology. Of course, in a modern, secular, democratic society, each person has the right to believe in God or in any figure of the supersensible; nevertheless, he or she does not have the right to establish this belief as the place from which the society draws its political legitimation. The “empty place” of modernity does not refer negatively to God or to any other order of the supersensible; rather, it testifies to society’s nonclosure on itself, which is to say, its nonidentity with itself. It is this divergence (écart) from itself which blocks society’s “immanence,” in a manner similar to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body’s immanence with itself which is always “short-circuited” at the last moment. The immanence of the body politic is foreclosed by a gap, which is to say, an emptiness that makes a gesture in the direction of altereity. In a modern democracy, the place of legitimacy is symbolically empty; there is no body that can incarnate the society’s identity as the king’s body did in premodern society; nonetheless, since Lefort’s thought is far from any form of anarchism, the place of power is not absolutely empty. Within a democracy the source of legitimate power is “the people,” but who is to speak in the name of the people? According to Lefort, political life in a modern democracy is a continual debate on just this question. No one can claim to be authorized a priori to speak in the people’s name; each person’s claim must be discursively validated and every claim is always subjected to challenge. The legitimate spokesperson for the people cannot be established with certainty; it is always “up for grabs” and as such it engenders an anxiety. The political anxiety which is endemic to democracy is experienced most intensely in times of crisis; it has as its “object” the possibility that the symbolically empty place will become really empty, which is to say, no one will be able to establish legitimacy and this would mean that the symbolic place of power would fall into the real. Lefort credits Machiavelli with seeing how the place of power, the imperio, must rise above the real conflicts within a society, since any deficit of legitimacy can give rise to an experience of fragmentation. Employing Lacan’s psychoanalytic language, we could say that a deficit in legitimacy gives rise to an experience of the body politic in “bits and pieces,” that is, an experience of the dissolution of the nation. According to Lefort, totalitarianism is a response to the modern experience of the void; it is an attempt to fill the empty place of power. It does not do this by attempting to reestablish something like the monarchy, where the place of power is occupied not simply by the real body of the king but also by a doubling of his body which makes reference to

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“another place,” that is, to a supersensible world: “King Louis of France by the will of God.” Lefort argues that the totalitarian project, including both its Communist and Fascist forms, is a counterrevolution against democracy; it seeks to fill the empty place with a materialization of “the people,” that is, a people no longer in conflict with itself but rather a People-as-One. Machiavelli had already recognized that this situation is impossible in reality; nevertheless, a “people without conflict,” like the notion of the People-as-One, is the fantasy that will always haunt the “democratic experience.” In the totalitarian regime, the führer, or the great helmsman, pretends to incarnate the unity of the People-as-One, and all the social conflicts which continue to exist are projected onto the outside, that is, onto the evil Other, for example, the enemy of the people: Jews, foreign agents, and so on. The logic of the terror is not to repress any real opposition; on the contrary, it is to cover over the gap that inevitably opens in the phantasmic projection of the People-as-One. Totalitarianism returns to the image of the body as the guarantor of the unity of a society which is supposed to be delivered from any division and to be at one with itself. Let us cite one expert in these matters, Adolf Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf, “The man who is exposed to grave tribulations, as the first advocate of a new doctrine in his factory or workshop, needs that strengthening which lies in the conviction of being a member . . . in a great comprehensive body. And he obtains an impression of this body for the first time in the mass demonstration. . . .”16 Lefort discovers at the heart of the totalitarian project a massive repression which is one that can be orchestrated in two dimensions: on the one hand, as a refusal to recognize the inevitability of conflict, that is, the conflict of class, of gender, of generations, and so forth; and, on the other, as a refusal of the fact that the identity of a “body politic” exists only as deferred, which is to say, it is never given but is always to be sought. Recall what Freud has taught us about the “return of the repressed.” In the 1920s Lincoln Steffens visited the Soviet Union and famously reported, “I have seen the future and it works.” Beginning as far back as 1956, Lefort, on the basis of his analysis of totalitarianism, in effect said of the Soviet Union long before the fault lines had begun to show, “It does not work.” He had already observed the inherent instability of the Soviet Union. Although the predictive power of his analysis does not prove its truth, it does nonetheless recommend it to our attention. Like Arendt, whose study of totalitarianism came from her interpretation of Nazism, Lefort’s analysis of it was forged through his analysis of the Soviet Union; both of them, while recognizing the differences between German Fascism and Soviet Communism, nonetheless subsumed these two regimes under the same

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category. This aspect of their thought provoked the wrath not only of the Communists but also of progressive intellectuals. As we will see in the body of the text, Lefort produces an interesting analysis of the failure on the part of certain groups of even the non-Communist left to perceive the novelty of the totalitarian enterprise. Arendt’s thought figures prominently among those few who were not blind to the totalitarian phenomenon. Lefort’s thinking rejoins her thought at some points while diverging from it at others. The most evident point of convergence is a shared concern for political philosophy, particularly the analysis of totalitarianism; the main point of divergence between them is in terms of the relationship between totalitarianism and modern democracy. In Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics, Michael Halberstam writes, “Totalitarianism, for Arendt, represents a crisis of modernity, a culmination of certain trends inherent in modern culture . . .”17 Although this characterization seems to be essentially correct, it involves an ambiguity. A brief reflection on this ambiguity will adumbrate the basic features that separate Arendt’s thought from that of Lefort’s. It is a question of what one means by “certain trends in modern culture.” Lefort argues that totalitarianism is a strictly modern phenomenon which is not to be confused with tyranny since it is a counterrevolution against modernity; it is a possibility that is implicated in the very structure of any modern democratic society. The totalitarian project is the frenzied attempt to fill the void left by the disincarnation of society; it implies the notion of a reversal of the modern within modernity itself. In Arendt’s thought, it seems at times as though totalitarianism is “modernity writ large”; for her, modernity is characterized by the “rise of the social,” that is, the process-like “metabolism with nature” which exits from the shadowy confines of the home and enters into public space, the space of the political. As Hannah Pitkin has put it in her book The Attack of the Blob, the “rise of the social” brings with it the character of necessity which it imposes on “the space of Action” which ought to be the place of freedom.18 Arendt’s reflection upon, and her critique of, this intrusion by the social leads her to conclude that modernity has the tendency to represent history as a process; thus she observes a proliferation of philosophies of history and a consequent lack of political philosophies. In her philosophical lexicon, process implies motion and motion is opposed to worldhood. Work is what installs a permanent “world’ which “houses” the mortal life of man. Arendt’s concept of movement converges in her analysis of totalitarianism in two respects. First, in her sociological analysis, a certain “worldlessness” is the condition for the rise of the totalitarianism: The worldless man is

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the prime candidate for the totalitarian movement. The intrusion of the process-like metabolism of nature into political space erodes both “the worldhood of the world” and the freedom of the space of action. The second respect in which her concept of movement converges in her analysis of totalitarianism is that “the rise of the social” gives birth to an ideology according to which there are laws of history; these “laws” are prescribed in Fascism by race and in Communism by the development of the forces of production. Arendt claims that these laws play a central role in the constitution of totalitarianism; in her thought, lawfulness is the essence of a legitimate government, and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny; she considers terror to be the essence of totalitarianism. Both she and Lefort recognize that terror is not merely instrumental, that it goes well beyond the repression of opposition; in fact, in both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, the terror intensified after the opposition had already been eliminated. It is regarding the question of “the function of terror” that Arendt and Lefort part ways. According to her, the totalitarian regime annuls the transcendence of law, inasmuch as it is no longer given in the form of an imperative, that is, as “Thou shalt, or thou shalt not.” Rather it is given as an empirical law, for example, Facism’s law of race or Communism’s laws of history; these laws of motion are incarnated in the real world. During the terror, the laws of motion become the “laws of killing”; thus the elimination of inferior races or of historically doomed classes is only nature’s or history’s work in process. Lefort notes that Arendt herself does not believe in the real existence of the laws of history, or of race, and so forth; thus we see it is the belief in the nonexistent laws of history which generates the terror. In Arendt’s thought, an ideology lies at the heart of totalitarianism; it is an ideology engendered by the empirical fact of the “rise of the social” with its constant motion, and it is a characteristic of “modernity as such.” Even though there are some other differences, at this time I indicate only two respects in which Lefort’s thought diverges from Arendt’s. The first is the strain in her thought which suggests that totalitarianism is “the denouement of modernity.” Of course, she never says that there is no difference between totalitarianism and modern, as opposed to ancient, democracy; nonetheless, the logic of her analysis leads to the conclusion that the difference is one not of kind but of degree, since both are borne on the ceaseless motion of modernity. In the second point of disagreement, Lefort contends that Arendt exaggerates the role of motion in totalitarianism because she does not recognize that a regime which is legitimated by the laws of history must also insist upon the “end of history.” She underestimates the stabilizing role of the One in the totalitarian regime, that is, its power to control almost all aspects of social life and thus

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shut down their proper dynamics. Lefort contends that such regimes are characterized by a certain immobility, that is, in some respects, reminiscent of premodern societies. Perhaps Arendt conflates two phenomena that Lefort judges to be essentially different: the frenzied attempt of the totalitarian regime to fill the void left by the disincarnation of society; and the “restless motion” that Lefort, following Tocqueville, thinks is an essential characteristic of modern society. Briefly stated, Lefort rejects Arendt’s negative characterization of modernity as being dominated by “the rise of the social,” and he does not believe that totalitarianism is produced by an ideology. More important, he emphatically distinguishes the level of the symbolic from the level of the ideological; this distinction, which is analyzed in the body of the text, leads him to the notion that democracy and totalitarianism are not ideologies, that is, they are not the instantiation of ideas but rather dimensions of the symbolic structure of the society through which a society gains access to the real.

Notes 1. Pierre Manent, “The Fate and Meaning of Political Philosophy in Our Century,” lecture given 9 June 1999 to the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 2. New York Review of Books, 15 June 1988. 3. See the preface to my book, Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992). 4. See Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law,” (Cardoza Law Review, nos 5–6); Specters of Marx, tr. P. Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994); and The Politics of Friendship, tr. G. Collins (London: Verso, 1997). 5. See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, tr. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (New York: Noon Day, 1957); What Is Literature?, tr. B. Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1949); Critique of Dialectical Reason, tr. A. Sheridan-Smith (London: New Left Books, 1976). 6. Emmanuel Levinas, Quelque Réflexions sur la Philosophie de Hitlérisme, Suivi d’un Essay de Miguel Abensour (Paris: Rivages, 1997). The essay by Levinas was originally written in 1934. 7. Ibid., 10. 8. Ibid., 19. 9. Ibid., 7. 10. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1951). 11. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Century: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 12. Ibid., 77. 13. Claude Lefort, “The Question of Democracy” in PFM, 9–20.

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14. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, tr. A. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963); and The Phenomenology of Preception, tr. C. Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). 15. Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 16. Cited by Michael Halberstam in Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 22. 17. Ibid., 142. 18. Hannah Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Conception of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

Abbreviations

Within the body of the text, a number of primary texts will be frequently cited; the following bibliographic code has been used in order to facilitate this citation.

Works by Lefort TM

Le Travail de l’Oeuvre Machiavel. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.

FH

Les Formes de l’Histoire: Essais d’Anthropologie Politique. Paris: Gallimard, 1978.

DPT

Democracy and Political Theory. Trans. D. Macey. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.

WPT

Writing: The Political Test. Trans. D. A. Curtis. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000.

PFM

The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Ed. J. B. Thompson. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986.

CRC

La Complication: Retour sur le Communisme. Paris: Fayard, 1999.

Works by Machiavelli P

The Prince. Trans. J. B. Atkinson. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1976.

D

The Discourses. Ed. B. Crick. Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1970.

xxxi

Selected Bibliography of Claude Lefort

1945 “L’analyse marxiste et le fascism,” Les Temps Modernes, 1:2, 357–362. 1947 “Les pays coloniaux. Analyse structurelle et stratégie révolutionnaire,” Le Temps Moderne, 2:18, 1068–1094. 1949 “Sociologie du communisme,” Les Temps Modernes, 5: 50, 1098–1108. 1951 “Notes critique sur la méthode de Kardiner,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 10. 1952 “Le prolétariat et sa direction,” Socialisme ou Barbarie, 10. ———. “Sociétiés sans histoire et historicité,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 12, 91–114. ———. “Capitalisme et religion au XVIe: le problème de Weber,” Les Temps Modernes, 7: 78. 1953 “Le marxisme et Sartre,” Les Temps Modernes, 8: 89, 1541–1570. 1954 “La littérature moderne comme expression de l’homme,” Congresso dos escritoires, Sao Paulo, 3–24. 1955 “L’aliénation comme concept sociologique,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 18. 1956 “Le totalitarisme sans Staline,” Socialisme ou Barbarie, 19, juil.-sept. (PFM, 52– 88) 1958 “La méthode des intellectuals progressistes,” Socialisme ou Barbarie, 23, janv.– fev. ———. “La magie et l’histoire,” Quatorze Juillet, 1. 1960 “Réflexions sociologiques sur Machiavel et Marx,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 28, 113–135. ———. “Qu’est-ce que la bureaucratie,” Arguments, 17. (PFM, 89–121) 1961 “L’idée d’être brut et d’esprit sauvage,” Les Temps Modernes, 17, 253–286. 1963 “Démocratie réelle et representation démocratique,” Cahiers du Centre d’études socialistes, févr., 22–28. ———. “La politique et la pensée de la politique,” Les lettres nouvelles, 32, 19–70. 1969 “Ambiguités de l’anthropologie culturelle. Introduction à l’oeuvre de Abraham Kardiner,” in Abraham Kardiner, L’individu dans sa société, Paris, Gallimard. 1970 “Merleau-Ponty: une pensée au-delà de la pensée,” Le monde, 18 avril. ———. “L’interprétation de l’oeuvre de pensée,” Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 1. 1971 Éléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie, Genève, Droz. ———. “Le corps, la chair,” L’Arc, 46, 5–18.

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xxxiv S E L E C T E D

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

O F

C L A U D E

L E F O R T

———. “Machiavel et les jeunes,” Science et conscience de la société, Paris, CalmannLevy, 191–208. 1972 Le travail de l’oeuvre. Machiavel, Paris, Gallimard. 1973 “La naissance de l’idéologie et l’humanisme. Introduction,” Textures, 6–7, 27–68. 1974 “Esquisse d’une genése de l’idéologie dans les sociétés moderns,” Textures, 8– 9. (PFM, 181–236) 1976 “Le nom d’Un” in Etienne de la Boétie, in Le discours de la servitude voluntaire, texte établi par P. Léonard, Paris, Payot, 247–307. ———. Un homme en trop. Réflections sur L’Archipel du Goulag, Paris, Le Seuil. ———. “La question de la revolution,” Esprit, sept., 206–224. 1977 “La première révolution anti-totalitaire,” Esprit, janv., 13–19. 1978 Les fomes de l’histoire. Essais d’anthropologie politique, Paris, Gallimard. ———. “De l’égalité à la liberté.” Fragments d’interprétation de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, Libre, 3, 211–246. (DPT, 163–210) ———. “Marx: d’une vision de l’histoire à l’autre,” in Les formes de l’histoire, Paris, Gallimard. (PFM, 139–180) ———. “Machiavel: la dimension économique du politique,” Les formes de l’histoire. ———. Sur une colonne absente. Ecrits autour de Merleau-Ponty, Paris, Gallimard. 1979 “L’image du le corps et totalitarisme,” Confrontations, 2. (PFM, 292–306) 1980 “Droits de l’homme et politique,” Libre, 7, 3–42. (PFM, 239–272) ———. “Penser la revolution dans la Révolution française,” Annales, 35: 2, 334– 352. (DPT, 89–114) 1981 L’invention democratique. Les limits de la domination totalitaire, Paris, Fayard. ———. “Permanence du théologico-politique?” Le Temps de la réflection, 2, 13–60. (DPT, 213–255) 1982 “Réversibilité: Liberté politique et liberty de l’individu,” Passé-Présent, 1, 216– 220.(DPT, 165–182) ———. “Mort de l’immortalité?” Le Temps de la réflection, 3, 171–201. (DPT, 256– 282) 1983 “L’antisémitisme et les ambiguités de la démocratie,” Commentaire, 21, 21–28. ———. “Le mythe de l’Un dans le fantasme et dans la réalité politique,” Psychanalystes, 9. ———. “La question de la démocratie,” in Le retrait du politique, ed. LacoueLabathe et Luc-Nancy, Paris, Galilée, 71–88. (DPT, 9–20) ———. “La terreur révolutionnaire,” Passé-Présent, 2, 11– 43. (DPT, 88) ———. “Edgar Quinet; la révolution manque,” Passé-Présent, 2, 45-95. (DPT, 115– 134) 1984 “Orwell. Le corps interpose,” Passé-Présent, 3, 80–97. (WPT, 1–19) ———. “Les droits de l’homme et l’état-providence,” Revue interdisciplinaire d’etudes juridiques, 13. (DPT, 21– 44) 1985 “Hannah Arendt et la question du le politique,” Cahiers du Forum pour l’indépendance et la paix, 5, mars. (DPT, 45–56) 1986 “Relecture du Manifeste communiste,” Dictionaire des oeuvres politique, PUF. (DPT, 149–162) ———. Essais sur le politique. XIXe–XXe siècles, Paris, Le Seuil.

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B I B L I O G R A P H Y

O F

C L A U D E

L E F O R T

———. “L’idée de paix et l’idée d’humanité,” Diogène, 135, 14–32. (WPT, 142–158) 1988 “Introduction. Le libéralisme de Guizot,” François Guizot, in Des doyens de gouvernement et d’opposition dans la France actuelle, Bélin (littérature et politique), 7–31. (WPT, 85–108) 1989 “La revolution comme religion nouvelle,” in The Transformation of Political Culture 1789–1848, ed. François Furet et Mona Ozouf, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 391–399. (WPT, 159-171) ———. “Tocqueville: une pensée des contraires. Note sur L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution,” Revue européenne des sciences sociales, 27, 85, 151–163. (WPT, 49– 66) ———. “Sade: Le Boudoir et la Cité,” Petits et grand théâtres du Marquis de Sade, ed. A. Lebrun, Paris, Paris Arts Center. (WPT, 67–84) ———. “Dissolution des repères et lenjeu démocratique,” Humain à l’image de Dieu, Genève, Labor et Fides, 89–108. ———. “Décomposition du totalitarisme,” Liberation, 10 Juillet. Reprinted in Ecrire. A l’épreuve du politique. (WPT, 252–256) 1990 “Renaissance de la démocratie?” Pouvoirs, 52, 5–22. Reprinted in Ecrire, 362– 382. (WPT, 256–272) 1991 “Humanisme ou anti-humanism: au sujet de Salman Rushdie,” Revue européenne des sciences sociales, 29, 89, 131–142. (WPT, 20–34) ———. “Introduction” to Gordon S. Wood, La création de la République américaine, 1776–1787, traduit par F. Delastre, Paris, Bélin, 5–28. ———. “Preface” to Japanese translation of Un homme en trop, Tokyo, Miraisha. 1992 Ecrire. A l’épreuve du politique, Paris, Calmann-Levy. ———. “Tocqueville: démocratie et art d’écrire. Une exploration de la chair du social. Note sur De la démocratie en Amérique” in Ecrire. A l’épreuve du politique, 55–72. (WPT, 35–49) ———. “L’épreuve de vérité?” in Ecrire. (WPT, 273–279) ———. “Machiavel et la verità effetuale,” in Ecrire. (WPT, 109–141) 1993 “La modernitié de Dante. Introduction,” in Dante, La Monarchie, Paris, Bélin. 1995 “La nation élue et le rêve de l’empire universel,” L’Idée d’humanité, Paris, Albin Michel. 1996 “Le sens de l’orientation,” Poésie, 78. ———. “Preface” to Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours au collège de France: 1958–1959 et 1960–1961, Paris, Gallimard. 1997 “Nach dem Totalitarismus,” Hannah Arendt. Nach dem Totalitarismus, ed. Daniel Ganzfried and Sebastian Hefti, Hamburg, Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 31–54. ———. “L’imaginaire de la crise,” Commentaire, 79, 525–536. 1999 La Complication: retour sur le Communisme, Paris, Fayard. 2002 La Cité des vivants et des morts. Préfaces et introductions, présentées par Claude Lefort, Paris, Bélin. 2003 Préface to L’Institution La Passivité. Notes de cours au collège de France (1954– 1955), textes établis par Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort et Stéphanie Ménasé, Paris, Bélin.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CLAUDE LEFORT

Part 1

Lefort as Reader of Machiavelli

1

The Prince

My intent in this section is not to evaluate Lefort’s interpretation of Machiavelli by an extensive contrast to other Machiavelli interpretations but rather to view his work of interpretation as generative of many of the key concepts of his own thought. This section is divided into three chapters: first, his reading of The Prince; second, his reading of The Discourses; third, the general theory of interpretation developed in Le Travail de L’Oeuvre Machiavel. Whatever one might conclude concerning the adequacy of Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli, it is impossible not to be struck by its richness and novelty. He brings to his writings on the work of Machiavelli a conceptual apparatus that is deeply marked by his long apprenticeship with the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. In his reading of Machiavelli, we shall see how Lefort puts to work, rather than merely follows, some of the basic concepts of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. “How is one to read Machiavelli?” (TM, 313). Lefort’s response is that one must read Machiavelli very closely, viewing it as a work that does something; which is to say, not as a work that pretends simply to mirror or reflect some state of affairs from an objective point of view but rather as a gesture that enters actively, with the aim of transforming, the field of discourse in which it is inscribed. But how, and in what direction? This will become apparent in the course of our reflections. From the beginning it must be emphasized that a recurring motif running through Lefort’s writing on Machiavelli is his constant opposition to any attempt to read The Prince as an “occasional work,” one written under the pressure of events— for example, in its most vulgar presentation, as an attempt to curry favor with Lorenzo the Magnificent; in other words, to get a job as an advisor to a tyrant. As Gadamer has taught us, such reductive interpretations put out of play the work’s claim to truth, thus leaving our interpretive horizons intact and without contestation. While not by any means neglecting the 5

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historical field in which Machiavelli wrote, Lefort presents him as someone who contests our conceptual horizons and who leads us, perhaps for the first time, to the thought of the political field as such. Far from reducing The Prince to a text written under the pressure of events, he views the prince as a figure of man in his relationship to Being. Some of the recurring themes of Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli emerge in the form of an opposition to an interpretation of him that would praise his novelty as being one which, having broken with the moralizing religious and metaphysically inspired forms of political philosophy, inaugurates the modern form of political discourse called political science; that is, an empirical science which thinks the political simply as a field of forces, as the place of the operations of naked power. Read in this manner, the virtue of Machiavelli’s thought is to have “demystified” the moral and religious representation of power, thereby permitting us to view it in its raw operations. In this interpretation, the corollary of Machiavelli’s empirical discourse on the machinations of power is a moral and political cynicism, supplemented by an emotional patriotism, which he gives vent to only in the last chapter of The Prince. To this reading, one must pose the question: “If power is rendered naked, what are the articles of clothing that have been disgarded?” Clearly the response must be representation. Later we shall see that Lefort has much to say concerning the notion of demystification; for now suffice to say that, for him, what Machiavelli gives us to think is the metamorphosis by which civil society is transformed into political society, a transformation which happens precisely through the process of representation. Where others have seen a mystifying cynicism in the projection of the image of the prince, Lefort sees the very constitution of the political. Far from obfuscating the operations of power, the image of the prince is that through which force is transformed into properly political power. According to the Russian formalists, the effect of poetic language is to defamiliarize language. Also, Merleau-Ponty argues that the true function of the phenomenological reduction is not to constitute a field of immanence but to break our familiarity with the world, “to stand back and let the world appear as sparks from a fire.” And for the Heidegger of Being and Time, the destruction of the history of metaphysics destroys its familiarity as a “history of ideas” and allows it to be seen again as if for the first time. One of the first effects of Lefort’s reading of The Prince is to render it strange, to defamiliarize this often, perhaps too often, read text which is standard material for courses in political science. Evoking psychoanalytic language, he goes so far as to speak of a “manifest subject” and a “latent subject” of Machiavelli’s writings. The apparently straightforward character of The Prince is constantly put into question through a close

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reading of the text itself. Lefort is sensitive to the tone of the text and its obvious self-contradictions; he observes that Machiavelli claims not to speak of ecclesiastical politics and then speaks of them at great length, and that he writes, “a monarch that we shall not name” and then goes on to name him as Ferdinand of Spain, and so forth. Lefort is also well attuned to the ironic dimensions of these texts; for example, Machiavelli writes, “We should not consider Moses, since he was merely the executer of matters decreed to him by God,” then, speaking of the action of the other armed prophet founders, “They will appear no different from Moses” (P, 145). Lefort also has an ear for the change of voices in the work of Machiavelli, particularly, as we shall see in the last chapter of The Prince and even more so in his analysis of The Discourses, when he contends that Machiavelli’s practice of writing corresponds very closely to the subject matter it is considering. There is the necessity for a true discourse, “whereby the writer says things that others have passed over in silence, as there is the necessity of political action which demands that the prince do things that an ordinary man is incapable of achieving” (TM, 330). Nevertheless, if the writer must say them, he must not do so too clearly. As we begin to see, Lefort’s reading complicates the apparent clarity of Machiavelli’s writing. Having put ourselves at a certain remove from some of the received ideas concerning Machiavelli, and having evoked the tone of Lefort’s reading, let us now turn to his work on The Prince. In general his interpretation moves through this text chapter by chapter. I do not follow his progression in detail but attempt to grasp some of the leading threads which run through it. One of Lefort’s first complicating moves is to show that the order announced by Machiavelli is not the order that he follows. In a letter to Vettori, Machiavelli writes that The Prince concerns “what is sovereignty, how many types of it there are, how one acquires it, how one keeps it, and why one loses it” (TM, 325). As such, one could consider it as falling within the genre of texts on the art of governing, similar to those written by the scholastics. Lefort begins his reflection by noting that it is what is “not spoken,” what is unsaid, in The Prince that separates it from this traditional genre and also from the works of Antiquity. He writes, “The author does not situate the relation of the prince with his subjects within the more general framework of a relation of man with his fellow men, nor with nature, nor with God” (TM, 326). Machiavelli does not place the situation of the prince within other forms of human organization, as, for example, Aristotle does when he situates the ruler within the form of familial authority. For both Plato and Aristotle, although in different ways, the political order is constructed in analogy with the natural order, as, for example, Plato’s tripartite division of the soul and the polity in the Republic.

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In the traditional Christian doctrine, elaborated philosophically by the scholastics, the political order is construed in analogy with the divine order, insofar as all authority descends from God. Machiavelli’s silence on these issues is indeed deafening. The things unsaid remain “at the horizon of things said” (TM, 328). This silence signals that what the writings of Machiavelli aim at is a new object, namely, the autonomy and irreducibility of the political vis-à-vis cosmology and theology. Thus we see that his thought cannot be placed within the conventional definitions of philosophy, psychology, or history. Assuredly, Machiavelli turns our thoughts in the direction of history, man, society, the state, the motives of the prince, and good and evil. “At first glance, however, the field of his investigation, the reality that he aims at, does not let itself be clearly circumscribed” (TM, 327). It is the novelty of the object of this work that troubles and contests the apparent clarity of Machiavelli’s presentation. I will attempt to illustrate this doubling of perspectives. In its straightforward reading, The Prince appears to be a text consisting of advice to a new prince: Machiavelli prescribes certain actions, offers a number of illustrations of how princes have retained power, and also relates some cautionary tales of how, and under what circumstances, rulers of the past have lost their kingdoms and sometimes their lives. From this perspective, the prince is the subject of political action, and Machiavelli is offering him technical instructions based on historical knowledge and the readings of the classics. Nevertheless, on further reading, we see that the prince is far from being a sovereign subject who acts in a purely instrumental manner; he is not the precursor of the Cartesian subject whose self-representation provides the ground of certainty upon which objects are represented. He is not the sole subject who initiates the ends and means of his actions. “He is himself ‘represented’, his work is perceived as an effect, be it of virtu or of fortune” (TM, 333). The image of the prince, it will be shown, is not incidental to his reality but constitutive of it. This notion of the subject radically contests the conception of humanism elaborated by Heidegger, according to which humanism would be the regime of sovereign subjectivity, ultimately issuing in the Gestell of technology. Lefort shows that in The Prince the subject is constituted across the play of desires, as masking a fundamental void, a noncoincidence of the body politic with itself. This is the introduction of what he does not hesitate to call a new ontology and a new political philosophy, one that destabilizes the meaning of terms and the apparent structure of the argument. Issues that seemed to be put out of play at the beginning of The Prince return in altered form further on in the text. Lefort writes, “Finally, little by little, we discern that the examination of particular hypotheses,

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that are the material of the first eleven chapters, gives way to a reflection on the present situation in Italy and on the political in general” (TM, 340– 341). On a political level, for example, the first chapter seems to dismiss the question of types of regimes, claiming that there are only two types: republics or princedoms. In the second chapter, discussion of the first type of regime is foreclosed by the much debated remark “because I have discussed them at length elsewhere.” It would seem that only princedoms remain, but in the fourth chapter, he does in fact distinguish different types of regimes by juxtaposing the rule of the Turks to that of the King of France, which is to say, he compares despotism to feudalism. Finally, in the fifth chapter, he distinguishes between regimes founded on their own laws and those that are not, remarking that whoever becomes master of, but does not destroy, a city living as a free community may expect to be destroyed by it, because “during an insurrection, the city can always take refuge in evoking the name of freedom and its traditional institutions, which are never forgotten whatever the course of time or whatever favors are accorded” (P, 139). Thus he makes a sharp distinction between a free community and despotism. Although it would appear that Machiavelli escapes all value judgments, it is not difficult to see a strong judgment in his description of the ecclesiastical state as one in which the prince neither defends nor governs his subjects. According to Lefort, Machiavelli’s discourse unfolds on many different planes: On the one hand, it is bifurcated by the transformations of research on the relations imminent in political action and the discovery of its limits; on the other hand, it is a transformation of an object of experience into an object of knowledge which engenders its own autocritique, through the recognition of a fundamental indeterminacy inherent in the field of both knowledge and action. Far from inaugurating and celebrating a technology of power and a positive science of the political, he reads Machiavelli as a thinker who adumbrates a fundamental critique of this project; as someone who elaborates an intertwining of knowledge and nonknowledge, and who views power not as a positive object, a sort of thing-in-itself, but rather as a relationship of poles in conflict. A fundamental ambiguity emerges in the relationship of a prince to the state; Machiavelli provides no theory of the historical origin of the state, no hypothetical state of nature out of which the state emerges. As noted above, he does not render the state intelligible in terms of a reference to the cosmos or a hierarchy of being. Lefort writes, “On the one hand, the object, the principality, is apprehended in a definition which constitutes it as the result of the operations of a subject. On the other hand, the subject, the prince, is himself determined relative to the place that he occupies in regard to the object” (TM, 348). For neither the prince nor the principality

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is it a question of the relationship between a subject and an object. The subject of The Prince is the imperio, that is, the place of nonorigin. The imperio is the name given to the power that certain men, or groups of men, exercise upon others, which refers to an exteriority beyond men. It is that in virtue of which their relationships order themselves in the framework of a State; “dimension” rather than “figure” of Society, of which it is perhaps as vain to seek its cause in particular human motives as to seek its cause in a religious or a metaphysical principle (TM, 348–349). The opposition of dimension and figure plays an important role in Lefort’s political philosophy. One might recall that in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty spoke of the flesh as a dimension, an element, recalling the notions of earth, fire, air, and water in early Greek thought. For Lefort the true subject matter of The Prince is the flesh of the political. It is “the space of an ‘entre-deux’ which announces itself as the place of the real (‘reel ’) which pre-exists the action of the political subject” (TM, 348). In an altered sense, one might employ Levinas’s phrase, “the origin before origin.” If the place of power preexists the political actor, then it is important to make precise what one means by this “before,” or at least what one does not mean. In Machiavelli’s thought, there is not a valorization of tradition or of nature. Observe how he distinguishes between the problems of a hereditary prince and those of a new prince, that is, the prince of a newly acquired territory. The privilege of the “hereditary prince” is simply that his subjects have become accustomed, by long experience, to his oppression and thus he has no motive for introducing destabilizing changes. The “natural prince” is called natural by nothing more profound than the habituation of his subjects, not because of any natural disposition of the body politic, or because of the institution of “good form” founded upon a design of Providence, or a natural finality. Nevertheless, the new prince must introduce changes which will necessarily be opposed by some of his subjects, and thus we see that “between the regime of one and that of the other, there is no substantial difference, but a difference in degree” (TM, 351). Machiavelli rejects the classical idea, with its implicit metaphysical opposition between the substantial and the accidental, of an essentially stable polity that would be disrupted by accidental violence. In rejecting this distinction, it could appear that Machiavelli also rejects the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power and establishes another principle of explanation, namely, violence pure and simple; but Lefort contests this appearance. Without wishing to diminish the role of violence in Machiavelli’s thought, or in political life itself, he contends that there is no master or key term in Machiavelli’s thought; he argues that we are always put in the presence of many terms simultaneously and are “con-

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strained to think in function of their relationship, that is to say, the action and reaction that they exercise on one another” (TM, 355). Power cannot be seen as a thing-in-itself. “Power itself is indissociable from the intelligibility that it acquires from the relationships of power” (TM, 356). Power is doubled in knowledge, but neither power nor knowledge tend of themselves toward a condition of stability. “In affirming the permanence of conflict, in rejecting the idea that a political form carries stability in itself, the thinker recognizes the permanence of accident, and consequently designates the function of the prince as that of a subject who acquires the truth in a continuous movement of rationalization of experience” (TM, 57). This means that the prince is neither “subject supposed to know” nor is he simply driven by the flow of events. The perspectives of both thinker and actor can neither be juxtaposed nor united; they are intertwined, which means that they are both identical and different. The prince, unlike Plato’s philosopher king, is not in a position of essential knowledge, and, unlike the “pseudo-sages of Florence,” he is not adrift in a sea of circumstances. Rather he is installed within what Merleau-Ponty called “a logic of contingency.” In the work of Machiavelli, Lefort sees the transcendence of the opposition between the brute opaque fact and the transparent essence, which is to say, he sees in Machiavelli’s thought a practice of interrogation. Above I quoted Lefort to the effect that the analyses of Machiavelli were driven by ideas that could not, and must not, be given direct expression. According to Lefort, in contrast to Leo Strauss, the reasons for this dissimulation are not purely of a political nature; they are philosophical in origin. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty opposes the notion of dialectic to what he calls the “hyperdialectic,” a dialectic without synthesis. He characterizes it as a form of thought, the naming of which would constitute a betrayal since this very naming would be a form of thematization that would arrest thought undertaken in the mode of interrogation. Lefort discovers this interrogative type of thinking operative in Machiavelli’s thought. “Let us consider what constitutes the markers of a thought of which it seems indispensable that it remains on this side of expression, as if by offering itself in the form of an explicit knowledge it would degrade itself, would hurl itself at the incomprehension of others, or better yet, it curves in a winding path as if it would only enter into possession of the truth through a double and constant denegation” (TM, 361). This hyperdialectical form of thought is commanded by that which it is given to think; one is tempted to say its object. The point is that what thought wishes to think is not an object, but neither is it a Heracletian river of flux into which one may never step twice. In the thought of Machiavelli, there is a constant opposition of terms: “time” as that which con-

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solidates and institutionalizes and “time” which drives all things before it; law and force; the relatively stable political structures and the advent of pure diversity; the desire to oppress and the desire to be free; virtue and fortune, and so forth. However, between these opposed terms there is no final synthesis; rather, there is a coming and going. This reading of Machiavelli views him as the quintessential thinker of modernity, because for Lefort modernity is neither the period dominated by the thought of a sovereign subjectivity nor simply a classificatory term; rather, it is a term which designates a response to an experience, a phenomenon, namely, that of the dissolution of the classical, as well as the Christian, ontotheological markers of certainty. On the positive side it gives rise to “a new status of experience and knowledge” (TM, 362). Lefort grants a certain privilege to chapter IV of The Prince, which is entitled “Concerning New Princedoms Acquired by One’s Own Arms and Virtue.” Let us follow his analysis, for its content but also as an illustration of the epistemological reflections just mentioned. The content of the chapter does not exactly coincide with its title. He speaks of “entirely new princedoms” which are, in a certain sense, not acquired but created, and thus he touches upon the very foundation of the political. He evokes the ancient founders: Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, Romulus and Remus. In the extremely informative notes to The Prince, James Atkins tells us that Machiavelli “presumably believed that each of these figures was genuinely historical”; however, he wisely adds that whether he did or not is “less important than their symbolic value” (P, 144). As Lefort has remarked, “the realist function of the great examples is a symbolic function” (TM, 363); this paradoxical formulation indicates that the symbolic does not merely signify but actually does something. It is an instance of what LéviStrauss has called “symbolic efficacity.” Also in this chapter, Machiavelli considers the opposition between virtu and fortune, but quickly we discover that fortune does not come to much; it merely provides an opportunity for the operation of virtu. When he evokes Moses, it seems that Moses’s claim to legitimacy by divine origin is only an appearance, that in fact the successful institution of a new order is the result of his virtu, as it is with all the other ancient founders. Although Machiavelli says this quickly and without much emphasis, it is of great importance. It would seem as though, in passing, he is rejecting the entire Christian and humanist conception of the divine or natural origin of legitimate authority and claiming that all, or almost all, depends on the virtu of the founder. Nevertheless, to the question, “What is virtue?” Machiavelli gives no certain response, but he intimates that it radically diverges from both the Christian and humanist conception of it. What this means will become clearer as I continue my analysis of Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli.

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A close reading of the text shows that the act of institution is not simply a product of the sovereign will of the prince. Rather, a prince who would found a new polity must “go along paths beaten by great men and imitate the most pre-eminent, so that if his own virtue does not measure up with theirs, at least it may smell like it” (P, 134). The prince must imitate the virtue of symbolic and mythical founders; this repetition, or quasirepetition, introduces the notion of ruse, or illusion; his virtu must smell like theirs. The elevation from which the prince, a most excellent man, can perform the most difficult and dangerous tasks of introducing new institutions must be constituted by encouraging the illusion through which his virtu would smell like that of the symbolic founders. At this point, Machiavelli introduces the opposition between the armed prophet (Moses) and the unarmed prophet (Savonarola). Recall that The Prince was written not long after the execution of Savonarola in the Piazzo delle Signore. From Savonarola’s point of view, he failed because of the corruption and lack of Christian faith of his followers; but from Machiavelli’s point of view, Lefort claims that “Savonarola failed because he was incapable of constraining men to conserve their belief, not in God, but in him” (TM, 366). Savonarola failed to elevate himself, by an imaginary identification with the ancient founders, to the point from which the act of institution is possible. However, this act cannot be accomplished purely in the realm of belief; it must also become a reality by the use of force. Moses was an armed prophet, but force of arms alone did not account for his success; he also provoked the belief in the divine origin of his mission. Lefort notes that Machiavelli substitutes himself for Savonarola and in doing so, in contrast to Savonarola, he transforms both the content and the level of political discourse. In Machiavelli’s estimation, the fundamental problem confronting Italy is not its lack of faith in the Bible and the ancient images of God but rather its lack of faith in the future: its failure to act audaciously in a new situation and its reliance on fortune and providence. On the more fundamental level, he transforms the level of discourse by diverging from the theological, thereby opening the space in which the political can appear. He presents the social and political field as a field of forces and divergent desires. As already noted above, it would be woefully inadequate to think of Machiavelli as a proto-political scientist, that is, one who transforms the political field into an object susceptible to a purely empirical knowledge. According to Lefort, the novelty of Machiavelli’s discourse is that “knowledge is now enrooted in non-knowledge” (TM, 367); the real is crisscrossed by the imaginary, and the factual by the illusory. Machiavelli’s thought “gives proof to an incertitude touching the foundations of knowledge, to an indetermination relative to the very being of the political”

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(TM, 368). His thinking encounters “a certain void” (TM, 368), in the very place where the ancient discourses rested upon a divine or a natural order. If not closely read, the sixth chapter of The Prince, and many other parts, can appear as a celebration of force and violence. Although Lefort wishes to show the inadequacy of this reading, he nevertheless does not wish to domesticate Machiavelli by occulting the role of force in his writings; he insists that “one who would consider the noble face of force must also ascribe, at the same time, to its stark face” (TM, 372). The founding and maintenance of a polity indeed implicates the use of force. It is not as if Machiavelli does not distinguish between good and evil, like the scientist who does not make any “value judgments”; rather, it is that those markers separating good and evil are not fixed. If there is an ethics in the work of Machiavelli it is, as we shall see later, an ethics of responsibility, in the sense given to this term by Max Weber at the end of his essay “Politics as a Vocation,” in which he opposes it to an ethics of ultimate ends. Both Machiavelli and Weber are sensitive to the fact that virtue, rigorously conceived and practiced, can lead to disaster; the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions. It is not as though Machiavelli does not distinguish between the true prince and the tyrant’s hunger for power; rather, he cannot conceive of a stable code, or set of precepts, by which to distinguish between them. In the eighth chapter of The Prince, entitled “Concerning Those That Become Princes Through Inequity,” after listing the achievement of Agathocle, Machiavelli writes, “Yet it cannot be termed virtu to murder one’s fellow citizens, to betray friends, and to be without loyalty, mercy and religion; such methods can cause one to win power but not glory” (P, 181). Power not glory? But what is there in glory which is lacking in power? Machiavelli’s answer is “recognition by the other.” The highly complex concept of recognition and exchange is at the center of Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli. He notes that Machiavelli’s “condemnation” of Agathocle is equivocal and is not made from a Christian or humanist conception of morality. Agathocle’s lack of glory is not due to his having committed crimes—Borgia has attained glory and he has committed many—but rather because his ascension to power was seen, in the eyes of his subjects and in the memory of posterity, as that of “the son of a simple porter” (TM, 380). The image of Agathocle does not rise above the social division of society, or society itself. He remains simply a man among others who has attained power by force. We turn now to the process by which the man of power is transformed into the prince, which is the most novel dimension of Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli. In the ninth chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli presents a theory of class conflict which he believes is universal and also

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the very foundation of the political. He writes, “Two opposing classes exist in every city” (P, 91); the conflict is between the rich (the grandee) and the poor (the people). In this respect, Machiavelli seems to echo Plato and anticipate Marx. In the Republic, Plato tells us that all existing cities are really two cities: the city of the rich and the city of the poor, and they are always in conflict. Marx begins the Communist Manifesto by informing us that all heretofore existing history is the history of class struggle. Whereas Plato proposes to stabilize the relationship of classes in the Republic through the noble lie of the three metals, thereby retaining classes but not class conflict, Marx would resolve class conflict through “the final struggle,” a struggle from which a classless society would emerge. Unlike Plato, Machiavelli does not conceive of eliminating the conflicts of classes, and unlike Marx, he does not envision the elimination of classes. As we shall see in the next chapter on the Discourses, Lefort will insist that one of the great novelties in Machiavelli’s thought was to view conflict not as something to be eliminated but as the very source of political life; he shows that conflict was the source of the strength of ancient Rome. According to him, the stabilization of class conflict is neither possible nor desirable. This brings to mind Heraclitus, who claims that Homer did not realize that the desire for all conflict to cease would be the desire for the end of the world. In Machiavelli’s thought, there is no possibility of eliminating classes themselves, since he has no theory of a substratum that would subtend class conflict, neither the division nor extraction of a surplus, nor the “natural” division of labor. Indeed there is economic exploitation, but for him it is the result of domination and thus not its explanation. The conflict is a conflict of two desires. “The common people want to be neither governed nor oppressed by the rich, and the rich want to govern and oppress the common people” (P, 191). Lefort insists that Machiavelli views this opposition neither as simply an opposition of fact whereby some people are in fact rich while others are not, nor one of specific interests, nor a conflict of “lifestyles”; rather, it is that one desires to command and oppress while the other desires not to be commanded or oppressed. Since it is not a conflict over something, for example, the division of a surplus, it cannot be resolved. Of the two classes, Lefort writes, “Their existence is only determined in their essential relationship, in the clash of the two appetites, in principle equally insatiable. And further, a class exists only by the lack which constitutes it in the face of the other.” In an article on Lefort entitled “Vers L’Oeuvre et le Monde: le Machiavel de Claude Lefort,” Pierre Manent notes disapprovingly the divergence of Machiavelli from Aristotle, for whom there is only one desire common to all men, namely, the desire for the Good.1 Manent remarks insightfully, but again disap-

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provingly, that this opposition of two irreducible desires leads to History rather than to Nature as the central concept of a modern, as opposed to a classical, political philosophy. According to Machiavelli, the situation of class conflict is universal and ineluctable, and a prince can found a civic princedom only by drawing support from one or other of the conflicting classes. He argues that a prince can take and maintain power only by means of his friendship with the people and not by a friendship with the rich. Why not the rich? At first glance, it would appear that Machiavelli proposes only prosaic and sociological reasons: The people are more numerous than the grandee; a prince can neutralize the grandee but he must live with the people; the rich will always be plotting against him, and so forth. This brings to mind the words of Bertolt Brecht when he says, “The government of the DDR has lost the confidence of the people; therefore it is necessary to elect a new people.” When we look more closely, however, we see that Machiavelli proposes a far more profound reason, and Lefort underlines it: “The man who becomes prince with the aid of the rich maintains his position with greater difficulty than he who does so with the aid of the common people. Because in the former situation, while he is a prince, he finds himself surrounded by so many who consider themselves his equal, and hence he can neither govern them nor manage them the way he wants to. The man who becomes prince with the aid of the common people finds himself alone, surrounded by none, or very few, who are not prepared to obey” (P, 193). The rich see the prince as their equal. He is one of them, one whom they can use to further their class interests; in their eyes, his image will never be elevated above the class struggle, he will simply be their instrument. This relationship between the prince and the grandee would be a personal relationship. The following anecdote may illustrate the point: A priest once told me that he was with his mother, a pious woman, at the scene of an accident where someone was badly hurt. She turned to him and said, “John, quick, get a priest,” to which he replied, “But Mother, I am a priest,” and she responded, “No, get a real one.” The personal relation of the mother to her son foreclosed her perception of his symbolic function. In like manner, the personal relationship of the grandee to the prince forecloses his properly political function. This will not be the situation in the prince’s relationship to the people: “The friendship of the people is easy to keep, because they only want not to be oppressed.” Lefort adds, and emphasizes, that it is the desire not to be oppressed by the rich, for “assuredly the prince oppresses in his turn. . . . But the violence of his power appears to be of a different nature than that of the grandee, for in them (the grandee) the people recognize its natural adversary—the Other which constitutes it as the immediate object of its desire” (TM, 383).

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In language reminiscent of Hegel, Lefort calls the adversarial relation of the people to the grandee a natural relation. The people are the immediate object of desire of the rich. By natural he means not politically instituted, or institutionally mediated. Thus the prince delivers the people from this natural relation because he commands the grandee and by that very fact he “disabuses them of their pretension to be the only one who dominates” (TM, 383). In the prince, the people seek protection against the grandee’s insatiable desire to oppress; and as Machiavelli frequently claims, the prince must accord his subjects real material benefits. Nevertheless, there is more involved here than merely a simple question of the calculation of interest. More important is the fact that this involves the very institution of the political order, since the prince, or, as we shall see, the image of the prince, is elevated above the natural conflict generated by the social divisions. For the people, the first effect of the institution of the political is the diminution of “the permanent grip which held them in prison” (TM, 383). By what Lefort calls, again using the language of Hegel, “a ruse of reason,” the desire of the people rejoins that of the prince; in making an alliance with the people, the prince is no longer constrained by the grandees, his equals. He finds himself alone, which is what he desires. There is an obscure accordance between the nonpower of the people’s desire and the absolute power of the prince’s desire; nevertheless, this accord through a “cunning of reason” does not take the form of a contract. Lefort makes a strong critique of social contract theory in general, and particularly of Hobbes’s version of it. As is well known, Hobbes argues that in the state of nature each man has unlimited sovereignty and thus each is a menace, a wolf, for the other. The war of each against all renders life in the state of nature nasty, brutish, and short. In order to bring an end to this universal antagonism, each man must alienate his sovereignty to the state, but only on the condition that all do so; this exchange of sovereignty for security engenders the Leviathan. Lefort’s fundamental problem with contract theory is that it atomizes and homogenizes society, and thus bears within itself the image of an unarticulated society, an image which no anthropological investigation sustains. According to him, the strength of the position of Machiavelli is to have seen that “pre-political natural society is already articulated in the form of a conflict of desires, and that these desires are not the same.” According to Hobbes, all men have the desire to live, thus the desire to rule and to be free is a bifurcation of a more fundamental desire: a desire for life, or for the Good, and so forth. For Machiavelli, on the other hand, all desires are constituted by an essential relationship of opposition, and thus there is no possibility of coming to an ultimate resolution. The institution of the political will “mask” the social divisions but not annul them, since it

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is borne on this conflict. We could say, evoking a line of Nietzsche, that the institution of the political is “strapped to the back of a tiger.” Let us for a moment anticipate the later work of Lefort. The desire to annul the conflict at the heart of the political is the temptation that leads to totalitarianism; it is the attempt to incarnate the unity of society in such a way as to annul any conflict. Machiavelli rightly saw that conflict is the very heart of political life. Later I will have much more to say about this, but for now, back to The Prince. Machiavelli claims that “the desire of the people is more honest than that of the grandee.” We must be careful not to see this as a moral judgment sustaining his analysis of the political, a moral judgment that would be complicitous with the Christian mystique of the virtue of poverty. Rather he is arguing that the people’s desire is more honest, since it is a desire not to be oppressed. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that this desire will be translated into good political judgment. He also believes that the people are less shrewd than the grandee; no one is more sensitive to the fickle character of popular judgment than Machiavelli. In fact, in one respect, the common people’s capacity for being deceived, its credulity, plays a basic role in Machiavelli’s theory of the institution of the political. There is no sentimental mystique of the people in Machiavelli’s thought: His point is not at all that the people are essentially good or wise. Nonetheless, the very condition of the rule of the prince is that he must not be hated by the people. He must have “a city fully fortified, and [be one] who is not hated by the people” (P, 205). In The Prince there is a constant polemic against the use of mercenaries and the reliance on fortresses; later I will discuss the danger presented by relying on fortresses and mercenaries. This danger is more than a problem of military tactics since it also brings with it the illusion that the prince, safe in his fortress, can govern even though he is hated by the people. Lefort speaks of the symbolic dimension of fortresses in the prince’s relationship to his own image. And he notes a subtle shift in Machiavelli’s language: In the pages leading up to the ninth chapter, Machiavelli has spoken of the friendship of the people and its relation to oppression; now he speaks of the nonhatred of the people and refers to the German cities as models, making reference to republics, a topic that he said he would not discuss. The “manifest” topic of chapter X concerns itself with the question as to “how a prince should conduct his affairs during a state of siege.” According to Machiavelli, a prince must have a year’s supply of provisions within the city walls, enough raw material to keep his workshops in operation, and so forth. However, a more fundamental issue emerges regarding the relationship of the prince to his subjects, one that comes about through a discussion of the problems stemming from the besieging

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power’s destruction of the houses and fields lying outside the city wall. Will this not lead the prince’s subjects to rebel against his rule and sue for peace? No, says Machiavelli. If the prince is not hated by the people, it will have the contrary effect. The besieging enemy will inflict all their damage at the beginning of the siege, which is to say, the damage will have already been done; it will be too late to rebel. “Then, more than ever, the people will step forward to rally around the prince, who would have seemed committed to them. When their houses were burned down and their property laid waste in his defense, man’s nature is such that he feels this commitment as much for favors that he renders as for those that he receives” (P, 208–289). From this we see that the relationship of the prince to his people is not contractual; the relationship has become internalized. It is not a calculation of interest, or of benefits, as it is in the thought of Hobbes. “His [the prince’s] prestige is such that it resists the weakening of his power. The physical constraint has been transformed into a social constraint. It is internalized in such a way that the obedience attained under the menace of arms has become consent and obligation” (TM, 391). Here we see the double relation of mutual dependency that holds between the prince and the people. This relationship is not understood by those who propose the use of mercenary forces or armed forces borrowed from another state. They have not understood the genesis of a “proper space of the political, where antagonism is changed into cooperation” (TM, 392). The antagonism is that of a prepolitical society. It is not an accident that Machiavelli illustrates this properly political regime by referring to the German self-governing republics, juxtaposing them to the states that employed mercenaries, then noting that it was the ecclesiastical states which introduced the practice of using mercenaries in Italy. In the ecclesiastical state, power is acquired and maintained neither by fortune nor virtu, “because they are sustained by long established religious customs, which are of such great might and merit that they keep power no matter how they behave or live. These princes are the only ones who have states but do not defend them, who have subjects but do not govern them” (P, 211). Two essential threads converge in Machiavelli’s discussion of the ecclesiastical state: On the one hand, it is a reflection on the current state of affairs of Italy, which bears a strong negative judgment on the role of the church in politics; on the other hand, it puts into play the relationship between the political and the theological. The papal states use mercenaries because they fear an armed people. The ecclesiastical states draw their legitimacy from theological doctrines, “from higher powers which transcend the mind of man. I shall refrain from discussing them, since their ascension and substance come from God. It would be the act of a presumptuous, reckless man to discuss them” (P, 211). Then he continues,

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“Nevertheless . . .” and in fact discusses them in some detail. Let us note in passing that in The Prince Machiavelli does indeed praise reckless men; however, the point here is that if the modern political space is founded on the reciprocal relationship of the prince and his subjects, as it is in the German republics, then the ecclesiastical states are not political entities at all. The space of the political can emerge only through a break from the theological, only when the theological basis of legitimacy is in default, and this is due to the fact that the political is basically a social relationship. This is a theme that occupies much of Lefort’s later work, in which the notion of a distinct break between the political and the theological is put into question, particularly in his article entitled “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” His rethinking of the relationship between the theological and the political was provoked by reading The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology by Ernst Kantorowicz. Nevertheless, saying that the notion of a distinct break between the theological and the political will be reconsidered is not to suggest that Lefort will ever embrace a theological foundation of the political; rather, the divergence between them, which was introduced by Machiavelli and even anticipated by Dante in The Monarchy, will remain essential to his conception of the modern state. The role of religion in the thought of Machiavelli is quite complicated. He thought religion was essential to a well-ordered polity but he would have preferred the civic religion of ancient Rome to that of Christianity; these are hardly the reflections of a pious man. In any case, it is clear that in The Prince a Christian theologico-political obscures the essentially social and historical dimension of the political, and since this has practical consequences, it brings about a fear of the people, a distrust of political life in general, the employment of mercenary forces, and along with these some disastrous effects, namely, partition, foreign occupation, and so forth. Remaining with Le Travail de l’Oeuvre Machiavel, and not anticipating Lefort’s later work, we must not form the following conclusion: If the political is founded neither on the divine nor on the natural order, and if it is rooted in a social relationship, then it must be simply the product of man acting with instrumental motives. Within the liberal tradition, the notion of the state is often presented in this manner and thus the political as such is viewed as the transparent achievement of people acting in a utilitarian manner. In an altered sense, this conception of the state is also shared by the Marxist tradition, in which the political is, in reality, the product of human activity; however, it is not perceived as such but rather is reflected in a camera obscura, the product of higher forces. The role of “critique” (a word that appears in the title, or subtitle, of most of the works published in Marx’s lifetime) is to demystify this ideological image. In

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both traditions, the image functions only to obscure the reality that exists independently of it. The image has no constitutive role, no “symbolic efficacity”; it functions only to hide the real operations of power, a position espoused in its extreme form by Michel Foucault.2 Since this demystifying theory has often been attributed to Machiavelli, some in fact claiming him as its founder, it is important to consider the role of the image in his thought. According to Lefort, Machiavelli’s employment of an imaginary dimension of the political is one of the most profound and innovative achievements of his work. Lefort writes: “His [Machiavelli’s] critique of tradition must oscillate between two poles. He is in the process of destroying the classical and Christian conception of the state, and also of denouncing the politics without principles of the pseudo-sages of Florence. For the prudent knowledge of philosophy and religion, he substitutes a non-knowledge, of such a sort that his analysis of powers seems for a moment suspended in the void. However, to the ignorance of the pragmatist, he opposes the teaching of history; to the demand of reason, he opposes foresight and the order of things . . . order of the relations of forces and desires” (TM, 400). Employing Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “intertwining,” we can say that knowledge and nonknowledge are intertwined, or condensed, in Lefort’s theory of the constitution of the image of the prince. Here we enter into one of the most novel aspects of his reading of Machiavelli. While other interpreters of Machiavelli view the relationship of the prince to the virtues attributed to him as being a pure expression of political and moral cynicism, opportunism, or, if one prefers, pragmatism, Lefort finds in this dimension of Machiavelli’s thought a new theory of the political, and not the beginning of political science. What appears shocking is that after listing the traditional virtues and their contraries, Machiavelli does indeed “depart from the precepts given by others” (P, 255) by teaching that the prince need not, and in fact must not, actually practice the virtues traditionally demanded of a prince. He tells us that “whoever forsakes what is done for what ought to be done is learning self-destruction, not self-preservation” (P, 256–257). In a world in which so many people are not good, practicing virtue is self-destructive. If it appears that the good is being displaced by the useful, and if the sole end of the prince’s actions is not the maintenance of his personal power but rather the common good, then this interpretation of Machiavelli can be very reassuring. The prince must act against conventional morality not in order to ensure his personal power but rather to maintain “good institutions.” In his dealing with unscrupulous rivals, the just statesmen must act in contradiction to moral principles. This is not the route that Lefort follows. For him this would be merely to substitute one conception of the useful for another, that is, the common good as a substitute for the

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prince’s personal power; but such a substitution would suppose that one knows in advance what are good institutions, and in what the “common good” consists. An instrumental politics presupposes a noninstrumental insight into the end to which it would be subordinated, something Habermas has clearly shown. However, as we have seen above, “to think the function of the government in terms of the struggle of classes, or in terms of a conflict which always takes form here and now, or in terms of a relationship of forces, but which nevertheless draws its origin from the insatiability and incompatability of the desires of men . . . this would be to situate oneself in a place which is neither that of morality, nor that of political technique, and from where, moreover, the sense of both comes to be revealed” (TM, 404). In the eyes of Lefort, Machiavelli is not debating the extent to which a prince must have, or not have, the traditional virtues. Virtue, as Aristotle has shown us, is a disposition to act; and as such it is an accident that adheres in a substance; its ontological status is that of a relationship of an accident to a substance. In opposition to this relationship, Lefort attributes to Machiavelli the idea that the being of virtue is a matter of being recognized by the Other. The prince is not a substance who would have, or not have, certain qualities; rather, his being is “being recognized.” “The conduct of the prince is not dissociable from the representation of it that is formed by the Other” (TM, 404). Machiavelli writes, “I hold that whenever we discuss all men—and particularly princes, since they are more in the public eye—we pass judgment on some of the qualities which are a source of either blame or praise for them” (P, 257). He then goes on to speak of a prince “considered generous,” thought to be good, and so on. The being of a prince is his being in the eyes of his subjects. It is not as if Machiavelli is giving a new answer to an old question; rather, “he changes the question itself, taking as his point of departure a phenomenon, the prince such as he presents himself in the relationship governedgoverning” (TM, 407). Indeed there is a sort of irony here: Machiavelli opposes himself to the moralizing and utopian tradition of political thought by telling us that instead of speaking of things as imagined, he wishes to speak of “the actual truth of matters” (P, 255). This return to the effective, actual order of things brings to mind Husserl’s doctrine of “returning to the things themselves.” In returning to the “actual truth of the political,” we find an image. The being of the prince is outside himself; it exists in the order of appearances. In what does this image of the prince consist? “The others are disposed to see in him an object of love or of hatred” (TM, 408). This desire of the people, which I shall explore presently, is the source of his power but can also be a trap which the prince must avoid. Machiavelli is intensely

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sensitive to the fickleness of human emotion: that people will pledge their lives when there is no danger but will cower in times of danger. His estimation of human nature seems to be in accord with Aristotle’s, who, in The Rhetoric claims that most men tend to be bad: slaves to their passions; cowards in time of danger. There is a dialectic of the estimation of the people; as is well known, for Machiavelli what the prince must avoid at all costs is to become the object of the people’s hatred. We have seen this in his critique of the use of fortresses, which give the illusion that the prince can be safe even if he is hated by the people. However, what is less often pointed out but of great importance is that the prince must also avoid being loved by the people. The danger of liberality, or goodness, Machiavelli observes, comes from the fact that the image of the liberal or good prince is unstable. It necessarily defeats itself with time, by the very effects of the action which tries to conserve it; the lovable image engenders a detestable image, that of a rapacious and cruel prince. The good image is not only the contrary of the bad, rather it touches it and finds in it its immediate prolongation. One cannot form the first without evoking the second. The only way of escaping this fatal metamorphosis is to accord oneself from the start to a non-good image, which is, moreover, not so bad if it contains an image of parsimoniousness, and even that of a certain cruelty. (TM, 408)

This is to say that the image of the prince must not be simply what the people wish to project on him. He must always avoid the desire to be loved by the people or he will suffer the consequences of being hated by them. As Machiavelli argues, love is supported by a bond of obligation which men, since they are evil, break on any occasion they find useful to do so. But fear is supported by a dread of retribution, which can always be counted on. Nevertheless, a prince should make himself feared in such a way that if he does not gain love, he does avoid hatred. Being feared and not being hated are sentiments that readily go together. The passion, or estimation, that the image of the prince must solicit from the people is neither love nor hatred but rather a certain stupefaction in the face of the ascendance of his power. The image of the prince must incarnate not goodness but majesty. Speaking of Hannibal, Machiavelli claims that his inhuman ruthlessness notwithstanding, his virtu made him an object of respect and awe in the eyes of his soldiers. Love and hatred have as their object the individual person, but respect and awe attach themselves to the position of the prince, a position above society and the conflicts that arise from its incompatible desires. This would appear to bring us to an impasse since, as

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we have seen, Machiavelli rejects both a theological and a cosmological foundation of the political. From whence then does this position of the prince as above society arise, except by a certain kind of ruse? In the eighteenth chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli writes, “Therefore, you ought to know that there are two ways to fight: by using wiles and by using force. The former is characteristic of man, the latter of animals. But frequently the former is inadequate, and one must resort to the latter. Consequently, the prince must perfect his knowledge of how to use the attributes of both animals and men” (P, 279). Later, in a discussion of animality, he argues that since the prince must perfect his knowledge of how to use animal attributes, the animals that he must select are the fox and the lion—the lion because he is powerless against snares, and the fox because he is powerless against wolves. The prince must be both a fox, to recognize snares, and a lion, to frighten away wolves. Through an ironic reversal, Machiavelli makes an implicit allusion to Cicero’s claim that harm can be caused by either force or fraud and that fraud seems characteristic of a little fox whereas force is characteristic of a lion; nevertheless, both are extremely alien to man, and fraud more than force is most worthy of contempt. Machiavelli’s transformation of Cicero represents a profound break from a metaphysical tradition in which humans and animals are absolutely separated. For him animality and its traits are not alien to man, and especially not to the prince, the most excellent of men. He does not elevate humanity above nature; and, perhaps more important, he does not simply leave intact the absolute opposition between law and ruse. “The law exists at all times, and it must be conceived to be, as force is, cosubstantial to the relation of men among themselves. As for force, it is, in its turn, effective only when linked to ruse”(TM, 411). Let us now begin with Machiavelli’s discussion of the fox. He shows that the fox is an expert at recognizing snares, which is to say, being a fox doubles one’s perspective, makes one think from the point of view of the other. One understands the intentions and motives of the other. Here I might evoke, even if slightly ironically, Arendt’s characterization of political judgment as judgment from an enlarged point of view. The “foxy” prince must understand the motives of the other, of both his enemies and his subjects. It is not as though Machiavelli is advising the prince to abide at certain times by ruse and at other times to have recourse to force. Rather, from the position of the prince, there is a condensation of law, force, and ruse. All men practice a certain dissemblance in the service of their appetite for power, “but the prince elevates this duplicity to another level. He is the great dissembler.” By this we understand that he knows how to disguise force and law, and thereby how to govern by the force of law, giving the beast a human figure and acknowledging the beast-like quality of man.

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The ruse practiced by the prince is not instrumental or particular; it is not a deception practiced to obtain some particular end. Rather, it is a deception by which the image of the prince comes to be elevated above the conflicts of society, and this image is deflected from the person of the prince in order to constitute the place of political power, the impresario. In conceptualizing the ruse “as the power to rejoin law and force, reason and passion, good and evil, the author [Machiavelli] gives us to think that power necessarily includes mystification” (TM, 413). Machiavelli says that the prince must “color” his actions, that his virtue must smell like that of the founders, which is to say that his action must be deflected from his own person onto an image, for if not, “if he throws down the mask and expresses himself with cynicism, he will be reduced to the limit of his own person, exposed to the look of all, a man among others, and thus doomed to hatred and contempt” (TM, 414). As we have seen, ruse, to be effective, must comprehend the motives of the others. We are aware of the prince’s desires: his wish to be above the members of his class, his desire for solitude, and so forth; but what are the desires of the people? I noted above that there is a kind of complicity between the prince’s desire and the people’s desire. The people desire the prince to rule because his rule disposes the grandee of their pretension to command and oppress; this is the case since the prince commands both the grandee and the people. The natural relation of conflict between the grandee and the people, whereby each is constituted in the face of the other as its determinate negation, is replaced by the institution of the princedom to which both parties owe obedience. Now we can see how this is accomplished: It comes about by projecting the image of the prince above the social conflict, and in a sense above the prince himself considered as a man among men.The prince is advised never to try to draw his support from the grandee, since they will always see him as their equal, a man among men. It is through the credulity of the people that the image of the prince is constituted. Machiavelli claims that “men are inexperienced, and so bound to the needs of the moment, that the deceiver will always find someone who will let himself be deceived” (P, 281). Note that Machiavelli does not say someone who can be deceived, but someone who “will let himself be deceived,” thus emphasizing a certain act of complicity in the deception. In Lefort’s reading of The Prince, there is indeed on the part of the people an act of complicity in their deception, one which progressively takes on the character of a symbolic exchange. The people judge by what they see, therefore it is not only useful to the prince that the people remain on the level of appearances but also it is precisely the necessary condition for power to distinguish itself from force. It would seem that this transcendence of power, which causes the

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people to assemble themselves into a unity and to cease being the simple matter on which oppression acts, cannot be deployed without an imaginary image. If this is the case, “it would be necessary to admit that the prince obeys rather than commands this ruse, that the reason of his ruse is inscribed within a ruse of Reason, that his subjects are not completely wrong to let themselves be blinded by the majesty of the state, that finally a small number only possess half of the truth when they discover and denounce the vices of the prince” (TM, 414–415). What about this small number who see that the prince is other than he appears? Who are they? They consist of two groups which I have already discussed: first, the grandee, whose personal social relation to the prince precludes their participation in the political deception, or, if one prefers, the fiction of politics; and second, the moralizing critics of politics, types like Savonarola. In the name of the truth, the latter bring to politics what Max Weber called an “ethic of ultimate ends,” which is to say, they destroy the possibility of political life. In a certain and contrary sense, they are as deceived as the people. The people judge by appearances; the majestic image of the prince produces results; when there is no court to appeal to, the people judge all men’s actions, and particularly those of the prince, by the final outcome. Both the moralizing critic and the grandee suffer from a vision which is too close. Both “attach themselves only to the particular; they conceive of the motives of a course of action, the causes of an action, but they do not consider the political in its generality. They sense that the prince is different from what he appears; however, since they are too close, they lose sight of the sense of his enterprise as it inscribes itself in its results” (TM, 415). Machiavelli has a genuine insight into what one might call the political psychology of the radical critic, that is to say, the tendency to make political judgments in terms of motives rather than of results. I recall reading the work of a “revisionist” historian of the Cold War who denounced the Marshall Plan for being motivated by a desire to open vast foreign markets for American goods. This it undoubtedly did; nevertheless, the fact that it was also instrumental in producing political stability in Western Europe for half a century was not something this historian took into consideration. The substitution of moral judgment for a properly political judgment, that is, the substitution of motives for results, is indeed “radical” in the sense that it uproots (recall Root and Branch, an old anarchist journal) the very being of the political, which as we have seen does not reside in the dimension of the empirical. Does this conception of the political commit Machiavelli to relativism? In a certain sense, yes, if by this one means that he does not ascend to an absolute perspective from which the political could be judged. Above, I noted Machiavelli’s having said “when there is no court to appeal

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to,” and this must be understood in a double sense: There is no juridical institution to appeal to, but there is also no metaphysical or ideal standard to serve as a measure. If there is to be political judgment—which, of course, there must be—it must find its measure within the political itself. As Lefort says, ici et maintenant, within the here and now. Nonetheless, the question of the ultimate, not the metaphysical, foundation of the political is not to be avoided. Lefort views Machiavelli’s response to the question of relativism in terms of his reflections on corruption and on how a prince may govern a society which has become corrupt. Within a sort of worstcase scenario, the ultimate foundation of the political becomes visible. By means of this form of argumentation, Machiavelli makes a tacit illusion to Aristotle’s Politics. It is instructive to note their similarity and, perhaps more important, their divergence. In chapter VIII of book V of the Politics, Aristotle states explicitly the form of argumentation that Machiavelli follows. He writes, “We are now to consider upon what the preservation of governments in general and of each state in particular depends.” In the first place, it is evident that if we are right in the causes we have analyzed for their destruction, we know also the manner of their preservation. For things contrary produce contraries, and destruction and preservation are contraries to each other.” By seeing what will destroy a regime, we see the essence of what it is. Let me note in passing the similarity of the structure of this procedure to what Husserl calls “free variation”; that is, in transgressing the limit of a category, we come to see that limit, which is to say, we see the essential structure of the category. Each type of regime has an essential structure, around which variation is possible, but only up to a point. Variation must be constrained in order to preserve a mean; the excess or the deficiency of the virtuous character of a regime may destroy it. Aristotle uses the example of the nose: “A nose which varies a little from perfect straightness, either towards a hook nose or a flat one, may yet be beautiful and agreeable to look at. But if the particularity is extended beyond measure, so that all the properties of the part is lost, then at last it can hardly be recognized as a nose.” Each type of regime incarnates a “good form” which is capable of retaining its identity despite accidents and contingencies. For Machiavelli, as distinct from Aristotle, the categorical system of essence and accidents is foreclosed. The state, according to him, is based on perpetual conflict and the struggle between virtu and fortune; there is no essential structure to conserve. Without following all the details of Machiavelli’s argument, we can ask, “Under what conditions is a regime destroyed?” At first it would appear to echo Aristotle when he counsels moderation by telling the prince that he should keep his hands off the property and the women of his subjects. Then, responding to the objec-

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tion that many princes and Roman emperors were virtuous and moderate but nevertheless lost their princedoms and often their lives, Machiavelli claims that the reason for this is the corruption of society; he adds, however, that this corruption must not be regarded as a contingency that befalls a “good form.” Rather it must be seen as an ever-present possibility, along with the constant threat that at any time freedom can dissolve into license. In the case of ancient Rome, the army presents a particular problem; in addition to the grandee and the people, the rulers “had to put up with ruthless and greedy soldiers” (P, 297). However, the difficulties posed by the army do not, of themselves, constitute a principle of explanation; according to Lefort, the emergence of the army as an independent power that would alter the relationship between the prince and his subjects is, in effect, only a consequence of the degeneration of the social body. Nor is the emperor’s lack of virtue a sufficient explanation; at this point “it ought to be noted that hatred comes to one through good deeds as well as through bad deeds” (P, 301). Consider the case of Alexander Severus, an emperor noted for goodness and justice. In the fourteen years of his rule, he never executed anyone without a trial. “Nevertheless, he was considered an effeminate man, one who permitted his mother to control him, and thus he came to be scorned. The army conspired against him and murdered him” (P, 301). By way of contrast, let us consider the characters of Commodus, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, and Maximinus, all of whom were extremely ruthless and rapacious, yet they all perished except for Septimius Severus, “a savage lion and a very wily fox.” How did he survive? Severus, an upstart, was able to hold on to such great power because on every occasion his enormous prestige protected him against the hatred which his rapacious acts might otherwise have inspired among the people. He left the people and the army “somewhat bewildered and amazed ” (P, 303). But how and why did the others come to such bad ends? Commodus, the son of the respected Marcus Aurelius, attained power by the right of succession and in like manner to Severus had a “ruthless and bestial nature”; nevertheless, he was conspired against and killed because “with no regard for maintaining his dignity, he often went down into the arena, fighting with gladiators, and following other sorts of base pursuits that were not worthy of the imperial majesty” (P, 304). As for Maximinus, of whom I spoke earlier, he lost prestige in the eyes of everyone because of his origins, “having once herded sheep in Thrace” (P, 309). As these examples show, the ultimate foundation of power is not the virtue of the emperor, nor the uncorrupted state of society, nor the support of the army; rather, it is the ability of the ruler to project a majestic image, one that evokes “bewilderment and awe from the people and the army.” All those who fell, the just as well as the unjust, did so because they, as men

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among other men, became objects of hatred, a passion which, as we have seen, attaches itself to the person of the prince. These rulers were incapable of deflecting the passions which they inspired onto the image of the prince. In this situation, “they [the people] are stupefied by the name of the prince, which is confused in their eyes with the majesty of the State” (TM, 424). In default of the imaginary, “an imaginary that men composed themselves because they know, in some sense, that they desire it” (TM, 426), hatred and contempt will be visited upon the prince. Thus we see the enormous difference which separates Machiavelli from Aristotle, and not only on the level of prudential recommendations but also in terms of their totally different notions of society and of ontology. According to Aristotle, a regime has an essence, the deviation from which can be demonstrated as the “effects of a denaturation”; its unity is primordial, its division is episodic and contingent. Whereas Lefort sees Machiavelli’s thought, and perhaps modern society itself, as being in principle open to the event. This is due to the fact that its unity is of a different form than that of the unity of an essence; it is not a unity before the event but rather of events. The image of the prince gives society its unity. Lefort argues that “this is because society does not relate to itself immediately, since it is always torn apart, its repose is given indefinitely to it as the task of plugging up the break by which the desires of classes and of individual men would swallow it up” (TM, 425). As will be shown more clearly when we view the later work of Lefort, society as “torn apart” is an effect of the modern disengagement from both a hierarchical representation of the cosmos and a theological basis for the legitimacy of the exercise of power. It is not as though Aristotle is wrong and Machiavelli is right; rather, they discuss different forms of society. Therefore, between the matter under discussion and the thought that thinks it there is a “reversibility” in the sense that Merleau-Ponty uses this term. Lefort claims that Machiavelli is one of the first to have seen this new form of society and to have responded to this new event which poses itself in the form of an indefinite task. In this modern form of society, the unity of a polity is not already given; rather, it is something to be achieved. This form of society is not one with itself; it does not relate immediately to itself. Its unity rests upon an irreducible break, a nonidentity with itself. However, this nonidentity does not take the form of a simple plurality, a notion frequently employed in contemporary political theory. There is a unity in modern society, but it is one to be achieved by an imaginary image, and this is why men “in some sense know they desire it.” In default of it, the society would dissolve into mere atoms and power would dissolve into force. Modern political society is constituted by a kind of reflection; it re-

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flects upon itself. This phrase, “a kind of reflection,” is used by MerleauPonty when he speaks of the unity of the body with itself in the experience of the body touching itself. The unity of the body with itself is never achieved; it is always short-circuited at the last moment. This nonachievement of the body’s touching itself is what opens it to the world and precludes its becoming closed in immanence. According to Lefort, this operation reproduces itself on the political level by way of the body politic. He claims that Machiavelli’s rejection of both a metaphysical and a theological domain of essence does not deliver him over to an “empirical political science,” a positivism of fact that would substitute itself for a positivism of essence. This is because for Machiavelli, the fact, provided that one takes it in all its ramifications, does not enclose itself in a signification; “rather, it slides between significations, it becomes an index of non-sense, of an indetermination, which taken in charge by a subject, opens to him the proper space of the discourse of the political” (TM, 426). (Note that the French non-sense does not correspond to the English word “nonsense.”) Thus we see that Machiavelli may not justly be called a political cynic, one who does not attain a stable, context-free criteria for political judgment, to use Habermas’s phrase. According to Lefort, Machiavelli elaborates a politics of risk, that is, one which “accords itself with the being of society, which accommodates contraries, which enroots itself in time, which ordains itself to dwell close to the abyss on which society reposes, which confronts the limit which constitutes it, that is, the incompossibility of human desires” (TM, 427). This notion of a politics of risk approaches Max Weber’s conception of an ethic of responsibility, that is to say, an ethic that is responsible not to ultimate ends but rather to the very course of history. However, within Lefort’s idea of a politics of risk, a marker is indicated that would orientate political judgment, and even if it did not transcend all contexts, would nonetheless slide between them, which is to say, it would transcend them not in a vertical manner but rather in a “lateral transcendence,” again employing a term of Merleau-Ponty. Lefort brings to center stage what might be taken as a mere digression in chapter XIX of The Prince, in which Machiavelli, after completing his discussion of the emperors of ancient Rome, remarks that the situation is markedly different for a modern prince because he does not have to contend with a large standing army, one which is deeply entrenched in the government. Machiavelli argues that “it is more necessary now for every prince to satisfy the people rather than the soldiers, because the people are stronger. With one exception, the sultans of Turkey and Egypt” (P, 311). This is due to the fact that their power does not rest on the people but on a large standing army. A few lines further on he claims that the sultan of Egypt’s state is unlike all other princedoms and that it is similar to

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the Holy See. This leads Lefort to question what these regimes have in common; he sees that they both incarnate “the modern form of despotism in which the military caste or the ecclesiastical state alone retain power, a power so ancient that it has become incontestable” (TM, 428). These regimes are, or at least appear to be, secure, which is to say, all the conflicts of society have been excluded or, at least, there has been an attempt to exclude them. “However, it is a security for which one pays the price of a diminished society and a miserable politics” (TM, 429). In Machiavelli’s text, fortresses and the use of mercenaries become symbols of despotism, and both are associated with the power of the church. His judgment on ecclesiastical politics is never in doubt; he claims that it neither governs nor defends its subjects. By what right does Machiavelli make such a judgment, if indeed he is as much of a relativist as it is claimed? We have seen that the “criteria” of political judgment is political life itself. Inasmuch as the prince’s desire is for power and glory, Machiavelli permits us to make a distinction between a genuine power and glory, one that emerges from the strife of political life, and a pseudo one based on a cowered population without any civic life. As we see here and will see more clearly in Lefort’s later work, despotism, and in a stronger and more specific sense twentieth-century totalitarianism, denies or forecloses something that is really there, something which will essentially reemerge as the repressed always does, namely, the social division; that is, the division caused by the desires and conflicts of classes and of individual interests. A politics that does not accord itself to this dimension of the real will eventually find itself in default by function of the reemergence of the social division. When all its implications become explicit, political relativism, like relativism in general, is self-refuting. When one arrives at the point of deliberating on the nature of the political, on what form of government is preferred, it would be ridiculous or, using Austin’s phrase, a “performative contradiction” if by this process of deliberation it would be concluded that the best form of government is one that forbids and represses deliberation on the question of what form of government is preferable. However, this is exactly what despotic and totalitarian regimes do. As we shall see as we follow the unfolding of Lefort’s thought, despotism and totalitarianism are not theories, positions reached by discursive deliberation, but rather are produced by a mutation in the place of power, what Lefort will elaborate as “the symbolic structure of the social.” For now let us consider the place of power as it is revealed in The Prince, in which the first chapter poses the question of the acquisition and the maintenance of power but does not interrogate the nature of princely power itself; this interrogation will emerge progressively as the work unfolds. The classical

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response to the question of the nature and origins of power, that is, its divine or cosmological origin, has been rejected by Machiavelli. In fact, he goes further than a simple philosophical rejection of this position: By comparing the Holy See to the sultan of Egypt, he strongly implies that the legitimacy that is drawn from a source so ancient that it cannot be contested leads to the deadening of political life, in fact, it leads to despotism. The alternative to this position would appear to be quite clear: If power does not come from God, then it must be simply a product of human social relations. Indeed, Feuerbach has told us that ceasing to be theologians, we must become anthropologists. Modern secular political thought has, by and large, taken this advice. But in the thought of Lefort, the alternative is not so clear-cut, the disjunction not so exclusive. In a manner resembling the way in which Merleau-Ponty links his critique of idealism to an equally strong critique of empiricism, Lefort rejects the alternatives posed by this neat disjunction between the theological and the anthropological. The prince’s position of power is extremely complicated. Long before Foucault, Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli showed that power is not something which can simply be possessed. Contrary to Mao’s slogan, political power does not come out of the barrel of a gun. Nor can it be defined simply as a monopoly on the means of coercive violence; rather, it is based on an intertwining of the imaginary and the real. According to Arendt, one of the most pernicious ways of thinking of the political is by means of the metaphor of making, of production. This manner of thinking has deep roots in Western political theory, going back to Plato’s analogy of the philosopher king as the pilot of a ship, that is to say, someone in possession of a technical knowledge. In the act of making, homo faber stands opposed to the inert material which he will shape in terms of a preexistent model, a blueprint, or an idea. Using this mode of knowledge, political thinking tends to misunderstand the political. Arendt’s objection to the production metaphor is basically that politics does not have to do with making but is concerned with action. Political action does not produce a finished product; rather, political action is delivered into an open space in which other actors will elaborate it in directions not anticipated by the one who initiated it. Lefort agrees with this but is not in accord with all the dimensions of Arendt’s thought. One might even say that his implicit critique of her conception of power begins at the other end. According to him, it is not simply that the result of political action cannot be circumscribed within a production model; he shows that the prince does not stand in front of the things as homo faber stands in front of matter. This point will be elaborated upon later when I critique Heidegger’s conception of modernity. For Lefort the position of power is constructed through the play of

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individual desires and the conflicts of classes; the notion that the prince is related to society as a carpenter is to his wood is not simply wrong or inappropriate; it is a dangerous illusion which is inscribed within the position of power, one that the prince must avoid at all costs. To digress slightly: In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, the details of which cannot be pursued here, Garry Wills, referring to Newt Gingrich and the Republican congressmen, said that they wished to reshape society by political means, which for him was like trying to change the weather with a thermometer. Although the image of a thermometer is perhaps too passive for what Lefort and Machiavelli are seeking, it does express the notion of an inherence of political power within society. But how are we to think this inherence? Lefort argues that the great politics, as he calls it, “supposes that there will be a taking in charge of a task inscribed here and now in the very being of the social” (TM, 433). Lefort’s emphasis, like Arendt’s, is on the “here and now” that arises in function of the lack of any model or pregiven blueprint. Nevertheless, even if one does say that there is a task to be deciphered in the things, one must be very careful with this image, for if the prince is not the great maker, he is also not the great interpreter. Lefort claims that “if it is true that there is a task to be deciphered in the things, do not forget that the power [the power to be deciphered] is itself inscribed in the register of that which it deciphers” (TM, 433). There can be no power of fabrication, or of interpretation, outside society; however, in a certain sense, there is a power above society. “The appearance of power itself is a moment in the institution of the social” (TM, 433). It is only in the measure that there is a social division (of desires, classes, interests, and so on) which engenders this separate power. As we have seen, this image of the prince, as the power above society, is generated by a complicity between the prince’s desire for power and the people’s desire not to be submitted to the oppression of the grandee. The people’s investment in the image of the prince gives them a political unity through which their status as the natural object of the grandee’s desire is surpassed. The unity of a separate power over and above society “reproduces the division which was its task to surmount”; and as we have seen, this unity of the body politic, like the unity of the body itself, is never effectively, or fully, achieved. It is only a substitute, but it must be emphasized that it is a substitute for something that has never been present. It has the structure of what Levinas calls “the trace.” Lefort argues that, like the experience of the body in the inachieved unity of a touching-touched, this nonclosure of identity offers an access to the world. “The access of the prince to the real is based on the nonidentity of society with itself. The prince both figures and masks the social division” (TM, 433). Because of this situation, one in which the prince’s

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power is based upon and masks the social division, many pitfalls and possible illusions arise. In one sense the prince or, better yet, the place of his power, the imperio, is above society. Indeed the prince does objectify his subjects; he does calculate both their intentions and their interests. This political transcendence was denounced by Marx as the political illusion; however, for Lefort, if it is an illusion, then it is a “real illusion,” one that is both efficacious and may not be surpassed. Thus it is problematic to call it an illusion; the image of the prince “is charged to incarnate the imaginary community, the identity in default of which the social body will dissolve” (TM, 434). Recognizing this, if only implicitly, the prince realizes that he must not identify himself with the image of him composed by either the grandee or the people. At the same time he is aware that he is linked to the people, dependent on their nonhatred, and that it is necessary for him not to satisfy their desire. “He must hold their desire in suspension, in order to dwell in the third [separate, at a distance], thanks to which civil order is instituted” (TM, 434). There is this fundamental ambiguity of the political: The prince incarnates the imaginary image that his function in society assigns to him, while at the same time he is taken up by it; his desire for power and glory has metamorphized the desires of his subjects. Thus we see that the very conditions which assure him an access to the real also mask it from him. There is a blind spot in the prince’s task. The blind spot is the point of intersection between his own desire and his subjects’desires. Lefort claims that there are different types of power and, correspondingly, different types of imaginaries. One type of power is based upon the weakness of its subjects; another type nourishes itself from the power of its subjects. We have already seen one type in our reflections on tyranny; it is characterized as an inauthentic power based on a cowering population. Another type of power is one that lives from the conflict of political life. Due to the people’s fear and their search for security, the former type disarms them, while the latter arms its subjects and thrives on conflict. There are also different imaginaries corresponding to the image of the prince. They are the different manners in which the prince is constituted as a subject, the different modes of political subjectification. In the one instance, the prince lets himself become fascinated by his own image, the image of an all-powerful ruler who gives society its identity. In doing so he estranges himself from the people. This is “as dangerous as when he closes himself within the walls of a fortress” (TM, 434). Allowing for the specific differences between tyranny and totalitarianism, Lefort, in his later work on totalitarianism, speaks of the extreme and fatal identification of the ruler with his own image as an “Egocrat,”one who would be the demiurge of society in history. Another imaginary involves an intertwining

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of the prince’s desire and the play of forces of history. In this case, the prince as the political subject tacitly recognizes that the basis of his power escapes him on all sides; Lefort argues that here the prince affirms himself as such only by sustaining the indeterminate which is constitutive of the real. His relationship to the indeterminate involves “a constant putting and re-putting of his desire into play in the field of history” (TM, 435). If one prefers to evoke a contemporary idiom, Lefort is describing the decentered character of the political subject. The pretension of the cogito to constitute a sovereign subjectivity is eclipsed by its relationship to the indetermination of the real. “It is not, therefore, in objectification that he [the prince] is really the subject, because the pretended objectification masks him from his own proper position” (TM, 435). The illusion of sovereign subjectivity arises from the fact that the subject is positioned by forces that are outside him, in fact, forces that speak through him. The thought proper to the prince is not the practice of the cogito but rather a thought in the interrogative mode, “an interrogation that is imposed upon him by the movement that makes him leave himself and return to himself, discovering at the heart of his project the trace of a strange necessity, and finding in the things a reflection of his own image” (TM, 435). His image is constructed by the intersection of his desire and the people’s desire. The prince must reject the fascination that his own image exercises on him. At some future moment, I will consider the relationship of Lefort’s thought to psychoanalysis in general, and to Lacan in particular. In the meantime, let me simply note the resonance of the above reflection with Lacan’s thought on the relationship of subjectivity and the mirror; the danger of the mirror, its allure, is its capacity to engender an imaginary identification by the child with its own reflected image, an identification which is always a mis-identification. In the worst of cases, the ego, the reflected image from the mirror or from the eyes of the other, can foreclose the subject’s placement in the symbolic order which is the domain of nonidentity and indetermination. At first glance, such themes may appear to be far removed from The Prince. However, when Lefort turns his attention to chapters XXII and XXIII, he shows how these themes are worked out with regard to the prince’s confidential staff, and “how he is to avoid flatterers.” If ill-chosen, the prince’s ministers can function as a mirror into which the prince can alienate his own image. They can constitute a mirror which entices his vanity, a screen which can separate him from the people. The relation of the prince to his ministers brings to the fore the question of the relationship between power and truth. On the one hand, the prince must not delegate his sovereignty to them; it must be he who rules. On the other hand, he must permit them, even demand of them, to speak the truth when

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asked even when it is not flattering to him or to the policies he has enacted. The prince must cultivate the type of modesty that would encourage his ministers not to be afraid to speak the truth. What Machiavelli sees, and what will become central to Lefort’s conception of totalitarianism, is that there must not be in the imperio a condensation of truth, law, and power. The exteriority of power and truth must be maintained. When the relationship to the outside is closed, the prince becomes, to use Arendt’s metaphor, like the inside of an onion which has contact only with the skin next to it and is far removed from the outside world. He becomes “blinded by his own image and chained to his past” (TM, 437). The selfreflection of the prince must pass through others. In a letter to Lorenzo de Medici, Machiavelli writes, “To understand the nature of the people fully, one must be a prince. To understand the nature of the prince fully, one must be of the people” (P, 95). Toward the end of The Prince, when Machiavelli attempts to find the causes of the present-day decadence in Italy, he attributes them primarily to the prince’s mesmerization by the image of past power and glory. We see that the source of this decadence is not primarily empirical. “It is not an error of the understanding; rather it proceeds from the impotence of the Subject [the prince] to mark his place in the social field. It is because this place appears to him as already traced, power and glory seem to be his properties, authority is mixed in his blood; and thus he is excluded from history” (TM, 439). He cannot find within himself the audacity to address the risk of history and to act in his own name. Machiavelli begins chapter XXV by claiming that “I am not unaware that many men have been, and still are, convinced that worldly affairs are controlled by fortune and God, so that even prudent men are unable to rule them, and have indeed no remedy against them” (P, 361). Note that he is not speaking in his own name but rather uses the phrase “many men.” In the next few lines he goes on to argue that since our free will ought not to be destroyed, it may be true that fortune is the mistress of half of our actions, but that even so she leaves control of the other half, or nearly that much, to us (P, 363). We notice that in the beginning of the chapter, fortune is posed as a positive power linked to God which determines half of our actions. Nevertheless, in the course of this brief chapter, Lefort shows that the concept of fortune, as a belief in an invisible power, “is consumed in the fire of reflection. . . . The combat between fortune and virtu proves to be imaginary. . . . Men have no adversaries but themselves; fortune is nothing other than non-virtue, the virtue which masters the world and itself” (TM, 441). Fortune is often linked to a river, or to a woman, or perhaps even to the very idea of time itself; it marks man’s finitude, not as a positive power which directs his affairs, not even half of

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them; rather, it designates the intertwining of virtu and non-virtu, knowledge and nonknowledge. The characterization of it as a positive power is simply an excuse which is often evoked because of our inertia, which is due to our being fascinated with our image, “chained to our own past.” The inertia is caused by our inability to respond to novelty. If Machiavelli seems to be giving advice, it is not as one who knows to one who does not know; in fact, there is nothing to be known. His advice is that the prince must be sensitive to the signs of novelty, to the changes of the times. Nonetheless, there is an ineluctable element of finitude in human affairs, and a tragic element within politics. Each epoch demands a certain style of action, a certain correspondence between character and the temporally given. There can be no art of governing which would guarantee success because this would annul our human finitude. “Happiness and unhappiness are not only the fruits of our own works, they are the fruits of an encounter. Still, it belongs to us to seize the occasion. There is a gift; concerning this gift there is nothing to say, of its origin nothing to know” (TM, 442). There can be no science of politics, no technique which assures it success; this is due to reasons which are not the same as, but also not entirely different from, those advanced by Aristotle, for whom the level of knowledge corresponds to the being of the object known. In his thought, we can have science, necessary knowledge, only of those beings whose existence and movement are necessary, as, for example, the heavenly bodies above the moon. Nevertheless, sublinear beings in general, and human affairs in particular, move in irregular ways, and our knowledge of them can never attain the level of science. This way of knowing can form generalizations only about things which are for the most part so. For Aristotle the contingency of these beings forecloses the possibility of scientific knowledge. This is the case for Machiavelli as well; for him, as for Aristotle, politics is not a speculative matter but a practical endeavor. The perspectives of science and of practice can never completely overlap; there is an irreducible contingency in the relationship between the character of the political actor and the times in which she or he lives. “There is an obscurity of the passion and of the imagination, which accords secretly with that of History” (TM, 444). As we have already noted, Lefort opposes any attempt to interpret The Prince as an occasional work, one written under the pressure of events and undertaken for purely utilitarian reasons. He goes even further and insists that, although sensitive to the signs of novelty—for example, the emergence of the modern state—The Prince is not simply a work of political theory. As do all great works of political philosophy (the Republic, the Politics, The Social Contract, and so forth) it has an ontological dimension. Lefort claims that Machiavelli outlines a

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new ontology. He writes, “The horizons of political thought are not themselves political. The relation of the prince with power is a figure of the relationship of man with time and with Being” (TM, 444). The true subject of The Prince is a reflection on the essential relation of human nature and time, and as such it bears upon a new ontology. As we have already seen, both Machiavelli and Lefort reject the stark opposition between the particular and the universal, between the essential and the contingent; they do this in the name of an intertwining of essence and fact. Lefort claims that The Prince involves both a new ontology and an analysis of a crisis in the contemporary situation of Italy in 1513, the year it was written. The final chapter of The Prince, which contains an exhortation to seize Italy and free her from the barbarians, has been interpreted as a cry from the heart. Machiavelli, read in this manner, is the cold and calculating political scientist who rejects any position from which a “value judgment” could be made. He is viewed as being overcome by patriotic fervor, as ending his empirical study with an outburst of emotion, a veritable fall into the irrational. This would seem to contradict much of the content of the preceding chapters. After having shown that fortune and God, as directors of human affairs, have been consumed in the fire of reflection, in this last chapter he evokes the name of God six times in the course of one page, claiming that it is God that ordains Italy’s redemption. He then goes on to speak of miracles, of miraculous and unprecedented things wrought by God. He speaks of “waters that have divided; a cloud that has led the way; water that has come from a rock, manna which has been rained down” (P, 377). Nevertheless, for Lefort’s reading of this chapter there is no contradiction to the preceding analysis. Instead he views it as “a performative enactment of the analysis.” He notes that Machiavelli does not speak in his own name, rather he furnishes the prince with the themes that he must use in order to mesmerize the people; or, better stated, he composes for the prince the image that he must evoke in order to give birth to the spirit of his subjects. He argues that the last chapter is neither analysis nor prophecy: “It gives a sensible form to ‘a perhaps’” (TM, 448)—“a perhaps” that a prince could arise whose virtu would smell like the virtu of a founder, one who would give rise to the reborn state of Italy. Lefort sensitizes us to the tone of Machiavelli’s hyperbolic writing. The final chapter of The Prince is a simulacrum of the discourse of a founder who could perhaps arise, “perhaps it would even suffice that the prince and the people would each pretend to believe the disclosure of the other—the one with the intention to assure his power, the other with the hope of escaping the grandee—in order for this end to be attained” (TM, 448). Lefort concludes his reflection on The Prince by noting that in the last chapter there is not a substitution of the imaginary for the real but rather an intertwin-

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ing of the imaginary and the real, which “renders sensible the limits of discourse” (TM, 449) and is the point of the intersection between knowledge and nonknowledge. It shows the impossibility of separating the imagination from political reflection.

Notes 1. Pierre Manent, “Vers L’Oeuvre et le Monde: le Machiavel de Claude Lefort,” in La Démocratie à l’Oeuvre: Autour de Claude Lefort, ed. C. Habib et C. Mouchard (Paris: Editions Seuil, 1993), 169–191. 2. Bernard C. Flynn, Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992), 79–96.

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The Discourses

My discussion of Lefort’s interpretation of Machiavelli’s The Discourses will be much shorter than my reflections on his interpretation of The Prince. It will not follow Lefort’s extremely detailed reconstruction of this work, but will be limited to a number of themes that are central to his interpretation. As with The Prince, I will concentrate my attention on themes that are central to Lefort’s own political philosophy. Let us begin by reflecting on the relationship between the two works of Machiavelli. Lefort begins his chapter on The Discourses by reminding us that in his interpretation of The Prince, the true subject of this work is not the prince himself, but the place of the prince as the political subject, the imperio. This is of great importance because Lefort wishes to show the profound continuity between these two works, despite a number of apparent differences. The first and most obvious difference is that The Prince is concerned with principalities whereas The Discourses is about republics. Indeed if, as Lefort claims, the matter under interrogation in The Prince is the nature of power, “the division of the state and of society, the division of classes, and that of the desires of classes” (TM, 453), then the objection to the continuity of the two works loses some of its force. Since we have already disabused ourselves of the received idea that The Prince is an advice manual for a prince, one that would be absolutely useless in a republic since there would be no prince, perhaps it would seem more plausible that there is a continuity between these works. However, evoking the idea that The Prince is a work of political philosophy as well as one that reaches beyond the boundaries of political philosophy proper to what Lefort has called a “new ontology” does not remove all appearances of discontinuity. I begin with the dedications of the two works. Of course, The Prince is dedicated to Lorenzo: “Receive, your magnificence, this little gift that I send you” (P, 95), whereas The Discourses is dedicated to Zanobi Buondel40

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monti and Cosimo Ruccellai. The former was a collaborator of the previous republic; the latter was the “black sheep” of a grand bourgeois family, which is to say that both of them were disaffected from, and hostile to, the Medici regime. Indeed, this does indicate a change in Machiavelli’s political perspective, revealing his loss of faith in any potential capacity for the Medici regime to reawaken a strong rebirth of political life in Florence. In fact, as we shall see, Lefort interprets The Discourses as an encoded call for a rebellion against the Medicis. Lest one overestimate the divergence of the two dedications, he points out, by citing Machiavelli, that the place of the prince is not effaced in the dedication of The Discourses: “I have chosen not those who are princes, but those who, on account of their innumerable good qualities, deserve to be”(D, 94). Here again we encounter Lefort’s distinction between the figure of the prince and the place of the prince, a place that could be occupied not by the Medicis but by those who deserve to occupy it. Nonetheless, we can still wonder why Machiavelli does not even so much as mention The Prince in The Discourses? How are we to interpret this silence? According to Lefort, the silence is strategic. However, in order to understand this strategy, we must consider another apparent objection against the continuity of the two works. As discussed in some detail in the previous chapter, Lefort interprets The Prince as an elaboration of a decisive break from both classical and Christian political philosophy. The break from the Christian sources was noted particularly in Machiavelli’s characterization of those types of regimes which are based on religious authority and therefore cannot be called into question; recall that, in an especially unflattering manner, he grouped together both ecclesiastical states and the regimes of the Turks, which is to say that both of them are despotic regimes. Although less dramatic, the break with classical political thought, both Greek and Roman, is by no means less important. Lefort has clearly shown that The Prince institutes a break with any political philosophy which bases itself upon nature, a natural order that would be mirrored in the order of the polis, for example, Plato’s Republic. The break from Aristotle is no less decisive; as Pierre Manent has shown, the conception of two irreducibly opposed desires is very far from Aristotle’s conception of the one human desire, that is, the desire for the Good. As for Roman sources, we should remember Machiavelli’s evocation and complete transformation, in fact his reversal, of Cicero’s story of the lion and the fox. Nevertheless, the Preface to book I of The Discourses is an evocation of the ancients as models and examples to be imitated; it is also a denunciation of his contemporaries for their failure to do so. Regarding civic life, he laments that one finds neither prince nor republic who refer to antiquity for examples; and, speaking of the Florentines of his day, he writes, “Hence it comes about that the great

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bulk of those who read it [ancient history] take pleasure in hearing of the various incidents which are contained in it, but never think of imitating them, since they hold it not to be merely difficult but impossible of imitation, as if the heaven, the sun, the elements and man had in their motion, their order, their potency, become different from what they used to be” (D, 98–9). How can one bring together Machiavelli’s radical break with tradition, as elaborated in The Prince, and his extravagant exhortation of antiquity as a source of models for emulation in The Discourses? Lefort addresses this apparent contradiction to show that it is not a contradiction at all. It is as though Machiavelli has elaborated two distinctly different strategies for the purpose of saying the same thing; the second one, however, imposes a silence, “a repression,” on the first. This brings us to one of the central themes of Lefort’s reading of The Discourses, namely, his awareness of Machiavelli’s dissemblance within the text. In his reading of The Prince, we have seen the extent to which he claimed that Machiavelli could not always be “taken at his word,” or rather that “his word” must be taken in a far more subtle context than would be apparent to the casual reader. In The Discourses, this interpretative practice of Lefort is even more marked. Let us begin by reflecting on this theme, one that will return often in Lefort’s interpretation of The Discourses. In the Preface to book I, Machiavelli presents himself as the guardian of tradition, one who calls for a return to antiquity, for repetition, and for imitation. Is it not then curious that the first sentence reads as follows: “Although owing to the envy inherent in man’s nature it has always been no less dangerous to discover new ways and methods than to set off in search of new seas and unknown lands because most men are much more ready to belittle than to praise another’s action, nonetheless, impelled by the natural desire I have always had to labor, regardless of anything, on that which I believe to be to the common benefit of all, I have decided to enter upon a new way, as yet untrodden by anyone else” (D, 97; emphasis added). How can Machiavelli insist on the mimetic return to antiquity and at the same time speak of the absolute novelty of his own enterprise? How can a call for imitation characterize itself as “entering upon a new way, as yet untrodden by anybody else”? Furthermore, how can he claim that at the beginning of the Quattrocento, the institutions of the Roman republic are being ignored when, in fact, they are glorified and idealized? Why does Machiavelli pretend to ignore his contemporaries’ appeal to ancient Rome as a model? Lefort argues that, for those who have ears to hear, the break from tradition initiated in The Prince is not reversed in The Discourses but rather it is continued and even deepened. He shows that Machiavelli does not propose a return

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to an original tradition; instead, he calls for a radical transformation of the image of the Roman republic, and for a critique of the role that tradition plays in the Florence of his times. As cited above, Machiavelli remarks, as though in passing, that his contemporaries take pleasure in the reading of history. Lefort contends that, according to Machiavelli, the history of Rome and the classical tradition had become for his contemporaries an aesthetic object, the contemplation of which gave them pleasure. Let us remark here that in Kant’s aesthetics, aesthetic perception is “disinterested,” which means that it is removed from all projects and is essentially contemplative. Machiavelli sees this as one of the problems posed by the role of the classical tradition in the Florence of his day; his desire was to transform the notion of tradition from its status as aesthetic object into a distinctly interested project, that is, a revolutionary one. Lefort argues that ultimately it is the revolutionary character of his project that imposes on Machiavelli the need to dissemble and encode his message. He writes, “The Discourses are offered to us as a mosaic, the fragments of which have been arranged in such a way as to render the motif invisible” (TM, 460). Lefort concludes that the difference between these two works is that some themes which are implicit in The Prince become explicit in The Discourses, primary among which is the function of history and time. The difference is really only a difference of emphasis. Using contemporary language, which somewhat overstates the matter, one might say that The Prince is written as a synchronic study, whereas The Discourses is written as a diachronic one. Even if, as we have seen, it is not the prince but the place of the prince that is the subject of The Prince, nevertheless this work is written from the point of a view of an actor situated in a place; therefore, the division of the state and of civil society, the division of the classes and their desires, “is given to thought in function of the position of the [political] Subject”(TM, 461). The Discourses, on the other hand, accentuates the role of time and history in the constitution of the place of the prince. “In The Discourses, the explanation of social space and its division is simultaneously that of time and its division” (TM, 464). It is not as though the dimension of time and history were absent from The Prince. Recall that, at the end of my previous chapter, I spoke of Lefort’s symbolic interpretation of Machiavelli’s criticism of the use of fortresses. I noted that what is lost by the prince’s enclosing himself within a fortress, either a real one or a circle of docile ministers acting as a mirror for his narcissism, is an openness to what Lefort called the real, the event. This aspect of The Prince is further elaborated upon in The Discourses. Machiavelli did this by constituting The Discourses as a reflection on ancient Rome in the form of a commentary on the first ten books of the Roman historian Titus Livy. According to Lefort, the representation of ancient Rome that is elaborated by

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Machiavelli is less significant in relationship to the past reality of ancient Rome than it is in terms of a critique of the contemporary politics of Florence. In fact, Lefort calls Rome “the manifest object” of The Discourses, the “latent object” being Florence itself. Rome displaces Florence as the past displaces the present. Rome plays many roles in The Discourses. Lefort writes, “Rome is thus, as it appears from the beginning of The Discourses, the incarnation of a socio-historical type, whose traits are defined in opposition to other types. Considered as such, it furnishes the term of a comparison, of which the states of antiquity or modern states, specifically Florence, figure as the other terms” (TM, 461). Nonetheless, Rome is more than the incarnation of a type which serves as a term of comparison. Lefort observes that the history of the Roman republic makes us discover a singular relationship between the instances of the political field which clarifies its logic and would otherwise have remain hidden, or, speaking more generally, “the order of the city [Rome] is indissolvable from a style of becoming. . . . Its virtue is to render readable the distinction of types” (TM, 461–2). Rome is not simply an empirical object or an ideal fact but rather is both historical and ideal. Its actual traits render visible other possibilities which have been foreclosed but which could have existed, or could be realized, in other societies. As such, one might be tempted to think of Rome as a kind of essence, or as the incarnation of an essence. However, Lefort tells us that it is a “style of becoming”; the notion of a style is given a distinct meaning in the writings of Merleau-Ponty, a brief glance at which might throw some light on the role of Rome in Machiavelli’s The Discourses. In the thought of Merleau-Ponty, there are neither facts nor essences but rather “a certain style.” He displaces the problematic of fact and essence by this notion of style. Every style, unlike the traditional concept of essence, is encrusted in the thickness of being; he claims that “not only in fact, but also by right it could not be detached from it, to be spread out as on display under the gaze.”1 The “style of becoming” is indissolubly linked to history, without itself becoming a simple historical event. Referring again to Merleau-Ponty, it is not an event but rather an advent. The advent, unlike the event, is not absolutely singular and, unlike the essence, is not subject to identical repetition; although historical, the advent has a signification which overflows its singularity. It continues to preside over a certain space and time; it opens possibilities, even ones it does not itself realize. In Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli’s The Discourses, the representation of Rome plays such a role. But if Rome is to play such a role, it must be destroyed as an object of aesthetic contemplation. Lefort proposes a hypothesis: “In affirming that no polity nor any leader wishes to imitate the ancients and that the model of Rome has been ignored; and

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that for the first time, it will be he himself who erects it in its truth, Machiavelli, without doubt, wishes to be understood as effecting a subversion of the tradition which wants to be the guardian of the ancient heritage; by suggesting that the love borne by the Florentines for Rome has as its function the covering over of their impotence to deal with the tasks of the present moment” (TM, 465–466). In fact, Machiavelli’s “commentary” on Livy’s first ten books will be a transformation of the representation of Rome as it existed in the Florence of his times. As we shall see, the content of this representation will be changed and, of at least equal importance, the relationship to the object will be transformed from one of aesthetic contemplation to one of action. Lefort argues that Machiavelli “makes us understand that there is a link between the knowledge of fact, the deciphering of the book, and the access to the real, which defines itself hic et nunc in action” (TM, 462). As noted at the end of this book’s previous chapter, the “access to the real” is not a relationship with things simply as they are, nor is the real simply a support for our subjective projections; rather, there is an intertwining of the subject and the object, which in this case is Rome. Now we must inquire about the content of the representation of ancient Rome which Machiavelli wishes to transform. Lefort claims that Machiavelli’s strategy in The Discourses is to ease readers into the text in such a way that initially they do not notice how radical his position is and how much it breaks with the tradition. Lefort finds in his texts an alternation of voices, which means that one must be careful to discern when Machiavelli is speaking in his own voice and when he is speaking in the name of the conventional view of things. Lefort contends that at the beginning of The Discourses, Machiavelli does not speak in his own voice, especially when he is describing the founding of Rome or when he lavishes praise on Sparta. While The Prince scandalizes our moral sensibilities by praising Borgia and by refusing to submit politics to personal morality— for example, the story of the lion and the fox—The Discourses begins with a quite reassuring vision of the coincidence of virtue and political greatness. Machiavelli writes, “In this case the virtue of the builders is discernible in the fortune of what was built, for the city is more or less remarkable according as he is more or less virtuous who is responsible for its beginning. This virtue shows itself in two ways: first in the choice of a site, and secondly in the drawing up of laws” (D, 102). Later, following the then conventional view, he claims that the fate of the polity is governed in large measure by fortune, that is, its beginning; for example, Rome was founded by free people, Florence is founded under Rome. Let us recall that in The Prince, Machiavelli attacks just such positions which grant to fortune the major part in the determining of the destinies of people.

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Then, by way of Machiavelli’s inventory of “received ideas,” comes the evocation, in a somewhat altered form, of the Aristotelian conception of the three forms of the state: principality, aristocracy, and democracy—along with the three forms of their perversion: tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy. He goes on to allude to Polybe’s historicized conception of these forms of the state which leads to a cyclical form of history and thereby strengthens the role of fortune in human affairs; after this he begins to praise “mixed regimes,” regimes which incarnate a segment of each of the three forms of the state. Then Machiavelli launches into an extravagant praise of Sparta and argues that Lycurgus was one of those who earned a great amount of praise for a constitution of this kind (mixed), since in the laws which he gave to Sparta, “he assigned to the king, to the aristocracy, and to the population each its own function, and thus introduced a form of government which lasted for more than eight hundred years, and which, to his credit, brought tranquility to that city” (D, 109). At this time, let us recall that in The Prince Machiavelli went to great lengths to show that there are no essential forms of government which are incarnated into real states; he argued instead for the notion of a “play of forces” which would replace the essentialist conception of political philosophy. If one were seeking some proof for Lefort’s contention that there is conscious dissimulation in The Discourses, then, in my opinion, it would be Machiavelli’s treatment of Sparta. His initial extravagant praise for Sparta, up to the point of his posing Rome as a sort of a failed Sparta and claiming that “in spite of the fact that Rome had no Lycurgus to give it at the onset such a constitution . . .” (D, 110), is later transformed into the most severe denunciations; he views both Sparta and Venice as regimes which have closed themselves off from history, from the event; in other words, they have refused any access to the real. Lefort continues to look for signs of dissimulation in the text itself. He notes that Machiavelli prefaces his discussion of these essential forms of the state by writing, “I would remark that those who have written about states say that there are to be found in them three forms of government” (D, 106; emphasis added). This and other remarks lead him to suspect that Machiavelli does not speak in his own name. Again Lefort proposes a hypothesis, this time concerning the strategic operations of The Discourses. He shows that under the disguise of classical theory, that of Aristotle’s Politics and Plato’s The Laws, Machiavelli introduces an interpretation of the history of Rome which requires new concepts. Then, basing his claims on the thought of Polybe, he uses a wellmade argument which “offers his reader a transition towards those interpretations which mask from them, provisionally, the distance that he takes from the ancients” (TM, 471). By evoking Polybe’s thought, Machiavelli also introduces a historicization of the Aristotelian scheme which greatly

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undermines an intelligibility of politics based upon essential structures, and replaces it with a completely historical conception in which class conflict plays an essential role. Let us follow Lefort’s “deconstructive” operation in some detail as he examines sections 2 and 3 of book I of The Discourses. In section 2, Machiavelli tells us that his intention is “to discuss the institutions of the city of Rome and what events brought it to perfection” (D, 106). He then begins by introducing the three essential forms of government: principality, aristocracy, and polity. After this, speaking about “those who write about states,” the next paragraph begins by claiming that others, who many think have better judgment, say that there are six types of government of which “three are very bad, and three are good in themselves but easily become corrupt, so that they too must be classified as pernicious” (D, 106). A principality “easily becomes a tyranny.” From aristocracy, “the transition to oligarchy is a easy one.” Polity is, without difficulty, “converted into democracy” (D, 106). Thus, whoever sets up one of these good forms is, in fact, setting up one of the bad forms because “there is no means whereby to prevent it passing into its contrary, on account of the likeness which in such cases virtue has to vice.” Machiavelli then presents a temporal scheme for the formation of governments and their transformation from one type of regime into another. He begins by stating that in prehistory, men live for a time “scattered like beasts”; later they form larger groups so that they can better defend themselves. After this they choose a man stronger and more courageous than the others to be the chief. This is followed by Machiavelli’s curious conception of the origin of justice, which goes as follows: They claim that the leader, or the prince, is a benefactor to the community and that “the sight of someone injuring his benefactor evokes a feeling of hatred in them, and they blame the ungrateful and respect those who showed gratitude” (D, 107). The ingratitude shown to the benefactors is perceived as despicable because the grateful ones see that they too might one day suffer from such action. Thus to prevent evils of this kind (evils visited upon a benefactor), they take to “making laws and to assigning punishments to those who contravened them, and thereby the notion of justice comes into being” (D, 107). As time passes, they choose as their leader not the strongest and boldest man, but rather “one who is most excellent in prudence and justice” (D, 107). Things go well for the principality, but only up to the point at which they no longer elect the prince and instead make his position hereditary. Then, Machiavelli argues, “his heirs soon begin to degenerate, as compared with our ancestors” (D, 107); they become extravagant and lascivious, thereby causing the prince to be hated. As he becomes hated, he becomes frightened, and his fear soon leads to offensive actions which

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quickly beget a tyranny. At the next stage, “strong leaders organize the masses for an uprising against the tyranny.” After the successful uprising, the masses look on their leaders as liberators, and the latter, to whom the very term “sole head” had become odious, form themselves into a government, thus bringing about the birth of the aristocracy. Again all goes well for the aristocracy until the administration passes on to their descendants; the latter, not having been brought up in bad times and having no experience of the changeability of fortune, ignore civic virtue and revert to all kinds of avarice, such as “seizing other men’s womenfolk” and so forth. This behavior then causes the aristocracy to become a government ruled by an oligarchy. After this there is a revolution which, having successfully rid itself of the oligarchical government of the few, has no desire to be ruled by a prince; instead, it institutes a democratic form of government “in which no sort of authority is invested, either in a few men or in a prince. Again, this democratic form of government maintains itself for a while but not for long” (D, 108), which is to say, until the generation that established the democratic regime passes away. At this time anarchy arrives. Everyone does what he or she likes and all sorts of outrages are constantly committed. The outcome is inevitable: Principality is reestablished, completing the circle. At this point, Machiavelli begins his praise of mixed regimes, especially of Sparta, even to the point of seeing Rome as a deficient Sparta. Rome did not get fortune’s “first gift” (Lycurgus), but rather received its second one. To use Derrida’s term, the second gift is a supplement of the first; nevertheless, in accord with the logic of supplementarity, we shall see that the supplement effaces that which it was to supplement. After Rome expelled the kings, “they appointed the consuls to take the place of the kings, so that what they expelled was the title of the king, and not royal power” (D, 110). In the republic, there were the consuls and the senate, but no place yet for the democratic element. Then, due to an increased populace and also to the fear of the upper classes that they might lose all, the tribune of the plebes came into being. Thus, like Sparta, “in its [Rome] government, all the estates now had a share” (D, 111). According to the argument advanced above, stability should follow, perhaps for eight hundred years as supposedly it had in Sparta; conflicting interests and passions are held in check by good laws. This is a scenario that is not at all what Machiavelli will propose. The fourth section of book I, entitled “That Discord between the Plebes and the Senate of Rome made this Republic both Free and Powerful,” begins with his demanding that we must not fail to discuss the tumults that broke out in Rome between the death of the Tarquins and the creation of the tribunes, nor to mention “certain facts which militate against the view of those

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who allege that the republic of Rome was so tumultuous, and so full of confusion, that had not good fortune and military virtue counterbalanced these defects, its condition would have been worse than that of any republic” (D, 113; emphasis added). Lefort notes that Machiavelli, no longer speaking in the name of “others who wrote on politics” writes “I” and opposes himself to “those who allege.” When he is speaking in his own name, the categorical system of classical political philosophy disappears and along with it the cyclical theory of history, which he never mentions again. What replaces it? Lefort argues that what takes its place is the same conception of the play of forces that we saw in The Prince, but this time it is given a historical elaboration. He contends that the later sections of book I inaugurate a critique of the conservative ideology of the Florentine upper classes of that time, an ideology which bases itself on classical sources. In this ideology the conception of the state and of law, as incarnations of the activity of reason, justifies the role of the grandee; in it, reason acts as an agency for the repression of irrational desires. This ideology argues that the upper classes, already in possession of goods and honors, are inclined toward stability and conservation; they are the natural site for instituting the regulatory function of reason, the law. The lower classes, on the other hand, animated by the desire to acquire both goods and honor, are the site of unruly passions. The distinction between reason and passion, both in classical philosophy and in classical political philosophy, is thus given a political incarnation. Plato’s Republic comes to mind; in it we see that reason stands above social conflicts and the conflict of desires. The law bears within itself the ideal image of a city regulated by reason, a city unified and integral, a city that is one with itself; this is to say, a city in which the social division becomes unified and all conflict and division have been annulled. This ideology contends that if Rome became great it was in spite of social conflicts and due to fortune and the army. Against this view, Machiavelli, “in his own name,” argues that those who condemn the quarrels between the nobles and the plebes seem to be quibbling about the very things that are the primary cause of Rome’s retaining her freedom; they “pay more attention to the noise and clamor of such conflicts than to what results from them, e.g., the good effects which they produce” (D, 113). He emphasizes that the greatness of Rome is based not on stability but on conflict, a theme which, as I showed in the previous chapter, is not new to readers of The Prince and is in profound variance with classical philosophy. Machiavelli writes that those who condemn conflict do not realize that in every republic there are two different dispositions, that of the populace and that of the upper classes, and that “all legislation favorable to liberty is brought about by the clash between them” (D, 113). In the early sections of book I, when Machiavelli presents

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his “classical” account of the genesis and demise of the state, there is no mention of these two irreducible desires which play such an important role in The Prince and the remainder of The Discourses. This would seem to lend further credence to Lefort’s suspicion regarding the sincerity of those early sections, in which Machiavelli spoke of law, the work of reason in classical philosophy, as that which stands outside and above social conflict, regulating an essentially perverse, fallen human nature. Further on in section 4 of book I, he speaks of law in such a way as to contest this classical humanist ideology and to throw even further doubt on his sincerity in the beginning of The Discourses. Speaking of the many examples of Roman virtue, he argues that since good examples proceed from good education, and since good education comes from good laws, “in this case, good laws come from the very turmoil which many so inconsiderately condemn” (D, 114). Thus we see that for him, the law itself emerges from social conflict and turmoil. Machiavelli radically rejects the idealized image of a “good society,” one which is in accord with itself and peaceful; he does not permit us to think that “the law imposes this good order, through the sovereign intervention of a wise man; this is because for him the law is enrooted in social conflict” (TM, 475). In our continuing discussion of Lefort’s political philosophy, we shall see that Machiavelli’s radical antiutopianism becomes a dimension of his own thought. According to him, Machiavelli is the first, and the most thoroughgoing, to reject what Lefort has called the sweet seduction of a “good society.” The other great philosopher of class conflict, the social division, is Marx, whose thought in the end falls victim to the image of a good society, that is, a vision of a society in which the social division will be definitively surmounted; the classical image of an integral society will be finally achieved. Machiavelli’s account of the origin of law in social conflict, this supplement which was supposed to make up for the lack of an initial code of laws (Lycurgus of Sparta), is incompatible with the idea of law which springs from the legislation of a sage. Here we see that the supplement has effaced what it was supposed to supplement. The image of Rome, torn by conflict and turmoil, more and more diverges from the supposedly conflict-free Sparta. Conflict, not stability, seems to be the ultimate foundation of liberty. As we have seen in The Prince, the basis of society is the conflict, not the repression, of desires: the grandee’s desire to oppress and the people’s desire not to be oppressed, for example. The law cannot be thought under the sign of measure, nor as related to a rational criteria which would put limits on the appetites of men; nor can it be conceived of as the effect of a natural regulation of the appetites imposed by the necessity of group survival. This is because “it [law] is born of the immeasurable desire for liberty, which is without a doubt linked to the desire for

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oppression; it is not an order which could establish itself by the elimination of disorder” (TM, 477). We see that the fundamental theme of The Prince returns in The Discourses. Recall that in The Prince the transcendence of the state was generated by a symbolic exchange between the prince’s desire and the people’s desire. Machiavelli strongly “advises” the prince against any attempt to form a polity by allying himself with the upper classes; by so doing, the prince would be seen as more or less an equal among equals, and therefore his symbolic function would be foreclosed. This theme returns in section 5 of The Discourses. Here, however, it is linked to the theme of history, the event, or what Lefort calls the “access to the real.” In this section, entitled “Whether the Safeguarding of Liberty can be more safely entrusted to the Populace or to the Upper Class and which has Stronger Reason for creating Disturbances, the ‘Have-nots’ or the ‘Haves’?,” Machiavelli opposes Sparta and Venice to Rome, declaring that for the Lacaedemonians and for Venice today political power is entrusted to the nobles, whereas for the Romans it was entrusted to the plebes. The aristocratically inspired argument for giving power to the “Haves,” which Machiavelli attributes to the defenders of Sparta and Venice, is twofold. On the one hand, it satisfies their ambition, “since with the stick in their hands, they play a more important part in the republic and so should be more contented.” On the other hand, it keeps the power away from the people; it “prevents the restless minds of the plebes from acquiring a sense of power” (D, 116; emphasis added), which would lead to “endless squabbles” because of the instability of their desire to acquire goods and honor. This argument is that the “Haves,” being already content, will be inclined toward moderation, whereas the people’s desires are quite insatiable. Machiavelli’s response to this, again in his own name, is based on his conception of desire. He claims that desire as such is insatiable; this means that the “Haves” will never be any more satisfied than the “Have-nots.” In fact, he argues that such disturbances are more often caused by the “Haves,” since their fear of losing what they already have arouses in them “the same inclinations that we find in the ‘Have-nots’ who want to get more, for men are inclined to think that they cannot hold on securely to what they possess unless they get more at others’ expense” (D, 118). In reality there is no opposition between the desire to conserve and the desire to acquire. Thus we see how the aristocratic position is refuted by Machiavelli. The theory of desire operative in his thought is not that of a desire which seeks to acquire something but rather it is made up of two desires: the desire to oppress and the desire to be free, each being the determinate negation of the other. Again Machiavelli addresses the question of the disposition of political power between the people and the grandee,

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but in The Discourses he poses it in a different way. Opposing Sparta and Venice to Rome, he gives the impression of an evenhandedness, but this eventually breaks down. At first it would appear that political power can rest in the hands of the upper classes as long as the population of the state remains small and the state does not wish to extend its territory. But if the state wishes to expand its territory, which would entail a large and wellarmed populace, then political power must be given over to this populace. We see that these two options are not equal, since the former, which attempts to maintain the status quo, implies a certain knowledge of the future, and, as we have seen in The Prince, “Time is that which drives all things before it.” Thus we see that the state cannot fortify itself against all future contingencies. The maintenance of land and the closing of its borders to all foreigners is similar to enclosing itself in a fortress. In a like manner, Machiavelli, in section 6 of The Discourses book I, states that since all human affairs are forever in a state of flux and cannot stand still, there will always be either improvement or decline, and necessity will lead one to do things which reason does not recommend. Therefore, if a community is constituted with a view to maintaining the status quo and does not desire to expand or change, “and if through necessity it is forced to expand, then its basic principles will be subverted and it will soon be faced with ruin” (D, 123). Thus we see that Rome is superior to both Sparta and Venice because it eschews the illusion of mastery achieved through the preservation of the status quo, and practices “a politics of risk,” an openness to the contingency of history, an ability to respond to the real. Recognizing that the dynamic of clashes between classes has as its aim the opening of the society to the world outside, Rome welcomed the fact of conflict and the possibility of expanding by the exploitation of accidents. It assumed “the risk of history, and its effective history remained in accordance with the principles of its genesis as a state” (TM, 487). Rome embraced the intertwining of knowledge and nonknowledge. Machiavelli claims that this is something which the Florence of his time is incapable of doing because of the ruling classes’ fear of its own population. He then goes on to praise the Roman institution of the tribunal and explicitly indicts Florence for its lack of such an institution. The tribunal allows any citizen to accuse anyone else of having behaved in a manner prejudicial to the state. An institution like this has two advantages: On the one hand, it keeps people in check through their fear of being indicted; on the other hand, it provides an outlet for the ill feelings that grow up in a city. Machiavelli is aware that when no normal outlet is given to conflict, recourse is had to abnormal methods which are very likely to bring disaster upon the republic as a whole. By means of this distinction between normal and abnormal, he be-

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gins to introduce the contrast between the public and the private. In section 7 of book I, entitled “How necessary Public Indictments are for the Maintenance of Liberty in a Republic,” he praises the usefulness of public indictments and denounces rumors and malicious slander. As we have seen in Lefort’s reading of The Prince, it is only a slight exaggeration to argue that its major achievement is its ability to account for the metamorphosis of force into political power. Machiavelli makes a similar point by means of his praise for public indictments and his condemnation of rumors and slander. Due to the fact that there is constant conflict in society, ill humor will inevitably arise. The question then is whether conflicts will be given legitimate expression, or whether they will circulate in a prepolitical or nonpolitical underground, where they will incite factions and conspiracies. As we shall later see, the theme of the legitimacy of conflict is central to Lefort’s interpretation of totalitarianism. A totalitarian regime is one in which there is no legitimate conflict; where all existing conflict is viewed as being instigated from the outside, caused by spies in the service of foreign powers, or by the ravings of madmen who are subjected to “care” in psychiatric institutions. In this type of regime, all conflict is excluded from the sphere of the political, the public realm. In The Discourses, Machiavelli argues that Florence’s inability to bring about a transformation of private conflicts (rumors, slander, and so on) into public conflicts (public indictments, tribunals, and so on) is caused by corruption. Most of his examples are drawn from the Florence of his time. Machiavelli indicts Florence for its lack of virtu, by which a conflict that was merely private becomes a public one. It should be noted here that Machiavelli’s distinction between the public and the private does not constitute an absolute separation, as it often appears to do in Arendt’s work. This is because both political indictment and malicious slander are nurtured by the same ill humor. The difference between them is in their relationship to the law, which as we have already seen is itself interwoven with social conflict. Lefort contends that both The Prince and The Discourses deal, in some deep sense, with the constitution of the political, that is, the field in which the political subjects are situated, in which force is metamorphosized into political power. In his later work, this field is called “the symbolic form of the social.” We have already seen how this was effected in The Prince. In The Discourses, however, the place of the political (an open space, a field) comes into being through the fact of legitimate conflict. Since it may always be openly contested, power is not incarnated in any figure. In Rome a private interest which masks itself as the public good is subject to an indictment before the tribunal. As mentioned above, Machiavelli designates the failure to effect this genuine political field as a state that is corrupted. The

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notion of corruption, the failure to subordinate private interests to the public good, plays a large role in The Discourses. The ultimate effect of corruption, and in a sense the condition of its possibility, is a loss of the desire for liberty. Later, Lefort develops the reflection on corruption more deeply in his interpretation of La Boétie’s On Voluntary Servitude.2 La Boétie tells us that for some people it would be less correct to say of them that they have lost their freedom than they have gained their servitude. He raises the possibility that not only can the desire for freedom be lost, but also can be replaced by an actual desire for servitude. As we have seen, uncontested power becomes corrupt. In section 35 of book I, Machiavelli speaks of the mistake that the Romans made when they appointed the Decemviri. He argues that “when the Ten were appointed and the appointment of councils and tribunals was suspended, the Ten were given power to make laws and in general the power to act as if they were the Roman people” (D, 198; emphasis added). Then, finding themselves on their own and with neither consuls nor tribunes to limit them, their ambition became limitless. In other words, they became corrupt. These last few sentences are extremely important for Lefort’s later work. We see that when the institutions of contestation are put out of play, the Ten acted as if they were the Roman people; this is to say that they pretended to incarnate the people. According to Lefort, this is precisely the pretension of the rulers of a totalitarian regime in which all legitimate opposition is foreclosed. In Rome, however, this was merely a temporary aberration, which did not interfere with Machiavelli’s praise of Rome for its willingness to accept conflict and turmoil. Both Sparta and Venice are places where he claims that private interests are never subordinated to the public good. As The Discourses progresses, he becomes more explicit in denouncing Florence for its corruption, by which he means that it is a state in which public life is ossified and conspiracies, factions, and rumors thrive. I will not continue to follow Lefort’s often very detailed reading of The Discourses. Instead, I close my reflections on his reading of it by summing up what it adds to his interpretation of The Prince, and to some of the themes that become operative in his later work in political philosophy. As suggested above, this focuses on his perception of Rome as a historical society. In Lefort’s reading of The Discourses, there is a transformation of the image of Rome as it functions in the conservative ideology of the Florentine upper classes who take pleasure in the humanist representation of Rome but who neither know it truly nor have a desire to imitate it. “The pleasure they give themselves from the examples and maxims, which is a blending of aesthetic pleasure and moral exaltation, masks a defective knowledge” (TM, 584). Machiavelli contends that in the hands of the Florentine bourgeoisie, Rome has become a myth, an ideal suspended

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outside time and history which is thus incapable of giving rise to action. Since Rome is the historical society par excellence, that is, a society that is open to contingency, to the event, the very idea of de-historicizing it seems to be a genuine perversion. This dimension of Machiavelli’s work holds a very strong attraction for Lefort. He argues that the important achievement of Machiavelli’s The Discourses is to have altered the mythical representation of the past and to have made his readers “recognize that all societies are taken in the same history, exposed to the same accidents, torn by the same antagonisms, ordained in function of a choice, which escapes the will of individuals, but nonetheless carries the trace of a human intention” (TM, 585). He claims that the recognition of a fundamental historicity is the defining characteristic of a modern society (I return to this later), and that Machiavelli is the first to have recognized this phenomenon. Premodern society and, in a distinctly different sense, totalitarian societies are societies of the eternal recurrence; they are societies structured in virtue of an originating myth. In discussing the interpretation of The Prince, I endeavored to show that Machiavelli institutes a type of political philosophy, and even a new ontology, but not an empirical political science. In a similar manner, Lefort wishes to show that Machiavelli does not simply juxtapose empirical history, conceived as “one damn thing after another,” to the eternal and transcendent dimension of myth. Rather, he speaks of the difference between a “transcendental” history and an empirical history, the “difference between an operative [effective] history and a re-presented history, that in consequence of the instituted politics in the form of factual regimes and an instituting politics from which all factual regimes derive” (TM, 586). In this citation, one can hear references to two sets of distinctions which are found in the work of Husserl, namely, transcendental history/ empirical history, and in the writings of Merleau-Ponty, instituting/ instituted. In The Discourses, Lefort returns to one of both his and MerleauPonty’s central concepts: the notion of style. Rome presents a certain style of becoming, namely, that of a historical society. In Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli, Rome plays the role of opening a vision of universal history. Roman history, far from being a failed Sparta, reveals the contours of universal history (TM, 587). Let me make precise the sense in which Lefort uses the term “universal history.” In his later work, when he writes on the rights of man, the elaboration of the notion of universality plays a large and important role. In fact, his development of a historical constitution of universality, beginning with his reading of Dante’s Monarchia and continuing through his analysis of the Soviet dissidents, is perhaps one of his major contributions to political philosophy. Nevertheless, we are not yet

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at this stage of his thinking. Returning now to the concept of universal history, we must emphasize that Lefort’s use of this term must be disengaged from anything resembling either a Hegelian or a Marxist conception of it. In both of these thinkers, although certainly in different ways, there is the idea of an immanent teleology; there is an end contained in the beginning, as the oak tree is contained in the acorn. At the end of history, and only at the end of history, we will see that our experience of contingency was merely apparent. Hegel tells us that the owl of Minerva takes wing only at twilight. Marx teaches us that the anatomy of humans holds the secret to the anatomy of the apes. There are no such conceptions in Lefort’s writings after his early break with Marxism. In fact, it is his critique of such notions that triggered his early break, a critique that was well under way in the late political writings of Merleau-Ponty. As I have already shown, using the distinction instituting/instituted, Rome serves as a privileged site for an elaboration of universal history in the sense that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of poetic language gives us an insight into the operations of instituted language, “spoken language.” It is not the case that all language use somehow tends toward poetic language; rather, poetic language does not close itself off from the instituting operations of language in the way that “spoken language” does. In “The Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty speaks of the painter’s vision which in some sense serves as the place from which vision as such brings itself forth in a primordial way.3 The painter’s vision permits us to see the coming into being of the visible. Artistic vision is not obsessed with merely the position of an object, but rather permits the play of light and shadow to reveal itself. Both prosaic vision and instituted speech, in their rush to see, or to hear, the fully constituted object ignore this play and remain with a stable and certain object. In a somewhat similar sense, the history of Rome lays bare the essential contours of a historical society. For reasons similar to the relationships between poetic language and ordinary language and between artistic vision and prosaic seeing, Rome, “since it does not close in on itself as a fully constituted object, a society closed to the outside, to the real” (TM, 588), allows us to think the historical dimensions of society. Lefort, echoing Merleau-Ponty, tells us that “we never have to do with pure individuals.” In his thinking, there is not the opposition between the singularity of the individual and the transparency of the universal concept; rather, there is generality and overlapping. In the language of Gadamer, there is “a fusion of horizons.” Recall that in The Prince, Machiavelli granted an important and crucial role to the idea of imitation. In founding a new principality, the prince must imitate the virtues of the great founders of the past: Moses and others. If the prince’s virtue is not as great as theirs, at least it must smell like

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it. In The Discourses, he tells us that none of the Florentines of his time are capable of doing this; he claims that it is not because they are simply ignorant of the past but rather because they have an idealized vision of it. They have turned the past into an object of aesthetic contemplation, an object that gives them pleasure but does not provoke them to action. The Discourses, by not viewing Rome as a static “classical” object for contemplation, demystifies it by seeing it as a process of historical creation. In the language of Merleau-Ponty and of Lefort, Rome is seen not merely as an instituted society, but also and simultaneously as an instituting society. Lefort, however, does not consider this idealization of the past to be totally innocent. Instead, he sees it as an attempt to avoid the problems of the here and now, an attempt made by old men for whom knowledge has lost its link to desire. On the other hand, Machiavelli’s demystification of an idealized past opens the possibility for “imitating” this past in the present, the here and now. Again noting the divergence between The Discourses and The Prince, let us remember that the addressee of the preparatory letter to the former is not the prince but rather those who deserve to be prince, that is, two young men who are disaffected with and hostile to the Medici regime. Lefort argues very strongly that The Discourses is an encoded call for rebellion against the Medicis. He especially makes explicit the political project of this work when he writes, “The task which is prescribed to him, which is of such great dignity that it is without precedent, consists of combating the factions which support the tyranny [the Medicis], and at the same time combating those who dominate the corrupt republic. The task is to prepare a break, one that only a sole prince could attempt, but whose ultimate and only end would be to institute a popular regime” (TM, 643). Now we see the reasons for Machiavelli’s extensive discussion of conspiracies and of the conditions that make them fail or be successful, along with his critiques of both legalism and the fetishism of the institute of law. For Lefort, Machiavelli is not simply discussing conspiracies, even those which include the dangers and risks of instituting a tyranny; he is actually calling for one. In present-day Florence, great transformations are possible, but only by advocating a “politics of risk” which would imply the audacity to transgress the law and to become a rampart against corruption, “a politics that would denounce and attack those who have made the state their private affair, a politics which would cause an uprising of a new mass of combatants in its service” (TM, 670). Since this call for revolution is thickly encoded in the text, Lefort’s descriptive interpretation of it is enormously detailed and complicated. In my exposition of The Prince, and especially of The Discourses, I have shown, in some small measure, the closely argued presentation which Lefort gives to us. His argument consists of

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exposing the changes of voice within the text and of pointing out the obvious self-contradictions within the text itself. After Machiavelli has linked politics to war, he tells us that when one sees a glaring mistake on the part of a general, it is probably a trap or a deception. Lefort frequently points to texts in which Machiavelli makes explicit the need, in certain circumstances, to deceive and to dissemble. As I said in the beginning, it is not my intention either to defend or to criticize Lefort’s interpretation of the work of Machiavelli—though I might remark in passing that I find it generally convincing—but rather to read this interpretation as the place of the genesis of many of the themes that will become operative in his later thinking. At this time, let me evoke at least a few of these themes: the noncoincidence of society with itself; the characterization of society as conflictual and thus without hope of ultimate resolution; the transcendence of the political in its relation to social conflict; the intertwining of knowledge and nonknowledge, and so forth. These themes, together with many others, have their origin in Lefort’s prolonged reflection on the writings of Machiavelli.

Notes 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, tr. A. Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 119. 2. Etienne de La Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, tr. H. Kurz (New York: Free Life Editions, 1975). 3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, ed. J. Edie, tr. C. Dallery (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

3

Machiavelli: The Practice of Interpretation

I conclude this reflection on Lefort’s interpretation of Machiavelli’s work with some of his thoughts on the concept of interpretation which were developed in Le Travail de l’Oeuvre Machiavel. These thoughts give us an inkling of his reflections on history. As has been already noted, a great part of this work—more than two hundred and fifty pages—is devoted to some “exemplary interpretations” of Machiavelli’s writings, including among others those of Cassirer, Ritter, Gramsci, and Strauss. For reasons of space, I do not consider this aspect of Lefort’s work. Nevertheless, I must point out that his extensive consideration of these other readings is not pursued simply to indicate the “state of the problem” or to attack alternative interpretations but rather to demonstrate his concern with the act of interpretation itself. What is it to interpret a work already so extensively interpreted? How does one stand in relationship to both the other interpretations and to the “original” work under interpretation? In the case of Machiavelli, this becomes even more complicated since in addition to scholarly and “serious” interpretations of his writing, the name of “Machiavell,” usually in the adjectival form of “Machiavellian” has become part of our ordinary language. This adjective usually carries a negative connotation which is applied to a broad spectrum of people in positions of power, ranging from statesmen and tyrants to department chairpersons and so forth. It connotes a certain ruthlessness, a diabolical capacity for manipulation; in a weak sense, it can also designate political realism, that is, a savoir faire at the art of realpolitik. It is doubtful whether Henry Kissinger would object to being called “Machiavellian.” Later I return to these particular complications which are attendant upon what Lefort calls the “decapitation of the proper name” (TM, 10) from the body of Machiavelli’s work. Let us for now remain with the “simple,” but actually not so simple, problem of interpretation. 59

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It is indeed significant that Lefort, in the title and body of this book, employs the word “oeuvre,” and not, for example, the word “text.” He opposes himself explicitly to the theory of interpretation which is linked with this term, and implicitly to another that I will attempt to elaborate. In the first place, he rejects any theory of interpretation in which the text serves as a sort of envelope for a “pure meaning,” a significance of what the text really means without considering what others have taken it to mean, and with the firm conviction that the others are simply wrong. For this kind of theory, the text (the work) is a sign: “It has the status of a spiritual thingin-itself, a thing which is what it is independently of the representations which posterity has made of it” (TM, 23). Against a kind of “hermeneutic nihilism” which is more current today than when Le Travail de l’Oeuvre Machiavel was written, this sort of “literary realism” protects the work’s integrity, that is to say, its identity across time. It safeguards the work against arbitrary interpretations in which it could, more or less, mean whatever the interpreter wants it to mean. Nevertheless, this integrity of the work is achieved at a price; as Merleau-Ponty argues, certain forms of idealist philosophy which seek to ensure certainty do so by exacting a premium more onerous than the loss that they indemnify us against. According to him, the onerous premium is that of our relationship to Being. In this context, for Lefort, the onerous premium is the closure of the work in upon itself, its being viewed as a sort of “spiritual thing,” an object enclosed within its own contours. In his view, the genuine work, “l’oeuvre,” is not itself an object; rather, it is an openness toward what it gives us to think: “The truth is that the work attracts our attention on itself only because it opens its reader to a road toward that which it thinks” (TM, 28–9). Our concern with The Prince or The Discourses is, at the same time, a turning of ourselves toward the history of Florence, or Rome; also, as we have seen, it is a turning toward the emergence and the intelligibility of the modern state, that is, toward the world. Why would it be of any interest to discover what a text means, except on the assumption that it opens us onto the real, the world? If one poses the work as an object, “one forgets to pose what would be its object” (TM, 29). Such an approach effects an illegitimate division between the meaning of the work and the world that the work gives to thought: “Illegitimate because it is always in the same experience that the work and the world give themselves. The world in relation with the work, and the work in relation with the world” (TM, 29). This indivisible experience of the work and the world is given not only to us but to other readers as well. To attend to the work is to think in the space that it opens, a space that is also open to others. Employing the language of Husserl, the subjective correlate of a pure, objective meaning would be a pure subject, a subject unaffected by

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the history of interpretations that have been proposed by the work; or, more precisely said, the history of interpretations that the work has provoked. To speak metaphorically, and not to forget that it is metaphorically, one might say that there is a spatial opening of the work which relates it to the world that it gives to thought, and likewise a temporal openness which points in the direction of the history of the interpretations of the work. The point of dealing with the critical literature on a text is not to dispose of some inadequate readings but rather, by means of a sojourn through it, to acquire a perspective on the work that one would otherwise lack. Other interpretations “touch us even when we condemn them” (TM, 25). Lefort argues that it is impossible to detach the paths, the other interpretations, which connect the writer to his posterity. One sees the writer’s work not in spite of its historical interpretations but through them. As Merleau-Ponty writes in “The Eye and Mind,”1 we see the tiles at the bottom of a pool not in spite of the water but by and through it. The work exists outside itself in the interpretations that it has engendered. The relation of the work to its interpretations is not that of a translation of it from one language into another; were it so, one could read the translation instead of the original, which exists in a language one does not know. In the case of commentary, the relationship to the original is indispensable. The commentary does not displace the original but rather lives by its relationship to it. Its presence haunts all the commentaries that it has provoked. One hears in Lefort’s notion of interpretation a certain resonance with that of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. For both of them there is no attempt to return to an original which would be unmarked by the centuries of commentary, as if the latter were so many layers of dust that one must blow off the ancient work. Nonetheless, neither of these thinkers attempts to efface either the “original” or the author. Let me turn briefly toward another, more contemporary, theory of textual interpretation, which is broadly designated as deconstruction. I do this to clarify Lefort’s position in terms of its divergence from this approach. Strictly speaking, “deconstruction,” at least in the hands of Derrida himself, is not a theory and much less is it a method of textual criticism; even though, as has been argued by Rodolphe Gasche in his The Tain of the Mirror 2 and by others, it has become one in the hands of its American followers. In the work of Derrida, a textual practice is linked to a substantive philosophical position; he argues—in this respect following the thought of Heidegger—that metaphysics as onto-theo-ology is the thought of Presence. It is the thought, or the desire to be the thought, of a presence that excludes absence. Metaphysics is constituted by sets of oppositions, the most fundamental of which are presence and absence, inside and outside. Derrida views metaphysics as a strategic operation by

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which one attempts to think the first term of this opposition in such a way as not to implicate the second. Therefore the second term, by means of privation, can be conceived of as derived from the first term. These systems of opposition are not simply oppositions but rather are hierarchically arranged in such a way that the first term dominates the second; the second becomes simply the privation of the first, which is external to it. With the purpose of exposing this strategy, which in his view is constitutive of metaphysics, Derrida “reads” a number of thinkers whom he considers to be situated within the metaphysical tradition. Briefly, I will consider Derrida’s reading of the philosophy of Husserl since it serves as an example of his reading of other writers. The text that Derrida deals with is the “First Investigation” of the Logical Investigations, a text in which Husserl proposes some “essential distinctions.”3 These essential distinctions are the two senses of the word “sign,” namely, expression and indication. At this time, Derrida’s analysis of this text will not be presented in detail but rather only in an outline form which I hope will be sufficient to demonstrate his contention that, with the maintenance of these distinctions, Husserl imports the tradition of metaphysics into his phenomenological project. Or one might say that the particular strategy of maintaining these distinctions is the phenomenological project, at least as Husserl conceived it. What Derrida attempts to show is that in the “First Investigation” of the Logical Investigations, the die is cast; or, otherwise said, the seed of transcendental phenomenology is contained within these essential distinctions. Derrida perceives that these distinctions already contain what will later be called a “transcendental reduction,” the epoche. Now let us see how this is the case. By definition, all signs have signification. However, an indicative sign is a sign without meaning, which is to say, it does not bear a meaning within itself. Instead, it triggers an empirical association; it makes the mind pass from one thought to the anticipation, or expectation, of another. There is no “meaning content” present in indication; there is only an empty signifier and nothing that is signified. For example, smoke is an indication of fire but is not animated by fire’s meaning, “the meaning fire”; rather, it provokes an empirical association. An expressive sign, on the other hand, is a sign charged with meaning; expressions are signs that “want to say,” vouloir dire. The expressive sign is animated by a meaning. In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida argues that within the metaphysical tradition, meaning comes to the sign and transforms it into expression only by means of speech, oral discourse.4 It looks at this point as though things are fairly straightforward: An expressive sign is employed in oral discourse; another type of sign, as something which by empirical association leads us to think of something else, is an indicative sign. Nevertheless,

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things are not so simple, since expression is always entangled with, caught up within, intertwined with, indication. Derrida contends that, according to Husserl, in communicative speech, meaning is always bound up with indication; however, expressive meaning is capable of occurring without a connection to indication, which is to say, in actual communication, expression is intertwined with indication. However, there can be expression without indication. It is toward the telos of “an expression without indication” that the technique of the phenomenological reduction will be elaborated. Indication must be set aside, that is, abstracted from, reduced to, an extrinsic and empirical phenomenon. Derrida argues that this must be the case, even if getting rid of this confusion involves an infinite task. The reduction of indication would require a movement from the real communicative employment of language to a necessarily solitary mental life, that is, to a thinking that is an interior dialogue that I have with myself, a dialogue that happens within the sphere of “ownness.” In this solitary sphere of mental life, nothing excludes my immediate presence to myself. Derrida, on the contrary, claims that reflection is unable to extract itself from dispersion; it is not possible to arrive at the coincidence of reflective consciousness with itself. What makes this coincidence of consciousness with itself impossible is what Derrida calls “writing.” As is well known by now, this “writing” is not to be equated with the ordinary sense of writing, that is, black marks on a white piece of paper. Writing, or better yet arche-writing, is everything that resists assimilation to the presence of consciousness to itself; it includes the materiality of the signifier; the work of differance; spacing or gapping; internal differentiation; the deferring in time; and so forth. Derrida argues that metaphysics constitutes itself as the desire to be a thought of presence and selfpresence, that is, presence without distance. He claims that metaphysics does this through the repression of writing and the valorization of an idealized conception of speech and voice. His critique of metaphysics attempts to show that the second term of these metaphysical oppositions— expression/indication, speech/writing, identity/difference—is far from being merely external to the first but is deeply implicated in it. For him, the inability of consciousness to coincide with itself is called “writing”: The play of writing is presided over and made into a “totality” by the preexistent totality of the signifieds. This “totality of the signifieds” is characterized by Derrida as “the book.” The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing. The book is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the disruption of writing, that is, against differance in general. Thus we see that Derrida makes an opposition between the book and the text; the text is “writing” insofar as it escapes the totalizing circumscription of the book.

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By now it should be clear that up to a certain point, at least negatively, there is a certain convergence between Lefort and Derrida, inasmuch as both reject the idea that the goal of interpretation is to grasp the purely ideal meaning, that is, a meaning for which the text would serve as merely an external envelope. Nevertheless, between them there are more divergences than convergences. For Derrida, the movement of the text beyond the metaphysical confines of the book is engendered by a tension which is installed by the metaphysical desire itself, that is, by the repression of arche-writing. The unity of the book is constituted by the repression of the dissemination proper to writing. Allowed to reign freely, dissemination breaks the enclosed borders of a book in order to establish an intertext. According to Lefort, as the borders of “the text as an object” are broken in the direction of the world, the work presents itself along with the critical activity that it has provoked. As is the case with Derrida, Lefort also does not elaborate a theory, or a method, of textual criticism. Rather he exhibits an interpretive sensibility, a sensibility that is linked to a substantive philosophical commitment and, in his case, is related to the work of Merleau-Ponty. It is related particularly to an idea that permeates MerleauPonty’s work from The Structure of Behavior through The Visible and the Invisible, namely, that of a fundamental indeterminacy of Being. As early as The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty was fascinated by the concept of the gestalt.5 He argues that this concept, arrived at by empirical research, contains the philosophical latency which contests the implicit ontology that subtends this empirical research itself, namely, the thesis of an ultimate determinacy of Being. The notion of gestalt exhibits qualities that preclude any attempt to think of it as a determined object. It can be thought of neither as an object nor an ideal, neither as a fact nor an essence. It exhibits a mode of being that is not adequately characterized as being either empirical or ideal. The notion of an ontological indeterminacy recurs throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work. Inasmuch as my concern is to trace an outline of Lefort’s interpretive practice, I must now briefly consider Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Ferdinand de Saussure. As is well known, Saussure distinguished between la parole and la langue, between the “event of speech” and the “structure of language.” MerleauPonty transforms this distinction into that of event and advent. In The Prose of the World he writes, “We propose, on the contrary, to consider the order of culture or meaning as an original order of advent, which should not be derived from the order of mere events, if such exist, or treated simply as the effect of unlikely conjunctures” 6 (emphasis added). In contrast to a structure, the advent does not leave time behind; it is a promise of events to come. The event is a datable occurrence, whereas the advent institutes a “style” which can be either continued or transformed; it “detaches” itself

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from spatial temporal location by opening a horizon. Meaning is given neither in the transparency of a concept nor in a determinate structure; rather it gives itself “in tufts and thickets.” It is neither fact nor essence, neither event nor structure, but, as Merleau-Ponty argues, meaning institutes a mode of generality. In the Preface to Signs, he continues to develop this notion through his discussion of the classic.7 According to him, a classic—the works of Descartes, Marx, or others—does not contain timeless truths nor is it strictly datable. Instead “it presides over a certain time” by opening horizons for further thought; it reveals a certain dimension of being, an indeterminate style which bears within itself the latency of further thought, including those thoughts which come to contest it. Even if we are not Cartesians, we owe many of our reasons for not being so to Descartes himself. Merleau-Ponty does not think the relationship between event and advent in terms of a juxtaposition; recall that in his description of the advent, he wrote events “if such exist.” Between advent and event there is a relationship of intertwining. The French Revolution, which he evokes as an example, is indeed a datable event which took place in 1789; nonetheless, like the Greek polis or the Roman republic, it also institutes a certain vision of history. It continues to preside over an indefinite time; it unleashes a play of significance, but one that is neither rigorously determined by a structure nor purely indeterminate. The advent institutes a mode of generality of being, of the “there is” (il y a) in which we are irreducibly inscribed. It is neither beyond being nor beyond history. Merleau-Ponty writes, “Acts of signification are essentially historical, the advent is event.” Advent is event, and event is advent. Thus we see that for him, the problematic of identity and difference is inscribed within the problematic of reversibility. Now let us return to Lefort, for whom the oeuvre of Machiavelli is of the order of advent. As we have already seen, its work (le travail ) is to open horizons of thought. An interpretation of this oeuvre does not seek to finally discover its true ideal meaning; rather, it is an attempt to “think in the space which it opens to the thought of others” (TM, 24). As noted above, “literary realism” saves the identity of a work, but in so doing pays an extravagant price. In my judgment, the dissemination of writing evoked by Derrida’s deconstruction forecloses the identity of the work and empties it into an anonymous field of textuality. While rejecting the idealist claim of literary realism, Lefort manages to save the identity of the work and also the authorial voice, but not as an identity in the form of A = A, but rather as an identity appropriate to the advent and to the body, an identity that exists not in spite of itself but by a divergence (l’écart) from itself. He views the relationship between the interpreter and the work being interpreted not as that of one between two disincarnate minds face-

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to-face but as one that exists within a historical institution that envelops both of them, an institution that conveys the status on the author, on the work, and on the critic. Interpreting a work is not simply a confrontation with a manuscript; rather, it is a participation in a historically specific institution. Machiavelli’s authorial voice exists not in the subjectivity of the man Machiavelli but as inscribed within a tradition of interpretation. “It is true that the true author is that writer who gives birth to a posterity, but it is also by it [posterity] that the writer is constituted as an author” (TM, 31). In Lefort’s version of the hermeneutic circle, the author does not become irrelevant; there is not, as in Foucault’s thought, the death of the author; rather, the “authorness” of the author is constituted in and across the historical posterity within which our own interpretive activity is inscribed. As Merleau-Ponty argues, it is not we who have language, but language that has us. In a similar manner, the work (le travail ) of the work (l’oeuvre) does not lie before us as an object; rather it works by eliciting our interpretative activity. Having insisted on the importance of the tradition of interpretations of Machiavelli’s thought, and having rejected the idea of a final true interpretation, how do we avoid a skeptical relativism that would paralyze all judgment? In the play of interpretations, how do we not suspend judgment in the air? The first chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, entitled “Perceptual Faith,” begins with the sentence, “We see the world, the world is what we see.” Merleau-Ponty then goes on to evoke some of the classical arguments of skepticism as they relate to perception, including those that evoke the perspectival character of our perception, that is, the fact that perception is always mine. In the subsequent chapters, he produces critical arguments against the major strategies that modern philosophy has evoked against skepticism. For example, against Hume’s skepticism, Kant elaborates his doctrine of transcendental reflection, a doctrine which seeks to base the veracity of our knowledge of the world as phenomena on the unity, and the categorical articulation, of transcendental subjectivity. Against this position, Merleau-Ponty contends that reflection cannot follow the route of constitution backward to its origin in a transcendental subject, in a manner similar to the way one can walk in either direction between Notre Dame and l’Etoile. Our prereflective involvement in the world precedes our reflection, and this reflection is always already guided by it. According to him, reflection can never undo, or get under, our inherence in the world. It always bears the stain of “coming second.” We can never arrive at the conditions of possibility which must hold if there is to be a world, since there “‘always already” is a world which the reflecting subject is a part of, that is, flesh of its flesh. Instead of transcendental reflection, Merleau-Ponty substitutes what he calls “hyper-reflection,” a reflection

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which knows itself to be always already involved in the world and which gives up any pretension to arrive at its own point of origin. Later I will have occasion to return again to this notion of hyper-reflection. Merleau-Ponty continues his enumeration of some classical arguments against skepticism with a consideration of Husserl’s thought in which skepticism entails a kind of psychologism which reduces an ideal science (for example, logic) to an empirical science of the fact (for example, psychology). Against Husserl’s attempt to overcome it by means of his theory of essential intuition arrived at by the technique of free variation, Merleau-Ponty argues that the technique of free variation would transform a real experience into a merely possible one. The initial experience would be submitted to variations up to the point that it would no longer be an experience of the same essential type as the one we began with, since through the process of free variation, the contingency of the given is subtended by the necessary structure of the possibility of its appearance.8 The move would be from contingency to necessity, and since doubt and possible skepticism are inextricably linked to contingency, one would move from the dubious to the certain. For Merleau-Ponty free variation is a “labor of experience on itself that would strip it of its facticity as though its facticity were an impurity.” He claims that this labor is an impossible labor; it is impossible to the extent that it believes itself capable of discovering “the essence as a positive being” and the realm of essences as a second order of positivity which would found, and subtend, the contingently given. On the other hand, he does not dismiss free variation as a procedure for the clarification of experience. What we put into question is its pretension to discover an intelligible structure that would exist independently of the contingently given, inasmuch as this would suppose a subject capable of detaching itself absolutely from the field of experience and contingency. It would require “a spectator without secrets and without latencies,” a subject who would be coextensive with their own upsurgence. It is true that I have the power to give myself leeway, to move from the actual to the virtual; however, I do not have the power to complete the cycle by transforming the real into a variant, or an instance, of the possible. According to Husserl, the eidetic and phenomenological reductions are linked in an extremely intricate manner, whereas for Merleau-Ponty, it is the intractability of our contingent insertion into the “there is” of the world and of nature that forestalls the completion of the epoche and precludes any knowledge of essences via the technique of free variation. He “resolves” the dilemmas posed by skepticism not by an argument that would guarantee certainty but rather by a reaffirmation of “perceptual faith,” that is, our insertion into the earth as Ur-heimat—in other formu-

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lations, he refers to this as “wild being.” For Merleau-Ponty there is no question of founding a universal philosophy based upon this dimension of wild being as a domain prior to all our interrogations and ambiguities. Wild being is not a ground of certainty; any attempt to return to some sort of first immediacy, a presence prior to difference, is neither possible nor desirable. In The Visible and the Invisible he writes: What we propose here is not the return to the immediate, the coincidence, the effect of fusion with existence, the search for an original integrity. . . . If coincidence is lost, this is no accident. If being is hidden, this is itself a characteristic of being, and no disclosure will make us comprehend it.9

In its attempt to overcome skepticism, philosophy cannot situate itself prior to the original division of sense (meaning) which renders skepticism possible. Merleau-Ponty claims that the originary breaks up and that philosophy must accompany this breakup, this noncoincidence, this differentiation. There is no way under this originary noncoincidence that would secure for us a place immune to doubt and ambiguity. Within the context of interpretation, Lefort proposes an “interpretative faith.” He argues that when we let ourselves be taken by the play of interpretations, we believe that there is a “sense” inscribed within the work (l’oeuvre), a meaning which preexists the operations of those who would work to produce it. We believe in a reality which is what it is outside the representations that the critics make of it, an inner truth which remains in itself, in its own place, and which commands the knowledge of it. “It is this faith that the interpreter communicates, a faith in the meaning of the work, in the sense of the world that it bears . . .” (TM, 35). This is not a statement of dogmatism. It does not contradict Lefort’s contention that meaning happens through immersing oneself in the interpretive literature, nor does it claim to have made a final definitive interpretation. It is a description of the activity of interpretation. The interpretation “ignores the representations as such,” just as perception is not concerned with the representations of the table but with the table itself. Like Merleau-Ponty’s notion of perceptual faith, Lefort’s interpretive faith attests to our original insertion into the flesh of history, the flesh of the institution of interpretation provoked by the work itself. In both these uses of the word “faith,” there is clearly no reference to religious faith. As Kierkegaard has shown us, religious faith is an act, a leap—one that we are capable of not performing, of not making, and possibly of losing. This is not the case with regard to the use of the word “faith” by Merleau-Ponty and Lefort. For both of them, the notion of faith is not opposed to disbelief; rather, it is opposed to knowledge. It

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exists at a level which is prior to the dimension of knowledge. “Doubt is not surmounted when one has recognized that all interpretations suppose a part taken by the interpreter, who is already enrooted in the being of which he speaks. . .”(TM, 33). Here Lefort begins to speak of a blind spot, a notion that recurs a number of times in the work of Merleau-Ponty. In a brilliant essay entitled “The Blind Spot,” Wayne Froman analyzes, in a richness of detail that we cannot follow here, the concept of the blind spot in Merleau-Ponty’s writings.10 In particular he shows how this notion limits and deconstructs the notion of “the point of view.” Above I have spoken of the noncoincidence of the experience of a touching/touched, of the visible and the invisible. The notion of the blind spot testifies to the inability of our reflection to coincide with itself, that is, to become a total reflection. It is my contention that a radical perspectivism, notwithstanding its “false modesty,” does in fact become a total reflection and thus is dogmatic. In Merleau-Ponty’s study of Husserl, “The Philosopher and his Shadow,” he argues that primordial faith, an original Ur-doxa, is not even in principle translatable in terms of clear and distinct knowledge.11 It is a faith more ancient than any “attitude” or “point of view”; it gives us not a representation of the world but the world itself. Reflection cannot go beyond this opening to the world except by making use of the powers it owes to this opening itself. Lest one believe that Merleau-Ponty limits this notion to the level of perception, one must recall that he says much the same thing when, in the Preface to Signs, he discusses the nature of a classic. He tells us that the question as to whether we are Cartesians makes no sense because many of our reasons for not being Cartesians are to be found in the work of Descartes himself. Above I quoted Lefort to the effect that interpretation was concerned not with the representation of the work but with the work itself. Now we wish to show that this is not dogmatism, but a radical perspectivism that claims no access to the work itself as independent of its representation in interpretations, that readily becomes dogmatism. This is due to the fact that the “point of view” that one “takes up,” being unaffected by any influence of the work itself, is explicable in terms of interest, be it an individual interest, a class interest, a gender (or sexual) one, and so forth. These interests are all in principle subject to an objective analysis— psychological, “ideology critique,” gender or race studies, and so forth— an analysis which could in principle be completed. In its turn this “point of view” and its “representation” of the work and of the world which corresponds to it could be explained. This form of “perspectivism become dogmatism” can readily transform itself into skepticism when “the point of view” of the explanation becomes, in its turn, subjected to critical reflection. Thus we see, reenacted, the skeptical perspective that was raised

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by Sextus Empiricus. He argues that if every “criteria” given for why a statement is true can itself be subjected to the same critical doubt, then we are well on the way to an infinite regress. All forms of the sociology of knowledge are haunted by the fear of infinite regress. If “representations” of the world correspond to “points of view” which are maintained by interest, then we can question the “interest” of the sociologist who proposes this interpretation. The only way out of this dilemma is to claim that one has found some privileged epistemological standpoint from which all other points of view are rendered intelligible, for example, the universal proletarian class consciousness of Marxism, the “free-floating intelligentsia” of Mannheim, the pure objectivity of the social scientist, and so on. However, once this happens the skeptical perspective is reconverted into a dogmatic one. Aristotle already anticipated the problem and responded to it by contending that all forms of discursive knowledge must be based on intuitive principles and all explanations must “save the appearances”; this is Aristotle’s way of saying that one must “return to the things themselves.” The advocates of radical perspectivism often appeal to Nietzsche, who writes in The Will to Power, “Facts are precisely that which there is not, only interpretations.” It would appear that Nietzsche authorizes their appeal. But perhaps there is a “blind spot” in Nietzsche as well, that is, himself. Alexander Nehamas in his Nietzsche: Life as Literature 12 interprets Nietzsche’s hyperbolic style as being a constant calling of attention to the contingent character of his own writings, their enrootedness in his own life—thus the title of his book: Ecce Homo. Let us return to Lefort’s notion of interpretation as interpretive faith. Paradoxically, it is the blind spot in our reflection on interpretation that enroots us in the things themselves and not in their representation. As we have seen from his reading of both The Prince and The Discourses, Lefort finds in the work of Machiavelli a frequenting of knowledge and nonknowledge. There is neither the “high altitude thinking” of the philosopher-king nor the temporalizing empiricism of the pseudo-sages of Florence. This same relation of knowledge and nonknowledge occurs in Lefort’s conception of interpretation; there is no ideal, or definitive final meaning, nor is there a drifting in a sea of interpretations. According to him, a genuine encounter with the other interpretations of Machiavelli is possible only if one views them in the light of their relation to the work itself and not only in relationship to its representations. Concerning the “false modesty” of pluralist interpretation—radical perspectivism—Lefort writes, “We lie to ourself when we concede to an interpretation the legitimacy of its enterprise and, in the same moment, we judge it to be singular, while supposing that others are possible. We accord it either too much or too little” (TM, 35). Too much if the interpretation, judged in its rela-

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tion to the work itself “outside its representation,” does not overcome our doubts and actually convince us. Too little because, if it does convince us in its relation to the work itself, then it deserves more than “a certificate of legitimacy” (TM, 35). As Gadamer argues, such a pluralist approach to interpretation neither confronts the work’s claim to truth nor contests our own interpretative horizons. According to Lefort, the act of interpretation responds to an appeal proposed by the work itself. He writes, “For the being of the work itself this meaning is only promised. This promise [the sense of the work] is always in retreat from that which it announces” (TM, 17). The retreat and the promise are inseparable; nevertheless, the presence of the work itself to which Lefort refers is not the full presence of metaphysics but rather is a presence always in retreat, a revealing which is also a concealing. The indeterminacy of the work is what interpretation responds to; it is an indeterminacy which is never to be definitively surmounted. When we speak of the presence of the work, “the proof of this presence is linked to that of an elemental indetermination” (TM, 54). Lefort provides a substantial critique of the so-called scientific method of textual interpretation, the details of which I cannot develop at this time. Today, with the eclipse of “structuralist” criticism, this pretension to “scienticity” on the part of critics is encountered less frequently than it was when he wrote Le Travail de l’Oeuvre. Nevertheless, the basic thrust of his critique is that these scientific pretensions are motivated by a desire to annul the indeterminacy of the being of the work, to turn it into an object that would be present all at one time, and once and for all. In a certain sense, Lefort views the work of interpretation as being analogous to that of a painter. As has been noted above, the visual artist brings to appearance the becoming visible of the visible which is that aspect of the visible passed over by “profane perception” in its rush to posit a fully determined object. In Lefort’s view, the interpreter, in common with the artist, follows the play of words and phrases which have been repressed by an interpretation of the work as a fully determined object. He writes, “At the root of this intolerance there is an obstinate refusal to hear the other beyond the limits which would promise to enclose his discourse within the frontiers of the certain” (TM, 41; emphasis added). “Profane,” objectifying interpretation refuses that dimension of the work in which there is “an excess of thinking over the thought” (TM, 41). Lefort claims that this excess of thinking over that which has been thought corresponds to an ontological dimension which is “. . . the excess of being over all that is (TM, 57). In Lefort’s practice of interpretation, what is at play is a problematic of identity and difference. As we have already seen, he protects the identity of the work in a way that is not possible for deconstructive criticism. He links the question of the identity of the work across time to the

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question of the Proper Name. One can rejoin the thought of a past author only in the present; it is always “I” who encounters her or him. From this evident fact, one might be tempted to conclude that one is dealing only with a “representation” of the work, or an ideal, impersonal domain of truth. But Lefort insists that to read the work of a past author is neither to practice a kind of empathy by which one could enter into her or his subjectivity nor to enter into a completely impersonal “objective” domain of truth. The space that the work opens is linked to the author’s experience of a present that no one can share, one that can be rejoined, but “only from another present and in another position. The enigma is that the name of the author is ineffaceable, even though I can think what he gives to be thought only under my own name” (TM, 59). Lefort connects his conception of the hermeneutic circle to the name of the author and not to the authorial voice. “The openness of the work is commanded by the first entry, which is his own [the author’s], but it supposes others. It is only because the entries multiply over the course of time that it [the work] exists as such” (TM, 59). There would seem to be, and to a certain extent there is, a certain convergence between the interpretive practice of Lefort and the hermeneutics of Gadamer, who makes a critique of structuralist interpretations in a manner similar to and certainly compatible with that of Lefort. He argues that in the structuralist conception of interpretation, the paradigm of the text is taken from linguistics, which is to say, from an objectification of language. Linguists do not want to enter into the discussion of the topic that is spoken about in the text. They want to shed light upon the functioning of language as such, whatever the text might say. Their theme is not what is communicated in the text, its topic; instead, they ask, “How is it possible for it [the text] to communicate anything at all by whatever means of punctuation and symbolization that occur?”13 For hermeneutics, on the other hand, the question is not how the text works but what it says; its goal is a mutual understanding in which the text serves as a mere “intermediary product, a phase in the event of understanding.”14 In Gadamer’s thought, interpretation becomes dialogue, a fusion of horizons that overcome an initial resistance to mutual understanding. He adopts the concept of horizon because of its malleability and the fact that it does not create a limit which would enclose one within it. Interpretative activity overcomes the resistances to mutual understanding by contesting the horizons of our precomprehension, or prejudgments. For Gadamer the work of interpreter can be compared to that of the translator, that is, someone who removes the initial incomprehensibility of a foreign language by translating it into another language and thereby facilitating dialogue. Lefort’s thought avoids any identification between interpretation

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and dialogue, since such an identification would minimize the role of the institution of interpretation. Employing the language of psychoanalysis, we can say that the relationship of dialogue, that of “the two” (deux), reduces the role of the “third”—what Lefort calls, following Lacan, the symbolic order. Later I will return to this notion, but for now it suffices to say that it is that which envelops the interpreter, the work, and other interpretations that are proposed by the work itself, in a manner somewhat analogous to the way in which a language envelops and transcends both of the partners of a dialogue as well as what is said in the dialogue, its subject matter. As already emphasized above, I am alluding to other practices of interpretation neither to give a detailed or judicious presentation of their positions nor to prove them incorrect, but with the aim of clarifying Lefort’s position by showing his divergence from them. At this point, it is beneficial to glance at the debate between Gadamer and Habermas on the nature and scope of hermeneutics. This I hope will forestall a possible misunderstanding, namely, that the just mentioned divergence between Gadamer and Lefort has something in common with the objections Habermas made to Gadamer’s hermeneutics. In his article “Rationality and Relativism: Habermas’s ‘Overcoming’ of Hermenuetics” Thomas McCarthy writes: While he [Habermas] agreed with Gadamer on the necessity for a sinnverstehenden access to social reality, he insisted nevertheless that the interpretation of meaningful phenomena need not, indeed could not, be restricted to the type of dialogic understanding characteristic of the hermeneutic approach.15

Habermas’s motivation for this critical position, that is, his desire for a framework that would transcend the dialogical position, could appear to resonate with Lefort’s position. However, the way in which each of them pursues this transcendence displays an enormous divergence between them, one that is much more marked than that between Gadamer and Lefort. Habermas is concerned with what he takes to be the “relativistic implications” of hermeneutics; he is bothered that the consensus, which for Gadamer is the aim of the hermeneutic activity, is not necessarily a rational consensus. He wishes to establish one of the following: a theoretical framework by which the consensus could be judged as rational, instrumental, or ideological. At different stages in his work, Habermas made various attempts to establish a “quasi-transcendental” reflection based upon either the nature of language, as in Knowledge and Human Interests, or through a “rational reconstruction,” as in The Theory of Communicative Action.16 At this time I cannot go into the details of his arguments. Never-

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theless, I am convinced, and have argued this point elsewhere, that considerably less difference exists between these two formulations than Habermas is inclined to believe.17 When speaking of his work I will remain at a broad level of generality. It is his contention that the presupposition implied in any and all speech acts is the structure of the “ideal speech situation,” that is, a structure of unrestricted communication in which all instrumental action and systemic distortions, which are consequences of either ideology or of unequal power relationships, have been removed. In The Theory of Communicative Action, he argues that while empirical speech is not identical with the ideal speech situation, it nonetheless presupposes this situation as a condition. It would appear that what Habermas calls a condition, a presupposition, is strikingly similar to what in the Kantian tradition is referred to as a “condition of possibility.” Whatever the intrinsic merit of Habermas’s position, it is not compatible with a thought that has accepted Merleau-Ponty’s critique of transcendental reflection. What Habermas claims to be able to do is to reach under the empirical employment of language in order to find the conditions which must hold if a language is to exist at all; or, stated in a different way, he wants to show that there are “quasi-transcendental conditions” which are presupposed in any employment of language whatsoever. In the critique of transcendental thinking that Merleau-Ponty presents in The Visible and the Invisible, this is precisely what one is not able to do. He argues that reflection is guided by the appearing object, or by the actual employment of language, and thus it is always secondary in relationship to them. As we have seen above, Lefort argues that the desire to achieve a total reflection, in the Habermasean sense, would coincide with the desire to reduce to zero the level of indeterminacy of the work itself. The notion of the indeterminacy of the work is what he has insisted upon throughout his reading of Machiavelli. Another divergence between Lefort’s thought and that of Habermas concerns Habermas’s theory of language in which he claims that the essence of language is to be the bearer of “validity claims.” This position is very far from Lefort’s when it is the dimension of the indeterminacy of the work itself that interpretation is a response to. Furthermore, as I have already cited, he argues that the opening to which the work gives access is not an impersonal domain of pure objectivity but remains ineluctably connected to the proper name of the author. The work gives us access to a domain of experience which is neither within the subjectivity of the author nor in a region of validity outside all relations to a particular time and space. The work, l’oeuvre, as with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the advent, is neither welded to a particular time and place nor eternal. The openness of the work demands a real name, not in the trivial sense that a book re-

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quires a reader but in the sense that its truth requires a reinterpretation. The truly great work opens a space that can be inhabited by future epochs. “He [the author] arranges in advance a place for the others.” The work exists “in the repetition and the variations of discourse that it evokes” (TM, 59). The work exists by a temporal divergence from itself. When discussing perceptual faith in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty evokes the intertwining of our access to the world, the “there is,” with an ineluctable horizon of phantasms. In a manner similar to the way in which monocular vision displaces the phantasms of binocular vision, these phantasms are displaced by the real. He writes: Everything comes to pass as though my power to reach the world and my power to entrench myself in phantasms only came one with the other; even more: as though the access to the world were but the other face of a withdrawal and this retreat to the margin of the world a servitude and another expression of my natural power to enter it.18

Lefort’s notion of interpretive faith also risks becoming enclosed in a domain of phantasms; it is always possible that we will deceive ourselves in the act of interpretation. Croce’s famous question, also the title of his book What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel?, could be asked of any philosophy, inasmuch as all philosophy must be posed as a question which can be answered only provisionally. It is always possible that what we consider dead today might come to life in future interpretations. For anyone reopening the already opened work itself, there is always the risk, and for Lefort an ineluctable one, of producing only a phantasm and of falling into the abyss of the simulacra. The temporal divergence of the work from itself, its essential distention across time and the necessity of its “reopening,” “renders inconceivable the presence of the work in a coincidence of thought with itself” (TM, 63). Nevertheless, these reflections on the fallibility of interpretation do not lead us to relativist conclusions, inasmuch as the work is not fixed “in its time” to be represented “in the time of the interpreter.” Its very being is to extend across time and to envelop it, not to eternity but to a future that returns to it in order to interrogate its truth. The identity of the work is an identity through, not in spite of, time. “To seek the meaning of the work, it is necessary to interrogate the being of the work” (TM, 66). Its being is to exist in a place and a time which in turn envelops the place and the time of the interpreter. In common with the work of art or the work of thought, the work of interpretation institutes itself within a symbolic field. As was noted at the beginning of our reflections on the interpretive practice of Lefort, the symbolic inscription of the work of Machiavelli

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poses a special problem, one that would not be encountered, for example, in the philosophy of Hegel. The problem is that it has not only provoked a scholarly tradition of interpretation but also inscribed itself into our common language in the form of the adjective “Machiavellian.” Lefort does not simply dismiss this usage of the name of Machiavelli as vulgar, as not being based upon a serious reading of the texts or perhaps not on any reading at all; he does not view it with contempt, as being beneath the level of comment or interpretation. If we consider the imago of Machiavelli, where one finds in a condensed form certain beliefs regarding the political, the pursuit of power, and humankind in general, then “we must ask ourselves what does this image teach us about the sociological effect of Machiavelli’s work?” (TM, 74). Lefort does not dismiss the myth of Machiavelli; in fact, he claims that in a sense it incarnates a truth and as such is part of Machiavelli’s legacy. How is one to characterize this myth which has become a stable part of the folklore of the modern mentality, a myth engendered by the decapitation of the proper name of Machiavelli? It is a myth of a particular type of evil, one that involves both deceit and ruse but which is not motivated by passion or fury; rather, it is subordinated to a calculation of means and ends. The Machiavellian character is not swept away by passion, he is sovereign in his own right. Reversing Kant, he gives himself as a maxim, “Treat others always as a means only” (TM, 75). He not only dominates others but also takes pleasure in so doing. He incarnates the phantasm of total mastery. “Malicious logic, accumulated ruse, serene perversity, joy [jouissance] are the composite of the concept of Machiavellianism” (TM, 75). Lefort notes the remarkable stability of this concept across time and its utilization as an accusation across the entire ideological spectrum; one might say that “Babbitts” come and go but Machiavellians go on forever. According to Lefort, the word “Machiavellian” designates an evil, the origin of which is based on the very nature of power itself. It is the name given to politics to the extent that it is evil. It designates that which the ordinary imagination wishes to represent each time that power is perceived as that which is absolutely foreign. It is the principle of actions unknown and unknowable which “situates itself at an insurmountable distance and determines the common existence as it pleases and for its pleasure” (TM, 77). According to Lefort, “Machiavellian” does not signify evil pure and simple. Were this the case, it would be simply a new name for a signification as old as human history. Rather, he contends that it expresses a historically specific experience of modernity’s relation to power. In a very detailed exposition which I cannot pursue here, he traces the history of this accusation. Suffice to say that virtually every ruler, and every pretender to power, has been denounced as Machiavellian by his adversaries. Although

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aware that Machiavelli’s works had been condemned by the Council of Trent, Lefort cautions against viewing religious intolerance as the sole explanation for the genesis of the myth. He argues that the specifically religious condemnation must be subsumed under the broader experience of modernity. In France, anti-Machiavellianism is linked to the widespread aversion to Catherine de Medici and her entourage; it is also part of a general Italiphobia at this time. It is an epoch when “Catherine appears to incarnate a foreign power, a power infinitely distant from her subjects, without any justification other than the interests of the sovereign” (TM, 84). More generally, it evokes the commercial, financial, and usurious activities imputed to Italians. This anti-Machiavellianism is linked by Lefort to a primitive form of anticapitalism. During this epoch, an emerging capitalism begins to act as a solvent to the traditional social ties, engendering a situation in which the activities of commerce and finance begin to render opaque the traditional forms of authority and the experience of power as personal dependence. It is a moment in history when a modern mentality comes to co-exist with the Christian worldview. It is an epoch when the businessman is still perceived as a monopolist and the search for profit has the name of the sin of usury, when the evils engendered by the new play of the market are imputed to the practices of immoral individuals. And as Lefort claims, it is a time when “the imagination is prompted to project a singular human type as responsible for this evil” (TM, 84). The name of this type is “Machiavellian.” The Machiavellian myth condenses “all the effects of the anguish provoked by the desacralization of the ancient order” (TM, 86). Machiavellianism is the name given by the early modern imagination to what Max Weber calls “the disenchantment of the world,” or, evoking a phrase that often recurs in Lefort’s later work, “the disincarnation of society.” One could say that the fiction of Machiavellian power has a double intention: On the one hand, that of naming the loss of the substance of society—that is, the dissolution of the bonds that unite political power to the totality of human existence—and on the other hand, that of pondering the menace consequent upon this experience of the disappearance of the belief in the unity of society with itself. By naming this loss and the menace consequent upon it, the Machiavellian myth both recognizes the loss of society’s unity with itself and accounts for this loss by viewing it as the contingent result of the diabolical activity of a sovereign subject. In a highly interesting but all-too-brief reflection, Lefort links the “Machiavellian” with Descartes’ figure of the evil genius, as elaborated in The Meditations. He does this to show that the status of the political and the status of the Subject are intertwined. The evil genius completes the practice of methodological doubt which is ter-

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minated by the experience of the Cogito. The evil genius shares many of the traits of the Machiavellian myth in that it condenses in itself both omnipotence and total deception. It is a transcendent power which turns everything into illusion, a transcendence of power which is detached from society and makes a “plaything” of our lives. Lefort tells us that the evil genius remains linked to the operations of science in the modern imagination, just as the phantasm of a power which is detached from society haunts the modern political imagination. Although he does not mention it, in the American context this link is incarnated in the figure of the “mad scientist,” so often evoked by science-fiction writers. As I have already said, Lefort does not simply dismiss the myth of Machiavelli; rather, he emphasizes the fact that it attaches itself to an experience which is essential for modernity. One could even say that the real work of Machiavelli’s thought is its sensitivity to a radically new experience, namely, the transcendence of a politics which is no longer linked to God, or to an intelligible cosmos. When we consider Lefort’s theory of democracy and totalitarianism, we will see that his own work is linked to, and often evokes, the same experience. Without pretending to offer an intelligible cause for it, his thought neither gets under it nor soars above it. It would be more appropriate to say that it is borne along by the same wave that bore the work of Machiavelli and his double, the Machiavellian myth. I conclude this chapter by saying that since Lefort views the “work of interpretation” as not being one of providing an adequate representation of a work, he would not want the interpreter to follow in the footsteps of Pierre Manard in Borges’s story Pierre Manard, Author of Don Quixote, in which a man who began to write a commentary on Cervantes’s Don Quixote ended up reproducing the work “word for word.” To do so would certainly be unfaithful to the work, since it would miss the tension within the work itself. Lefort conceives of the work itself as a place where there is “the exercise of a speech indefinitely in search of itself” (TM, 697). This nonidentity of the work with itself institutes a rupture in the work that outlines the place of the interpreter and provokes his thinking.

Notes 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Eye and Mind,” op. cit., 167. 2. Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). 3. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, I, tr. J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970) 269–299, passim.

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4. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomenon, tr. D. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, tr. A. L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). 6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, ed. C. Lefort tr. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 79. 7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, tr. R. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 79. 8. Bernard C. Flynn, “Textuality and the Flesh: Derrida and Merleau-Ponty,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 15:2 (May, 1984), 164–177. 9. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 121–122. 10. Wayne Froman, “The Blind Spot,” unpublished manuscript. 11. See Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, 159–181. 12. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). See especially chapter 1, “The Most Multifarious Art of Style,” and chapter 6, “How One Becomes What One Is.” 13. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Text and Interpretation,” tr. D. Schmidt and R. Palmer, in Dialogue and Deconstruction, ed., D. P. Michelfelder and R. Palmer, 31. 14. See the editor’s introduction in Dialogue and Deconstruction, 3. 15. Thomas McCarthy, “Rationality and Relativism: Habermas’s ‘Overcoming’ of Hermeneutics,” in Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. J. B. Thompson and D. Held (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 57. 16. See Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, tr. J. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971); see also Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., tr. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 and 1987). 17. Flynn, Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics; see especially 38–78. 18. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 8.

Part 2

Lefort on Premodernity

4

Premodernity

As I indicated in the Introduction, Lefort’s project is to understand the political dimensions of modern society. Many paths in his itinerary have brought him to the work of Machiavelli. His belief that Machiavelli elaborated the first distinctly modern political philosophy attracts him to the Florentine. Later in his thinking we see that he views Dante’s The Monarchy as an adumbration of this modern discourse on the political; for Lefort there is a definite connection between the concept of modernity and the notion of political discourse. Political discourse and its “object,” the political (le politique), appear only in, and are perhaps constitutive of, modernity. In the strict use of these terms, there really is no premodern political discourse; and, as we shall see, both ancient Greece and Rome are “modern societies.” Nevertheless, if one specifies “modernity” as a distinct instance of human history, this would seem to presuppose some conception of the premodern which constitutes the backdrop from which the modern emerges. Lefort’s reflection on premodern society takes two forms: On the one hand, it is a meditation on “societies without history”; on the other, it is a consideration of the “theologico-political” as it relates specifically to Christianity and the European monarchy. In considering “societies without history,” Lefort, who is not an anthropologist and has not done fieldwork, relies on the work of a number of anthropologists. Even though he has an extensive knowledge of the anthropological literature—having written on Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown, Mead, Malinowski, Kardiner, and others, including his late friend Pierre Clastres—his work on so-called primitive societies nonetheless takes the form of an interpretation of anthropological works. As was shown in the last chapter, when Lefort interprets a work he does not remain within the contours of the work; rather, he is turned toward “the world” that the work addresses. According to him, if an interpreter takes the text as object, then 83

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he forgets the object of the text. Therefore, when he writes on the work of anthropologists, he is, in fact, writing on the world toward which these works direct us. Let us begin with the phrase “societies without history.” There are numerous ways in which this phrase can be understood. It can be viewed in a purely privative manner implying a lack of history, for example, a society that would neither have nor do something that would make it historical. This issue was dealt with in Lefort’s 1952 article “Société ‘sans histoire’ et historicité,” collected in Les Formes de l’Histoire. This is an extremely instructive article since it is an illustration of the continuity and discontinuity of his work. The beginning of the article adumbrates what will become one of the main dimensions of his subsequent work, whereas the end of it, the explanatory part, is written under the influence of Marxism and shows us precisely that aspect of his early writings which will disappear in his later work. Lefort begins the article with a consideration and rejection of the Hegelian and Husserlian conceptions of societies without history. He writes, One knows that for Hegel universal history does not take in the empirical course of humanity. History properly so-called is born only with the State, when social life puts itself in form under the effect of this instance which confers on it public elements and conscious expression. (FH, 30)

The dialectic of history moves from consciousness to self-consciousness to Reason to Spirit. An empirical humanity which fails publicly and consciously to represent itself does not enter into this dialectical movement; it never rises above the repetitive cycles of nature. In a not altogether dissimilar manner, in The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl makes the distinction between transcendental history, which is finalized toward the infinite task of rationality, and a merely empirical one, which is absorbed in the “life interests” of a natural environment. Lefort rejects both of these “rationalist conceptions of history” as being ones that simply characterize these societies in terms of what they are not, rather than in terms of what they actually are. From this rationalist perspective, no analysis is made of how these societies articulate themselves; in fact, the very possibility of such an analysis is put into question. What Lefort seeks in the works of anthropologists is a positive analysis of what these societies are; he is not interested in what they are not. In the opposition—an opposition which is not absolutely drawn—between modern and premodern societies, it is not adequate merely to claim that the society in question is either “with or without history”; rather, what is demanded is an analysis of their “manner of being in time” (FH, 33 ). The “primitive” society lives its temporality, its manner of becoming,

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not simply as a lack of history but as a refusal of history; that is, it refuses a mode of temporalization that would give rise to a linear history. It is a “temporal putting in form which does not authorize the conception of a relation of succession between its elements” (FH, 32). It is not as though such societies have no concept of change, or of time; rather, their mode of temporalization is such that no linear temporality is formed that could be represented by a line, or a river. Their temporalization is such that it occults the novel dimension of the future, that is, the future as a mode of indetermination. Lefort based this reflection on the analysis done by Gregory Bateson in his article “The Value System of a Steady State.” He argues that the results of Bateson’s work do not apply only to the Balinese society from which he drew them; rather, he interprets them as moments of the very structure of premodern societies. Bateson tells us that “everything happens as if Balinese life obeys an essential imperative: maintain stability” (FH, 41). Conflict between individuals is regulated in such a way as to limit any possible disruptive consequences. A war is viewed as the termination of relationships between the rival groups; each group withdraws into fortifications which render combat impossible. Bateson claims that this representation is so strongly enrooted in the culture that it is already present in the behavior of children. He writes, “Stability is maintained by an emphasis on the discrete and the separate. The exchange of speech is most often reduced to necessary communications” (FH, 41). Music and dance are organized as an enchainment of separate and decomposed movements; they are not ordered in a crescendo. Space and time are lived as radically discrete and determinate. Bateson continues, “One observes, in general, an incapacity to imagine an indeterminate future. What is not yet is what is not produced, the future is as fixed as the past. Better said, it is viewed as that which will be past” (FH, 42). In an analogous manner, each individual within the village is related to all others by a strictly prescribed set of rights and duties which are determined by parentage, age, sex, and position in the hierarchy. A stranger is interrogated with regard to his genealogy and his alliances. In order to be accepted, he must be fully determined in virtue of all relevant categories. If he remains unknown (indeterminate), he is treated as an enemy. If for any reason it is not possible for him to be treated as an enemy (for example, if he is too strong), he will be converted into a brother. However, under no circumstances can he remain indeterminate. Particularly in Balinese society, but also in premodern societies in general, Hegel’s dictum that “the being of self-consciousness is a being recognized” is realized with a vengeance. At this point, Lefort evokes Marcel Mauss’s analysis of the role of the gift in establishing and maintaining recognition; he approvingly cites Elementary Structures of Kinship, in which Lévi-Strauss writes, “The observers

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have often been struck by the fact that it is impossible for the Indians to conceive of a neutral relationship; or more exactly, of an absence of relationship” (FH, 44). In these societies, Being is experienced as radically determined. The social divisions are fixed in such a way as to preclude any social conflict. The hierarchy is anchored in nature, or in myth, and, as we shall soon see, even in cows. As Lefort argues in his later work, the world is viewed as determinable only to the extent that it is already fully determined. He writes, “This incapacity to represent to themselves an absence of relation is of the same order as the inability to imagine a past and a future at a distance from the present. Stagnation [steadiness] is not a fact of nature but a manner of co-existence. It is implied in the way in which men perceive themselves and relate to one another, that is to say, in a collective praxis” (FH, 45). The opposition is not between nature and history but rather between two forms of temporalization, even “two modes of historicity” (FH, 40). Lefort contends that, in fact, one can see sketched in “societies without history” the outline of the structure of historical societies. In the elaborate institution of the gift, there is a certain consciousness of, along with an attempt to ward off, the possibility of social conflict. As Merleau-Ponty has remarked, “One can see in historical societies the memory of ‘societies of repetition’.” Lefort approvingly mentions MerleauPonty’s remark that in history nothing is ever absolutely suppressed, that one can see in modern society the memory of premodern society. In his later work, although the distinction between a premodern and a modern society is maintained, the emphasis is no longer placed on the aspect of temporality as a collective praxis; rather, its focus is to establish the basic contours of premodern society. Lefort will begin speaking of the symbolic dimension of society; he will argue that the symbolic dimension of premodern societies is outside the society, that is, in another place and another time, a time and place always already determined. At the end of “Société ‘sans histoire’ et historicité,” we come upon something that, after much critical self-reflection, disappears in his later thought. We arrive at the point at which the question, “What explains the difference between historical societies and ‘societies without history’?” is posed. Lefort’s response is, “In stagnant societies the dialectic of recognition repeats itself without engendering a dialectic of work, production remains subordinated to the relationship of man to man and its inscription in a collective form” (FH, 47). In historical societies the fact of production engenders a “principle of productivity” which disengages production from the established forms of collective coexistence. Without evoking his name, Lefort turns toward the analysis of work given by Kojeve in his commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. According to Kojeve, work, particularly the slave’s work, produces an objectivity. The object which is produced

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is not immediately consumed; this introduces a temporal delay, a delay which interrupts, as Arendt would say, the “metabolism with nature” of both production and consumption. It is this delay which institutes objectivity, or a “neutral relationship.” As Lefort sees it, work supposes a detour, a kind of distancing, from the other. It is “a fold in the condition of human existence, thanks to which something new is elaborated which figures in itself as something neutral” (FH, 47). At this period in his thought the emergence, the disembeddedness, of the principle of production is what gives rise to the historicity of historical society. By claiming this, he rejoins the basic tenet of Marxism, namely, that the forces of production are the motor force of history, and as such destroy the quasi-eternity of nonhistorical society—let us recall Marx’s celebration of British imperialism in India. At least this is how Marx is conventionally read, and this is how Lefort read him in the article presently under consideration. Both Hegel and Husserl see a radical disjunction between historical and nonhistorical societies, whereas Marx is credited with seeing a profound continuity in human history. As will be shown below, Lefort no longer reads Marx in this way. In his 1965 article “Marx: From One Vision of History to Another” (PFM, 139–80), he argues that, with the advent of modernity and capitalism, Marx saw a major discontinuity in human history. Nonetheless, the aspect of the earlier position which Lefort definitively rejects is the attempt to explain the symbolic structure of society by a social process within society itself, be it production, rationalization, enlightenment, or any other. On the other hand, what will be retained and deepened is his conception of an opposition between premodern and modern societies. The notions of “determinate” and “indeterminate” will continue to play an essential role in his philosophy. Let us now turn briefly to his 1955 article “L’Alienation comme Concept Sociologique” to catch the flavor of Lefort’s Marxism during this period; and, more important, to see concretely how premodern societies, in order to forestall both social conflict and indetermination, anchor their symbolic dimension outside themselves. The article begins with a critique of “Marxist humanism” which was so prevalent in France and elsewhere at this time. Disapprovingly, Lefort cites M. Bigot’s book Marxisme et Humanisme, when he writes, “The key to Marxist political economy is to be found in Marxist philosophy . . . where one is made conscious of a contradiction between empirical reality and the human and natural reality” (FH, 49). This citation could have come from Erich Fromm or from any number of authors of the period. The basis of Lefort’s objection is simple: If one accepts the idea that alienation is the disjunction between empirical reality and the natural essence of man, then one makes Marx an idealist, in fact a far more rigorous one than Hegel. He does not oppose “Marxist humanism” to

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so-called scientific Marxism, which was much beloved by the orthodox Marxists; thus he does not contribute anything to the exceptionally sterile debate which occupied so many intellectuals at that time. Rather he links the notion of alienation to a historically specific form of the modern experience. With the purpose of showing that alienation does not consist in the disjunction between empirical reality and the human essence, or species being, Lefort evokes Evans-Pritchard’s study of an African tribe called the Nuer. Referring to the Nuer as a cattle-raising people is something of an understatement, since they are a people whose whole life and social structure is thought of in terms of cows. One’s position in the social hierarchy is determined not only by the number of cows one possesses but also by their beauty, which is judged by accepted aesthetic standards which are lost on the outsider. All their myths involve cows. Evans-Pritchard writes, “The social idiom is a bovine idiom” (FH, 57). All human emotions and conflicts are represented in terms of cattle; Evans-Pritchard even notes an “obsessive character” in their relation to cows. The Nuer live in a cowish universe in the sense that modern humanity is said to live in a mechanical age in which machines form the basis of our way of thinking about ourselves and the world. Most remarkable is that in the Nuer society there is in a certain sense a fatal domination by the cattle over the people. There is even a myth that cows are the enemy of mankind who deliberately sow dissension and plot the total annihilation of the Nuer; they do this out of vengeance for the killing of a great Mother Cow. Indeed, some might be tempted to say that the Nuer are radically alienated in cows. One could also say, paraphrasing Marx, “The system of personal relations is masked by a sort of animal dependency” (FH, 56). Not commodity fetishism but “cow fetishism.” According to Lefort, this is not the case, and it would be inappropriate to speak of the Nuer as being alienated because for the Nuer there is no experience of a disjunction, or contradiction, between their reality and the cowish universe. The cows furnish the “natural” reality to which the symbolic universe of the Nuer is fixed by a projection. Nevertheless it is a projection that can be understood as such only from outside the parameters of the Nuer society. It is only if one places oneself outside the Nuer society, “as does the observer, Evans-Pritchard, that one can consider its interest in cows as obsessional, and thus distinguish the imaginary and the real” (FH, 60). These notions—that the symbolic dimension of the premodern society is placed outside of the society and that a distinction exists between the imaginary and the real—play an important part in the article and an even more important role in Lefort’s mature thought. This article allows Lefort to give a sociological and historically specific description of the phenomenon of alienation, claiming that the experience

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of it is discovered at the interior of modern capitalist society. He states, “It is in situating oneself at the interior of society that one discovers the phenomenon of alienation. The opposition of the real and the imaginary are given to the inhabitants of capitalist society, and not to the gaze of an outside observer. All of Marx’s demonstrations tend toward the discovery of the reality of an irreality—the reality of a socialization of labor and the irreality of the form of the commodity” (FH, 61). The conclusion is that the Nuer are not alienated in cows but that we are alienated in commodities. As we shall see later in more detail, Lefort’s rejection of Marxism is not blanket and total; indeed, he retains aspects of Marxist thought which are usually ignored or marginalized. However, the idea that he rigorously rejects is the notion of alienation and the group of concepts attendant upon it, namely, the primacy of productive relationships, the labor theory of value, the distinction between the base and the superstructure, and so forth. Through the notion of alienation is how Marx attempted to locate the symbolic dimension of society within social reality. I will not continue to discuss Lefort’s sociological specification of the concept of alienation except to say that even early on, his thinking fell neither into the orthodox Marxist camp nor into that of Marxist humanism. In his later thought, what remains is the notion that in premodern society the symbolic structure cannot be distinguished from the real at the interior of a society itself. As the symbolic dimension of the Nuer society is anchored in the reality of cows, so, too, is the symbolic dimension of the society in premodern Christianity conceptualized within a theological problematic and thereby anchored in the reality of another world, an invisible world which is massively affirmed. Only in the function of the mutation brought about by democratic revolutions are the symbolic and the imaginary able to be distinguished. Lefort’s own thought becomes possible only through the symbolic mutation of which he speaks. Between the political and the thought of the political, there is what Merleau-Ponty calls “reversibility,” but this anticipates the further course of our study. Lefort has written two articles on the work of the anthropologist Kardiner, “L’Idée de Personnalité de Base” in 1951 and an introduction to the French translation of The Individual and His Society in 1965. A brief comparison between these two articles will prove instructive. What attracted Lefort to Kardiner’s writings is his attempt to think through the relationship of the individual and society. Kardiner is influenced by a “culturalist” version of psychoanalysis, that is, one in which Freud’s alleged “biologism” is exorcized. He begins by distinguishing between primary institutions and secondary ones. Primary institutions are those which form the personality of the child in terms of her relationship to basic human needs:

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food, sexuality, discipline, familial relations, and so on. Secondary institutions are the myths, the forms of social interaction, and those structures of sociability not relating directly to “fundamental” human needs. Kardiner’s thesis is that the secondary institutions can be explained by the “basic personality” which is formed in relationship to the primary institutions. The “basic personality” designates a style of conduct which is common to all of the members of the same culture; it is the manner of reacting in the same way to the fundamental problems of existence. Lefort uses Kardiner’s example of the women on the island of Alor, who worked all day in the fields and whose relationships with their children were extremely casual, not to say neglectful. Eating habits were irregular; often the children were hungry. This behavior engendered a permanent sense of insecurity in the children’s basic personality. Kardiner writes: The sentiment of insecurity, the lack of self-confidence, the distrust of others, the incapacity of forming solid affective attachments, the inhibition of men with regard to women, the absence of an ideal, the incapacity to follow a task through to its completion, are the traits of the “basic personality.” (FH, 70)

This basic personality in its turn is the cause of the defining characteristics of the secondary institutions. In their religion, the gods are poorly defined and capricious, as are the child’s parents. The arts are pursued negligently, houses are poorly constructed, and divorce is frequent. All of which is to say that the secondary institutions exhibit the traits of insecurity that were engendered in the basic personality; these traits of insecurity are, in their turn, explained by the manner in which the child adapted to the primary institutions. Lefort objects to the linear causality employed by Kardiner; his critique resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s critique of causal thinking in psychology which he presents in The Structure of Behavior. Nevertheless, the aspect of Kardiner’s work that attracts Lefort is his view of the culture as a total form, a gestalt. The aspect that he is critical of is Kardiner’s employment of the concept of causality, whereby the “secondary institutions” are explained by the causality of the “basic personality,” which in its turn is caused by the “primary institutions.” Lefort sympathetically cites Bateson’s critique of Kardiner, in which he objects that Kardiner “has cut [separated] too brutally in his explanatory scheme the primary and the secondary institutions. . . . Religion, magic, and mythology form part of the primary institutions which mold the child” (FH, 74). Lefort objects to the rigorous division of the culture and to the reductionist attempt to explain the “higher” by the “lower.” Kardiner’s employment of a linear causality is judged by Lefort to be inappropriate for the human sciences.

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It lacks a type of dialectical thinking which would reveal the mutual implication of all the “parts” of the culture in a total configuration, a gestalt; or, employing a word dear to Merleau-Ponty, a “schema.” This article overtly aims its reflection and criticism on Kardiner’s writings; nonetheless, we implicitly see in it Lefort’s critique of Marxism. He criticizes Kardiner for his rigorous distinction between “lower” and “higher,” and for his causal reduction by which the latter is explained by the former; but is this not precisely the explanatory scheme employed by Marxism, with its opposition between the base and the superstructure, and its attempt to explain the superstructure of religion, myth, and political forms by the causality of the base, that is, the forces and social relations of production? I am unable to follow in much detail Lefort’s second and much longer 1969 article on Kardiner’s work. My aim is to point out what is present in the first article and absent in the second, and to view his critique of Kardiner as an implicit autocritique. He begins the 1969 article by lauding Kardiner’s “double attempt to discover at the heart of the psyche the imprint of social institutions, and at the heart of society the trace of a subject” (FH, 81). Beyond the mechanistic and scientistic dimensions of Kardiner’s method, he credits him with having aimed at a conception of “the reversibility of the individual and the social” (FH, 83). Lefort begins his critical reflection by problemitizing his conception of psychoanalysis. He writes, “Kardiner makes psychoanalysis a branch of psychology and assigns to it the function of a positive science, which is distinguished by the specificity of its object” (FH, 90). Thus psychoanalysis becomes a science by which observable behavior is explained by the observation of levels of behavior which are judged to be more primary. This quasi-behaviorist criterion of observability causes many of Freud’s most basic concepts to disappear: the drive, the ego, the superego, the role of phantasy, and so forth. Kardiner remarks that the libido is not observable but sexual behavior is; thus we see that for him psychoanalysis becomes an inductive science. Lefort objects to this behaviorist transformation of psychoanalysis; he views it as a radical impoverishment of Freud’s thought and furthermore contests Kardiner’s contention that he is able to reappropriate the essence of psychoanalysis while merely losing “some of its abstract and non-observable constructs.” Take, for example, the notion of drive, dismissed by Kardiner as a biologistic construct; he argues that we can observe the activities of eating and of sex, so why do we need to have the nonobservable notion of drive? Lefort objects to this reduction since it annuls the concept of “personality” as the history of successive investments of the libido. We can indeed observe the act of eating; however, what we cannot directly observe is the psychic investment by which the mouth becomes an erogenous zone in which one is inscribed in relation to others

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and to the world. Likewise we cannot observe the “propping up,” or leaning, of the demand for love on the need for food. The exclusive fixation on “real” observable behavior annuls the phantasmic dimension which accompanies the real. While I am skipping over the argument’s details, what Lefort objects to is its elimination of the symbolic dimensions of psychoanalysis and its transformation into a science of real behavior, a transformation that loses the idea of a “symbolic matrix, which is irreducible to the play of events and forces, by which the singular history of an individual is inscribed, and whereby is found inscribed its necessity” (FH, 97). His critique of Kardiner is not being carried out for purely epistemological interests. Let us recall that Lefort reads Machiavelli, who is usually conceived of as the inventor of political realism, in such a way as to emphasize the transcendence of the State; he accentuates the symbolic exchange between the prince and the people which elevates “the place of the prince” beyond the conflicts of society itself. As we have seen above, he argues that if this is an “illusion,” then it is an intractable one, which is to say that it is not an illusion at all. Rather it is the symbolic dimension of the society and as such is irreducible to the real. Kardiner interprets the Oedipal situation as simply one historically specific instance of a frustration which is imposed on the child in the name of its adaptation to the primary institutions of society. He sees it as one instance, among others, of the “real” frustration of a “real” need. In conjunction with Lacan, and I would say with Freud, Lefort argues that the interdiction against incest is not one real frustration; rather, it entails a radical transformation of the psyche. Moreover, it is the unique transformation that engenders the psyche itself. He recognizes in it the “inauguration of the social symbolic, where law and desire are articulated.” Lefort cites Laplanche and Pontalis from their The Language of Psychoanalysis, in which they write: The Oedipus complex is not reducible to an actual situation, to the actual influence exerted by the parental couple over the child. Its efficacy derives from the fact that it brings into play a proscriptive agency (the prohibition against incest) which bars the way to naturally sought satisfaction and forms an indissoluble link between wish and the law.1

Lefort’s position rejoins Lévi-Strauss’s thesis that the interdiction against incest is the universal and minimal law through which culture differentiates itself from nature. In some cultures a figure, other than the father, can incarnate the law which bars the child’s desire. Lefort even claims that “perhaps the interdiction is already outlined in the dual relation of the mother and the child” (FH, 103). Nevertheless, the child must encounter the instance of what Lacan calls the Third, which disrupts the

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imaginary relation of the mother and child. The imposition of the law is that by which the subject gains access to the world of culture, and thereby to empirical reality. This interdiction, which inaugurates the subject in its relation to empirical reality, may not itself be considered an instance of empirical reality. Lacan’s position, appropriated in part by Lefort, resonates with the tradition of transcendental philosophy. Allow me at this moment to invoke, in its most general outline, Kant’s response to Hume. If the most basic categories through which we have access to empirical reality are themselves empirically determined by the laws of association, then the inevitable outcome is a radical skepticism. Analogously, if there is an empirical genesis of the law, then the consequence is that there is no law at all. Criticizing social-biologistic theories of the origin of the law’s power to interdict as being based on the empirically observable fact of revulsion, Charles Taylor in The Sources of the Self draws the same conclusion, namely, the law would have no power to interdict.2 Taylor then argues that the distinction between the morally forbidden and the biologically revolting is a phenomenological given and that any theory that does not respect it must be rejected. As Freud would argue, the social biologist reverses cause and effect inasmuch as he does not see that the forbidden is not based on revulsion but rather that revulsion is a consequence of the forbidden; the “natural” incestuous desire becomes revolting because it is forbidden. Revulsion is a reaction formation engendered by the law’s interdiction. The phenomenon that both Taylor and Lefort address would appear not to be seen, or perhaps to be denegated, by certain forms of empiricism. This phenomenon is a response to the question, “How does the biological organism that the human being is at birth come to be responsive to a purely symbolic universe?” In Kardiner’s writings, the law becomes a series of rules imposed on the child’s needs in function of his or her dependence. In its turn, this leads to a redefinition of the institution, which is then viewed as an “ensemble of rules of conduct” that are “fixed under the effect of the repetition of individual actions, or one might put it, crystallizations of individual behavior” (FH, 105). The institution thereby becomes merely a complex of fixed individual behaviors. Let us recall what initially attracted Lefort to Kardiner’s writings. He saw in this work the possibility of a reversibility between the individual and society. Now we see that Kardiner’s realism has annulled this possibility; the gestalt-like character of a culture has been analytically broken down into the crystallization of individual behaviors, and society is thus reduced to a system of interrelationships between individual agents. “Once the institution is defined as a complex of behaviors and the culture as a complex of institutions, then the social organization comes to be

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explained in terms of the play of relationships between its ultimate units which are individuals” (FH, 106). Above, I hinted that Lefort’s critique of Kardiner could perhaps be seen as an autocritique; this, however, was meant to apply only in that particular situation. Since his days on the lycée’s benches as a student of Merleau-Ponty, he has never been tempted by the type of analytic realism that is finalized toward representing society as a fully determined scientific object. Nevertheless, in this 1952 article “Société ‘sans histoire’ et historicité,” written while under the influence of Marxism, he attributes to Marx the notion of a continuous progress of history that is governed by the forces of production. He explains the genesis of the symbolic by means of an element of the real, that is, production. Production is “work” as conceived of by Kojeve, which means it is a detour that opens a dimension of objectivity. In this interpretation, a “real” process would engender an access to the real. One could argue that Lacan himself was strongly influenced by Kojeve; nonetheless, the extent of this influence cannot be determined here. But we can say for certain that it was not on the point of attempting to engender the symbolic order through the process of work.3 In this chapter, the aim of my reflection has been to offer a “limited” view of the itinerary of Lefort’s thought. It is limited to the extent that it does not present an exposition of Lefort’s early writings on bureaucracy, writings that would have thrown further light on his relationship to Marxism. More important, I am focusing on his conception of premodern society in order to show that modernity effects a radical mutation in the symbolic structure of society. By now it should be clear that, according to Lefort, the defining characteristic of premodern societies is the attachment of the basic contours of these societies to another place, that is, a supersensible world. Premodern social organizations respond to the imperative of maintaining stability; this requires both the absolute determinacy of the past and the future and the absence of any social conflict. I now turn my reflection to Lefort’s 1987 article “Dialogue with Pierre Clastres,” published in Writing: The Political Test, a 2000 collection of his recent articles (WPT, 207–235). Clastres was close friend of Lefort’s who died quite young in an automobile accident. He had been a practicing anthropologist and is the author of Society against the State and The Gualaki Indians.4 In this article, Lefort’s somewhat critical reflection on Clastres’s work is prefaced by a beautiful eulogy of his talents and gifts. Since there is no reason to presuppose a familiarity with his work, and inasmuch as my point is not to emphasize the divergence between them but rather to make precise Lefort’s conception of premodernity, I will follow Lefort’s presentation of Clastres’s position, which is both accurate and judicious. As the title Society against the State would indicate, Clastres de-

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fines the laws of primitive society not by their refusal of history, or of social conflict, but rather by their refusal of any power that would be capable of detaching itself from society and thereby becoming an independent entity outside it. This is another way of saying that premodern society refuses the State. According to him, the imperative of the primitive community has a political intention, namely, the maintenance of radical equality. The description of the premodern society that Clastres gives is appealing in most respects; it is a society without coercive power. He begins Society against the State by opposing himself to the representation of the gruesomely repressive and violent character of primitive society drawn by Nietzsche at the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil. In many respects, Clastres’s picture of the primitive societies which he studied has a resemblance to the Greek polis, a place where persuasion between equals rules instead of violence. They are societies in which the members do not, and should not, take a direct order from any other. Like the polis, these societies are fundamentally political societies which are governed by the principle of equality between members. There is an extreme vigilance against anything that would threaten to disturb the internal equality of the group, for example, the production of a surplus of goods beyond the immediate needs of the group. These societies carry on endless wars against their neighboring tribes, by means of which the society’s own integration and the integrity of each of its members is maintained. In this respect, we could paraphrase Hegel’s remark that “War is the health of the State” as “War is the health of the society.” Regarding the fundamentally political nature of society, there is no opposition between Lefort and Clastres. Lefort writes: Via an entirely different path than the one Clastres was to follow, little by little, I had been led to think that society was in its essence a political society, that one type of society was to be distinguished from another by the way it “set into form” its relations between peoples, classes, or groups, and that the principle of this “setting into form” was linked to the way in which power is generated and represented. (WPT, 215)

As we have seen, and will see again, Lefort insists on the fundamental division of any society, a division which in turn necessarily leads to conflict. This could appear to put him at odds with Clastres, but he insists that this is not the case, inasmuch as the societies that Clastres studies are not societies that coincide with themselves. If this were to be the case, there would indeed have been a radical parting of the ways, since for Lefort there is absolutely no society which coincides with itself. In fact, as we shall see, the phantasy of a society at one with itself is for him deeply implicated in the totalitarian project.

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According to Clastres, social division and internal conflict are not absent in these societies but rather are refused and defended against; if they are defended against, then they must exist. Clastres shows that the major technique, which is used to fend off the growth of any power that would detach itself from society and thereby submit the people to the rule of a leader, is a terrifying initiation ceremony by which the society imposes on its members one simple law: You are worth no more than anyone else; you are worth no less than anyone else (WPT, 221). A society that idyllically coincided with itself would be in no need of such a cruel defense against the tendency of power to become oppressive. Nonetheless, there are some fundamental divergences between the thought of Lefort and that of Clastres; these differences focus upon the role of the State. Lefort objects to Clastres’s thesis of a radical opposition between primitive societies, conceived as societies without a state, that are egalitarian and free, and societies with a state that are conceived of as generated by a complicity between the desire to oppress (Machiavelli) and a desire to serve (La Boétie). Let us emphasize that Clastres does not contend that all state societies are the same; he certainly does recognize that there are degrees of oppression; he also does not offer societies without states as models of “good societies” to which we could some day possibly return. Lefort presents four aspects of Clastres’s thought with which he is not in accord : first, that state societies are distinguished only by the degree of oppression or the intensity of servitude; second, that the origin of the state is a primordial misfortune which continues to multiply its effects; third, that the nature of the state is adequately understood in terms of the exercise of coercive power; and fourth, that the state, where it exists, completely submerges social life. Clastres claims that the emergence of the state is a sort of primal tragedy by which power comes to be elevated above society. This is not at all the case for Lefort’s thought, in which there is no tendency to equate the state with tyranny, no matter what the degree of its intensity. Lefort’s fundamental problem with Clastres’s thought is that it does not seem to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate power, a distinction that is absolutely essential to Lefort’s thought. He asks Clastres, rhetorically, what place his thought can make for a political tradition which is sustained by the conviction that power belongs to no one and that “rigorously opposes to the love of the good master the sense of the law, which assumes an equality in principle between all” (WPT, 219). Within state societies, Clastres argues that there is the imperative: One must love the tyrant. While Clastres sees the emergence of the state, its “transcendency,” as a sort of primal tragedy, Lefort views the transcendence of power as not necessarily tragic, but much depends on the nature of the transcendence. Furthermore, he is convinced that there is a transcen-

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dence of power in the very society that Clastres describes as refusing any transcendence whatsoever. This leads Lefort to a reflection on the notion of power which is operative in Clastres’s work and, more pertinently for our purposes, in Lefort’s own conception of power. He argues that the power that the primitive society organizes itself against is not power as such but rather is a power that has become separated from the society. In opposition to this power that has become separated, Clastres proposes community power. He writes, “The essential property of primitive society is its exercise of absolute and complete power over all the elements of which it is composed” (WPT, 221). Nevertheless, the only function of this power is to ensure that equality reigns between men and that no one gains anything by exercising it. This power, enacted in the ceremony of initiation, is certainly coercive, but in order to elaborate on its unique form Lefort quotes Clastres, who writes: There is a simulation of a separate power in the institution of chieftainship so as to conjure away the threat that this power would imply and, in the same stroke, to make manifest the active sovereignty of the group. (WPT, 221; emphasis added)

Clastres’s analysis of chieftainship rests on the idea that a separate power is conceived of as a “resurgence of nature” within culture, or, as Lefort paraphrases it, “Power’s transcendency harbors for the group a deadly risk” (WPT, 221). By means of the initiation ceremony, the law is inscribed on the body of the young men of the tribe. The law that they learn is the law of primitive society: no one can want to have any less or any more than any one else. This law is inscribed on the bodies of society’s members and announces that the primitive society will not run the risk of division, that is, the risk of a power which is separate from the society itself and could escape its control. For Clastres these societies “were able to create a means for neutralizing the violence of political authority (WPT, 220). Lefort shows that the very description that Clastres gives of the exercise of community power introduces the notion of the law that comes into being by means of a ritual. Lefort remarks that one can draw two conclusions concerning this ritualized inscription of the law: Clastres’s, which claims that this law is not separated from society itself and is one through which the community assembles itself; or the other conclusion, drawn by Lefort’s, which claims that the order of the community—for Clastres the place of power—cannot be dissociated from primitive religion. Power is exercised within a religious ritual. By “religious” Lefort specifies the experience that these societies have of an order of the world which is “that of their insertion into natural and supernatural life” (WPT, 223). His

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point is that the self-incorporation of the group is not simply a selfincorporation but is linked to its incorporation into natural and supernatural life: “This mode of inscription presupposes the primary idea of a law that lies at a distance from men, so that it swoops down upon them from the outside” (WPT, 224). According to Lefort, the self-inscripted interiority that Clastres emphasizes is pointed “towards an absolute external.” Ritual is based on a belief in the power of invisible beings, which is to say, it is a belief in the existence of another place. This belief testifies to a consistent intertwining of this world and another world, an intertwining of the visible and the invisible. This “self-inscription” of the community implies a relationship to alterity, to what is other. We see that Lefort does not think that the State is the first instance of a power which is separate from society, as an “other” and at a distance; rather, he views the relationship to alterity as being always already there. The law which governs the self-inscription of the premodern community is the law of another place. The law is always a law of transcendence. As if in passing, at the end of this article, Lefort remarks on a phenomenon which is very important for his interpretation of the Christian theologicpolitical, namely, the doubling of the body. Clastres’s writings on the ritual of the inscription of the law on the body not only attempts to foreclose the relation of the law to exteriority but also ignore the relationship of the body to another place. The body on which the law is inscribed, while being “a natural body, also finds itself inhabited by, shot through with, forces that have their location outside of it” (WPT, 226). Lefort also objects to Clastres’s use of the word “choice,” even if Clastres meant the choice to be an unconscious one. In his description of the process by which the society constitutes itself, he speaks of a choice directed against power’s becoming separate from society, whereas for Lefort the political institution of the social, of the society, “testifies at once to an elaboration and to a test of the human condition in given circumstances” (WPT, 226). There is a sense in which the elaboration of a political form is always already begun; the political subject does not coincide with itself. Its origin does not begin with a choice; even in modernity, it commences with an enigma.

Notes 1. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, tr. NicholsonSmith (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 286.

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2. Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 53–91. 3. Bernard C. Flynn, Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics, 168–174. 4. Pierre Clastres, Society against the State, tr. R. Hurley with A. Stein (New York: Mole Editions, 1977); and The Archeology of Violence, tr. J. Herman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1994).

5

European Premodernity

As we have already seen in the previous chapter, Lefort’s conception of premodern societies, “societies without history,” is that generally these societies can be included in, but do not exhaust, the type of societies which characteristically have their symbolic structure fixed to nature or to a supersensible world, another place. A rejection of history, whereby its temporalization is such that the future is as fixed and determinate as the past, is not an essential characteristic of these societies. Societies whose symbolic structure is anchored in another place do not necessarily reject history, or linear temporality; we need only to think of Judaism, or particularly Christian societies. If one objects to this topography, claiming that it is exclusive because some societies have not been considered—Buddhist and Islamic societies, for example—then I would respond that Lefort is not trying to construct a topography of all possible societies. Rather, he is attempting, as Foucault would say, to write a “history of the present.” More pertinently, Lefort is practicing what Merleau-Ponty calls hyper-reflection. Merleau-Ponty argues that in the classical philosophy of reflection—the tradition emerging from Kant but not limited to him—the philosophical project is to regress from objectivity to its conditions of possibility which are conceived of as having their place in the unity of the transcendental subject. The project continues following backward the path from the unity of the subject to its articulation in a system of categories that render possible the appearance of objectivity. As I said above, self-reflective philosophy claims to be able to do this in a manner similar to the way in which one can walk in either direction between Notre Dame and l’Etoile. According to both Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, this regression to the zero point of subjectivity is impossible since it would ignore, or foreclose, the sense in which the subject is always already inserted into the flesh of the world, the there is. The project of a total reflection would pretend to undo 100

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our natal bond with the world in order explicitly and consciously to remake it, either by means of a transcendental regression in the manner of Kant or by way of the fully achieved phenomenological reduction, the epoche, in the manner of Husserl. This project involves, according to Merleau-Ponty, a sort of sophisticated naïveté inasmuch as the “constituted objectivity,” which is conceived of as the achievement of subjectivity, serves as the “guiding thread” of the whole analysis. The illusion of total reflection is consequent on an occultation of its own origin. The whole reflective analysis is not false, but still naive, as long as it dissimulates from itself its own mainspring, and as long as, in order to constitute the world, it is necessary to have a notion of the world as preconstituted—as long as the procedure is, in principle, delayed behind itself.1

Our initial inherence in the world is repressed and comes to have the type of efficacity that Freud called Nachtraglichkeit, that is, a delayed action or action at a distance. In the classical notion of reflection, the conditions of possibility, though discovered after experience, are ontologically prior to experience. For the notion of a reflection that would coincide with itself, the stain of being “second” is considered to be a scandal. In opposition to this form of reflection, Merleau-Ponty proposes what he calls “hyperreflection,” which is a reflection that is mindful of its own secondary character. It is cognizant of the fact that it is a response to a situation that is “always already given” and cannot be returned to its origin. This notion of hyper-reflection is captured in Kafka’s phrase, quoted by Lefort in the Preface to The Visible and the Invisible, “The things present themselves to us not by their roots, but by some point or other situated toward the middle of them.” These ruminations on the ontological and epistemological status of reflection may appear far afield from the present topic, but they are not. Lefort’s thinking constantly practices the type of hyper-reflection adumbrated in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. In response to the question asked above, we can say that in Lefort’s thought there is no question of his elaborating a categorical system that would fit every possible society. In the course of this book, I will occasionally make comparisons between Lefort’s thought and that of Habermas; for now, I will merely sketch some of the differences between the thought of Lefort and that of both Hegel and Habermas. From a heuristic point of view, these comparisons will be quite helpful; they should sensitize us to what Lefort is not doing. Arendt tells us that modernity has produced philosophies of history but no political philosophies. Ultimately, this strict opposition between

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philosophies of history and political philosophy will not apply to Lefort’s way of thinking. This will become apparent if I consider a certain kind of philosophy of history, one in which Hegel is the prototype and Habermas its most recent representative, in order to illustrate what I mean by Lefort’s practice of hyper-reflection. Since my project is not to discuss the thought of Hegel as such, I will evoke the most conventional representation of his philosophy in order to show the opposition between total reflection and hyper-reflection with regard to the philosophy of history. In the Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel rejects an epistemological starting point, counseling us that the fear of error may well be the fear of truth. In its stead he embarks on the pathway of doubt and perhaps even the highway of despair—we enter into the bacchanalian revel from which none emerge sober. While not denying Hegel’s sensitivity to the tragic dimensions of life—his characterization of history as the slaughter bench of men’s ideals—nevertheless, his journey is like that of Odysseus, who travels in order to come home. The end is imminent in the beginning; the telos is implicit in the arche. History is the process of making explicit what was implicit; the starting point is situated in the point of completion, or, using Adorno’s phrase, it is a completion “without remainder.” The apparent contingency of the starting point is annulled in the necessity of Spirit’s self-recognition. From the point of view of the philosophical “we” subject, the apparent chaos and violence of history emerge as a rational system. The “truth of” any epoch, including our own, will be given only retrospectively, at twilight, with the flight of the philosophical owl. Our experience of what Heidegger calls our throwness, for Hegel is due to our inability to understand history as the dialectical unfolding of the “absolute in time.” If indeed “things give themselves in some point or another situated towards the middle of them,” for Hegel this would be because we have not yet been able to raise ourselves to the position of the reflecting “we” subject. In Heidegger’s reading of Hegel, the dialectic of history is a process which absolves the bonds of our finitude. For Lefort’s practice of hyper-reflection, the contingency of the “starting point” is ineluctable; the intractable contingency of reflection precludes any possibility of constituting a system in which our own starting point would find its place. Turning briefly to Habermas, we see that history for Habermas is not the process of Spirit’s self-recognition. Nonetheless, it does involve a development in which something which was implicit becomes explicit; this something is communicative rationality, which is finalized toward reaching a valid consensus. In The Theory of Communicative Action, he writes: The use of language with an orientation to reaching understanding is the original mode of language use, upon which indirect understanding,

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giving something to understand or letting something be understood, and the instrumental usage of language in general, are parasitic.2

In a manner that I cannot rehearse here, Habermas argues that the very understanding of any linguistically formed proposition involves the recognition and acceptance or rejection of a validity claim. He argues that there is “a fundamental connection between understanding communicative action and constituting a rational interpretation.”3 The stress that Habermas gives to validity claims is orchestrated for the purpose of generating a “context independent” position of interpretation, a position which he considers to be the only alternative to a radical relativism. At this time I will not enter into a debate as to whether this is the case; nevertheless, I emphasize the following: If one accepts this position regarding the ubiquity of rational validity claims in all employment of language, then a problem arises: Self-evidently there are uses of language that are not finalized toward reaching a rational consensus, for example, the linguistically formed edicts of a pharaoh, the Nuer people’s myth concerning cows, and so forth. Habermas acknowledges that the rational dimension is also in worldviews other than the modern Western world. He writes, “We are implicitly connecting a claim to universality with our Occidental understanding of the world.”4 He argues that this is the case because in Western modernity what is implicit in all language—the positing of validity claim—becomes explicit. Within a secular modern discourse, all claims to validity are subject to a critique and are accepted only on the basis of a stronger argument. According to Habermas, it is not that premodern people are irrational. It is rather that the worldviews which they inhabit are preinterpreted, that is, interpreted in advance of experience and thus immune to critique. In this aspect of Habermas’s argument, he is not far from the position of Lefort; however, the manner by which he arrives at his position and its ontological underpinnings are completely different. Habermas argues that there is an evolution of worldviews which is finalized toward the explicit positing of validity claims by a “de-centered ego.” The point of rupture between premodern and modern worldviews is the distinction that is consciously made between the culturally constituted representation of the world and the world. The premodern world is characterized by the “deficient differentiation between language and the world; that is, between speech as a medium of communication and that about which understanding can be reached in linguistic communication.”5 For Habermas, the cause of this deficiency is their failure to make the distinction between nature and culture. Within the worldview of the Nuer people, the representation of the world cannot be opposed to the world itself. It would make absolutely no sense to say, “What evidence do

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you have that the cows are plotting against us and sowing disorder?” since this would imply that there is, or could be, an uncoupling of the representation of cows and the cows themselves. As we have already seen, Lefort has shown that this would involve a claim that there is a disjunction between “the world” and the cowish representation of the world, a distinction that can be made only from the outside. For Habermas, inasmuch as any proposition about the world is subject to a radical critique, a rational consensus with regard to any of them is projected to infinity, in a manner similar to Kant’s notion of a regulative idea. Using the work of Piaget and Kolberg, who respectively provide theories of cognitive and moral development, Habermas claims that History is the process by which we arrive at rational consensus. He also writes: As is well-known, Piaget distinguishes among the stages of cognitive development which are characterized not in terms of their content but in terms of structurally described levels of learning ability. It might be a matter of something similar in the case of the emergence of a new structure of worldviews.6

The telos of the progress of worldviews is the de-centered subject who is capable of positing criticizable validity claims. Habermas’s position is not ethnocentric in any meaningful sense of the term, which would exclude all the “politically correct” nonsense. This lack of ethnocentricity is due to the fact that for him our worldview is not really “ours” because it is context independent, which means that all its assertions are subject to rational critique. The fact that it is realized in a particular time and place, its contingency, does not affect the position itself, its validity, inasmuch as it is only making explicit what has always been implicit in any use of language. Habermas’s argument is the following: If this argument, or position, were in any significant manner affected by the contingency of its origins, then we would be delivered over to relativism. As I have shown and will continue to show, this is not the case with the philosophy of Lefort. I have been considering the philosophies of history of both Hegel and Habermas to illustrate this point. The historical starting point of Lefort’s thinking is not at all irrelevant; for him, history is not a ladder that, once climbed, can readily be kicked away. His reflections on modernity are deeply embedded within the history of premodern Europe. The contingency of Lefort’s starting point is not merely apparent, it is ineluctable. According to him, history does not realize an immanent teleology, either of Spirit or of rational language. One of the strongest aspects of his work is its ability to argue for the contingency of history’s origins while simultaneously avoiding the fall into any form of

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relativism. His reflections on modernity begin with his thoughts on the Christian theologico-political dispositif, that is, the symbolic organization in which premodern Europe lived. We shall begin our exploration of this premodern world by attempting to forestall what seems to me to be a massive and egregious misunderstanding of his position. The role that Christian theology plays in his theory of the historical genesis of European political modernity in no respect implies a Christian belief. For the believing Christian, the origin and subsequent spread of Christianity is divinely ordained: It is guided by divine providence. For Lefort, it is simply a historical fact. Even though Christianity “dramatizes,” puts into form (miseen-forme), an ontological dimension of the relation between humankind and the world, this analysis nonetheless does not imply any adherence to the dogmas of Christianity, including the existence of God and the divinity of Christ. To claim that his work is a “Christian theory” of democracy is positively absurd. The Christian theologico-political is a contingently historical given. Certainly by means of rational arguments one can contest its claim to truth; nevertheless, the role that it played and, in a certain sense, continues to play in our Western tradition cannot be dissolved simply by rational argumentation. In Lefort’s conception of the genesis of a universalist democratic tradition, the problems attendant upon the role of a particular religious institution are recognized and confronted in an interesting way. This theme will be developed more fully later; for now let it suffice to say that there is nothing in Lefort’s thought that would play the role of what one might call a “universal solvent,” by which we mean “something” that would necessarily dissolve the premodern structures of non-Western societies and render them more like our own—for example, the development of the forces and relations of production, the spread of rationalization, the emergence of market economies, inherent linguistic capacities, and so forth. According to him, the genesis of democracy is contingent; so, too, is its fate. Lefort’s most extensive discussions of the theologicopolitical are to be found in his Preface to the French re-edition of Dante’s The Monarchy and in a 1981 article, “The Permanence of the TheologicoPolitical?” Before turning to these works, it would be helpful for me to situate the questions to which they are responses. In some measure, I will be following Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment.7 As indicated in my discussion of Lefort’s notion of “societies without history,” their mode of temporalization is such that the future is posed as being as determinate as the past, that is, they reject a linear temporality. The uniqueness of the particular event is occulted and thereby rejected. In both Greek philosophy and in Christianity, this uniqueness is also altered. Turning briefly to Greek philosophy, we see in Plato’s philosophy that the singular temporal

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phenomenon is intelligible only insofar as it participates in the eternal idea, thereby instituting a distinction between doxa and episteme as illustrated by the “divided line” in The Republic. The notion of the temporal as the abode of the unintelligible is established in different ways by earlier Greek thought, for example, in the writings of Parmenides and Heraclitus. In Aristotle’s ethical writings and in The Politics, this disjunction between the temporal and the intelligible is less pronounced. He tells us that there is a kind of knowledge that pertains to the affairs of men. This knowledge can never be a necessary knowledge, a science, since its object does not exist necessarily; it can arrive only at general patterns which are “for the most part so.” Nonetheless, in the strong sense, intelligibility’s connection to eternity remains. In his Poetics, arguing against Plato, he defends tragedy, proclaiming that it, or poetry in general, is more noble than history since it comes closer to essential knowledge. Even if Herodotus were to be put into verse, history tells us only what has happened, whereas tragedy tells us what could have happened. Thus tragedy is closer to philosophical truth, which is a knowledge of “essences,” that are what regulate possibilities, and does not, like history, consider “only what has happened.” Though there are Greek historians, there is, strictly speaking, no Greek philosophy of history. Speaking very broadly, in this respect the Greek intelligibility of “the temporal singular event” remains in a kind of proximity to the type of societies referred to as “societies without history.” Likewise, Christianity has a problem with time; it is not able to adhere to either the premodern or the Greek experience of it. This foreclosure is due to the enormous importance which it attributes to two singular events: the creation of the world and the incarnation of God in the historical person of Christ. Christianity must reject the Greek conception of circular time—characterized by Augustine as “the wicked dance in circles”—inasmuch as it would require that the universe be uncreated and endless. Pocock writes: The Christian insistence on a God who had created the world and men at a point in time past and would redeem men and end the world at a point in time future, though of incalculable importance for the development of historical thought, did not of itself render intelligible the succession of particular events and phenomena in time, or ascribe any special importance to time considered as the dimension of that succession.8

Indeed it might be argued that by means of its doctrine of the Second Coming, Christianity introduced an eschatological philosophy of history, since from this perspective individual historical events could be rendered

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“intelligible” by referring them to the prophetic books of the Bible, particularly the Book of Revelations. This possibility is radically rejected by Augustine inasmuch as it implies the capacity to interpret the actions of God through temporal events. As Peter Brown has shown in Augustine of Hippo, Augustine polemicized against astrology for precisely the same reasons.9 This prophetic Christian philosophy of history was rejected by the patristic intellect and relegated to the “underground of heterodoxy.”10 We might add that Augustine calculated that the world would end on 23 October1998, which means that the apocalyptic events were placed a millennium and a half away from his own present—perhaps this was his way of saying “forget about them.” Given the recent remarks of certain American Christian fundamentalists, it would appear that prophetic Christianity continues to generate fantastic “philosophies” of history. The mainstream of traditional Christianity, from Augustine to Aquinas, effected “a radical divorce between eschatology and history.”11 History is indeed governed by providence; however, the signs of providence were not legible within history. In Lefort’s language, one would say that the symbolic markers, which are the foundation of law, power, and knowledge, are located in another place, a massively affirmed invisible world. Nevertheless, inasmuch as the Church had become a temporal worldly power, certain problems began to arise. Some form of mediation that would link the visible to the invisible, the temporal to the eternal, had to be established. Let us briefly digress in order to indicate the consequences of a failure to establish such a mediation. This is well illustrated in Emanuel LeRoy Ladurie’s study Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, a social history of the village of Montaillou in the Pyrenees.12 It was the last village to actively support the Cathar heresy, a heresy that professed a rigorous Manichaeanism which affirmed the absolute transcendence of the invisible from the visible, the radical separation between the spiritual world and the material one. All forms of mediation were denounced as blasphemy. The consequence of this doctrine was a form of nihilism in which there were no standards for temporal or social behavior. The only imperative was the belief that the invisible world was absolutely transcendent; thus there emerged a form of nihilism, something Nietzsche was able to conceive of only after “the death of God.” The Cathar society was totally incapable of forming any sort of political order, since anyone who would claim authority would by this very gesture implicitly exempt himself, his own body, from the radical condemnation of the material world. Likewise the moral prohibition of some kinds of sexual behavior would imply that all other forms of sexual activity were not morally reprehensible. If the material world is rejected, there can be no gradations. This road to political anarchy and moral nihilism was not followed

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by mainstream Christianity. In order to establish a legitimate political order, the Church understood that forms of mediation between the visible and the invisible, the temporal and the eternal, must be established. Interestingly enough, these forms of mediation are not to be found in the works of the philosophers but appear in the works of poets and jurists. For the history of the mediations which laid the foundation for the Christian political order, Lefort follows Ernst Kantorowicz’s remarkable book The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. I will briefly summarize those aspects of Kantorowicz’s position which are central to Lefort’s conception of the theologico-political. Citing an anonymous Norman writing in the year 1100, Kantorowicz writes: We thus have to recognize [in the king] a twin person, one descending from nature, the other from grace. . . . One through which, by the condition of nature, he conformed with other men: another through which, by the eminence of [his] deification and by the power of the sacrament [of consecration], he excelled all others. Concerning one personality, he was, by nature, an individual man: concerning his other personality, he was, by grace, a Christus, that is, a God-man.13

Christ was human and God by nature, whereas his deputy, the king, was human and God-man only by grace. Consecration provided the king with a body of grace by which he became “another man,” excelling all others. The king’s body is doubled by grace, which is to say, the king’s power is a consequence of and not the cause of the doubling of his body. The doubling of the body is an effect of the grace of consecration by which the king is inserted in a chain which leads back to Christ but does not really originate with him because, according to the anonymous Norman, the kings of Israel also have participated in this doubling, though they have done so not as representatives of Christ but rather as anticipations of Him. Kantorowicz shows how this is linked to the double nature of Christ and the theology of the Eucharist. Putting it briefly, at first the phrase “the mystical body of Christ” referred to the presence of the body of Christ in the Eucharist, as opposed to his real body which was in heaven. In consequence of a heresy that denied the “real presence,” the Church generated another set of oppositions between the true body of Christ in the Eucharist and the mystical body of Christ in the Church. This doctrine was summarized by Pope Boniface VII as follows: Urged by faith, we are bound to believe in one holy Church, which represents one mystical body, the head of which is Christ, and the head of Christ is God. This notion of “the Church as the mystical body of Christ” is progressively secularized. In the devel-

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opment of secularization Aquinas holds a key position. Kantorowicz remarks that the Doctor Angelicus was inclined to replace the liturgical image of the mystical body with the juridical idiom of the “mystical person.” After the twelfth century, the notion of the mystical body, originally referring to the Sacrament of the altar, is used to describe the body politic of the Church with Christ as its head. As the Church was a mystical body with Christ as its head, so the realm is a mystical body with the king as its head. The figure of a marriage is frequently employed: Kantorowicz quotes James I, who in 1603 in his speech to Parliament said, “What God hath conjoined then, let no man separate, ‘I’ am the husband, and all the whole island is my lawful wife; I am the head, and it is my body.”14 As has already been shown in the Introduction, it must be emphasized that my speaking of the king’s two bodies is not metaphorical. Power resides in the “second,” the invisible body of the king. A Declaration of the Lords and Commons in 1642 reads as follows: It is acknowledged that the King is the Fountain of Justice and Protection, but the Acts of Justice and Protection are not exercised in his own Person, nor depend upon his pleasure, but by his Courts and his Ministers who must do their duty therein, though the King in his own Person should forbid them: and therefore if Judgment should be given by them against the King’s Will and Personal command, yet are they the King’s Judgments. The High Court of Parliament is not only a Court of Judicature . . . but it is likewise a Council . . . to preserve the public Peace and Safety of the Kingdom, and to declare the King’s pleasure in those things that are requisite thereunto, and what they do herein hath the stamp of Royal Authority, although His Majesty . . . do in his own Person oppose or interrupt the same. . . .15

Let us consider the strangeness of this political image, that is, how nothing in our modern experience corresponds to it. It certainly is not the simple distinction between the office and the person who happens to occupy it at the present moment; such a distinction is appropriate only in a modern bureaucracy. Power resides neither in the visible body of the king nor in the “office”; rather it is present in the invisible body of the king, a body that never dies: “Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!” The relationship of the king to the Law is complicated. According to John of Salisbury, the prince, while having absolute power, is absolutely limited by the law. He argues that the King, though he is not bound by the ties of Law, is yet Law’s servant as well as that of Equity; that the prince bears a public person and that he sheds blood without guilt. The king is linked to the Law but not subject

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to it. He is both father and son of Justice, as Jesus was both father and son of Mary. As a judge, the king sheds blood without guilt because he sheds it in virtue of his persona publica and not his natural persona. The “body politic” with the king as its head is not a convenient metaphor or a manner of speaking; rather it is the phantasmic means by which the Nation effects its own unity, the manner in which it becomes one nation. Through the image of the king’s body, the societies of premodern Europe represented themselves to themselves. It was their way of recognizing themselves; and as Hegel has shown in The Phenomenology of Spirit, the being of self-consciousness is a being recognized. The synthesis of themselves that they effected through the image of the king’s body constituted their reality as political entities. It was both the source and the limitation of political power. Within absolutism the power of the king is absolute in the sense that there is no formal mechanism of appeal against it; however, it is absolute but not arbitrary in the sense of depending on the whim of the natural person who happens to be prince at the moment. It is absolute but not despotic inasmuch as the king in his “body of grace” is the nation. Thus we see that the body of the king is not simply an empirical concept. It is that by which the society constitutes itself as the “form of society” that it is. I shall return to this phrase, “form of society,” as it is used by Lefort in his critique of “positivism” in political philosophy. His most extensive discussion of this notion is found in “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” (DPT, 213–255). The main point of this article is a consideration of the articulation between religion and the political (le politique). In Lefort’s reflections on the premodern societies that we have just surveyed, we observe that he was content to look for essential or invariant structures, prominent among which was the reference to another place. When he approaches Christianity, his reflections become more historically specific; his aim is to understand the symbolic structure of the ancien régime. The purpose of this understanding is to shed light on the democratic revolutions which were, using Hegel’s phrase, its determinant negation, which is to say, its purpose is to understand our political modernity. To proceed further, I must introduce Lefort’s conception of régime. He begins elaborating this notion with a citation from Hegel’s Encyclopedia: It has been the monstrous blunder of our times to try to look upon these inseparables [religion and the political] as separable from one another, and even as mutually indifferent. The view taken of the relationship of religion and the state has been that, whereas the state had an independent existence of its own, springing from some source and power, religion was a later addition, something desirable perhaps for strengthening the political bulwarks, but purely subjective in individuals—or it may be,

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religion is treated as something without effect on the moral life of the state, i.e., its reasonable law and constitution which are based on a ground of their own. (DPT, 214)

In opposition to political science, Lefort situates himself in the proximity of classical political philosophy; he does this by insisting upon the concept of “the regime.” As a prelude to my interrogation of this concept, I follow his reflections on “the monstrous blunder of our times,” which is “positivism” in political theory. Basically, his objection is the same as Hegel’s, namely, the separation of what is inseparable. The problem that Lefort finds with “political science” is that its conception of society, as a causal conjunction of functional combinations of various autonomously intelligible spheres, does not show us how, or whether, these spheres are spheres, or divisions, of the same society. The scientific point of view in political science involves the same sort of conjuring trick that Merleau-Ponty unmasked in the psychology of perception. The trick is that the initial unity is decomposed into sense data, associations, judgments, and so forth; then, out of these units, one reconstructs the initial experience; however, the entire procedure has been guided by the initially experienced unity. There is a sort of “question begging,” whereby the reconstructed whole is supposed to be the conclusion of the “scientific” procedure, but in fact the procedure would have been impossible had one not had one’s eye on the whole, the unity, from the beginning and at each step along the way. Nevertheless, this experience of the whole is itself never spoken of. For Lefort there are spheres of society, or if one prefers, divisions, but they are divisions of one society; the spheres are internal divisions. There is a flesh of the social, whereby the spheres are spheres of the same society because of their inscription within one space. He writes: . . . if we make a rigid distinction between what belongs to the realm of economics or politics (defined in modern science’s sense of the terms), or between what belongs to the juridical or the religious in an attempt to find within them signs of specific systems, we forget that we can arrive at that analytic distinction only because we already have present to ourselves an idea of the originary dimensionality of the social, and that this implies an idea of its originary form, of its political form. (DPT, 218)

As we have already seen, the “political form of the social” is a major concept for Lefort. Nevertheless, his conception of the political form is not the Hegelian idea of totality, since for him the philosopher is not necessarily in search of an elusive object such as a totality; rather, he considers different regimes, or forms of society, in order to identify a principle

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of internalization that can account for a specific mode of differentiation and articulation between classes, groups, and social ranks. At the same time, he seeks a specific mode of discrimination between markers, “be they economic, juridical, aesthetic, religious, which order the experience of coexistence” (DPT, 218). The putting into form (mise-en-forme) by which a society institutes itself involves an engendering of sense (mise-en-sens); although a society is certainly never transparent to itself, it is nevertheless a system of intertwining meanings. Social practices are recognizable as such only because they mean something within the general context of meaning, otherwise they would be simply physical motions. Also there is a miseen-scène of social relations, by which Lefort means that a society gives itself a “quasi-representation of itself” (DPT, 219). By “quasi-representation” he does not mean an actual picture—the flag, the eagle, and so forth. In Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, he speaks of a corporeal schema, the notion that one possesses a corporeal schema of one’s own body which is not an image or a picture of oneself. While not being purely and simply visual, it tends nonetheless toward visibility. It is a notion more aligned to spatial and temporal unification than to a literal image. The synthesis that the body effects of itself by means of a quasi-representation is a synthesis of the visible and the invisible. The mise-en-scène by which a society constitutes its own identity is likewise a quasi-representation consisting of a synthesis, or an intertwining, of the visible and the invisible. Now that I have evoked these lines from the Phenomenology of Perception, a word of caution is necessary. The human body is an organism, but in no sense does Lefort employ an “organic metaphor” of society. Although the representation of the social body and an organic metaphor of society play a role in his writing, as we have seen and will see, neither is assumed to be operative in society as such, rather, both are viewed as arising in specific historical contexts. According to Lefort, it is this mise-en-sens and mise-en-scène, the form of the social, or “the manner of being in society,” that is denegated by political science to the profit of both a system of independent spheres and a reconstructed knowledge of the whole. Inasmuch as Lefort clearly rejects the “modern” conception of the exteriority of the religious from the political, I turn again to his conception of their relationship. Their separation is clearly a historical phenomenon coincident with the Enlightenment. Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment?” is a demand to free ourselves from the self-incurred tutelage of the priests; it is a demand that we make public use of reason. Clearly the constitutional guarantees of the democratic revolutions make provisions for the separation of church and state. The generalized secularization of the West is an indisputable fact. However, the evocation of this fact does

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not resolve the philosophical issue. One recalls that in Nietzsche’s story “The Madman,” many of the people standing about in the marketplace, who heard the madman announce the death of God, were already atheists; yet the news of the death of God was “further from them than the furthest star.” Obviously Nietzsche’s meaning is that the onto-theological notion of God continues to operate long after the belief in the existence of God has been explicitly renounced. In like manner, in suggesting a “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” with a question mark, Lefort is certainly not calling for a religious revival. Clearly what he means is that the intertwining of the religious and the political is not dismantled by their institutional separation, or by the conscious refusal to base one on the other, or by the conscious rejection of religious belief. It is precisely to the doctrine of Christianity which was the most scandalous to the thinkers of the Enlightenment, the belief that the man Jesus was the Son of God, that Lefort turns our attention. Even if some of the thinkers of the Enlightenment still retained a belief in a “supreme being,” or some sort of theism, nevertheless to believe in the divinity of Christ would be for them to admit that Reason submits itself to authority, to heteronomy. The figure of the God-man would constitute a radical obstacle to the project of Reason’s immanence to itself. While Lefort is not proposing a regeneration of the belief in the divinity of Christ, nonetheless he does tell us that it is a profound failure of modern philosophy to have relegated this belief to the level of an erroneous opinion. The king represents at the same time the unity of the realm and the intersection with the divine through which the operations of power have their legitimacy. The unity thus constituted transcends the level of events, particular occurrences, and engenders a unity and identity in depth by which the living are put into relation to the dead and to the future. This unity is projected on the body of the king. Granting the deepening of secular trends—for example, the development of a state administration which tended to give the state an independent and impersonal appearance—Lefort nonetheless contends that these changes did not entirely eliminate the notion of the kingdom as a unity that was both organic and mystical, a unity in which the monarch was at the same time the body and the head. In fact, as the process of modernization engendered progressive fragmentation, the body of the king serves as the only focal point which guarantees the unity and integrity of the field of the social. According to Lefort, the figure of the king’s body as overcoming both spatial and temporal dispersion, and as the focal point of the Divine origin of legitimacy, is not simply a “mystification” occulting the process of the extraction of surplus value or masking the operations of power. Rather, it constitutes

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the social space within which class conflicts can operate and within which one can distinguish between the legitimate and the illegitimate uses of power. The king as mediator between the body politic and the Divine is not a theory, thus it is neither true nor false. Instead, it opens the space in which one can distinguish between the true and the false in social and political discourse. It is not disputed that in premodern Christian society the religious and the political intertwine. In the framework of this religious dimension of the theologico-political, what kind of questions are posed and what sort of opinions are generated? Lefort rejects the option of religious belief on the level of the political and simultaneously denies the idea that religion is an ideology, or simply an erroneous opinion. In addition he rejects the argument that even if the doctrinal tenets of religion are false, nevertheless the doctrine must be retained because of its utility for maintaining social and political order. Lefort writes: When it remains true to its inspiration . . . what philosophy discovers in religion is a mode of portraying or dramatizing the relations that human beings establish with something that goes beyond empirical time and the space within which they establish relations with one another. This work of the imagination stages a different time, a different space. Any attempt to reduce it to being simply a product of human activity is doomed. . . . . Of course, human beings populate the invisible with the things they see. . . . Yet anything that bears the mark of their experience also bears the mark of an ordeal. . . . Once we recognize that humanity opens on to itself by being held in an opening it does not create, we have to accept that the change in religion is not to be read simply as a sign that the divine is a human invention, but as a sign of the deciphering of the divine or, beneath the appearance of the divine, of an excess of Being over appearance. (DPT, 223)

In Lefort’s thought, religion, in our secular age, does not consist of a compendium of curious beliefs that unenlightened people were once credulous enough to entertain. For him this view attests to the vanity of perceiving “the social and the political fields as purely and simply a product of human invention.” That is, his position functions as a critique of humanism. The root of man is not, as Marx wrote, man himself; rather, interpreted under the divine, it is “an excess of Being over appearance,” a power of revelation which philosophy cannot surpass. Religion poses, in its own way, the nonidentity of society with itself, the écart which defers society’s identity with itself. As the immanence of the body with itself is, in the thought of Merleau-Ponty, perpetually deferred, likewise the immanence of the body politic is, according to Lefort, also deferred and sub-

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mitted to a nonidentity with itself, a difference from itself, an irreducible alterity. Religion “dramatizes” the Other. Religious discourse orchestrates a problematic of difference. These texts of Lefort seem to evoke the late writings of Heidegger, for whom the name of the ontological difference (“an excess of Being over appearance”), when it is thought within the ontotheological tradition, is God. Beneath the names of the onto-theological tradition, Heidegger seeks a more profound notion of the difference as such, namely, the Event. In the later part of “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?,” Lefort writes: Do we not have to ask whether the religious might not be grafted on to a more profound experience as a result of some determinate representation of origins, community, and identity? (DPT, 230)

What is this “more profound experience”? Surely it is the experience of “the non-identity of Being and appearance,” the experience of difference, what Merleau-Ponty speaks of as the Advent. In agreement with Leo Strauss, Lefort argues that it is the positivism of the social sciences which has banished the concept of the regime from modern political philosophy. The notion of the regime is constitutive of the mise-en-sens and the mise-en-scène. It is that which gives unity to the social division; it is the internal articulation of society. The regime is also what engenders the affective domain of a society, that is, the feeling of “belonging” to a particular society. To specify his conception of the regime, Lefort turns to prerevolutionary France and considers the historically specific symbolic organization of the ancien régime. He directs his attention to the work of the French historian Michelet, claiming that Michelet explains “the most obscure and the most intimate element in the position and representation of power.” Then in parentheses Lefort adds, “and let me repeat that one cannot exist without the other” (DPT, 242). Concerning the people of France, Michelet writes, “No other people so love their king.” According to Lefort, Michelet’s accomplishment is to have interrogated . . . the mystery of the monarchical incarnation—beyond the conscious representation of a divine-right king whose power restores something of the presence of Christ and thereby makes justice appear in his person, there lies an unconscious representation of a society embodied in a king, of a society whose political institutions are not simply ordered in accord with a ‘carnal principle,’ but whose members are so captivated by the image of a body that they project on it their own union, that their affects are precipitated in an amorous identification with that body. (DPT, 242–243)

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I will briefly summarize Lefort’s appropriation of Michelet’s conception of the role of the king’s body. He views the work of Michelet as an unfolding of the tension between two ideas, or two sentiments: on the one hand, the notion that religion and a religious tradition give a sense of place, a sense of enrootedness in a particular time and place; on the other, the notion that right, autonomous law, is the work of the self-creation of humanity. It is an assertion of self outside all authority which is supported only by the work that is being accomplished. These two notions, familiar to us in our contemporary debates, are clearly at odds with one another. Michelet negotiates this tension by a variant of what has been called “the secularization thesis,” but with a very personal twist. He views Christianity as the religion of equality and fraternity, as a religion which is based upon the love of humanity. Particularly in France, this love of humanity has been invested in both the priest and the king, who are considered to be representatives of the social generality. Michelet argues that the names of both the priest and the king, of the representatives of what is most general, “that is, most divine in the thought of a nation lent, as it were, the obscure right of the people a mystical envelope in which it grew and became stronger” (DPT, 238). At the moment when the “social feeling,” the love of humanity, comes to be fully developed, the people must cast aside the “mystical envelope” in which the feeling was invested; this is the moment of the Revolution. It was during the coronation at Rheims cathedral that the people’s love was invested in the king. Reflecting on Michelet’s quasi-mystical experience at this coronation, as he described it in his Preface to The History of France, Lefort writes, “He watches the king being crowned, but he secretly transforms the coronation into a disposition so as to reveal a second coronation which, so to speak, reduplicates it” (DPT, 239). This second coronation is that of the people; those who were martyred in the Revolution replace the martyred Christ, “the Lord’s anointed becomes the anointed of the Revolution, which becomes God’s epic poem” (DPT, 239). One can see that this is not simply a question of secularization, since the Revolution itself is not secular, inasmuch as it participates in the sacred character of the ancien régime. Responding to Quinet, who criticizes the Revolution for not having founded a new Church, Michelet argues that it adopted no new Church for the good reason that “it was itself a Church.” The old Church and, along with it, the monarch was the ladder that once climbed could be kicked away. Michelet writes: Until then [the Revolution] unity [of the people] had been based upon the idea of religious or political incarnation. A human God, a God made of flesh was required to unite Church and State. Humanity was still weak,

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and placed its unity under the sign, the visible sign, of a man, an individual. From now on, unity will be purer, and will be freed from this material condition; it will lie in the unity of hearts, in the community of the spirit, in the profound marriage of feelings which joins each to all. (DPT, 241)

If the Revolution is a new Church, it differs profoundly from the old one. The old Church, an alienation of the people’s feeling of its own unity, was founded on love, but this happened in such a way that Law, or Right, disappeared. Christianity is a religion of grace, of free, arbitrary salvation, and of the good pleasure of God. The human monarchy, constructed in the image of the divine monarchy, glorifies love. In the personal relationship that exists between man and God, between man and king, “love is put in the place of law” (DPT, 243). Law as such is abolished, and obedience to arbitrary rule is based on a loving submission to the king. The action of the king is as arbitrary as God’s choice of who is to be damned and who is to be saved. According to Michelet, we must dig deep, “deeper than Dante to uncover the profoundly popular basis on which this colossus was built” (DPT, 244). While reflecting on this “profoundly popular basis,” Lefort discovers that Kantorowicz’s conception of the king’s two bodies, which he sees as being implicit in Michelet’s work, has been modified. For Kantorowicz, sovereign power descends from God through the doubling of the king’s body; one could say that the “natural” body of the king is a signifier of his body of grace. In this primarily juridical rendering of it, the king’s body of grace, his invisible body, is the source of his authority. While not negating this, Michelet adds to it his observation that the natural body of the king exercises a charm which delights the people: “It is insofar as it is a sexed body, a body capable of procreation, of physical love, and a fallible body, that it effects an unconscious mediation between the human and the divine” (DPT, 244). The body of Christ marks the presence of the divine in the human, but “it does not fully mark the presence of the human in the divine; it cannot fully indicate the presence of man and of the flesh in God” (DPT, 245). According to Lefort, it is Michelet who uncovers “an eroticopolitical register” in the relationship between the king and the people. The king’s natural body becomes the object of the people’s love: his marriages, his paternity, his liaisons, his festivals, his amusements and his feasts, and, also, his weaknesses and even his cruelties “attract the gaze of all.” In short, all the images of his humanity that inhabit the people’s imagination “assure that the king and the people are conjoined” (DPT, 245). In his analysis of the condemnation of Louis XVI, Michelet sheds light on his conception of the role of the king’s natural body. During the trial of the king, the primacy of Law and Right is asserted over the arbitrary

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caprice of Love. For Michelet this trial is conceived of as a labor of demystification; the king had to be divested of his symbolic dimension. He had to reveal himself as an ordinary and, in fact, a rather miserable human being, one who looked and walked like a fat farmer from Beauce. The trial was an attack on the “bizarre fiction that the wisdom of the people is concentrated in an imbecile. Royalty had to be dragged into the broad light of day and exposed on all sides” (DPT, 245). It had to be exposed as a worm-eaten wooden idol. Nevertheless, Michelet argues that the great mistake was to have permitted the blade of the guillotine to fall, since it was not sawdust that appeared but rather blood that flowed. He claims that the body of the dead king does not destroy the monarchy but is an event that revives it. If the king had simply been judged and sent on his way, the demystification of the monarchy would have been complete. But the king as executed occupies again the place of the suffering Christ: “The passion of Louis XVI becomes a sort of traditional poem which peasants and women passed on by mouth, the poem of barbarian France” (DPT, 257). In this encapsulated form, we have had a glimpse of Lefort’s conception of European premodern society and its relation to the Christian theologico-political of the ancien régime at the time of the French Revolution. While he does not commit himself to all of Michelet’s analysis—in fact, he criticizes it in a number of ways—we see nonetheless that Michelet’s interpretative practice has revealed something that would be absolutely foreclosed to the empirical “scientific” analysis which Lefort has criticized. What is it that has been brought to light that would otherwise not have been seen? It is what Lefort calls “the symbolic structure of the regime.” In a 1983 issue of the French review Psychoanalystes, dedicated to the theme Mythe de l’Un dans le Fantasme et dans la Réalité Politique, he writes: When we speak of symbolic organization, symbolic constitution, we seek to disclose beyond practices, beyond relations, beyond institutions which arise from factual givens, either natural or historical, an ensemble of articulations which are not deducible from nature or from history, but which order the apprehension of that which presents itself as real.16

The affinity between Lefort’s notion of the symbolic and the Lacanian opposition of the symbolic, the imaginary, the real, is self-evident. Lacan expresses the pregiven and irreducible character of the symbolic order, the order of the Other, when he writes, “. . . I say that no meta-language can be spoken,” or more aphoristically, “. . . there is no Other of the Other.”

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However, we must not conclude from this that Lefort believes that it is Lacan who invented the notion of the symbolic. According to Lefort: The notion of the symbolic is much older, even if the word is not used. Remaining within the limits of political philosophy, no doubt Plato designates a symbolic power when he makes, through the figure of Socrates, a critique of the naturalist thesis of Callicles or the realist thesis of Thrasymachus. No doubt La Boétie does the same, for a different end, when he substitutes the Name of the One for the power of the tyrant. Before him, Machiavelli observed that the prince must detach himself from the images that his subjects project on his person, and relate his authority to the Name of the Prince. . . . He opened a register that was neither that of the imagination nor that of empirical reality.17

Lefort continues this discussion by linking the notion of the symbolic to the classical distinction between the intelligible ideas and the sensible world, and to the modern distinction between the transcendental conditions of experience and phenomenal reality. Nevertheless, one should be very careful in making this association because, as Heidegger has shown us in great detail, these distinctions are fundamentally temporal distinctions, that is, distinctions between the temporal and the nontemporal. This is not the case with Lefort, for whom the symbolic is “not outside of time . . . and does not point towards a pure a priori . . . and is not in time. . . .”18 Recall Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh of language which he opposes to Saussure’s radical opposition between language and speech. For Lefort, the symbolic order is that which deploys the “within and without,” it is what operates this distinction: The symbolic structure of society is neither within nor without. The symbolic in his use of the term is not a supersensible world nor is it an empirical fact. Furthermore, as distinct from the classical philosophical oppositions, the Symbolic Order, as that which deploys the relationships of law, power, and knowledge, cannot itself be an object of knowledge in the strict sense. In order for it to be an object of knowledge it would necessarily presuppose a subject-for-whom it is posed, a subject that would have to be situated nowhere. This would entail what Merleau-Ponty refers to as “high-altitude thinking” (pensée de survol ), the possibility of which is radically excluded. As we have seen, a theory of absolute knowledge in either its Hegelian or Marxist form, whereby a subject becomes absolute in the historical process and thus capable of grasping this process as a whole in its knowledge of its genesis and identity, is also excluded. Likewise another form of absolute knowledge in its quasi-positivist psychoanalytic

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sense is excluded, for although Lefort uses psychoanalytic categories, psychoanalysis is not for him a “master discourse” or a “grand narrative,” because the very possibility of psychoanalysis is intertwined within the contingent history whose structure it reveals. Between the categories and what they render intelligible, there is not a relationship of pure exteriority but rather one of what Merleau-Ponty calls reversibility. Instead of positioning an object before a subject which posits itself, intelligibility is achieved through an intertwining of the knower and known, by a crossingover, or chiasm. Concerning the reversibility of psychoanalysis and the social and political field in which it both emerges and which it renders intelligible, Lefort writes: The discovery of psychoanalysis finds itself linked to an event . . . the dissolution of the markers of certitude. But, all the efforts made to explore the genesis of psychoanalysis . . . must not make us lose sight of the fact that such an event is inscribed within a revolution, a revolution which Tocqueville named ‘the democratic revolution,’ which has snapped the foundations of the distinctions between men within society: a distinction that was always in all the anterior social formations anchored in nature, or what comes to the same, sanctified by myth or religion.19

The concept of the symbolic order, similar to the notion of epochal givens in the thought of Heidegger, is described as a clearing, a space in which things can appear as what they are. Indeed it is linked to man’s relationship to Being; and, as with the “epochal given” in Heidegger’s thought, it is not at our disposition. However, in contrast to the “epochal given,” there is no “mystical” sense of a destinal sending, which, if not for Heidegger himself, at least for a number of Heideggerians—Jean-Luc Marion, among others—evokes the notion of a sender. These reflections on the notion of the symbolic order bring us back to Lefort’s notion of the regime. There is a filiation between these two notions; often he employs the expression “symbolic structure of the regime.” As we have already seen, the regime is a notion that behaviorist political science cannot grasp. Inasmuch as the notion of the regime is linked to classical political philosophy, it might be useful to reflect for a moment on the divergence between Lefort’s employment of the term and that of the ancient Greeks. In the eighth book of The Republic, Plato chars the devolution of regimes, from the “aristocracy” of the republic itself to “timocracy,” to “oligarchy,” to “democracy” and ultimately to the worst of regimes, that of “tyranny.” For Plato as well as Lefort, the regime is what gives limits and provides intelligibility to the social organization. It is the unity within which the social divisions articulate themselves, where the

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classes regroup themselves and form different types of hierarchy. According to Plato, the different types of regimes are linked to the parts of the soul; each part of the soul imprints its fundamental characteristic on the regime that exists under its sign. These articulations of the soul, its divisions and its possible conflicts, are not the effect of the political institution; rather, they are ontological givens through which the political order is linked to an intelligible nature. In Lefort’s thought, there is no such connection but this does not mean that there is not an ontological dimension of the political. As we have seen and will continue to see, the political (le politique) is not a pure construction of man; however, this link to Being is not thought of in terms of a knowledge that would have access to a domain of essences, what Merleau-Ponty calls a “second order of positivity.” According to Aristotle, the regime—monarchy, aristocracy, and polity, along with their degenerate forms, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy—is not viewed as an externalization of the powers of the soul. Rather, each regime represents the domain of a part of the society, be it the one, the few, or the many. These articulations are structured in terms of one desire: the desire for the good. The reader will recall that in our discussion of Lefort’s interpretation of Machiavelli and the critique proposed by Pierre Manent, what particularly attracted Lefort to Machiavelli as a modern political thinker was his notion of not one desire but two, and the irreducibility of conflict between the desire to oppress and the desire to be free from oppression. Inasmuch as he conceives of conflict as being ineluctable, we see where Lefort’s thought diverges from the thought of Aristotle. He rejects the idea of a “good regime,” one formed by reason which would produce stability. Recall his extensive underwriting of Machiavelli’s contention that Rome was great not in spite of, but because of, conflict. Its “instability” opened it to the event, which is to say, to being a truly historical society. Lefort emphasizes the radically anti-utopian aspect of Machiavelli’s thought; he uses it to criticize both Marxism’s phantasm of a society delivered from conflict (social division) and Aristotle’s conception of a stable society ordered by reason. In a more positive vein, the regime, according to Lefort, is what gives unity to the social divisions and conflicts— be they those of classes or of interests—by which a society articulates itself. He praises Marxism for its theory of class conflict but criticizes it for being unable to account for the fact that this conflict happens within one society. The regime is society’s “manner of being in society . . . its permanence in time, regardless of the various events that may affect it” (DPT, 216). Lefort claims that it is what gives definition and limits to social institution; the political regime is what refers to “the principles that generate society or, more accurately, different forms of society” (DPT, 217). The

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regime is the shaping (mise-en-forme) that human existence takes in different societies; it is the ultimate marker of a society’s identity, its selfidentity. The “space” called society cannot in itself be conceived as a system of relationships, no matter how complex one might imagine that system to be. On the contrary, the regime is society’s overall schema, “the particular mode of institution that makes it possible to conceptualize (either in the past or in the present) the articulation of its dimensions and the relations established within it between classes, groups and individuals, between practices, beliefs and representations” (DPT, 218). As was stated above, the regime is a putting into sense (mise-en-sens) and a staging (miseen-scène); it has a “family resemblance” to Merleau-Ponty’s conception of a body’s schema. In giving definition to the contours of a society, the notion of “the symbolic dimension of the political” touches upon the notion of identity and difference. These reflections join themselves to a reflection on religion. Recall the citation from Hegel’s Encyclopedia that Lefort cites at the beginning of “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” I will dwell for a moment on his use of the question mark. Here we see Lefort’s political thought rejoin his “ontology.” For Hegel, religion, particularly Christianity, remains the unsurpassable framework within which the modern state was to develop. His thought on religion contains a certain ambiguity as to what constitutes an ultimate discourse; he tells us that religion is a “thinking in representation.” Religion depicts what philosophy conceptualizes; thus philosophy must transcend religion. For orthodox religious faith, religion is the ultimate discourse which is not transcended by any other. This ambiguity in Hegel’s position led Arnold Ruge to write an ironic pamphlet which denounces him as an atheist while simultaneously praising him for his atheism. With regard to religion and the “origin of the symbolic,” Lefort’s position both touches on and diverges from the position of Hegel. For him there is not a condensation of religion and the political. He writes: . . . one cannot separate the elaboration of a political form—by virtue of which the nature and representation of power and social division (divisions between classes and groups) can stabilize, and by virtue of which various dimensions of the human experience of the world can simultaneously become organized—from the elaboration of a religious form— by virtue of which the realm of the visible can acquire death, and by virtue of which the living can name themselves with reference to the dead, whilst the human word can be guaranteed by a primal pact, and whilst right and duties can be formulated with reference to a primal law. In short, both the political and the religious bring philosophical thought

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face to face with the symbolic . . . through their internal articulations, both the political and the religious govern access to the world (DPT, 221–222).

In a certain sense, one might say that the political and the religious are the internal articulations of the symbolic, which simultaneously mark our finitude and open us to the world. In Lefort’s thought, religion testifies to a relationship between humanity and the Other; it is a protest against the attempt to close humanity and human history in on itself. As does Hegel, Lefort diverges from the Enlightenment critique of religion which views it as a sort of primitive attempt to explain the world and man’s place in it. For the Enlightenment, religion dissipates before science as the fog before the rising sun. Lefort’s philosophical reflections on religion do not take the form of a debunking, nor—though he touches on it in a certain respect, as I shall discuss later—does he follow the tradition that has its origins in Feuerbach. According to this tradition, religion is a projection of human nature without its finitude and limitations in which the theological is viewed as an esoteric anthropology; reversing the account in Genesis, it sees God as created in the image of man. For Lefort, philosophical thought seeks to preserve the experience of a difference that goes beyond differences of opinion, and the relativity of differing points of views which this entails. He points to “the experience of difference which is not at the disposal of human beings, whose advent does not take place within human history, and which cannot be abolished therein,” the experience of a difference which relates human beings to their humanity and shows that their humanity is not at their own disposition; it cannot set its own limits and cannot absorb its origin into those limits. “Every religion states in its own way that human society can only open onto itself by being held in an opening it did not create. Philosophy says the same thing, but religion said it first, albeit in terms which philosophy cannot accept” (DPT, 222– 223; emphasis added). Since philosophy and religion say the same thing, in this respect Lefort’s thought converges with Hegel’s; nevertheless, the two diverge on the question of what is said. Hegel argues that the doctrinal content of Christianity depicts what the Hegelian philosophy will conceptualize, which is, God’s self-objectification and entry into time in the figure of Christ, whose suffering, death, and resurrection depict Spirit’s self-alienation and its ultimate reconciliation in the doctrine of Absolute Knowledge. For Lefort’s thought, what religion testifies to, what it “said first,” is the “excess of being over appearance.” When we recognize that humanity opens onto itself by being held in an opening it did not create, then we have to accept that a change in religion is not to be read simply

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as a sign that the divine is a human invention, “but as a sign of the deciphering of the divine or, beneath the appearance of the divine, of the excess of being over appearance” (DPT, 223). In this citation, what Lefort means by “a change in religion” is the advent of modernity. In premodern societies, humanity’s experience of its noncoincidence with itself, which for Lefort is an experience, is interpreted as its relationship to another world, an invisible world of God, or the gods. The doctrinal content of religion is a dramatization of this experience of noncoincidence. As I said above, philosophy deciphers in religion a mode of dramatizing the relation that human beings establish with something that goes beyond empirical time and space, something within which they establish relationships to one another. There is an unambiguous priority of the ontological dimension in Lefort’s thought, and the doctrinal content of religion is founded upon it. In premodern societies the symbolic dimension, within which people establish relations with one another and the world, is dramatized, or depicted, in religious terms; that is, as a relationship to an invisible world. This work of the imagination stages (mise-en-scène) a different time and a different space. People populate the invisible world with the things they see or have seen. They invent a time that existed before time and they organize a space that exists behind their space; they create scenarios based upon the most general conditions of their lives. We see that in a limited sense Lefort’s thought does rejoin Feuerbach’s; inasmuch as the spirit, God, gods, and so forth are projections from everyday life. However, what is not explicable as being a human projection is the experience of being delivered over to oneself on the basis of a fundamental alterity, the experience of an “alterity in language, of a division between creation and unveiling, between activity and passivity, and between the expression and impression of meaning” (DPT, 224). Marx was mistaken when he claimed that “to be radical is to go to the root, and for man the root is man.” We can never arrive at the root. We are delivered over to ourselves by a fold in being, an excess of being over appearance. Schreimacher defines the religious sentiment as “a feeling of profound dependence.” However, in order to capture the force of what Lefort means, the word “dependence” taken positively is too anthropomorphic, since it invokes Freud’s story that the origin of God is the projection of the providential father. Perhaps we come closer if we revise Schreimacher’s statement to read: a feeling of profound nonself-sufficiency, a nonselfcoincidence in relation to the other. At times Lefort does capitalize the “O” of the Other, nonetheless, in a time of unbridled enthusiasm for the philosophy of Levinas, one must be careful. The resonance of his capital “O” is with the capital “O” of Lacan’s Other and not with that of Levinas;

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even with Lacan it is a resonance and not a coincidence. Rather, the thought of Lefort points to certain aspects of the work of Merleau-Ponty, inasmuch as the body’s identity is constituted across a fundamental divergence, an écart with itself. Although Lefort does not do this, we could invent a formula that the religion of premodernity is the symbolic dimension as interpreted by the imagination; the fundamental indeterminacy through which societies relate to themselves and the world is dramatized in terms of determinate figures existing in the visible world. In speaking of the bovine universe of the Nuer society studied by Evans-Pritchard, Lefort contends that they have no experience of a divergence between the perceptual world and their mythic depiction of the cows. This is a distinction that could be made only by an outside observer. We can see that on this issue there is a profound continuity in Lefort’s style. He is adamant on the point that within premodern society it is not possible to distinguish the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real; perhaps we could even say that premodernity is the condition in which this distinction is impossible, or that it is impossible for those living in a premodern society to make the distinction between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. Speaking of premodernity, Lefort claims that the symbolic dimension of these societies has the peculiar characteristic of being able to “secure the conditions of occultation,” conditions which if they did not exist would make it possible for the question of an opposition between the imagined world and the real one to appear. In such societies, the real is determinable only insofar as it is assumed to be already determined by virtue of a mythical or religious utterance, an utterance that attests to a knowledge that is based on neither the active process of knowledge nor any technical invention (and cannot be contested by such); it also is not derived from an interpretation of the visible. According to Lefort, this refusal to put the religious discourse, which fixes the foundations of the symbolic in another place, into question is not a matter of dogmatism nor some sort of psychological disposition that entails the inability to raise questions. Rather, he would say that this manner of interrogation is not symbolically enabled; such questioning just does not make sense in a premodern society. Thus we can see that the question mark in the title of the article “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” refers to both the continuity and the discontinuity between premodernity and modernity. It is continuous insofar as the theologico-political refers us to the experience of society’s nonidentity with itself, which is to say, insofar as it refers us to our relation with the Other, to that which is not within human history. In this sense there is a permanence. The project to suppress this relationship to the Other is necessarily phantasmic, and, as

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I shall discuss later, the suppression of this relationship leads to the necessarily doomed project of totalitarianism, be it Communism or Fascism. With regard to what is discontinuous, in the following chapter, I discuss how modernity is the condition in which the figure, but not the place of the Other, is effaced. At the foundation of its self-identity, modernity discovers a radical indetermination; it is a form of the social in which there can be no “materialization of the other” (DPT, 226). Nevertheless, if one were to mean by the “theologico-political” that a regime must define itself on the basis of a sacred text, for example, the commandments of God, or the will of the gods, then in this respect there would be a profound discontinuity between modernity and premodernity. The symbolic of modern society incorporates into itself an indetermination at the basis of its identity; nonetheless, it is not a form of the social where all identity is eroded. It is not the advent of a kind of nihilism; rather, its identity retains a reference to the indeterminate, to the unknown. If the occultation of the questioning of the opposition between the imagined and the real is the basis of premodern society, then we could say that modernity is the lifting of this occultation and the recognition that all determination, all definition, can be put in question. All determinations could conceivably be determined other than they are actually, or factually, given. In modern society, the symbolic can be distinguished from the imaginary and the real. According to Lefort, the symbolic is what gives access to the real; for him the real means what can be given in empirical reality. He does not retain the Lacanian sense of it as indicating a relation to what falls outside all symbolization. Insofar as the symbolic is itself determined by the imagination in premodern societies, openness to the world is strictly limited. As Habermas would say, in these societies openness to the real is limited by the extensive “preinterpretation” of reality given by religion and myth. In modernity, the “lifting” of this imaginary determination of the symbolic grants us an access to the real unprecedented heretofore, but this comes at the price of a loss of the certainty that was afforded by such determination; for example, science becomes possible but only as a falsifiable discourse, and the supersensible markers of certainty are effaced. On a political level, we see that if the certain foundations of premodern society were fixed in another world, and if the doubling of the body of the king acted as a mediator between the visible and the invisible, then political modernity must be the disincorporation of the political. In modern society, no figure of mediation can incarnate society’s quasi-representation of itself, its mise-en-scène. The place of the Other remains, but its determinate figuration is effaced. The place of the Other remains, but it remains as an empty place.

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Notes 1. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 34. 2. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, I, 288. 3. Ibid., 116. 4. Ibid., 44. 5. Ibid., 49. 6. Ibid., 68. 7. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). 8. Ibid., 7. 9. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 10. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 33. 11. Ibid., 34. 12. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, tr. B. Bray (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 13. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study of Medieval Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 46. 14. Ibid., 223. 15. Ibid., 21. 16. Claude Lefort, “Le Mythe de l’Un dans le Fantasme et dans la Réalité Politique,” Psychoanalystes: Revue du College de Psychoanalystes, 9 (October, 1983), 42 (translation mine). 17. Ibid., 41–42. 18. Ibid., 41. 19. Claude Lefort, “Démocratie et Avènement d’un ‘Lieu Vide’,” Psychoanalystes: Bulletin du College de Psychoanalystes, 2 (March, 1982), 16 (translation mine).

Part 3

Lefort on Modernity

6

Modernity and Revolution

In the previous chapters, I followed the development of Lefort’s conception of premodern societies. In a general sense, these were societies in which the symbolic structure is fixed in another place, that is, outside time, either in a time before time or in an invisible world. Specifically, with regard to the Christian theologico-political of the ancien régime, this “outside” takes the form of a doubling of the king’s body. Lefort’s unique manner of combining the writings of both Kantorowicz and Michelet shows both that the invisible body of the king is anchored in another place which is the seat of his sovereignty and juridical authority and that his visible body functions on an erotic-political register, as the object of the people’s love which connects not only the divine to the human but also the human to the divine. In the Freudian sense of the term, one could say that his imago is symbolically efficacious, which is to say, it is not a “mere” representation or a mystifying “mask” that hides the real, be it conceived as the operations of power (Foucault) or the extraction of surplus value (Marx). Its symbolic efficacity means that it does something: It gives unity to the regime; it gives the continuity within which social division and conflict are orchestrated; and it gives a sense of belonging to a particular time and place. My reflections on premodernity ended by posing the question of the permanence of the theologico-political. My conclusion was twofold: If one refers to the symbolic structure of society as that which gives access to the real but which is not itself a part of the real, then it is unsurpassable; but if one refers to an imaginary representation of the symbolic which entails a figuration of the symbolic and affirms that it resides in another place, then it is subject to profound mutation. I also said that a later chapter would show how the foreclosure of the symbolic is linked to the totalitarian project. Lefort argues that modernity is this “profound mutation” in the sym131

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bolic order; the harbinger of this mutation is the French Revolution. One of his most extensive writings on the French Revolution takes the form of a reflection on a book of his friend François Furet, entitled Interpreting the French Revolution. I will attempt to disengage these thoughts on the Revolution from the specific context of Lefort’s reading of Furet’s book. Unfortunately, I will not be able to pursue all the details presented in the text. Lefort evokes sympathetically Furet’s practice of interpretation, a practice that he names “conceptual history,” the essence of which is condensed in Tocqueville’s remark in The Ancien Régime and the Revolution: “I am talking about history, not recounting it.” Furet’s position is laid out in “The Revolution Is Over,” one of the essays in his book. His point is that history is given to the historian as preinterpreted. This preinterpretation is done not only, and primarily, by other historians but also by the historical actors themselves; and the historical document issuing from the hand of these actors is already a self-interpretation. Furet claims that, whether from the right or the left, royalist or republican, conservative or Jacobin, the historians of the French Revolution have taken the revolutionary discourse at face value. This is because the historians themselves have remained locked into that discourse. He writes, “They keep putting on the Revolution the different faces assumed by the event itself in an unending commentary on a conflict whose meaning, so they think, the Revolution itself has explained to us once and for all through the pronouncements of its heroes.”1 His point is that as long as the ideological positions which have their origin in the Revolution were “live issues,” historians were “locked into” the discourse of their chosen hero of the Revolution. For example, for the Bolsheviks the Revolution was what the Jacobins interpreted it to have been. Nevertheless, he argues that at the present time (1977) and, we might add, even more so with the fall of the Soviet Union, these positions are no longer credible; only a few cranks identify themselves as either MarxistsLeninists or royalists. In the present moment, we can as it were step back, not in order to finally see the Revolution “objectively” but rather to interpret it in categories other than those of its own self-interpretation. Furet’s interpretative sensibility is similar to that of Lefort’s notion of interpretation in two respects. On the one hand, Lefort always takes into account his own historical position when he is reflecting on the past—he even claims that there are aspects of democracy which are visible only after the experience of totalitarianism, which is to say, aspects that could not possibly have been visible to the founders of democracy themselves. On the other hand, the categories in which he interprets historical events take into account the intentions of the historical actors but do not coincide with the actor’s self-interpretation. Neither Furet nor Lefort conceives of the French Revolution as simply the change of one set of institu-

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tions for another, or as the replacement of one ruling class by another. Lefort, however, maintains that these changes and replacements could not be accounted for in terms of real processes (for example, conflicts of interest, a hold on state bureaucracy, and so forth) or in terms of ideology. In “Interpreting Revolution within the French Revolution,” he argues that the French Revolution makes appear “a scheme, or body of schemata of actions and representations which govern both the shaping [mise-en-forme] and the staging [mise-en-scène] of a society, and, at the same time, its dynamic” (DPT, 91). Speaking of revolution only as the transfer of power is a massive presupposition. It is a presupposition that treats power as some sort of thing that could be transferred and remain unaltered from one hand to another. One of the basic tenets of Lefort’s thought is that power cannot be separated from its representation; moreover, he argues that “power has a symbolic status” which cannot be reduced to ideology. I hope that by now my reflections on his use of the term symbolic will forestall the notion that, in saying this, he means that it is a symbol of something else; for Lefort it is symbolic insofar as it is efficacious. As I have already noted above, it is not at all true, as Mao claimed, that political power comes out of the barrel of a gun. Political power is inextricably linked to a representation and can be exercised only as represented. In “Marx: From One Vision of History to Another,” Lefort reads Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in such a way as to show that power could not be exercised because it could not be represented. Concerning the genesis of revolution, Lefort argues that the conditions that give rise to a revolution are not exploitation, or even misery; rather, the symbolic efficacity of the system of representation, within which this experience of misery could have been encoded and endured, has collapsed. The failure of the symbolic order engenders a revolutionary response when it is accompanied by “the advent of a new idea of time, of the division between past and present, true and false, visible and invisible, real and imaginary, just and unjust, between that which conforms to nature and that which goes against nature, between possible and impossible” (DPT, 93). For Lefort the French Revolution is not directed against Louis XVI or his entourage but against the regime, that is, against the representation of the unity of the society which was engendered by the doubling of the king’s body as a point of mediation between the visible and the invisible. With regard to the dynamics of the Revolution—and on this point he diverges significantly from Furet—they are founded upon, and testify to, “the appearance of the abyss which is at once revealed and concealed by absolutism” (DPT, 113). For Lefort the revolutionaries’ mode of discourse, the excess of the Terror, is not fully explicable in empirical or ideological terms; rather, it is viewed as an index of the irreducible gap

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that suddenly appeared between the symbolic and the real, “of the indeterminacy of both, and a gap in the Being of the world which we still experience” (DPT, 114). There is an ontological dimension of the Revolution intertwined with its historical dimension. Concerning premodern societies, we saw that these societies could not distinguish between the symbolic and the real. The arrival of this “distinction” does not come as a smooth epistemological transition from one “episteme” to another; rather, it arrives as a rupture, that is, as a wound from which blood will flow. The denegation of this rupture will have not only political effects but also effects within the register of philosophy. For the moment I will remain with the former. In the French Revolution, the principle of legitimacy of the ancien régime was effaced, and this brought about many possible consequences. Permit me to outline one of them, which Lefort does not mention but which seems to be implicit in his analysis, namely, the possibility that no new symbolic structure would be put into place. This would be the total nightmare scenario in which no political symbolic would mediate the relationships between men. It would not be a Hobbesian regression to a state of nature as if such a state existed prior to civil order; rather, it would be the creation of such a state of nature. At least for a short time, such a condition would seem to me to be possible. This was not the course taken by the French Revolution; indeed, an extravagant explosion of violence took place. Nevertheless, this violence was linked with the attempt to repair the symbolic dimension of the political. Obviously, saying this does not constitute an apology for the Terror; rather, it is an attempt to understand it. Furet’s explanation of the dynamics of the French Revolution proceeds empirically; he argues that the absolutism of the Revolution is the inverse of the absolutism of the monarchy, that it is engendered by the rules of a revolutionary ideology which is the effect of men of letters who occupied the political vacuum which absolutism created. He borrows from Tocqueville the notion of the deleterious consequences of substituting men of letters for politicians. Lefort does not contest Furet’s historical explanation but prefers to pursue his own thought on another register where he makes an analysis of the “revolutionary imaginary.” On the level of the imaginary, there is both an objective and a subjective dimension. I will begin with the objective one. We see that after the revolution, there comes into being for the first time the representation of a society that is political through and through, that is, a society in which “all activities and all institutions are assumed to contribute to its general construction and to bear witness to it” (DPT, 106). Following the revolutionairies’ attack on the “obscurantist” priests, the society is totally disengaged from any relation to transcendence and believes itself to be in principle transparent; in

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principle, everything can be known and transformed. Vladimir Nabokov gives us a chilling representation of a society bent on self-transparency in his novel entitled, significantly enough, Invitation to a Beheading. The crime of his main character, Cincinnatius C., is that of being opaque. Regarding the subjective dimension of the imaginary, that is, those for whom this self-transparent society exists, there is now a “new man,” someone whose vocation is to become a universal historical agent and whose political existence merges with his private existence; this new man is called the revolutionary militant. Allied with the subjective and the objective representations are their opposites, that is, a society which is not yet transparent and a society which does not yet correspond to its essence but must be forced both to be good and to install a republic of virtue. The opposite of the revolutionary militant is the egotistical man, a man who, like every other man, is particular, yet whose very particularity contrasts with a pretension to universality; in a sense he is a priori guilty of egotism. According to Lefort, this figure becomes intelligible “only if we locate its source in the illusion that a society can, ideally, be in harmony with itself and that an individual can be the bearer of its ends. Revolutionary ideology is constituted by the insane assertion of the unity, or indeed the identity, of the people” (DPT, 107). The People, identical with itself, is the source of all legitimacy, all truth, and all virtue. The logic of the Terror springs from the primal contradiction lodged within the revolutionary imaginary, namely, that the People must be distinguished from the people, who exist as an empirical mass of particular people. This “People as One” corresponds to its essence only when it acts and consciously views itself as acting in such a way as to realize the republic of virtue. The people can be “the People” only through self-activity. Lefort writes, “The people perform operations which allow them to be their own midwives.” They must constantly constitute their own identity; however, as soon as this selfactivity becomes concrete, it risks falling into particularity and thus being denounced as usurpation. Nevertheless, how does one account for the empirical division of the people, since “within the revolutionary imaginary” the division of the people cannot emerge from itself; its unity is essential inasmuch as it is this unity which fills the “hole” left in the symbolic. All empirical divisions, conflicts, must have their origin from the outside and be caused by the ill will of the enemy. Thus we see emerge the image of the “Other-as-enemy,” and the beginning of the obsession with “the plot.” The Terror is viewed as being engendered by the image of the militant becoming a traitor and acting in the interests of a foreign power in “an absolutist plot.” On the one hand, we have the Assembly, which claims to represent the people by making laws in their name; on the other hand, “we have the men of the Sections and the clubs, or the masses who par-

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ticipate in the revolutionary journées and who claim to embody the people in action. Yet when those same men appear for what they are, namely minorities, they expose themselves to being denounced as de facto groups who are betraying the people, simulating their identity and acting as usurpers” (DPT, 108). As long as this image of the “People as One” presides over political activity, each one who would pretend to speak in the name of the people will be denounced as an agent of the plot. The “genius” of Robespierre, “the incorruptible,” was that up to a certain point he escaped identification with any empirical faction, thereby fostering his own illusory universality. Lefort has written an entire article on “The Revolutionary Terror” which consists of a very close reading of a speech given by Robespierre on 11 Germinal year II (31 March 1794). I will not follow this article in detail but will attempt to abstract some its essential contours. Lefort argues that Robespierre simultaneously imposes himself as a master and obliterates the place of the master. Using the artifice of speech, he does away with speech itself. The revolutionary truth, of which he is the origin, silences all debate. He claims that “Robespierre’s speech does not take the Terror as its object, rather it exercises the Terror, it represents an important moment of the Terror in action. It speaks Terror” (WPT, 60). The speech of the revolutionary orator gives itself out not as the speech of any particular man but of the People itself. Since the representation of the “people as one” is a phantasm, this revolutionary speech participates in a phantasmic “logic” which contains contradictory representations and which cannot itself be represented. As an example of this revolutionary discourse which happens in the grip of phantasm, Lefort uses a speech given by Billaud-Varenne to the Assembly on 1 Floreal year II (20 April 1794). The French people have set you a task which is as vast as it is difficult to carry out. The establishment of a democracy in a nation that has languished in chains for so long might be compared to the effort made by nature during the astonishing transition from nothingness to existence, and those efforts were no doubt greater than those involved in the transition from life to annihilation. We must, so to speak, recreate the people we wish to restore to freedom. (WPT, 79)

Like the logic of a dream, according to Freud, the logic of this speech knows nothing about the law of noncontradiction. It claims that the People both delegate to the Convention the task of their own re-creation and, at the same time, demand that the delegates give birth to them by restoring to them a liberty that they have never known. The absurdity of this is doubled when one recalls that the delegate himself is part of the

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people itself. The Billaud-Varenne speech was given in the defense of the Terror; clearly the enormity of the task to be accomplished precluded anything that would limit the terrorists’ action. Abstracting for now from the significant differences between the Terror of the French Revolution and the terror of totalitarianism, Lefort partially agrees with Arendt’s claim that, inasmuch as the role of terror is not to get rid of real enemies, it does not have an instrumental value but rather a constitutive one. According to her, terror is the logic of the life processes become political, whereas for Lefort terror and its apologistic discourse is linked to the attempt to incarnate the phenomenon of the “people as one” on the level of the real. On this point their analyses diverge; in the last chapter of this book, entitled “The Fate of the Concept of Totalitarianism after the Fall,” I shall develop this more fully. For Arendt the life processes are a continuous “metabolism with nature”; they have the character of a process, and any institutionalization of stability would run counter to their process-like character. The crystallization of any activity must be immediately remetabolized, that is, eaten up by the revolutionary movement; this analysis is anchored in her triparte division of Labor, Work, and Action. In Lefort’s thought, it is almost the contrary, since the notion of the “People as One” is a phantasm; it exists only on the level of the imaginary. In reality, as he has learned from Machiavelli, a society is always in conflict with itself; social division cannot be effaced. Lefort views terror as a frenzied attempt to efface the social division, the conflicts, and thereby to institute the phantasm of “the People as One” in reality. He writes, “the Terror is interminable. It must not end: without it, the Revolution will be nothing” (WPT, 82). For him the Terror has epistemological and ontological dimensions. The image of a society at one with itself, delivered from social division and conflict, can be grasped only during the purge, where there is a separation between the enemies of the people and the People; or, better yet, during the enemy’s extermination. Severing virtue from crime and the People from its enemies is not a means of instituting the Republic, it is a way of making the social both visible and conceivable. These acts, which separate the People from its enemies and deny social division, generate vision and knowledge, claiming the Terror threatened from the onset to be interminable. The terrorists constantly had to create the ground in which they wanted the Republic to take root. “Their fascination with being is at the same time a fascination with the abyss. This is why they all call down death upon their own heads in an attempt to find a sign of their inscription in the people, in nature and in history” (WPT, 84). The motive of the Terror was to make visible in the real what can exist only on the register of the imaginary; this project is, as such, impossible.

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The Terror that was possibly interminable did in fact come to an end. Furet gives a plausible historical explanation for this; he claims that after the execution of Danton, the sense of being under threat could have awakened the Convention’s instinct for self-preservation and thus led to the end of the Terror. The end of the war and the victory of French forces eliminated one of the major justifications for the Terror. Inasmuch as Lefort sought the origin of the Terror in the revolutionary imaginary, it is to this register that he returns in order to analyze “the end of the interminable.” The terror exercised in the name of a democratic revolution cannot find an ideological justification for its institutionalization. Lefort writes, “The Terror is revolutionary in that it forbids anyone to occupy the place of power; and in that sense, it has a democratic character” (WPT, 86). Only Marat openly called for a dictatorship. Generally speaking, the charge of calling for a dictatorship is an accusation that one usually hurls against one’s enemies. However, this will not be the case with regard to the exercise of terror by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Both Leninists and Fascists will furnish an ideological justification for the institution of terror; in the former it is the Leninist theory of the party as the repository of truth and legitimacy and in the latter it is the führer principle. I will develop this at length in the chapters on totalitarianism. The individuals in the French Revolution who exercised the Terror “were all required to take responsibility for it, but the strength they derive from it always lacks the cement that might have been provided by an institution guaranteed by a definite, reliable, and general power.” Lefort tells us that Saint-Just came close to recognizing the precarious situation of someone who exercises terror when he said, “We are not sufficiently virtuous to be so terrible.” For Lefort it would have been more accurate to have said, “Fearful as it may be, our power is too hollow to be so terrible.” The Terror was essentially exercised by individuals who could not free themselves from their own will or imprint themselves in a body whose cohesion was ensured by the existence of its head: “In short, they could not act as bureaucrats” (WPT, 87). As we have already seen, the French Revolution is directed against a regime in which the unity of society is effected and represented by the body of the king. As we will presently see, the symbolic order (dispositif symbolique) that will be established by the Revolution is one in which there is a disincarnation of society, which is to say, no figure will incarnate the unity of the society; this is, of course, not to say that there will be no bureaucracy. Lefort argues that any institutionalization of terror would require a stronger form of legitimacy than a democracy can furnish; no democracy could install something like the Inquisition or the Stalinist purges. Lefort tells us that in Robespierre’s last days he became obscurely conscious of, to use Habermas’s expression, this legitimation deficit; he

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did indeed look for a “stronger” basis of legitimation in the cult of the Supreme Being. It is this belief that will offer “the vital and ultimate guarantee of public safety—of, that is, a terrorist dictatorship.” Robespierre wished to articulate the Terror with an orthodoxy. “From the end of Prarial onwards, Robespierre continues to speak of the virtue and happiness of the people, and of the unity of the body politic, but he also constantly denounces atheism, naturalism, materialism and philosophism” (WPT, 87–88). Robespierre claimed that by becoming the agents of God, those who exercise the Terror will shed both their individuality and their responsibility. The terrorists will free themselves from their own will by representing themselves as relying upon a “tribunal that is higher than the tribunals of mere mortals; they must love only the Terror, and thus can perform their duties in all innocence” (WPT, 88). In doing this, Robespierre had made a profound, one might say fatal, error, since in modern society, terror cannot give itself a theistic legitimation. Using our strict sense of the term, we can say that in modernity theology will be unable to give any institutional justification. Nevertheless, in grotesque forms it will be “atheism, naturalism, materialism and philosophism” that will show themselves up to the task of anchoring “the desire for an absolute gap and the fantasy of the interminable in an organization.” Up to this point, my thematic exposition of Lefort’s thought has taken the form of a progressive specification of his thinking on its way to a comprehension of the present. After a consideration of his work on the thought of Machiavelli, I then moved on to his conception of premodern societies in general. From this interpretation of premodernity, I moved to his thoughts concerning the meaning of the Christian theologicopolitical, thus further specifying the concept of premodernity through his reading of the work of Michelet and by his interpretation of the French Revolution as a reaction to the symbolic structure of the ancien régime, as a revolution that effects a mutation in the symbolic order, which as we have seen does nothing less than to open our access to the real—our relationship to Time, to History, and to Identity/Difference. The institution of modernity is an Advent in the sense that the term was used by MerleauPonty; it is “of the order neither of the fact nor of the essence.” It is a fold in the flesh of history. In some respects, the advent of modernity is comparable to Nietzsche’s reflection on the “death of God” but with a very significant difference. As is well known, in Nietzsche’s thought the death of God is the denouement of an internal, and defining, feature of the Christian religion which already had been characterized by Hegel as the religion of the death of God. In at least one version of Nietzsche’s story of the demise of God, it is the incorporation of the will to truth—itself a figure of the ascetic ideal—that sows the seeds of Christianity’s autodestruction.

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Nietzsche characterizes Christianity as “Platonism for the people.” Christianity’s synthesis of the Greek philosophical tradition, insofar as this furnished it with a coherent worldview, is perhaps the condition of its institutionalization and longevity. Nevertheless, the influence of Greek thought incorporated the cruel “will to truth” within the very heart of Christianity, and it is this “will to truth” which ultimately turns against the Christian dogmas; the Greek gift of philosophy turns out to be a Trojan horse. During the Christian epoch, the “highest values,” including those which legitimated its political institutions, refer to “another world,” to a supersensible world. The death of God erodes this reference to the supersensible world; it is the “devaluation of the highest values.” According to Nietzsche, whether we recognize it or not, the death of God is an accomplished fact. It delivers modern men and women over to a massive option: On the one hand, there is nihilism, that uncanny guest that knocks at the door of Western civilization; on the other, there is the self-overcoming that issues in the übermensch, that is, one in whom the will to power is such as to be able joyfully to embrace both the death of God and the eternal recurrence. Nietzsche’s doctrine of nihilism is too complicated, and too well known, to permit or require an extensive exposition at this time. Rather I will bring to center stage those aspects of it that might offer a significant comparison with Lefort’s conception of modernity. His notion of “incomplete nihilism” might be viewed in terms of two figures, namely, “the last man” and the nihilist engaged in a frenzy of destruction, examples of which would be the yuppie and the bomb-thrower. The figure of the last man renders visible the picture of modernity and democracy as its aristocratic critics conceive of it. It is a vision of a society that has become unmoored from all higher values. It is a society that believes in nothing and is not willing to risk or to sacrifice anything; it is a place where humankind is reduced to triviality—as Nietzsche says, no longer even dangerous. In this society, men and women are concerned with nothing other than their bank account and a few personal manias, be they antique cars or the latest fashions. It is a society without relationship to transcendence of any kind whatsoever. Modern literature abounds with images of this pitiable creature either dragging him- or herself from one meaningless activity to the next, or being the contemptible conformist bent on crushing anything which is new or different. Nietzsche also tells us that nihilism gives rise to groups that have no raison d’être other than to kill and rob nonmembers. This is the type of nihilism expressed by Dostoyevsky’s characters in The Brothers Karamazov and The Possessed who believe that “if God is dead, then all things are permitted.” It is the nihilism of the teenager who will push someone in front of a subway train just “for kicks,” or the Wall Street trader who will embezzle millions of dollars. Already

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evoked by Plato, it is the nightmare vision of an actor who knows no limits. Nietzsche’s salvorific narrative, enunciated by Zarathustra who, in the name of one who is to come (alluding to John the Baptist) announces the übermensch. Nietzsche both compares and juxtaposes the übermensch to Christ, since both are the bearers of a myth. Even though, for Nietzsche, since its creator is St. Paul, the myth related to Christ is one which devalues the world by relating it to eternity. It asks, “What is this world in comparison with eternity?” This is a myth of “blasphemy against the earth.” To the contrary, the myth borne by the übermensch will “give innocence to becoming.” It will “redeem” the temporal, the fleeting, the moment, by giving it the status of a quasi-eternity. I say “quasi-eternity” because I am in agreement with Deleuze, who argues that “the eternal return” is an ethical and not a cosmological doctrine. Or, better said, it is an ethical doctrine that is given expression by the figure of a cosmological theory. One may ask whether Nietzsche’s conception of modernity is adequate, but for now I will make a few critical comments to which I will later return when presenting Lefort’s notion of modernity. The image of “the last man” is certainly a profound one and not one to be readily dismissed. Indeed, there is a leveling, a homogenizing, in a modern and democratic society. Again employing Charles Taylor’s phrase, we have moved “from being a society of distinction to being a society of dignity.” We may ask whether this transition is adequately characterized as a falling. As is well known, Tocqueville was very sensitive to the conformism attendant upon modern democracy, but he argued nevertheless that this was not the whole story. We, moderns, may ask ourselves: Is there not a certain nobility in self-rule and a kind of poetry in the affirmation of the dignity of all? As for the frenzy of destruction that the previous century knew, the great murderers of our epoch—Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—were not, after all, men without any “values.” Our initial comments regarding Lefort’s conception of totalitarianism have shown us that it is a regime which should be understood in terms of its reference to transcendence, but not simply in terms of its absence or loss of it; terror is not engendered by the absence of values, but rather by the integral “positive” aspect of the logic of totalitarianism. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the übermensch and of the Eternal Return will not be discussed here, except to say that it is hard to see any political significance in them, his occasional references to the “grand politics” notwithstanding. Likewise there would seem to be nothing compelling in the interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought as proto-fascist. To understand “the crazed little house painter” at the head of a mass movement as the incarnation of the Nietzschean übermensch is implausible, to say the least. If Nietzsche is, as a recent book title claims, The Last Apolitical German, then he must definitely be exonerated from charges of

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Nazism. Nevertheless, at the same time, this is a recognition of a serious limitation in his conception of modernity, and it certainly does have a political dimension. Now in broad outlines and without any textual exegesis or reference to the secondary literature, I will briefly consider Heidegger’s notion of modernity in terms of its heuristic value in making a comparison with the thought of Lefort. I will not embark on a detailed exposition of Heidegger’s conception of the history of Being. For him the history of Being is the history of the epochalization of Being attendant upon the withdrawal of Being, which is accompanied by the forgetfulness of Being, and which is followed by the forgetfulness of this forgetfulness. The articulation of Being takes the form of a distinction between Being and beings—what Heidegger calls the Ontological Difference. The history of metaphysics, and perhaps for Heidegger history as such, is the inability to think the ontological difference. Metaphysics is the thought in which the difference between Being and beings comes to be thought in terms of a hierarchy of types of beings, that is, of superior and inferior beings. The turn toward metaphysics, already prepared for in the not-yet-metaphysical thought of the pre-Socratics, occurs explicitly in the work of Plato with his construction of the opposition between the sensible and supersensible worlds, between the visible and contingent phenomena and the invisible and eternal ideas; which is to say, a hierarchy of different kinds of beings. When the forgetfulness of the ontological difference is itself forgotten, this gives rise to the “errancy” by which the question of Being is progressively forgotten; at the same time, inasmuch as each epoch is both a revealing and a concealing, the destiny of Being is revealed. On the basis of this interpretation, Heidegger constructs a powerful conception of the history of philosophy which at the present time will concern us only insofar as it is involved in his conception of modernity. According to him, the next moment of Being’s epochalization, which follows its Greek moment, is its transformation into the Christian world; in this world the ontological hierarchy is that of God and the world, that is, of creating and created being. This is followed by the modern world, or, more precisely said, the modern worldview, which gives itself in the rise of subjectivity; its harbinger is Descartes. For Heidegger it is not the dualism of thinking being and extended being that is important in Descartes’ thought; rather, what is fundamental about his thought is that both “subject” and “object” are beings revealed in the subjectivity of a Cogito. Being thus has become the power of re-presenting. Before Descartes’ philosophy, Being was the thought of presence, whereas with his philosophy and after it, Being is the thought of represence. The Cartesian subject’s re-presenting in the acts of the Cogito

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becomes the ground of the representation of all beings, including God. In modernity, the world has become what it is possible to represent. Through a reading of Leibniz, Kant, and Nietzsche, Heidegger argues that the problematic of subjectivity, or subjecticity, has become a problematic of Will. Then, in a not unproblematic interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power, he argues that this doctrine is a doctrine of “the Will to will.” Here we see that the re-presenting Subject of Descartes has become the “Will to global mastery”; the world is no longer what can be re-presented, rather, it is what can be transformed by the Will in its desire to master the globe. The world has become the stuff of a “standing reserve.” The modern epoch—the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—is characterized by Heidegger as the epoch of technology; but his notion of technology is no longer conceived of on the basis of a project of a subject; rather, it is a notion of an enframing by which both “subjects” and “objects” are given as “stuff to be manipulated.” According to him, the age of technology does not mean the proliferation of technical devices; on the contrary, it is because modern society is an age of technology that the technical devices exist. In the now famous phrase, Heidegger has said that the essence of technology is itself not technical; rather, it is the manner in which Being gives itself. Within the epoch of technology, the ontological difference has become flattened in a maximum sense. In all previous epochs this difference had been transformed into a hierarchy of beings, in which at least a sense of difference had been retained, for example, between the sensible and the supersensible; between God and the world; and between the subject and object. Now, in the modern age of technology, Being has become stuff. Whereas Nietzsche sees how “the true world finally became a fable,” Heidegger sees that the history of Being is a history of exhaustion. He argues that all of the predetermined possibilities of metaphysics have been played out; with its flattening of the ontological difference, modernity has become a desert. The desert grows. As such, modernity bears within itself no possibility of selftransformation, it is only more of the same; any exit from the desert of modernity must be accomplished by a radical transformation. Heidegger has understood that any project of the will, far from leaving modernity behind, would underwrite its most basic gesture. To will the end of modernity would be like saying, “There are no cannibals around here anymore, I just ate the last one.” Not wishing to become involved extensively in the discussion of Heidegger’s politics, I will nevertheless remain with what “seems” to be generally agreed upon, insofar as anything is genuinely agreed upon. His attraction to Fascism was not based on its racism or biologism. Indeed, as a Nazi bureaucrat remarked, Heidegger had a personal vision of National

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Socialism. In his mind, Nazism was the radical revolutionary transformation that would bring about an alternative to the desert of modernity. It was another beginning, improbably linked to the beginning of Western civilization in ancient Greece, but now, with Hölderlin playing the role of Homer and Hitler cast in the role of Solon, Nazism presented its “inner truth and greatness.” Heidegger’s “autocritique,” if it is one at all, consists of his characterizing his political choice as a “mistake.” However, from within the parameters of his thought, this characterization is absolutely accurate: At a certain time he “mistook” Nazism for an alternative to the Gestell of modernity; then he discovered that Nazism was in fact only more of the same and he proclaimed the scandalous comparison between mechanized farming and mechanized mass murder; then he retreated from politics into a period of quietistic waiting. Throughout all this, his characterization of modernity did not alter; it was only his “activist” attempt to transform this modern world that was viewed as simply being a part of it. In its stead, a meditative attitude awaits for another “dispensation of Being,” “another beginning.” In Die Beitrage, Heidegger explains that “a deep silence will descend upon the earth, and that only a God can save us now.” It is not only his reference to God that is disconcerting; even more disturbing is the sentiment that we are in dire need of being saved. If for Heidegger modernity is a sort of desert, for Habermas it is the realization, or the promise of the realization, of humanity’s highest capacities. His conception of modernity is situated within the Enlightenment, which is characterized by Kant as a certain coming of age of humanity. Another Enlightenment thinker, Hegel, saw the unfolding of history as a movement in which what was implicit progressively becomes explicit. Marx viewed history as a movement from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. Habermas’s conception of modernity is nurtured from these ideas, among others, but for heuristic reasons I will stay with those mentioned above. From Kant,, Habermas inserts himself in a tradition of transcendental philosophy but in such a way as to significantly modify this project. Kant defines transcendental as the concern not with our knowledge of the world but with the conditions of the possibility of this knowledge insofar as it is a priori. This regression from the fact of knowledge to the conditions of its possibility is a movement toward subjectivity and is concerned with discovering the conditions which must hold subjectively for knowledge to be possible. According to Kant, we arrive at transcendental subjectivity, which is a system of conditions that must hold if knowledge is to be possible for a finite mind, which is to say, a mind lacking intellectual intuition. It must be emphasized that Kant does not say a human mind. Clearly he is not concerned with the question of whether to exclude angels or extraterrestrials; rather, he wants to insist

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that mankind is itself a factual species of beings. Kant does not wish to base the conditions of our knowledge of the world on a worldly being, a being which is itself part of the world. Habermas will modify Kant precisely on this point. In Knowledge and Human Interest he writes, “the achievements of transcendental subjectivity have their basis in the natural history of the human species.”2 In so doing, Habermas transforms transcendental philosophy into a quasi-transcendental position. In his early work, the following three species interests function as transcendental frameworks: the interest in mastery, the interest in communication—that is, the interest in reaching a consensus derived from the framework of tradition—and the interest in emancipation. These three species interests give rise, respectively, to the natural sciences, the hermeneutical sciences, and critical theory. In his later work, this framework of species interests will be replaced by what might be called another quasi-transcendental position; though Habermas himself, for reasons that cannot be pursued here, would object to this characterization. Nonetheless, the capacity of language to raise validity claims is conceived of as the condition for any employment of language—strategic, expressive, or whatever. My point is to show that for Habermas modernity is the condition in which a fundamental dimension of the human species comes to be institutionalized. As was shown above, there is a certain similarity between Habermas and Lefort in terms of their characterization of premodern societies. Both view the premodern life world as being extensively preinterpreted, which is to say, it is given a meaning that is not subject to critical examination. According to Habermas, this is because of the “insufficient differentiation” between language and the world, that is, between language and that which language is about: the world. Within a premodern society, with its insufficiency of differentiation between language and the world, the validity of the claims that are being made are not subject to problemitization; they cannot be questioned. At this point the Hegelian or, more accurately said, the developmental aspects of Habermas’s thought reveal themselves. If, as he claims, the raising of universal validity claims is the “inherent telos of human language,” and if the form of rationality is “built into” language,3 then any linguistic creation that does not exhibit these qualities can be viewed only privatively; that is, either as belonging to a stage in which “the implicit dimension of language has not yet become explicit, or as merely expressive, in which case it loses all truth value in becoming a truthful expression of subjectivity.”4 As we have seen, in Hegel’s thought the possibility of a systematic exposition of human experience in which one level of experience follows another and reveals the latencies of the previous one is based upon the retrospective reflection of a “we” subject having reached the point of Absolute Knowledge. The

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“bacchanalian revel” is revealed as having been a system, but this can be known only from the point of view of its completion. Hegel escapes the scepter of relativism not by a formal epistemological reflection, as Kant had done, but through the retrospective glance of a completed project which assigns to each aspect of expression its role as a moment in the process. In his later work, Habermas, having moved away from a Hegelian and Marxist understanding of history, is nevertheless in need of “a contextindependent position.” The developmental systems of both Hegel and Marx are replaced by Piaget and Kohlberg. In volume one of The Theory of Communicative Action, he argues as follows: As is well known, Piaget distinguishes among stages of cognitive development that are characterized not in terms of new contents but in terms of structurally described levels of learning ability. It might be a matter of something similar in the case of the emergence of new structures of world views. The caesurae between the mythical, religious-metaphysical, and modern modes of thought are characterized by changes in the system of basic concepts.5

The notion of the decentered ego is the guiding thread of Habermas’s appropriation of Piaget. Accompanying this notion is the clear distinction between the internal and the external, between language and the world—the point being that the subject who emerges from this developmental process is one who clearly distinguishes representation from reality, language from things. This is a subject who is in a position to pose falsifiable claims to truth, to inhabit a modern life world. If Habermas’s picture of modernity is by and large positive, it is not without its dark sides. While the modern worldview is the institutionalization of the human capacity for communicative rationality which issues in a rational and noncoercive consensus, at the same time it represents the development of the capacity for instrumental rationality, that is, of means/ends rationality. He faults Max Weber for making this mode of rationality primary. Habermas does not look on in horror at the development of technology. He does think that it has a capacity to foreclose the communicative employment of reason and it exhibits a tendency to colonialize the life world through bureaucratic rationality. He does not dismiss Weber’s conception of the modern world as the iron cage. In his earlier and more Marxist writings, the systematic distortions of discourse were located in the differentiation of power, and ultimately in class domination. In his later work, these distortions are attributed to the bureaucratizing tendencies of modernity and the dominance of instrumental and strategic rationality. If Habermas’s thought is still seen to be within the Marxist tradition—and it is by

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no means self-evident that it should be—then it is to his merit that he was the first to see that the bureaucratizing tendencies of modern society are tireless and illimitable. He understood that they are not the product of “reification” or “alienation” and as such capable of being “reabsorbed” in a collective “praxis,” or, in his terms of being dissolved in communicative rationality, he saw that they are here to stay. He also thinks that their actions can be circumscribed by communicative rationality and that their aggressive colonialization of the life world can be resisted. If there is a utopian dimension in Habermas’s thought, then it is, particularly in the later works, an attenuated one. Nonetheless, his conceptual system is based on the counterfactual, but enabling, possibility of a universal rational consensus, on the elimination of all coercive powers by means of communicative reason. In principle, conflicts are resolvable in the form of an ideal speech situation, even if this is posed as a regulatory idea in the Kantian sense. It is this dimension of Habermas’s thought that diverges most profoundly from that of Lefort’s. Against the backdrop of these three thinkers, together with what I have already said of Lefort’s conception of premodernity, I will explore his conception of modernity and the political latencies that it bears within itself. As is Nietzsche’s conception of modernity, Lefort’s conception of the modern world is conceived of in terms of its relationship to transcendence, but modernity’s new relation to transcendence, brought about by a profound mutation, is not one which can be fully understood merely in terms of its loss. As we have seen, Lefort’s conception of the symbolic structure of premodernity involved a reference to transcendence; this was its transcendent relation to “another place.” This reference was effected by the doubling of the king’s body, thus making the king a point of mediation between the visible and the invisible. In the French Revolution, the death of the king, both body of nature and body of grace, effects a mutation in our experience of the world. One is perhaps tempted to view Lefort’s notion of modernity as a sort of “political” version of Nietzsche’s conception of the death of God, but such a temptation should be resisted, since for Nietzsche what remains of God after his death is the smell of his decomposition, for example, the churches which have become his tombs and sepulchres. Recall that in the story of the madman in The Twilight of the Idols, many of those standing about did not believe in God, and thus they laughed at the madman’s questions as to the whereabouts of God; although they were atheist, they were unaware of the death of God. For Nietzsche they had simply substituted something else for God, be it Progress, Humanity, Socialism, or whatever. These people are as blissfully ignorant of the death of God as is the old monk whom Zarathustra meets on his way down the mountain; knowledge of God’s death would require

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a radical self-transformation; Zarathustra preaches that man is “something to be overcome.” There is as much difference between man and the übermensch as there is between humans and animals. In a similar vein, for Heidegger the way beyond modernity’s desert to “another beginning” cannot be willed but must be anticipated, since the very act of willing it would link it to the epoch of modernity and thus compromise its novelty and discontinuity. In Lefort’s thought, the advent of modernity does indeed constitute a profound rupture with the past. Nonetheless, for him there is a moment of continuity between premodernity and modernity, for although the figure of premodern transcendence is effaced, the place of this transcendence remains as an empty place. In keeping with those “standing about in the story of the madman,” practitioners of political science do not appreciate the magnitude of this transformation. In our last chapter, we spoke about Lefort’s contention that modernity is a condition in which a society can no longer incarnate itself in a determinate representation. Modernity is this disincarnation of society in which the figure, but not the place, of the other is effaced. Perhaps among the most difficult and challenging aspects of his thought is the idea that modernity disrupts the relationship between the visible and the invisible, between the world and another place; nevertheless, it does this without collapsing in on itself, that is, without foreclosing a reference to transcendence. Referring to his atheism, Sartre said, “We are on the plane where there are only men and things.” There is a certain kind of robust common sense that gravitates in this direction. If we subtract God, or the gods, and so on from the “things that are,” then it would appear that what remains would be people and things. This unphilosophical equation supposes that “to be” is “to be” either a person or a thing, that is, either a subject or an object. It is precisely this supposition that Lefort, in the wake of Merleau-Ponty, does not make. As we have seen above, according to Lefort religion is not simply a false proto-theory or a psychological projection. Religion is for him an encoding, a dramatization of a real experience which has ontological importance; it testifies to a dimension of transcendence that need not be configured or conceptualized in religious terms, which is to say, in imaginary terms. Above I have cited Lefort to the effect that humanity opens unto itself and the world by being held in an opening that it did not create. This ontological experience of nonselfsufficiency is not effaced with the “death of God”; rather, it is reconceptualized: It is what links premodernity to our epoch. Our epoch is not, as Lyotard has said, one of mourning for the death of God; perhaps it is one in which an ontological dimension of existence is revealed, a dimension which had been occulted by the religious imaginary. Lefort’s insistence on a continuity between past and present delivers

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him from what has been called the “longing for total revolution,” a longing that has infected so many intellectuals. Derrida’s book The Other Heading certainly lacks the quasi-religious tone of Heidegger’s “another beginning” in his Die Beitrage; nevertheless, it too announces a change of direction which would disjoin the future from the past in an absolute sense which can be characterized only as Other.6 In premodernity the religious foundation of power, law, and knowledge is an imaginary interpretation of the symbolic; however, from within modernity this imaginary interpretation becomes visible as such. As Lefort contends, it is only from within modernity that one can make a distinction between the symbolic and the imaginary; the great danger is that in effacing the imaginary configuration of the symbolic, we have effaced the symbolic itself. On a philosophical level, this is what Merleau-Ponty calls positivism, using the term in an extended sense which means not applying it only to the philosophy of the Vienna Circle. In his sense of the term, “positivism” refers to all those who would think Being under the sign of positivity, which is to say, those who would think Being as the “Great Object.” Lefort extends this critique to the “social scientific” conception of modernity.

Notes 1. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, tr. E. Forster (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 16–17. 2. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest, 312. 3. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action I, 130. 4. Flynn, Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics, 66. 5. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action I, 68. 6. See Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, tr. P. A. Brault and M. B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); and Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), tr. P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

7

Modernity and Law

A certain modern ideology fosters the view that “the social” can be explained on the basis of itself. Although Lefort criticizes this conception, he does not view it as a simple illusion or error. If it is an illusion, then it is one that has been motivated by modernity itself, inasmuch as the Enlightenment takes the form of a questioning of the religious guarantees of legitimacy and rightly sees that no determinate figure can replace the ancient markers of certainty. What this ideology fails to see is that it is not the dimension of the Other but rather the figure of the Other that is effaced in modernity—which means that the very activity of questioning is enabled by a symbolic dimension. What unrestrained critics of the Enlightenment such as Heidegger, Strauss, and Levinas, do not see is that if indeed there is a danger attendant on the loss of the religious foundation of politics and of ethics—that is, the danger of nihilism—there is nonetheless also a gain, which is that of the institution of an interrogation that will call the Law and all authority into question. This gain is what we call freedom, which, according to Lefort, is the very condition of the political and of politics. Within the universe of Lefort’s discourse, there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a premodern politics. Recalling that for Lefort religion is “grafted on a more original experience,” I will attempt to describe the new manner of experiencing the world and the social that happens with the onset of modern democracy. Speaking of this democracy Lefort writes, “This shaping [mise-en-forme] of society . . . testifies to a new determination-figuration of the place of power” (DPT, 225; translation modified). As we have seen, the place of power in the ancien régime is another place. In its modern form this other place does not disappear; it remains an empty place. Modern society maintains an exteriority from itself, which is what permits it to have a quasi-reflection on itself. This space between society and itself, this nonidentity with itself, is 150

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well understood by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. The public exercise of reason, called for by Kant, is possible only after reason removes itself from the power of heteronomy, which is to say, the sense of being determined from another place. This nonidentity of society with itself makes possible (enables) a discourse on “the political as such.” Since Lefort does not believe that an epistemology was enforced by the police, he claims that such a discourse was not repressed in premodern society, nor was it forbidden; rather it was impossible, due to the fact that it was not symbolically enabled. He argues that in premodern society, When reflection exercised itself on power, the organization of the City, the causes of its corruption, it remained rigorously subordinated to a theological representation of the world, which alone fixed the markers of the real and the imaginary, the true and the false, the good and the evil. There was not for thought a place of the political, and consequently there was an aim toward the real in the place proper to the political. (FH, 236)

In these societies, the place of a discourse on the political is occupied by a discourse on another place, another world, “a massively affirmed invisible.” The disruption of this discourse on another place—that is, the place of heteronomy—is (to use Kantian language in a somewhat inappropriate manner) the condition of the possibility of a discourse on the political as such. A merit of Lefort’s political philosophy is to recognize that even with the disappearance of another place, modern society continues to manifest an exteriority of society with itself, insuring it of a quasirepresentation of itself. He goes on to write: We must of course be careful not to project this externality on to the real; if we did so it would no longer have any meaning for society. It would be more accurate to say that power makes a gesture towards something outside, and that it defines itself in terms of an outside. Whatever its form, it always refers to the same enigma: that of an internal-external articulation, of a division which institutes a common space, of a break which establishes relations, of a movement of the externalization of the social which goes hand in hand with its internalization. (DPT, 225)

To say that the social no longer exists in function of its relationship to something else is not to say that it is identical with itself. Rather, it is a form of society which maintains, in its own particular way, the divergence (écart) of the symbolic and the real. This place, emptied of the figure of the Other, is the place in which the distinction between the symbolic and the

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real is maintained. Modern society effaces the figure but not the dimension of the Other. This dimension of the Other cannot be materialized, or incarnated, in a determined figure of the Other. It remains radically indefinite. The source of legitimacy in a democratic regime is the people, but “the people” remains indeterminate. I will continue my exposition of Lefort’s conception of the modern sensibility by following his 1996 article, “La Dissolution des repères et l’Enjeu Démocratique,” where he summarizes this conception of the modern sensibility.1 However, permit me to remark before beginning that my use of the word and the concept modernity is more frequent than that of Lefort since I am attempting to bring to the fore a distinction that is implicit in his work. Our epoch is characterized by the dissolution of any determinate figure in which society could incarnate its unity. It is an epoch in which the political emerges from the religious, an epoch in which there is a “dissolution of the markers of certainty.” This dispositif symbolique is referred to by me, and sometimes by Lefort, as modernity. In reality, this mutation of the symbolic is lived either as being accepted, and this is what Lefort calls the democratic project, or it is lived as an effort of foreclosure, and this is what he calls the totalitarian project. Democracy and totalitarianism are ways of living modernity. Since before referring to modernity as a political form of society, I have attempted to isolate the modern sensibility it-self; this is an abstraction but a legitimate one, I hope. In the article referred to above, Lefort orchestrates his conception of l’enjeu démocratique through a critical reflection on the work of Leo Strauss. He claims that the question that motivates Strauss’s reflection is, “Is it possible to live without ultimate references?” Arendt has posed the same question by asking, “Can we live without metaphysical banisters?” Lefort begins with a sympathetic treatment of Strauss’s book Natural Right and History, in which he reflects on modern man’s inability to comprehend the ancient Greek notion of politeia. For the Greeks, the politeia was the ordering of a city in such a manner that it would secure the best conditions for its inhabitants to live a life of excellence. Strauss argues that the moderns have a tendency to translate politeia as “constitution,” but for him this translation limits it to a juridical sense. For the Greeks, it meant both a constitution and a way of life, as, for example, in the expression “the American way of life”; or, as Lefort suggests, the notion of “regime” as the expression is used in the ancien régime, which refers to “both a way of life and a form of government.” The source of Lefort’s sympathy for Strauss’s reflection is obvious. As we have seen, for him the effacement of the notion of a régime is central to his critique of the “scientific” conception of the social sciences. Nevertheless, it is instructive to observe the divergence between Lefort’s and Strauss’s respective analyses of the reasons for the repression of this term

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as it appeared in classical political philosophy. According to Strauss, the agency of this repression is the emergence of “the philosophy of history,” be it in the writings of Hegel, Marx, or in any other form. The reason for the incompatibility of the Greek politeia and the modern philosophy of history is that the Greek conception involves a judgment; it refers to the best type of civic order that would produce a life of excellence. For the philosophy of history, on the other hand, it is the course of history which determines the nature of each epoch, that is, its rise and its decline, or its “consignment to the dustbin of history.” If there is a “judgment of history,” it has little to do with judgment in the ordinary sense, namely, in which good is distinguished from evil by reference to a criterion; for Strauss, this is a natural criterion. Strauss claims that the philosophy of history’s banishment of judgment is sanctioned by modern sociology, and in particular by Max Weber’s radical distinction between fact and value. Within the social sciences, factual judgments, in imitation of the natural sciences, are to be value free. For Strauss this promotes both relativism and, ultimately, nihilism. Furthermore, he argues that it is impossible to practice this distinction; since the human world, in contrast to the natural world, is structured in function of “values,” so, too, must be our description of it. He notes that a description of a concentration camp that does not mention cruelty because of its not being a value-neutral term would be both absurd and inaccurate. Referring to Strauss, Lefort writes, “To my eyes, the critical reflections of Leo Strauss have an undeniable pertinence.” 2 Nevertheless, they also call for some reservations. Lefort’s first reservation with Strauss’s thought concerns his conception of the philosophy of history. According to Strauss, the philosophy of history introduces the notion of “an historical process” which annuls the possibility of judgment. I note in passing that regarding this matter the position of Arendt is very close to that of Strauss. Lefort considers Strauss’s reflections on the philosophy of history as being inadequate since they do not take into account a new experience of historical time which gave rise to a philosophical reading of history. He writes, “Let us not forget that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the reading [of history] is itself the effect of a new experience of history, that of the discovery of irreversibility, a notion absent from the classical universe.”3 The classical experience of time was cyclical; as Arendt tells us, the concept of revolution before the nineteenth century meant a putting back in order, that is, the return of a cyclical moment. As I have noted above, Christianity, in its mainstream and nonmillenarian form, contains no coherent conception of history. Lefort connects the new experience of the irreversibility of history to the political upheavals at the end of the eighteenth century—the French and American Revolutions and so forth. It was dur-

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ing this time that the experience emerged of history having crossed a threshold; it was revealed that there was no going back and that the past could no longer serve as a model for the future. This new sensibility is experienced very strongly in the writings of Alexander de Tocqueville. The growing equality of condition is a providential fact; it would be folly to set oneself against it. The new sensibility expresses itself in the great philosophies of history, namely, Hegel and Marx, and also in the works of both writers and historians, for example, Chateaubriand, Guizot, Michelet, Quinet, and Tocqueville. This leads to another of Lefort’s reservations concerning Strauss’s critical reflection on modern man’s inability to understand the Greek word politeia. Strauss tells us that the paralysis of judgment engendered by the philosophy of history is reinforced by the view of the social sciences, with their tendency toward relativism. Agreeing with Strauss, Lefort has no sympathy for the type of radical relativism that would have us suspend judgment because of the relativity of the criteria by which we would effect the judgment. He has spent the best part of his intellectual life not just explaining the difference between democracy and totalitarianism but arguing for the superiority of democracy and denouncing all those for whom “all societies are equal before God” and who were thus not able to make a judgment concerning Stalinism. Nonetheless, Lefort’s response to the emergence of the social sciences, particularly ethnology, is quite different from that of Strauss. Rather than throw up his hands in horror because of the relativism of the social sciences, he discovers in the practice of these social sciences—particularly in anthropology, which is usually considered the most prone to cultural relativism of all the human sciences—an implicit philosophy, that is, a philosophical sensibility that is not elaborated or thematized but that nevertheless is perhaps in conflict with the explicitly stated philosophy. The nonthematized notion which emerges from the implicit practice of these sciences is the idea of “humanity,” which is another notion not found in the classical world. By the idea of humanity Lefort does not mean an empty abstraction. He writes, “It is the discovery of the other who, to the extent that he is other, is also one similar to myself (semblable).”4 What the ethnologist discovers in his practice is the reversibility of perspectives. Our common humanity does not consist of a shared quiddity but rather of a certain immersion in what Merleau-Ponty calls “the flesh of the world,” each fold of the flesh of the world visible from each other. The grandeur and the philosophical sense of the anthropological experience is “to know that if I cannot lead myself to immigrate into the other, I must seek all the time to recognize the place of the other, and let myself be interpreted by him.”5 Lefort views the anthropologist as living, on both a social and a cultural level, the notion that

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Merleau-Ponty elaborated in The Visible and the Invisible, in which he writes, “I can see because I am myself visible. I see the visible from the midst of itself, rather than from a subjectivity situated nowhere.” In “Metaphysics and the Novel,” an essay collected in Sense and NonSense, Merleau-Ponty tells us that there is often more philosophy in novels and historical works than there is in books designated as philosophical texts.6 A very significant portion of Lefort’s work consists of his unearthing the implicit philosophy in writers not usually thought of as philosophers, for example, de Tocqueville, Chateaubriand, and Michelet. In his thinking regarding the social sciences, which seem to preach a ferocious sort of relativism, he discovers that in fact they are engaged in a practice which implies the notion of a common humanity. Their stated philosophy notwithstanding, the social-scientific inquiry testifies to a new experience: the experience of an indefinite Other. This overlapping of perspectives is one dimension of the modern experience of Being as indefinite, that is, the experience of the dissolution of clearly marked boundaries. This notion of the indefinite plays an important role in Lefort’s conception of human rights, as we shall see below. Lefort’s third objection to Strauss’s thought concerns his idea that modern society is no longer a political society. Lefort’s response to this aspect in both Strauss’s and Arendt’s work is in reality a response to Heidegger, a thinker with whom both of them had studied. As indicated in my brief gloss of Heidegger’s conception of modernity, according to him the modern world is the gestell of technology where Being gives itself as standing reserve. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger views the Soviet Union under Stalin and the United States under Roosevelt as two pincers of the project of global mastery, and according to him, National Socialism was viewed as being the true alternative. In the middle of the 1930s, at the peak of Stalinist terror, Heidegger could see no significant difference between the USSR and the United States. The notion of a regime, and the difference between regimes, cannot be thought in the Heideggerian universe; it is foreclosed by the centrality of his conception of technology. Of course, Lefort is not attributing this kind of blindness to either the thought of Arendt or of Strauss, both of whom are German-Jewish refugees to the United States and do not ignore the difference between democracy and totalitarianism, and certainly prefer one to the other. Lefort writes, “But he [Strauss] does not think the difference in the sense in which the ancients envisioned the opposition between a healthy society and a corrupt society.”7 In keeping with Heidegger he does not theorize the distinction in terms of different regimes, because for both of them the real difference is between modernity and Plato or Aristotle (Strauss) and between the pre-Socratics and the moderns (Heidegger). For both of

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them the modern world is characterized in terms of the project of global mastery. Lefort’s objection to this way of thinking is that modern society cannot be adequately described in terms of the enframing of technology. All his thinking regarding modern society can be brought to bear on this point. In a certain respect, his conception of the modern world is exactly the opposite of Heidegger’s view, which claims that the modern world is flat, a desert, a standing reserve where everything is subject to calculation. According to Lefort, the modern experience is that of the indefinite, the loss of certainty, the frequenting of the unknown, or, one might say, the experience of the unconscious of psychoanalysis. On a more prosaic level, one could cite the experience of the unpredictable outcomes of elections upon which important issues depend. If there is something like a thinking “beyond metaphysics,” it is a thinking that opens itself to the dimension of experience that cannot be conceptualized with certainty, an experience which engages in a play— what Lefort referred to in his study of Machiavelli as “an openness to the event.” Responding specifically to Strauss with regard to the issue of whether modern society is still a political society, Lefort simply points to the existence of public debates which he claims are political in any meaningful sense of the word. He uses the example of a demonstration of thousands of people in the streets of Paris who are concerned with the issue of public versus private (religious) education. In the United States, one could use the examples of the civil rights movement, the debates concerning the Vietnam War, and the continuing debates regarding distributive justice. Permit me to begin to raise an issue to which I shall return later. We have seen that, for Lefort, one of the dimensions of modern experience is that of the irreversibility of historical time; in his article presently under consideration, he groups together Heidegger, Strauss, and Arendt as philosophers who not only have rejected the concept of progress but also have elaborated a reversal of the notion of progress, namely, a philosophy of history as decline, as loss. For Heidegger it is the loss of “the question of Being”; for Strauss it is the loss of a sense of human nature and of natural right; for Arendt it is the loss of Action. Although none of these three calls for a literal return to the past—as if such a thing were possible—nonetheless, each looks to the past as a place of retrieval, whether it be a retrieval of the question of Being, of natural right, or of the sense of action played out in the Greek polis, a notion which, I believe, remains normative for Arendt. Lefort argues that there is a certain tendency within the philosophical disposition that rejects the experience of modernity, and in particular the issue concerning us here, that is, the irreversibility of historical time. There is a nostalgia not only for Greece specifically but also the past in general. This desire for the “good old days”

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can be presented in a very sophisticated philosophical version. I will return to this subject later in my discussion. Lefort’s final objection to Strauss’s thought is that it does not recognize modern democracy as a new form of political society. He notices that in Strauss’s extensive commentary on the writings of Plato, he never comments upon Plato’s characterization of democracy in book eight of The Republic. Plato depicts democracy as the theater of the dissolution of the markers of social life: children disobeying their parents, students disrespecting their teachers, old men making fools of themselves for the pleasure of children, even donkeys refusing to recognize themselves as donkeys. For him it is a political regime of license, where the opposition between good and evil desires is effaced. Lefort contends that this representation would be profoundly inappropriate for modern democracy inasmuch as it ignores the fact that modern democracy emerges as a defense of rights and as a rejection of the arbitrary. He never defines democracy as simply the rule of the majority; rather he always considers it within the context of a republican tradition, a tradition in which the obedience to the law, a law that one has imposed upon oneself, is the contrary of the subjection to the arbitrary will of another, or even to one’s own caprice. There is not an equation between freedom and caprice, or license. In terms of Lefort’s positive considerations of modern democracy as a new political form of society, perhaps its most striking aspect is that of the disincarnation of power. Modern democracy is a mutation of the “theologicopolitical” dimensions of the monarchy which preceded it. He writes, “For that system [the monarchial] the very principle of knowledge and law found itself incorporated in the power, which is, itself, incorporated in the person of the prince. But the birth of modern democracy occurs under the sign of the affirmation of a right and of a law beyond any power which could appropriate them.”8 In modern democracy, power resides in an empty place; this place can no longer be unambiguously designated, since it is a regime in which radical indeterminacy is instituted. With the death of the king, body of nature and body of grace, the place in which society transcends itself cannot be incarnated in any determinate figure. As we have seen above, this does not mean that the society becomes identical with itself; rather, it means that the legitimacy of law can no longer be referred to another place, which is not to say that it resides in this place. The trace of the another place, of social man’s identity with himself, is indicated in the democratic notion of “the people.” Lefort is intensely aware that a merely empirical genesis of the law would be equivalent to the destruction of its legitimacy, since on the empirical level—on the level of the real—there are only interests, and an interest cannot impose an obligation either on myself or on someone

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else. At another level, Kant gives an example of the same thing in his Critique of Practical Reason. For Lefort, the moment of transcendence is not referred to the universal form of the will but rather to the enigma of society’s movement of self-transcendence. Evoking the words of Lefort already quoted above: Whatever its form, it always refers to the same enigma: that of an internalexternal articulation, of a division which institutes a common space, of a break which establishes relations, of a movement of the externalization of the social which goes hand in hand with its internalization. (DPT, 225)

It is with the gesture that power makes toward something outside itself that the society diverges from the sum of its empirical interests. It is a gesture that is made in the name of the people, because in a democracy legitimacy arises from the people. But who are the people? And who speaks in the people’s name? This question is, in principle, impossible to resolve. The continuing debate concerning it is the very life of a democracy. Lefort’s sense of the indeterminacy of the place of legitimacy is well illustrated in an aside he makes comparing modern democracy to ancient Greek democracy. And although he does not note this, it distinguishes his thought from that of Arendt, for whom Greek democracy remains normative. He tells us that it is imperative not to confuse the notion that power belongs to no one with the idea that it designates an empty place; the former is the formula of ancient Greece, the latter is not. To say that power belongs to no one is to say that “power is in the middle,” that no one in the community of equals has the right to possess it, that it is engendered by consensus. This formula was initially elaborated within the Greek aristocracy before its being linked to democracy. Essential to this conception is a well-defined group with a definite notion of its own common space and its limits, that is, its own identity. Here power belongs between us, not to anyone individually or outside us. As is well known, even at the height of Greek democracy, citizens were a distinct minority. The history of Greek democracy reveals a progressive diminution of citizenship. Whereas on the contrary, the notion of “the people,” from which modern democracy draws its legitimacy, is precisely not a definite notion; it has no exact limits. In this democratic regime, in contrast to the premodern regime, there is no distinct figuration of the Other; correlatively, there is no figure which incarnates the One. This radical indeterminacy of the people is a central tenet of Lefort’s conception of modern democracy. The democratic regime is defined by the legitimacy of division and conflict. The democratic form of society, by eliminating the reference to

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another place, opens a space proper to the political. What is striking is the following: The delineation of a specifically political activity has the effect of erecting a stage on which conflict is acted out for all to see (once citizenship is no longer reserved for a small number) and is represented as being necessary, irreducible and legitimate. (DPT, 227)

Lefort does not argue that modern societies have no identity; he remains at a certain distance from all theories of massification, suspecting them of having a longing for a more substantial identity, that is, an identity of the type proper to premodern societies. According to him, the identity of modern society, and for modern humanity as well, is not one of loss but rather one that is continually put into question. Who we are, and who speaks in our name, is given in modernity not as a fact but as a question (DPT, 18). Democracy is the regime in which the social division is recognized and conflict is institutionalized. We have seen that what attracted Lefort the young Marxist to Machiavelli was the latter’s emphasis on the notion of social conflict. The aspect of Machiavelli’s thought that led Lefort out of Marxism was that the Florentine did not envision any definitive resolution of the conflict between the grandee and the people, no ultimate synthesis or final struggle.9 Lefort argues that only modern society legitimates social division and breaks with the image of a substantial community. There are, of course, empirical conflicts of interest in all societies, including monarchies; however, in a monarchy—inasmuch as the source of legitimacy and social identity are anchored in another place—conflict, court intrigues, even assassinations can be permitted without putting the social identity or the origin of legitimacy into question. Nevertheless, in a modern democracy, the law is neither situated outside the social, in another place, nor is it simply a product of the social. Modernity gives rise to the notion that the law is a pure convention, but as Lefort has shown us this is an illusion. Obviously, the laws of particular countries are made by people at particular times and places. Nonetheless, lawfulness as such, the distinction of the permissible and the impermissible, is not itself a convention; rather, it relates us to the enigma of social man’s nonidentity with himself. Lefort writes, “Certainly the law announces itself. But in announcing itself it simultaneously effects its own retreat,” and then he continues, “If I say I have a right to, it is because I am situated in the movement of a first law which escapes me.”10 The law, lawfulness, is never present as such. As Heidegger has shown us, every revelation is, at the same

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time, a concealment; likewise for Lefort, the law, in announcing itself, withdraws. Lefort is not the only thinker to be struck by this curious character of the law, that is, of its never being fully present. Kafka tell us that, “Before the Law stands the doorkeeper.” In fact, innumerable doorkeepers, “each more powerful than the last.” The supplicant “before the Law” is astonished that the door to the law, which should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, is visited only by him. As he is dying, it is “explained” to him that “no one else could be admitted here, since the gate was made only for you, and now I am going to close it.” The law is both universal and singular, and as such must be so. If the law were only singular, if I claim to be a law unto myself, then all the arguments that Wittgenstein advanced against a private language could be evoked. If the law were only universal, then I would take no interest in it and would not seek access to it. As Kant writes in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, “In order to will that which reason alone prescribes to the sensuously affected rational being as that which it ought to will, certainly there is required a power of reason to instill a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction in the fulfillment of duty.” There must be a causality of reason to determine the sensibility in accord with its own principles. Respect for the law is a fact of reason. It is the one, and only, instance of a causality of reason. Strictly speaking, knowledge of this is foreclosed, since causality is a relationship of sensuous determination. Anyone who would attempt to gain access to, to know, the causality of reason would make himself guilty of the speculative transgression against which the Critique of Pure Reason was directed. Moreover, although the law as imperative is accessible to all, it is impossible to know whether our actions, even if in compliance with the law, are done out of respect for the law. As Kant claims, “It is in fact absolutely impossible to discern with complete certainty a single case in which the maxim of an action, however much it may conform to duty, rested solely on moral grounds.” Indeed, the doorkeepers are powerful. We find among them Immanuel Kant himself. For both Kant and Kafka, the law is not accessible to immediate intuition. It cannot be present in person. It is my contention that there is something fundamentally elusive about the law, and this is primarily due to its temporal structure. I will now turn briefly to two thinkers who, at least in part of their work, exhibit a sensitivity to a fundamental divergence from itself by which the law phenomenalizes itself. Lévi-Strauss and before him Freud—the former in The Elementary Structure of Kinship and the latter in Totem and Taboo—have argued that the transition from nature to culture is effected by the “imposition” of the law in its elementary form, that is, the incest taboo. In function of the incest taboo, a “primal herd” is transformed by the necessity of exogamous marriage into an articulated social group

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which is held both together and apart by the exchange of women. The biological mechanism of reproduction involving male, female, and offspring is supplemented by the avuncular function of exchange. Social life, considered not as commerce with nature but as the interrelation of people effected within an articulated whole—a society rather than a herd—is established by a political act, that is, the imposition of the law. I will reflect a moment on the status of the representation of the law. The law seems to be located neither simply within nor simply outside of society. Both LéviStrauss and Freud are sensitive to this ambiguity of the law. In Elementary Structure of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss writes: Let us suppose then that everything universal in man relates to the natural order, and is characterized by spontaneity, and that everything subject to a norm is cultural and is both relative and particular. We are then confronted with a fact, or rather, a group of facts, which, in the light of previous definitions, are not far removed from a scandal: we refer to that complex group of beliefs, customs, conditions and institutions described succinctly as the prohibition of incest, which presents, without the slightest ambiguity, and inseparably combines, the two characteristics in which we recognize the conflicting features of two mutually exclusive orders. It constitutes a rule, but a rule which, alone among all social rules, possesses at the same time a universal character.11

The law prohibiting incest, the prototype of all laws, resides unambiguously in neither nature nor culture; rather, it participates in both. The analysis of Lévi-Strauss suggests that the law itself, the very form of law, may in some respect “predate,” be irreducible to, the act of legislation. In Freud’s Totem and Taboo, the ambiguous status accorded to the origin of the law is not identical to that found in the work of Lévi-Strauss, but neither is it unrelated. The “story” or “myth” or “hypothesis” that Freud relates is well known. The tyrannical father of a primal herd monopolizes the women for his exclusive sexual enjoyment and exiles his sons. The sons in frustration rise up against the father and kill him. Then, full of remorse and in an effort to overcome the fratricidal struggle for power, the dead father is replaced by a totem animal (which is subsequently replaced by God) as author of the law. This totemic system is, as it were, a covenant with their father, in which he promised them everything that a childish imagination may expect from a father: protection, care, and indulgence; while on their side, they undertook to respect his life, that is to say, not to repeat the deed which had brought destruction on their real father. The sons resolve not to kill, or to eat, the flesh of the totem animal; they also promise to abstain from sexual intercourse with women of the same clan,

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thus necessitating exogamous marriage. Freud says that they had no alternative but to “institute the law against incest,” thereby renouncing what was the very motive of the rebellion in the first place. I will now turn to the ambiguous intertwining of the law and its transgression. One habitually thinks of the law as existing and then subsequently being transgressed. In this text of Freud, however, things are not so simple. “Totemic religion arose from the filial sense of guilt, in an attempt to allay that feeling and to appease the father by deferred obedience to him” (emphasis added). Generally, guilt is consequent on the transgression of the law, but in this instance the institution of the social, the law, comes to exist subsequently to its transgression. It comes to exist by deferred action, by nachtraglichkeit. The law cannot be said to be instituted by men, nor is it simply imposed on them from elsewhere. It is neither outside nor inside. The ambiguous status of the law is such that it comes to exist in and by the guilt generated through its transgression. Freud further notes the intertwining of the institution of the law and its carnivalesque transgression in the phenomenon of the memorial festival of the totem meal “in which the restrictions of deferred obedience no longer held.” The festival commemorating the origin of the law is a massive and collective transgression of the law in which the totem animal, symbol of the primal father, is killed and eaten, and all sexual prohibitions are ignored. The totem meal commemorates not only the origin of the law but also its transgression. In the analyses of Lévi-Strauss and Freud, the status of the law, the ur-law, is a “scandal” to a metaphysics of presence and to the linear conception of temporality, inasmuch as it both precedes itself and follows from itself, and is never given as present, either in the opposition presence/absence or in that of present/past. This theme, of the retreat of the law, emerged early in Lefort’s work. The reader will perhaps recall his critique of the anthropologist Abraham Kardiner’s attempt to transform psychoanalysis into a quasi-observable form of behavioral psychology. Central to that critique was Kardiner’s reduction of the law, that is, the interdiction against incest, to simply an empirically observable given. Lefort does not give an anthropological foundation to democracy, as if the democratic regime were somehow called up by the very nature of reality as such. According to him, democracy is a product of a contingent human adventure; nonetheless it does respect certain ontological conditions of the social, or perhaps of Being as such. To clarify this point, let me anticipate the future course of this book. At a time when most of his listeners thought that he was crazy, Lefort argued that the symbolic dispositive of totalitarianism could not stabilize itself, that it could not last indefinitely. In fact, decades before it actually did collapse, he argued that the USSR would implode. His point, to which I will later return, is that there

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are intractable and permanent dimensions of our ontological condition to which the totalitarian regime could not accommodate itself, namely: the intractability of conflict, the social division, the nonidentity of society with itself. It is possible that a democratic regime could have never arisen, or that all such regimes will be destroyed; nevertheless, given the fact of their existence, they have accorded themselves with the ontological given to which I have already referred. With regard to what laws are to be passed, the empirically observable and legitimate debates rest upon the ontological presence/absence of lawfulness as such. In a democratic society, the symbolic place of society’s identity with itself remains empty; this place can be occupied only temporarily and in function of procedural rules that legitimate both opposition and contestation. There is an irreducible exteriority of power from itself; its center does not coincide with a point of mediation which would link it to a supersensible domain, that is, to another place.

Notes 1. Claude Lefort, “La Dissolution des repères et l’enjeu démocratique,” Humain à l’image de Dieu (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1989), 89–108. 2. Ibid., 93. 3. Ibid., 94. 4. Ibid., 95. 5. Ibid. 6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Metaphysics and the Novel,” tr. H. Dreyfus and P. A. Dreyfus, in Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964). 7. Lefort, “Dissolution,” 96. 8. Ibid., 99. 9. Ibid., 101. 10. Ibid. 11. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship, tr. J. Bell and J. Sturmer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 8–9.

8

Modernity and Rights

In Lefort’s thought, when I use the expression “I have a right,” this notion of right is attached to a “first law that escapes me.” He argues that the modern conception of “right” attests to the disincarnation of the polity, the exteriority of society to itself. The philosophical problem connected with human rights is the question of their foundations. In whom do human rights inhere and how do they come to be constituted? The simplest answer is that they inhere in each individual, that they are innate and granted by God. The problems with this response are self-evident. In a secular society, a political theory that presupposes the existence of God will not do. The first part of the response is equally, if less obviously, problematic. If we put the rights-bearing individual at the center of our discussion, have we not thereby committed ourselves to a social contract notion of society? Such a notion of society is certainly excluded from Lefort’s thought. As we have seen, he uses the concept of the symbolic order precisely because its defining characteristic is that it is not reducible to having been instituted by preexisting subjects; on the contrary, one becomes a subject by one’s placement in it. Lefort argues that social contract theories are a form of positivism by which society attempts to explain itself exclusively in terms of itself. Moreover, we would have to ask: “Who is this man in whom rights inhere?” Is it “natural man” or—the same thing stated differently— “universal man”? This man who emerges with the new notion of rights is a man or a woman without historical or social determinations, a radically indeterminate man. This notion of Man has been attacked by both the right and the left. Lefort quotes Joseph de Maistre, “I have met Italians, Russians, Spaniards, Englishmen, Frenchmen, but I do not know man.” In its modern form, often but not necessarily linked to the political right, a hermeneutically informed neo-Aristotelianism would object to the abstract formulation of 164

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the bearer of rights. It would argue that rights are the products of the history of a nation. However, the problem with this formulation is that it dissolves modernity into tradition because it does not recognize the historically specific transformation of the notion of rights which took place at the time of the democratic revolution. The concept of rights certainly preexists the modern period, but in modernity it undergoes a profound mutation. During the period of the medieval monarch, the Christian prince was obliged to respect specific rights that were acquired historically by specific groups, for example, the clergy, the nobility, the estates. In the article “Politics and Human Rights,” Lefort writes: Subjected to right, in the sense that the origin of this right was to be found in God or in Justice, his power extended nevertheless beyond all limits, to the degree that he dealt only with himself in the relation that he formed with his subjects. (PFM, 256)

Rights here have a specific place of origin in the relationship of the king with himself, body of nature and body of grace; they are the rights of specifically defined groups. With the disappearance of the king, rights acquire a new “subject”: Man. From the left, the most sustained attack on the concept of the rights of man is to be found in Marx’s On the Jewish Question, in which he writes, “The so-called rights of man, the droits de l’homme as distinct from the droits du citoyen, are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society, i.e., the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from community” (PFM, 245). According to Marx, the “Man” of the Rights of Man is an abstraction, but an abstraction based upon a historically specific type, namely, the egoistic bourgeoisie of capitalist society. Both the Rights of Man and the man or women to whom these rights belong are a product of ideology. As readers of Marx know, an ideology is a universalization of a historical position of a dominant class. The mechanism by which this particular ideology is produced is that of the relationship between civil society and the state in a capitalist social formation. Lefort writes: Marx retains from the bourgeois revolution what he calls “political emancipation,” that is, the delimitation of a sphere of politics as a sphere of the universal, at a distance from society, leaving society reduced to a combination of particular interests and individual existences, broken down into its component parts. He regards this political emancipation as a necessary and transitory phase in the process of human emancipation. And since this phase is conceived of by the bourgeoisie as the very realization of human emancipation, he sees it as the moment of the “politi-

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cal illusion” par excellence. In this sense, political “emancipation” and political “illusion” turn out for him to be indissociable. (PFM, 247)

Basically Lefort has three objections to Marx’s reading of the notion of rights. His first objection is that Marx views the rights of Man as being radically the rights of the individual who is opposed to, and separated from, society; here the right of private property is clearly the paradigm. Lefort objects that the rights of freedom of speech, freedom to write, and freedom of association are certainly not the rights of an individual separated from other individuals, inasmuch as the two former freedoms involve an interlocutor, and, in the latter case, one obviously cannot associate with oneself. The second objection is historical. Marx regards the modern state as the effect, and the completion, of bourgeois property relations, whereas Lefort locates the figure of universalization that is the condition of the modern state much earlier. He writes: . . . the figure of the Nation, of the People, of the agency that serves as guarantee of its unity, began to emerge in the fourteenth century . . . the split of which he [Marx] speaks between the universal and the particular took place for the first time in Europe as a result of the formation of the monarchy, based on a theory of sovereignty, and not as a result of the fragmentation of private interests. . . . Far from the state arising out of the emancipation of bourgeois society, shaking itself free of the feudal world, it was much more the case that the establishment of territorial kingdoms, unified by the common allegiance of subjects to the monarch and gradually leveled down by state power, created the conditions for the expansion of the bourgeoisie. (PFM, 254–255)

Lefort argues that what Marx ignores is the fact that the formation of the etat de droit is a product of the secularization of the Christian notion of the “mystical body of Christ,” a notion that both historically precedes, and is irreducible to, bourgeois property relations. Lefort’s last and most important objection, an objection that in some way subsumes the first two, is the same objection that he elaborated upon in great detail against both Marx’s theory of ideology and the orthodox Marxist theory of history, that is, their failure to make the distinction between the ideological and the symbolic—a failure that entails a denegation of the symbolic and thus of the political as such. Marx is able to characterize political emancipation, and along with it the “political illusion,” as merely partial only because his analysis is finalized toward a society that would be transparent to itself, a society that would be coincident

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with itself in the real. For him an exteriority of society to itself could appear only as an illusion, an alienation based on the partial socialization of society. His thought fails to see the mutation in the symbolic by which “right comes to represent something which is ineffaceably external to power” (PFM, 256). Before proceeding to Lefort’s concept of rights, I will remark in passing that although Marx’s misconception of the rights of man has rendered his thought serviceable for legitimating the ideology of totalitarian regimes, nevertheless Lefort is not arguing that Marx’s thought constitutes a totalitarian discourse. In Marx’s philosophy there is a play between political illusion and political emancipation, the latter being conceived of as a necessary stage in human emancipation, whereas in a totalitarian regime, political emancipation is annulled and political illusion reaches a point of paroxysm in the phantasmic claim that the State, or the Party, incarnates the entirety of society. As we have seen, Lefort claims that the democratic revolution is what initiates a society that is not identical with itself, that is, a society whose identity with itself is not constituted in another place through the mediation of a social body projected on the body of the king. The style of reflection that he practices, the type of concepts that he employs, are appropriate to the form of society upon which he is reflecting. For Lefort, “Man” is neither an aberration of the Enlightenment nor a mystification of the bourgeoisie. He argues that the notion “Man” discloses a transversal dimension of social relations, relations in which individuals are the terms and which confer on those individuals their identity, just as much as they are produced by them (PFM, 257). “Man” designates neither fact nor abstraction but rather a dimension of a historically specific “flesh of the political”; it introduces into political discourse the notion of the indeterminate. Right adheres to an indeterminate point; it points to a “sphere that cannot be controlled” (PFM, 256). Or, perhaps stated otherwise, right represents the domain of power’s exteriority from itself; right lacks a fixed point, a social body. As one might expect, Lefort summarizes his conception of rights in the form of three paradoxes. The first is the following: With the breakdown of the hierarchical social forms of the ancien régime, the society becomes a society of free and equal individuals in the sense that it becomes homogenous and thus the object of mathematicized sociology. Nevertheless, this society is at the same time “uncircumscribable, by virtue of the fact that it cannot be related to itself in all its elements and represent itself as a single body, deprived as it has now become of the mediation of an incorporated power” (PFM, 256). In other words, modes of existence, modes of activity, and modes of communication, whose effects are indeterminate

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and for that very reason move out of the orbit of power, are now recognized. As we have seen above, this “frequenting of the unknown,” this new relation with the Other, engenders psychoanalysis. The second paradox is that in a democratic society the rights of man are declared to belong to each individual; nevertheless, there is an intertwining of the act of declaring rights and the rights declared. With regard to rights, the relationship between the act of enunciating and the enounce is not at all the same as, for instance, a table’s being red and the act of saying that the table is red. The redness of the table is prior to, and unaffected by, our predication of it; however, this is not the case with rights. Since there is no definite center from which a master discourse could be announced (recall Lefort’s critique of the notion that democracy is a form of secularized religion), and since there is no sacred text definitively fixing the enunciation to the enounce, the signifier to the signified, then all such fixings must be provisional and subject to revision. Lefort writes: It is impossible to detach the statement from the utterance as soon as nobody is able to occupy the place, at a distance from all others, from which he would have authority to grant or ratify rights. Thus rights are not simply the object of a declaration, it is their essence to be declared. (PFM, 257)

Inasmuch as rights cannot be definitively fixed, Lefort, in spite of the importance he attributes to institutionalization, does not identify democracy with the institutionalization of any particular rights; rather, for him a democratic polity is the “theatre of a contestation” (PFM, 258). As language (la langue) institutes the possibility of speech (la parole), democracy institutes the field within which rights can be announced and contested. The third paradox is the following: In one respect rights belong to the individual and society appears to be composed of many little sovereigns; but in another respect, it is the democratic polity that, in its own particular way, accords legitimacy to the symbolic order, an order which is not reducible to the activity of a subject but rather grants subjectivity through one’s placement in it. Identity is thus engendered by this transversal dimension of the social. The existence of the type of rights in a democratic society testifies to the disincarnation of the point at which, in the ancien régime, law, power, and knowledge were condensed. They testify to a certain exteriority of society to itself; no longer are they a point of mediation between the visible and the invisible. Lefort sees his noncoincidence of society with itself, which comes to a certain transparency in modernity, as emerging at the time of the constitution of the European monarchy.

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In the early 1990s, in his series at the French publishing house Bélin, Lefort published a bilingual edition, in French and Latin, of Dante’s La Monarchie. His Preface to this edition is a long interpretative essay entitled “La Modernité de Dante.”1 To begin with: the audacious title! “Modernity” predicated of a text written in 1311, a text that argues for a universal monarchy founded on arguments drawn from the works of Aristotle and the Bible. In the text of Dante, Lefort found adumbrated two ideas that would come to fruition in the modern period, namely, the ambiguous identity of sovereignty and the phantasm of the One. For him, The Monarchy is not just an occasional work written under the pressure of events, nor is it an idiosyncratic position taken by Dante; rather, he sees it as a work that lies at the very foundation of the constitution of the European monarchy. In fact, a large part of his essay deals with the historical appropriation of this book by the monarchs of Europe. Lefort considers it to be a work that effects a mutation in the symbolic dimension of the political. In what sense can this work be called modern? I begin with the fact that Dante views mankind as having two destinies, one eternal and the other temporal. The former is ruled by divine grace and falls under the governance of the Pope; the latter is guided by the development of the intellectual virtues and is ruled by the universal monarch. With this gesture, Dante establishes the autonomy of temporal life—autonomy in the sense that life on earth has its own proper teleology; it is not subject to the rule of the Pope. At the same time, he asserts the autonomy of philosophy from theology, and puts philosophy in charge of engendering the temporal perfection of man on earth. Nevertheless, we can ask: “Why must temporal perfection demand the form of a universal monarchy?” In The Monarchy Dante writes, “By the temporal government of the world, or the universal empire, we mean a single government over all men in time, that is, over and in all things which can be measured by time.”2 He then advances a number of reasons for this, the first of which is an analogy with the body. Evoking Aristotle, he writes, “Just as nature makes for the thumb one purpose, the whole hand for another, the arm for still another, and the whole man for purposes different from all of these, so an individual man has one purpose, a family another, a neighborhood another, a city another, a state another, and finally there is another for all of mankind, established by the Eternal God’s art, which is nature.”3 The function of mankind is to develop its specific difference from the rest of creation, namely, its intellectual growth, a function that transcends the ability of any individual or group. The condition for the realization of this telos is universal peace. To achieve this state of universal peace “a single world government is necessary.”4 Why? Again he cites Aristotle, arguing that where there is a multiplicity there

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must be hierarchy. As a single person is ruled by his or her rational faculties, a household is ruled by the father, and mankind as a whole must be ruled by a single individual, the emperor. Although consistently citing Aristotle, Lefort notes Dante’s profound break from Aristotle. For Aristotle, the object of political philosophy is the city. The city is situated in a well-defined geographical space, in which there is a clear demarcation between citizen and noncitizen. Lefort shows that Dante abandons the idea of borders of natural sociability; for him, “the civic society of the human species includes nations of multiple dimensions, people who are ignorant of one another, who are exposed to different climates and who are attached to their own particular customs, and whose unity rests solely on their common submission to the jurisdiction of a universal monarch.”5 According to Aristotle, the constitution of a city is universal only in the sense that it must conform to reason; nonetheless, it can be realized only in a particular city. Indeed, the idea of universal humanity preexists Dante, though he was the first to transform it into a political category. His second break from classical philosophy, and the second aspect of the modernity of Dante, is the role played by history; in his thought there is a distinctively proto-Hegelian conception of history. Another of the reasons that he advances for the universal monarchy, and why it should be Roman, is that the birth of Christ took place during the Augustan Empire, “when there prevailed a maximum of world peace,” which happened in consequence of a complete and singular world government.6 Dante entitled book two of The Monarchy “That Roman World-Rule Was Acquired by Right.” This right did not consist in the subjective intentions of the Romans; rather, after surveying the history of the conquest of the ancient world, Dante concludes that the final victory by the Romans was effected by “a cunning of reason.” The Romans did not wish to rule the world in order that Christ could be born in a state of universal peace; nonetheless, this is what constitutes the truth of the Roman victory. Lefort writes, “What confers legitimacy to the conqueror, are not his intentions, but the result of his action, such that it would appear après coup as having posed a marker on the course that humanity follows in the direction of its final end.”7 Dante’s argument contains a certain ambiguity, as did Hegel’s. On the one hand, Dante at times comes close to subordinating the birth of Christ to a rationality of universal progress, and thus making it an indicator, or marker, of what is the temporal destiny of humanity, namely, universal monarchy. On the other hand, Dante evokes miracles which indicate the direct intervention of God in Roman history, and at times it appears that the Romans, and not the Jews, are the elected people of God. Perhaps better put: If the Jews and the vicar of Christ (the Pope) are

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elected in terms of the eternal end of man and the Romans are elected for the temporal end of man, this radically advances the foundation of a purely secular politics. The authority and legitimacy of the emperor are not derived from the Pope but rather immediately from God. Referring to Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, Lefort argues that it is Dante who conceives, for the first time, of two universes that are not only distinct but also in some sense autonomous: the universe of humanitas and that of Christianitas. There are two models: one human centered, the other theological centered. Moreover, his analysis discovers two versions of the mystical body: one of the Church and the other of Humanity.8 The monarchy gives a new figure to humanity, it institutes a conception of linear history in opposition to the cyclical conception of time; it also gives an autonomous dignity to earthly life and to secular politics. In addition, this notion of the “monarchy” excited the imagination of the princes of modern Europe and introduced a reflection on the myth of the One.9 Readers of Lefort will take note when he writes, “The true name of the emperor is the name of the One.”10 In opposition to Proudhon, Marx argued that history moves on its bad side. For Lefort, there is, to use Merleau-Ponty’s expression, a profound intertwining of, on the one hand, the concept of universal humanity as a political category which will give rise to the notion of the rights of man; and, on the other, the figure of the One as a phantasm that will invite the occultation of difference in the name of an impossible unity. In his earlier works, Lefort argued that the symbolique dispositif of the eighteenth century bore within itself the seeds of both democracy and totalitarianism. Later, in “La Modernité de Dante,” he traces this representation to the fourteenth century. The figure of the One institutes an ambiguity concerning the limits of sovereignty. He writes, “Such is the double aspect of the formation of the State at the end of the Middle Ages: the inscription of power and the law on a territory, the delimitation of political society into defined frontiers, the concentration of the means of power between the hands of the prince and, in a parallel way, the conversion of this territory onto holy land, the transfiguration of the State into a spiritual being, the investment in the person of the king with an authority of divine origin.”11 This will simultaneously limit and extend sovereignty; it will be evoked against arbitrary power but also give rise to messianic imperialism and dreams of world conquest. Lefort argues that the figure of the One is not an invention of Dante; it is not a theory proposed by him. Rather, it is an interpretation of the symbolic dimension of the political, which for Lefort is neither a theory nor a practice, neither true nor false. It is that which opens a space for theory and practice, and for the true and the false. The One is less an idea in a theory and more a representation having sym-

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bolic efficacity, as Lévi-Strauss used this term in reference to the creation story recited by the shaman to a woman giving birth to a child. Continuing to trace the intertwining of the idea of humanity and the phantasm of “the One,” I will now turn to Lefort’s essay “Le Nom d’Un” (The Name of the One), which appears with other essays on La Boétie’s The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude in the book La Boétie et la Question du Politique.12 The opposition between La Boétie and Dante could not be more stark. Nonetheless, La Boétie prefaces his text on voluntary servitude, written in the sixteenth century, with a citation from Homer that could just as well have been written by Dante. He writes, “I see no good in having several lords. Let one alone be master, let one alone be king.” But far from considering the kingship of the One to be the condition for the achievement of the temporal destiny of humanity, La Boétie sees in it a monstrous vice, “which does not even deserve to be called cowardice, a vice for which no term can be found vile enough, which nature herself disavows and our tongues refuse to name.”13 La Boétie’s revulsion for the role of the One is that it is not explicable by cowardice. Two men, maybe even ten, may be afraid of a single man and serve him out of fear; but in the case of the One, “a million men refuse to assail a single man from whom the kindest treatment received is the infliction of serfdom and slavery.”14 According to La Boétie, servitude, submission to the One, at least when it is not imposed by force, is not endured but desired. The people are “charmed by the name of the One.” The One is not a foreign oppressor, rather, it is a phantasmic representation of the body engendered by, to use psychoanalytic terminology, projection. He argues that he who thus dominates over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body. He has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. “Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy on you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trampled on your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have power over you, except through you? How could he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you?”15 Further on in the text, speaking of the people under the yoke of the One, La Boétie argues that “this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.” Lefort’s reading of this text is close and detailed; it will not be possible to summarize it here. Rather, we shall draw from it what seems relevant for our present project. Regarding the question of servitude, Lefort is careful to note the distance that separates the thought of La Boétie from that of Hegel. According to La Boétie, it is not death which is the sovereign lord and master; also he does not argue that servitude is first of all a slavery to life. For him, those charmed by the name of

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the One would cheerfully endure death at his behest. Perhaps we should hesitate radically to juxtapose Dante and La Boétie, as if “the One” that Dante affirms and La Boétie denounces were identical. Such a juxtaposition could overlook the profound break that La Boétie effects with, and within, the Christian theologico-political. As we have seen, Dante establishes the basis for a politics that is autonomous from the spiritual power of the church. However, the emperor, “the One,” who does not derive his authority from the Pope, does nonetheless derive it directly from God, who is the immaterialized invisible. By contrast, “the One” of which La Boétie speaks is detached from any transcendence whatsoever. Indeed, “Why be astonished and scandalized at the spectacle of a million obeying even the most weak and effeminate man, if they believe that this perfectly ordinary man, with an ordinary body, is the instrument of the will of God,”16 that is, if they believe that the body of nature is linked to the body of grace? La Boétie is so far from connecting the power of the One to the image of God that his last sentence in The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude reads as follows: “As for me, I truly believe I am right, since there is nothing so contrary to a generous and loving God as tyranny, I believe He has reserved, in a separate spot in Hell, some very special punishment for tyrants and their accomplices.”17 In the thought of La Boétie, the problematic of the doubling of the body remains; however, the place of the materialized invisible as a moment in the theologico-political is effaced. Thus Lefort contends that La Boétie opens “the space of a new speech” in which the origin and intelligibility of the figure of “the One” will be sought in human desire. One must ask: Desire for what? If desire seeks to possess its object, the desire for slavery seems contradictory and absurd, since the slave relinquishes his or her very right to possession. Also, it is a strange desire in its relationship to its contrary, the desire for liberty. La Boétie insists that in order to extricate oneself from the power of “the One,” it is not necessary to do anything but only to stop doing something, namely, desiring servitude. Since “the One” is constructed solely out of our desires, “it is not necessary to deprive him [the tyrant] of anything, but simply to give him nothing.”18 Freedom and the desire for freedom are identical; you will be free “merely by willing to be free.” The desire for servitude can be substituted for the desire for liberty, and vice versa. La Boétie is not speaking of an “inner freedom” but of political freedom, and he is not underestimating the violence of tyrants. He is speaking of the constitution of tyranny on the symbolic level. Recently, I read an account by an American China scholar, an erstwhile Maoist, of his trip to China during the “great cultural proletarian revolution.” At the end of his stay, he said to his guide, who had shown him many miracles wrought by the reading of Mao’s Red Book, “I have a

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feeling that you have deceived me.” To which his wily interlocutor responded, “I have a feeling that you desired to be deceived.” Voilà! Voluntary servitude. But we may ask: Whose desire is it? What could be the motive of this desire? It is at this point in La Boétie’s text that the notion of the people appears. He speaks of the poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined by their own misfortune and blind to their own good. He claims that it is the desire of “the people” that constructs “the One.” Immediately after evoking the people as the basis for this desire for servitude, there appears the citation above concerning the constitution of the phantasmic body, a body with an infinite number of eyes to spy, arms to beat, feet to trample, a body which is constructed by borrowing from many persons who have only two eyes, two feet, and so forth. With regard to this form of the doubling of the body, Lefort argues that the visible body of the tyrant, who is only one among others, attaches itself to the image of a body without equal, without replication, at the same time entirely separate from those who see it; this image of a body which is entirely related to itself, and which is all-seeing, all-acting, would let nothing subsist outside itself. “Image of detached power, overhanging the mass without power, master of the existence of all and each; but also image of the society allreassembled and possessing one and the same organic identity. Or, better put, the same image condenses division and indivision.”19 What is purchased at the cost of freedom is the construction of another body, a body in which the plurality within society finds, on the level of phantasy, a substantial identity. Nevertheless, simultaneously with this mad affirmation of the Other, the society that incarnates itself phantasmically lets us understand, literally, that it is embodied as “the One”; plurality denies itself, engulfing itself in “the One.” The One is a vision, but it is a unique vision in which there is a condensation of seeing and visibility, of activity and passivity. In this phantasmic body of the Other, the chiasm (intertwining) of vision and visibility, of identity and difference, is closed. Recall that for Merleau-Ponty, the immanence of the touchingtouched, of the body’s identity with itself, is never realized; it is always deferred. It is in function of this nonidentity with itself that the body is open to alterity. On the level of this phantasmic body, the social body effects an identity with itself, that is, “the closure on itself of the social.”20 At this point, Lefort sees a further complication in the text of La Boétie; he asks the following question: “If La Boétie addresses the people, does he not himself participate in the illusion of the unity of the people?” As we have seen, the phantasmic identity of the people is strictly correlative to the place of the tyrant. Lefort argues that he (La Boétie) would give to the people the status of the Other, the status that was before confined to the

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tyrant; to put it briefly, “he would occupy the place of the slave and, at the same time, that of the master”; however, he asks, “With this gesture, does not La Boétie himself come to occupy the place of the tyrant?” At this moment in Lefort’s analysis, the question of the addressee of La Boétie’s discourse comes to be thematized and, along with it, the role of language in its relationship to freedom. There also arises the inherent ambiguous and contradictory character of the phantasm of the One; the One exists both in the register of the imaginary and in that of the symbolic. It is, at the same time, image and name. As we have seen, the motive for the construction of “the One” is the effacement of plurality. In front of the image of “the One,” the fact of the social division is occulted. The closing of the social on itself, if it were possible, would foreclose the need for language; it would foreclose the symbolic. Nevertheless, as Lefort observes, La Boétie speaks of the One, he does not speak to the One, inasmuch as to speak is to evoke a dimension of the plural. Lefort shows that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, La Boétie’s appeal to the desire for liberty is not founded on a classical conception of human nature which would be inscribed in each person. Rather he appeals to the dimension of an “entre-vous”; he relates liberty to “‘l’entre-connaissance’ des semblables.”21 La Boétie claims that “if there is anything . . . that is clear and obvious . . . it is the fact that nature . . . has cast us all in the same mode, in order that we may behold in one another companions, or rather brothers.” Further on in the text he writes, “. . . nature has fashioned us according to the same model so that in beholding one another, to that end that each can mirror and quasirecognize the one in the other, since she has bestowed upon all of us the great gift of voice and speech for fraternal relations, thus achieving by the common and mutual statement of our thoughts a communication of our wills; and since she has tried in every way to narrow and tighten the bond of our union and kinship; since she has revealed her intention not to make us all united as one, there can be no further doubt that we are all naturally free, inasmuch as we are all companions”22 (emphasis added). In evoking freedom, La Boétie appeals to the very dimension of plurality that has been occulted by the image of ‘the One’. This appeal is situated in speech and language. To think about language is to think, at the same time, the separation and conjunction of subjects, for language is neither in the individual nor outside of him; rather, it is in the space between individuals, a space which both separates them and joins them. This is to think about language in such a way that it is not reducible to the imaginary. “In thinking about language, we already think the political, delivered from the illusion of the One.”23 It is the reversibility, operative in the space of language between the one and the other, that belies and contests

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the phantasmic closure of the social on itself that the figure of the One would institute. The “great gift of language” presupposes the exchange of opinions, a multiplicity of voices. The charm of “the One” institutes the phantasm of a pure said which would resonate in one voice. La Boétie appeals not to human nature but to the very plurality that the desire for “the One” would efface. He appeals to a dimension of the indeterminate in which the markers of certainty have disappeared, in which there is no said that cannot be contested, and in which the relationship of one to the other cannot be effaced in the relation of “the One” to all others. Thus we have seen the inherent ambiguity of the idea of “the One”: on the one hand, it inscribes the idea of humanity in a purely political register and lays the foundation for a secular politics; on the other, it fuels imperialistic dreams of world conquest and a quasi-deification of rulers. It also introduces a permanent ambiguity with regard to the limits and the overlapping claims of sovereignty; and, last, it spawns a proliferation of peoples viewing themselves as “chosen” to perform a universal task. Nonetheless, it does generalize the idea of human rights outside the confines of a particular circumscribed polity. I will now briefly return to Lefort’s reflection on Kant’s “Project for Perpetual Peace.” Recall that Dante was the first to conceive of the idea of humanity on a political level, and that he also viewed the universal empire as creating the condition for perpetual peace. In “The Idea of Humanity and the Project of Universal Peace,” Lefort claims that in Dante’s thought there is “a strange conjunction between the dream of the empire and the foundation of humanism . . .” (WPT, 145). According to Dante, humanity will represent itself as One by its submission to a unique emperor, whereas Kant’s reflection on universal peace takes the form of thoughts on the regulation of war. Wars must be fought in such a way as not to make peace impossible; this ultimately will lead to a situation in which wars will not be fought at all. We will not be able to pursue Kant’s argument in detail at this time. The point that Lefort wishes to make is that such reflections imply a trans-national point of view, a cosmopolitan point of view. In the thought of Kant, the cosmopolitan point of view does not emerge from the moral register of duty, since duty can be imposed only by practical reason acting without external constraints. Rather, it emerges from nature itself, “She herself does it, whether we will it or not.” For Kant, as for Dante, the unity of humanity is brought about by the cunning of reason, or, more properly put, the noumenal course of history, which in a religious discourse would be called Providence. It is achieved through man’s unsocial sociability; that is, in an attempt to get as far away from each other as possible (why else would anybody live at the North Pole?), we come eventually to occupy

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the entire finite space of the earth, at which point the earth reveals itself as our common home and thus humanity reveals itself as one.” Nevertheless for Kant, and in opposition to Dante, the unity of humanity does not call forth a universal state or a unique ruler who would incarnate this unity. Concerning universal monarchy, Kant writes, “. . . laws always lose in vigor what government gains in extent; hence a soulless despotism falls into anarchy after stifling the seeds of the good.” According to him, the unity of humanity does not take the form of a supranational body in which the individual states would be conceived of as organs, a monstrosity denounced by La Boétie; rather, there is for Kant, the enthusiastic observer of the French Revolution, a disincarnation of the unity of humanity, that is, a dissolution of a determinate imaginary figure of humanity. Lefort argues that for Kant “humanity appears as a field, at the same time material and spiritual, always non-actualizable, in which is born, and toward which polarize themselves, all forms of political existence and coexistence.” At this point, I will reinscribe Lefort’s reflection on these thinkers within the position that he has developed in the course of his philosophical itinerary. Above we said that for Lefort the monarchy of Dante was less a theory or a proposal than an interpretation of the symbolic structure of society. In “Le Mythe de l’Un dans le Fantasme et dans la Realité Politique” he writes, “When we speak of symbolic organization, symbolic constitution, we seek to disclose beyond practices, beyond relations, beyond institutions which arise from factual givens, either natural or historical, an ensemble of articulations which are not deducible from nature or history, but which order the apprehension of that which presents itself as real.”24 He uses the notion of the symbolic in a manner that is, in at least one respect, similar to that of Lacan. He argues that the symbolic is a marker of finitude, of the inability of society to be present at its own institution, of the impossibility of society to coincide with itself, to give itself its own foundation. Dante is, the aspect of his modernity notwithstanding, at least in one essential aspect premodern, inasmuch as he locates the place of legitimacy in another place, namely, the place of the materialized invisible: God. For him the point of mediation between society and the other place is the body of the emperor. The emperor is the point of mediation between the sensible and the supersensible. Society necessarily refers itself beyond itself. However, the premodern mise-en-scène—staging—of Dante’s reflection is the doubling of the body of the king in the direction of transcendence without deification. The nonidentity of the body of the king with God introduces an ambiguity concerning the limits of sovereignty and thus establishes the foundation for a cosmopolitan point of view, a

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universal dimension of the political. The virtue of La Boétie is that of having seen early on that the notion of the One, through which humanity is unified, contains within itself the latency of a totalitarian phantasm. If “the One” is thought of without reference to transcendence, then there occurs society’s misrecognition of itself, whereby its unity is staged as a closing of the identity of society on itself in the grotesque figure of “the One.” The figure of “the One” is no longer viewed as the intersection of the visible and the invisible; rather, it becomes an imaginary identity which is absolutely visible. In Lefort’s reading of La Boétie, the phantasm of the One forecloses the symbolic in two directions: in its vertical reference to transcendence and in its lateral reference to language and the plurality of voices, the space of l’entre-connaissance des semblables. He argues that this effacement of society’s nonidentity with itself, as envisioned by La Boétie, is actually attempted in the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century in the figure of the “egocrat,” who pretends to incarnate the identity of society with itself, thereby conceiving all signs of social division, of plurality, of any opposition whatsoever as originating from the outside and as such liable to unlimited repression. According to Lefort, our political modernity consists in the disincarnation of the place of power. In “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism” he writes, “In modernity there is no power linked to a body” (PFM, 303). The symbolic place of society’s identity with itself remains an empty place. In a democratic regime, the figure, the body of the king, is effaced but the place that it occupied is not. In such a regime, the society’s identity with itself is constituted through the lateral dimension of discourse. As we have already seen, Kant was able to think the unity of humanity without reference to a substantial poll of identity, for example, an emperor or a universal state. Lefort’s conception of the nature of the rights of man is not founded in a supersensible world. Also, these rights are not by their nature the property of individuals: They are the product of history—indeed, of a particular history—but they are not circumscribed within its boundaries, because from the beginning its boundaries were not unambiguously given. As we have seen, the very foundation of the legitimacy of the European monarchy contains within itself a tension between particularity and universality: “The true name of the emperor is the name of ‘the One.’” The One is inscribed in both the register of the imaginary and in that of the symbolic; this happens by means of a chiasmatic intertwining, in the sense that for Merleau-Ponty there is not an opposition between the visible and the invisible. Likewise for Lefort, there is not a radical opposition between the imaginary and the symbolic dimensions of the social; instead there is a dimension of historical displacements and realignments. The philo-

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sophical legitimacy of the rights of man is not established in a domain of essence conceived of as a higher order of positivity; rather, this legitimacy is achieved by an historical adventure in which there is a disincarnation, not only of the place of power, but also of the figure of man, since the figure of citizen may not be juxtaposed to that of man. Man, the bearer of the rights of man, is neither a noble essence nor an empirical configuration; it is an indeterminate notion both linked to, and transcending, its historical origins. Man emerges in a locality, and at the same time puts into question all attempts to confine it locally. The universality of the rights of man exists in what Merleau-Ponty calls “a lateral universality” and, as such, it problematizes the opposition between the particular and the universal, as well as the absolute opposition between politics and ethics. One is tempted to ask: “What really is the status of the universality of the rights of man?”—this idea that is “encrusted in the joints,” in the flesh, of our Western political institutions. If the notion of a universal dimension of the political is linked to the unfolding of a particular history, can it really be universal? You will recall what Kant said in his Critique of Judgment, that “If I were to judge a poem as beautiful for me, my position would be laughable.” Then he proceeded to ground the subjective universality of the aesthetic judgment on the universality of the faculties of imagination and understanding. Are we not saying something similar to Kant’s laughable critic, namely, that the rights of man are universal for us? Perhaps we, who do not have recourse to Kant’s universal human nature or to Hegel’s conception of our own history as finalized toward universal truth, should resist the temptation to respond to this question and instead attempt to problematize the word “really.” From Merleau-Ponty, we have been taught to see the intertwining of the seer and the seen, and to distrust any “high-altitude thinking” that would seek to establish a subject not formed from within the visible, but one that would see it from nowhere or from above. In like manner, we should not seek a political philosophy that would be the correlate of a subject lacking all political culture, a subject who would not have been formed within the flesh of the political and who would view the field of the political from nowhere. Thus, rather than attempt to ascend to such a position, we should problematize the very desire to occupy it. In fact, we know that the rights of man are experienced by us as universal, and we know that, in fact, such an experience is not limited to those who have been formed within the institutions that we have been considering. In the Paris metro, we have seen, written in Chinese characters, the signs in Tiananmen Square reading Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Perhaps, rather than seek beyond and in absolute opposition to the order of fact an order of the de jure, we should deconstruct

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the very opposition and in so doing be mindful of Aristotle’s injunction that one should not accept problematicity from a mathematician nor demand certainty from a rhetorician. Needless to say, the point of Lefort’s reflection on The Monarchy is not at the service of an attempt to establish a world government; its aim is to underline the fact that the conception of sovereignty, from its very origin, is not welded definitively to a particular space and time. The secular state is conceived of as a spiritual being, having as its end a universal mission. If the territorial boundaries of the state do not mark an absolute limit to sovereignty, then what is its limit? Is it possible to say what it is in a definitive fashion? The modern conception of rights is attached to the juridical institutions of democratic societies. Indeed, as Arendt argued, for a stateless person—one having no well-defined and enforceable rights—the conception of universal human rights can wear thin—to the point, in her opinion, of being a moralizing abstraction. Nevertheless, there is something in the modern experience of rights that rebels against the idea that someone who does not have legal, enforceable rights simply has no rights at all; for example, that the inhabitants of a state that does not inscribe certain human rights in its constitution are as right-less as a stone. The absolutization of the geographical limits of sovereignty has been a position consistently taken by totalitarian regimes. For example, in 1993 at a United Nations conference on Human Rights held in Vienna, an alliance was formed by China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and others to denounce the very idea of human rights as being simply a means used by Western powers to undermine the sovereignty of these countries.25 We also recall that the consistent response from totalitarian regimes to the objections made to their imprisonment of dissidents in psychiatric hospitals, their murdering of demonstrators on Tiananmen Square, and so forth, was that such denunciations were “attempts to interfere in the internal affairs” of the Soviet Union, China, Chile, and so forth. How can one not be struck by the fact that these brutal regimes advance arguments in defense of their abuses which, though infinitely crude and obviously self-serving, are structurally similar to the arguments that philosophers have made against the idea of universality? A historicist argument is made which insists that the ethical and political ideas of a culture are strictly circumscribed within its historical development; it claims that these ideas are intelligible only in terms of that culture’s historical development and that their validity coincides with its geographical borders. As we have already seen, Lefort argues that rights do not adhere in the individual as a sort of natural endowment; he shows how they were engendered within the history of political institutions. Rights adhere in “the flesh of the political” and are linked to their enunciation. The notions of

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the flesh and of the history of symbolic mutations are not such that they are subject to rigorous definition, which is to say, rigorous limits. Lefort does not think of the universality of human rights, to use a notion of Merleau-Ponty, as a horizontal universality, that is, as an instance of an essence that would transcend each of its instantiations. He regards it in terms of a lateral universality, which is to say, a universality that is not achieved by the subsumption of individuals under a category but by an overlapping, a certain promiscuity. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes: There is no need to add to the multiplicity of spatio-temporal atoms a transversal dimension of essences, what there is is a whole architecture, a whole complex of phenomena “in tiers,,” a whole series of “levels of being,” which are differentiated by the coiling up of the visible and the universal over a certain visible wherein it is redoubled and inscribed.26

He argues that the essence is not an abstraction or a construction, as the empiricists would have it; on the contrary, the pure individual which is absolutely identical with itself, an atom of being, is an abstract construction of empiricism. The history that gave birth to the modern conception of rights is linked to a particular time and place but is not riveted to it; rather, it bears within it an ambiguous universal that carries within itself an ambiguous signification which implies a certain kind of universality. I will briefly return to Lefort’s reflections on universality and the cosmopolitan point of view which he develops in “The Idea of Humanity and the Project of Universal Peace.” As we have seen, he begins this article with a consideration of Dante’s conception of the oneness of humanity as represented in the body of a universal monarch; he then proceeds to a discussion of Kant. For my purposes here, I will consider one idea from this article. In The Monarchy, the idea of humanity is posed within a theologico-political context, whereas in Kant’s “Project for Perpetual Peace,” the idea of humanity, and along with it the universality of human rights, is posed in a different context. This context, while not without a theological dimension, is also linked to a historical event, that is, a time when “great thinkers . . . were perceiving a new rhythm of human history,” a new sense of history (WPT, 156). According to Kant, peace, the condition of mutual recognition, is both an idea of reason and a product of the finality of nature. The cosmopolitan point of view is not simply a moral imperative; it is also linked to a historical event. Due to man’s unsocial sociability, the entire earth will become populated. This provokes Kant to propose something like a worldwide version of what American historians have called the “frontier thesis,” which argues that when things get bad enough in the East one simply goes West. Nevertheless, this possibility is

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foreclosed when the entire surface of the earth becomes populated; at this point it is absolutely necessary to live together. From this cosmopolitan point of view, the other must not be viewed as an enemy. Lefort writes, “I would say that the instauration of peace appears as a result of people’s expansion over the entire extent of the earth and of the constitution of a network of relations among them that, although legal to a greater or lesser extent, testify to the necessity of living together” (WPT, 151). For Kant, this condition is the result of a finality of nature, a noumenal course of history which cannot as such be known but of which signs can be detected in history. Lefort regards this Kantian view as, arguably, a secularized conception of Providence. Of course, he is not committed to the idea of a natural teleology of nature or history; nonetheless, even without these ideas, Kant’s analysis continues to be pertinent for him. Even if it is not caused by the operations of Providence, nevertheless, the full body of the earth, the increase in the spread of travel and communication, and the rhythms of modernity all contribute to a situation in which Lefort claims “humanity appears as a field both material and spiritual, always unrealizable, in which is born and toward which are polarized every form of political existence and coexistence. Upon this condition alone, the conjunction of the idea of humanity with that of right can take on some meaning” (WPT, 155). The proximity of people on the earth and the experience of a finite world give birth to the symbolic space of humanity. This symbolic space is not one that is projected on the body of a universal monarch; rather, it is an “empty space” in which communication and mutual recognition can take place, a space in which the other is encountered as someone similar to me. Lefort claims that “indeed, peace can be based only on the idea that the relationships among men are relationships among fellow men” (WPT, 157). He employs the word “fellowmen,” a word used by Tocqueville to signify the experience of the other in a democracy. In a small digression in this article, Lefort cites Valéry’s Reflections on the World Today in which he writes, “The age of the finite world is now beginning. . . . An entirely new, excessive, and instantaneous solidarity between regions and events is already a most marked result of this great development. We must henceforth relate all political phenomena to this new universal condition.” Lefort remarks that Valéry, who “retained the imprint of the Greek spirit, the love of limits,” is not particularly pleased with this new situation; however, he does not dismiss Valéry’s concerns, he agrees that the modern condition does imply a homogenization of difference. Nonetheless, for Lefort this is only “half of the truth,” since the modern experience also opens the symbolic space of humanity. He writes, “. . . progress in education, the spread of information and the rise of the

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idea of the rights of man can engender decisive effects in the political order which head in the direction of peace” (WPT, 157). This double reflection on the experience of modernity is a recurrent motif in the work of Lefort. He recognizes in modernity the inevitability of certain trends, as Tocqueville thought of the inevitability of the progress of equality; but rather than give a nostalgic denunciation of them or a resignation to them, he searches for what new possibilities they might open. It is interesting to contrast this stance with that of another thinker who “retains the imprint of the Greek spirit.” Jacques Taminiaux relates that in a seminar given by Heidegger in southern France, Heidegger at a certain point departed from the theme of his lecture and remarked: “Tourism should be forbidden.” Taminiaux mentioned in passing that all the participants were staying in tourist accommodations.

Notes 1. Claude Lefort, “La Modernité de Dante,” preface to Dante’s La Monarchie, French translation by M. Gally (Paris: Bélin, 1993) (English translations mine). 2. Dante Alighieri, The Monarchy, tr. H. Schneider (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 4. 3. Ibid., 12. 4. Ibid., 8. 5. Lefort, “La Modernité de Dante,” 10. 6. Dante, The Monarchy, 2. 7. Lefort, “La Modernité de Dante,” 23. 8. Ibid., 36. 9. Ibid., 41. 10. Ibid., 7. 11. Ibid., 52–53. 12. Claude Lefort, “Le Nom d’Un,” La Boétie et la Question du Politique, ed. P. Léonard (Paris: Payot, 1976) (translations mine). 13. Etienne de La Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, 48. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 52. 16. Lefort, “Le Nom d’Un,” 260. 17. La Boétie, The Politics of Obedience, 86. 18. Ibid., 50. 19. Lefort, “Le Nom d’Un,” 267. 20. Ibid., 268. 21. Ibid., 268–269.

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22. La Boétie, The Politics of Obedience, 56. 23. Lefort, “Le Nom de’Un,” 271. 24. Claude Lefort, “Le Mythe de l’Un dans le Fantasme et dans la Realité Politique,” Psychanalystes, 9 (Octobre, 1983), 42 (translation mine). 25. New York Times, 14 June 1993. 26. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 114.

9

Modernity and Ideology

In my chapter “Modernity and Revolution,” Lefort’s analysis of the French Revolution dealt with the notion of the One, particularly in his analysis of revolutionary terror. The dynamic of the Terror was that each who spoke, spoke in the name of the people, the people as “the One”; nevertheless, the very particularity of the speaker opened him or her to denunciation as a usurper. In presenting Lefort’s conception of democracy, I have traced the role of the people as the essentially indeterminate source of democratic legitimacy. We have seen that the Terror was the frenzied attempt to close over the abyss, the gap, opened by the disincarnation of society which reveals society’s nonidentity with itself. Before considering Lefort’s conception of totalitarianism, it is important to reflect on his conception of ideology in general and in bourgeois, or contemporary, ideology in particular. To do this I will follow his article “The Outline of a Genesis of Ideology in Modern Society” and also point to another article, “Marx, from One Vision of History to Another.” Lefort begins by noting the diverse uses of the word “ideology,” which have rendered the term almost useless. For him, this misrecognition of the problem of ideology is not simply an error; rather, as Freud would say, it is an illusion that “attests to a new resistance to a discovery which would endanger the certitude of the subject” (PFM, 183). As we have already seen in some detail, the premodern condition is one in which it is impossible to distinguish between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. In premodern society, the symbolic is given an imaginary interpretation by means of the affirmation of another place; the real is encountered as determinable only insofar as it is already determined from another place. We have seen that for Lefort modernity is the condition in which the place of the institution of society becomes an “empty place.” But this is not modernity’s own self-interpretation. Lefort argues that moder185

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nity’s self-interpretation is what he will call ideology. As opposed to Marx, he views ideology as a historically specific concept which does not include religion and could not be applied to premodern societies. For Marx, the genesis of ideology is a moment in the historical genesis of humanity; it is attendant upon the division of manual and mental labor. In German Ideology, Marx claims that “the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior. . . . Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness [language] concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious”1 (emphasis added). I will direct attention to the phrase “at first”: Consciousness and language emerge, at first, directly from immediate sensuous reality. “At this stage,” language for Marx is motivated. Using this modern terminology, “motivated” is being employed in the way Saussure uses it—there is motivation when the relationship of the signifier to the signified is not arbitrary and conventional, but natural. “At first,” language is directed to, and arises from, our immediate contact with reality; it is only “later” that it can disengage itself from this original and motivated relationship with reality. The mechanism of this disengagement is the division of labor. The event that marks a fundamental mutation in the relationship of language to reality is the point at which the division of labor evolves into the separation between manual and mental labor. In Lefort’s thought, ideology becomes a specific domain in which the essence of the social is represented; he writes, “Oppositions of every kind are changed into determinations of the universal, domination is converted into an expression of the law”(PFM, 185). He notes that in the thought of Marx there is a clear affinity between ideology and the political; both are viewed as expressions of the fact that the socialization of society is not complete. Nevertheless, for Marx the possibility of completion is “encrusted in reality, a possibility to which Communism will give effective expression.” In his thought, ideology realizes in an imaginary way “that unity which only the real movement—namely, the negativity of labor and of proletarian practice—will bring about”(PFM, 185). Lefort objects to Marx’s thought at the moment when he situates the social institution at the level of the real, that is, a real process of social production. He argues that when Marx does this, he is conflating the level of ideology and the symbolic dimension of the social. As an indication of their nonidentity, Lefort alludes to Max Weber’s analysis of China, where the symbolic system, “the configuration of the signifiers of law, power and knowledge did

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not permit the dismantling of the social relations of personal dependence” (PFM, 186). In fact, Lefort credits Marx himself with a similar insight, in the “other version” of history that he elaborated in Grundrisse and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; here Marx recognizes that in capitalist society there is a radical disjunction from all precapitalist formations. Nonetheless, it is to the more conventional interpretation of Marx that I now turn my attention. Here the function of ideology is to mask social division by viewing it as a natural division and to mask historical division by seeing it as essential and atemporal. As Lefort writes, “The existence of ‘restricted social relations’ [attendant upon the incomplete socialization of society] entails the projection of an imaginary community, under the cover of which ‘real’ distinctions are determined as ‘natural,’ and the particular is disguised beneath the features of the universal and the historical is effaced in the atemporality of essence”(PFM, 191). In such a conception of ideology there is an opposition between ideology and knowledge, that is, between the imaginary unity and the real division. Behind the ideological mask lurks the harsh reality. Lefort’s conception of modern ideology in a certain sense reverses and reinscribes Marx’s notion. According to Marx, what ideology hides is the real, whereas for Lefort ideology is the attempt to “conceal the enigma of its political form, to cancel out the effects of social and temporal division which are produced therein, to re-establish the ‘real’” (PFM, 191). Its ultimate aim is to reduce the indetermination of the social. Modern ideology does not oppose knowledge and the real; in a certain sense, it is knowledge of the real. Of course, this must be immediately qualified. Lefort is not simply identifying ideology and knowledge; rather, he is speaking of the role that this knowledge attempts to play. As was noted in our reflections on the theologico-political in Lefort’s thought, there develop spheres of knowledge that become self-enclosed, that is, “objective,” which is to say that the insertion of a subject into the field of knowledge is denied. On a socialhistorical level, Lefort sees in modern ideology what Merleau-Ponty calls “positivism,” that is, the passion for the real, the objectification and flight from the enigmatic indetermination which marks our insertion into Being. Referring to ideas that are given a more detailed exposition in the “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?”, Lefort titles a subsection of “Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies” as “Social Division Is Not in Society.” Ideology masks “the gap” in function of which society is not identical with itself; when it tries to make society intelligible in terms of itself, it misunderstands the sense in which society is delivered over to itself. Lefort argues, “We misunderstand it when we forget, finally, that what it articulates presupposes the fact of its own articulation, or, in other words, that the processes of division and institution are ‘older’ than those of social

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division and social institution. The limits of Marx’s thought are thus most clearly revealed by the attempt to conceive of the social from within the boundaries of the social, history from within the boundaries of history, human beings in terms of, and with a view to, human beings” (PFM, 195–196). Ideology would occult “the enigma of the institution” (PFM, 202). Lefort defines ideology as that which masks the folding over of social discourse on itself. It does this by suppressing all the signs which could destroy the sense of certainty with regard to the nature of the social. It represses all signs: of historical creativity; of that which has no name; of that which is hidden from the action of power; of that which breaks apart through the dispersed effects of socialization—all the signs that make a society, or humanity, as such alien to itself. Recall the citation of Kafka that Lefort uses in the Preface to The Visible and the Invisible: “Things give themselves to me not by the root, but by a place somewhere near the middle of them.” Regarding the so-called bourgeois ideology, Lefort contends that it is organized in terms of a split between ideas and the supposed real. The text of bourgeois ideology is written in capital letters: Humanity, Progress, Nature, Property, Order, and so forth. Although any reference to “another place” is effaced, nevertheless, each of these ideas bears within itself a trace of transcendence. The ideal is posed as a representation of the real and as a norm. The norm articulates itself as a rule embodied in a social type: the boss, the family man, and so on. The bourgeois subject establishes itself as a subject by incorporating itself in a role, or a type; it organizes itself in terms of exclusion. It institutes a distinction between the subject, expressing himself in terms of the role, and “the other, who, not having access to the rule [the role] does not have the status of a subject” (PFM, 206). This situation leads to oppositions: society and the underworld; civilization and barbarism; the normal and the pathological, and so forth. Bourgeois ideology effects itself by a certain doubling of language, for example, the Family refers to the real family but at the same time transcends it and justifies it; the Family offers itself as a norm for the regulation of the family. By means of its reference to transcendence, the ideological construction is erected in order to stave off any contingency. Lefort claims that this mode of ideological discourse is haunted by tautology. “The words ‘family,’ ‘property,’ ‘society’ . . . crystallize into a knowledge which dispenses with all justification” (PFM, 211). The purpose of the ideal’s transcendence is to cancel the contingency of its empirical enunciation. Nevertheless, given both the identity of the content of the ideal and the reality to which it would furnish a transcendent justification, bourgeois ideology is haunted by the reemergence of the contingency which the ideal was created to efface.

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In a certain way, there is a resonance between Lefort’s conception of bourgeois ideology and Michel Foucault’s characterization of the episteme of modernity. Nevertheless, the differences are obvious; Lefort is not involved in an epistemological project of discovering discursive regularities. Rather the coincidence is that both thinkers notice a certain instability in the modern discourse. Foucault speaks of an “empirical-transcendental doublet,” whereby the transcendental dimension, which would ground the condition of the appearance of the empirical, is troubled by the possible reemergence of empirical content within it. Lefort argues that the ideal discourse of transcendence “finds itself threatened with being perceived as a de facto discourse”; in such a situation, it would be unable to define its place as a transcendence vis-à-vis the empirical. The discourse of modernity is characterized by the instability of an order that was intended to raise it to the status of essence. Lefort devotes the last part of the article “Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies” to a discussion of what he calls the “invisible ideology,” that is, the ideology of contemporary industrial democracies. This ideology differs considerably from the classical bourgeois ideology in many important respects. In a certain sense, one could argue that it reverses it. If bourgeois ideology attempted to occult the “enigma of institutions” by means of a reference to transcendent essences, the contemporary industrial ideology does the contrary. It collapses the transcendent into the factual by eliminating the distance between the discourse on the social and the social discourse itself. This “new logic of dissimulation” is a celebration of “communication” (PFM, 222). “Here we no doubt have one of the most remarkable movements of the imaginary: to abolish the personal element into the impersonal discourse which presents the essence of social relations, while substantiating the fiction of a living speech, the speech of a subject, when, in fact, the latter is dissolved into the ceremony of communication” (PFM, 226). The “invisible ideology” does away with the capital letters of the bourgeois period; now the austere figure of “The Boss” is substituted by the image of “the nice guy.” The image of property and the family firm— as one may recall in the representation of the family firm in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks—is replaced by the image of the efficiently operated organization which is managed by a management specialist who supplies the employees with notions like “dress-down Fridays” or Silicon Valley where one can bring one’s dog to work. With this invisible ideology, relations of authority are not really effaced; rather they are occulted. All the blue jeans and puppy dogs in the world do not annul relations of power when it is time for “downsizing.” Lefort writes, “It [the ideology] does not hold the other at a distance, but includes its ‘representative’ in itself; it presents itself as an incessant dialogue and thus takes hold of the gap

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between the self and the other in order to make room for them both within itself” (PFM, 227). This ideology constitutes an imaginary group of bogus intimacy; it engenders a pseudo-closeness which hides all sense of distance, strangeness; it eliminates the sense of adversary, of otherness. This ideology provides the assurance, the certainty, of the social bond because it is well removed from any test of reality. It installs within mass society the limits of a “little world” where everything happens as if each person were already turned toward the other. The subject, lodged in this network, is not concerned about whether the “others” are watching or listening, since this “personal phantasm is installed, once and for all, in the place of the entre-nous” (PFM, 228). Although it is efficacious in assuring both communication and the notion of the subject in the group, this “we” is merely secondary; for, prior to its utterance, the very conditions for a network in which the agents are linked together are established by these “agents” being “deprived of any mark of their opposition to one another, as well as any criterion of discourse as discourse.” Within this situation, ideological discourse is buried within the socialization process and the illusion appears, according to which “nothing is removed from the sphere of communication.” What tends not to be contested is the phantasmagoria of reciprocity, according to which everything is in principle sayable, visible, intelligible, for such is indeed the effect of the occultation of division: the image of an unlimited discourse in which everything would become transparent. (PFM, 229)

An unlimited discourse transpires in which everything can be said; this gives rise to an imaginary transparency. This sense of intimacy and familiarity is not limited to human groups. Lefort tells us that this pseudofamiliarity refuses to admit the “otherness” of nature itself; it tends to ignore the dangers of nature. In a recent New York Times article, a forest ranger referred to what he called “the Disney effect,” by which he meant people attempting to pet vicious grizzly bears. In the Paris Metro, one encounters an advertisement for Volvic water in which a man is hugging a tree. The sign reads: “Nature loves you with all of its force.” On the day I read this ad, two thousand people were killed in an earthquake in Turkey. Lefort refers to this ideology as “invisible” because the representation of the Other is absorbed into the Same. This ideology is nonlocalizable; it is everywhere. As one of many examples of it, he notes the tendency toward “self-assessment” in education, which he sees as an effective device for obliterating the presence of the teacher and thereby rendering the relationship of authority invisible. He goes on to evoke different contem-

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porary phenomena, namely, that of the “school psychologist,” the mania for newness, the ideology of communication, and so forth. Lefort regards the desire for being “up with the times” as a form of dissimulation of the mysterious relationship between past and present. Just as bourgeois ideology was threatened by the possibility of becoming seen as a tautology— that is, The Family is the family—so is the invisible ideology threatened by becoming completely inept and thus incapable of performing the function that ideology has assumed in the past, namely, that of legitimating an established order. He goes so far as to argue that this impossibility of legitimating applies not only to the system of ownership but also “to the real as such.” It can give rise to what Habermas has called a “legitimation defect,” thus engendering a form of interrogation “which brings to light the question of the other, the question of being” (PFM, 236). From this last phrase, one can see that, for Lefort, the “critique of ideology” is not simply an affair of sociology; it carries with it an ontological dimension. One becomes aware of the fact that he is not an uncritical celebrant of modern democratic societies. The “invisible ideology” is articulated within the “democratic polity” and there is an ontological tension between them. On the one hand, democracy, which is not simply a set of institutions, is a regime subtended by a mode of “being in the world” which is open to “the enigma of its institution,” by which I mean that there are no markers of certainty pointing to another place, a place from which it would draw its legitimacy. The democratic regime is not present to its own institution. Yet in this empty place of the democratic polity, there is an ideological dissimulation which reaches into the ontological region of our relationship to the Other and to Being. At times Lefort’s description of the invisible ideology of modernity sounds similar to that of Herbert Marcuse’s depiction of one-dimensional society; in fact, Lefort approvingly quotes from Marcuse’s work once or twice. The similarities are clear: a sense of flatness, the occultation of opposition and also of difference, the tension between the ideal and the real, and so forth. At certain moments it sounds close to Heidegger’s description of the modern world as being engulfed in the “the gestell of technology” whereby Being is revealed as “standing reserve” and the ontological difference is leveled. Perhaps Marcuse’s characterizations of one-dimensional society are a leftist version of Heidegger’s conception of the gestell of technology. Nevertheless, one should not be deceived by these similarities. Marcuse longed for an apocalyptic emergence of a force of negativity that would substitute itself for the negativity of the proletariat which, according to him, has been “co-opted” in consumer capitalism. At different times in his writings, he placed this force of negativity in various locations. In his early book, Reason and Revolution, reason itself be-

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comes a place of negativity; and later, absurdly and almost pathetically, the force of negativity is found in racial minorities and hippies; then, finally, it is discovered in aesthetic experience. As indicated above, Heidegger speaks obscurely, and in a distinctly prophetic tone, of “another beginning,” whose coming is to be measured in centuries. No such apocalyptic event is enunciated in the work of Lefort. As we have seen, he rejected the Marxist attempt to place the origin of “the social institution” in the process of production, and consequently rejected the revolutionary role of the proletariat. Nonetheless, he did not set out on a search for a substitute as one sees happen in Marcuse’s thought. From Machiavelli’s thought, Lefort learned that there is an irreducible conflictual nature of society which is not, and cannot be, finalized toward a complete resolution, a “final struggle.” Conflicts are inevitable; they arise historically and are plural; they do not tend toward a bipolar opposition, as, for example, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. According to Lefort, what can contest the dissimilating work of ideology is the structure of the region in which it arises. There is in his work no identification of ideology with the symbolic structure of the social—he criticized Marx for just such an identification. He argues that the ideological project leads to an inevitable failure; in its bourgeois form, it would anchor itself in the certainty of transcendence but, as we have seen, it is the loss of such certainty that is the founding event of modernity, a loss that shows itself in the disincarnation of the social and the death of God. The invisible ideology of modernity is an imaginary projection of familiarity, which would have us turn away from experience. Nevertheless, experience asserts itself. Volvic may try as much as it likes to convince us that nature loves us, but we know it does not. Willy Loman, in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, tries desperately to believe that he is not just liked but “well-liked”; however, the force of the past, along with his guilt and madness, thwart this impossible project of credulity. In the next chapter I will turn to Lefort’s writings on totalitarianism, which he does not view as an ideology but as a type of regime.

Note 1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 13–19.

Part 4

Lefort on Totalitarianism

10

Totalitarianism as “Measures Taken”

In this section, I will first consider Lefort’s early writings on the nature of totalitarianism and then study his later work on totalitarianism as found in his 1999 book La Complication. In this book he elaborates his conception of totalitarianism in terms of its difference from the positions of Martin Malia in The Soviet Tragedy, of François Furet in The Passing of an Illusion, and of Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.1 I begin with his article “Novelty and the Appeal of Repetition,” which was published as a postscript to a re-edition in 1971 of a collection of his articles entitled Elements d’une Critique de la Bureaucratie.2 This article is the occasion for a self-reflection on his own intellectual and political itinerary; in it his self-reflection is mainly political, whereas in another essay, to which I will repair presently, it takes a more philosophical turn. These early essays were written at a time when Lefort considered himself a Marxist. He broke with the Trotskyists in 1948 in order to establish, with Cornelius Castoriadis and others, the group Socialisme ou Barbarie; at issue was the nature of Soviet society. Rejecting the Trotskyist conception of the Soviet Union as a workers’ state with a bureaucratic deformation, the group analyzed the Soviet Union as a new form of society characterized by the dominance of a bureaucratic stratum. Lefort never subscribed to the Leninist illusion that the problems of bureaucracy were primarily the “remnants of the Russian Czarist past.” Rather he viewed bureaucracy as a self-expansive system rooted in the position of a new social stratum whose power derived from its position within a political configuration; he contrasted this with the bourgeoisie, who form a social class on the basis of the private ownership of the means of production. A bourgeois is, first, one who extracts surplus value because of his or her relationship to the means of production, and second, a member of the bourgeois class. The bureaucrat, on the other hand, is one who extracts surplus value solely in 195

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virtue of his or her being a member of the bureaucratic stratum. One can see that the essays written in Éléments d’une Critique de la Bureaucratie were written under the influence of Marxism, but a Marxism of a heterodox order, in the sense that the extraction of surplus value is based on a political relationship and not primarily on a relationship to the means of production. In his essay “The Contradiction of Trotsky,” Lefort detects in Trotsky’s early positions a “fetishism of the Party.” Trotsky wrote, “None of us desires or is able to dispute the will of the Party. Clearly, the Party is always right. . . . We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right” (PFM, 40). In his later writings, Trotsky extracts himself from this fetishism. In his 1940 book Stalin, in clear contradiction to the above position Trotsky writes, “A political party is neither a ‘homogenous entity,’ nor an omnipotent historical factor, but ‘only a temporary historical instrument, one of very many instruments and schools of history’” (PFM, 40). The “contradiction” of Trotsky is that he never, before being forced into exile, elaborated a revolutionary position against the party bureaucracy. Why not? Because, even after disabusing himself of the party ideology, until the end of his life he continued to believe that the October Revolution had given birth to the first “workers’ state,” a state in which the bureaucracy was a temporary aberration, namely, a “bureaucratic deformation.” He never recognized that bureaucracy is a system of exploitation and not simply a parasitic caste. Against Trotsky’s views, Lefort proposed a revolutionary position. He argued that the result of the October Revolution was not a workers’ state but a new system of exploitation against which the working class should, and will, rise. This was Lefort’s position in 1948 when he was twenty-four years old. Of course it was no longer his position in 1971, when he was writing the postscript in which he reflects on his earlier position. Commenting on his erstwhile political stance, he writes, “Even those who see how the party separates itself from the exploited strata, detaching itself and constituting the core of a new social formation, may end up by transferring onto the Class as such the sacredness which was previously invested in an institution [the party]” (PFM, 124). This is clearly in contradiction to the position he took in 1948: He observes that while rejecting the sacred character of the party, he had nevertheless transformed it onto the Class. And he does not use the term “sacred” in a hyperbolic sense, but seems to mean it quite literally. Lefort continues this reflection on a more abstract plane. He claims that thought may well be able to free itself from certain images, but what resists this attempt is the relation that we maintain with the representation of the past. We tend to give the past a mythical function in order to assure ourselves of a truth that is already given and that will not betray us; we do

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this to conjure away the indeterminacy that constantly reemerges in the history that we live. Lefort argues that it would be pointless to rely on the movement that severs us from our old beliefs; of course, there are illusions that we have destroyed, but “the soil in which they have grown nourishes other seeds.” He continues: It is perhaps when we have tasted the bitter exhilaration of overturning our original ideas that we remain most enslaved to their principles. In any case, so many desires are invested in the political sphere that the progress of knowledge merely displaces its own limits rather than eliminating them; and each time new doors open before us, we must assume that elsewhere others are closed. (PFM, 125)

Lefort argues that neither political reflection nor philosophical reflection can issue in self-transparency. As both Gadamer and Merleau-Ponty have taught us, it is impossible definitively to exit the horizons of our own prejudgment, that is, we are inserted within the flesh of history. What is left to us is a form of interrogation which seeks to respond to the constantly reemerging signs of indeterminacy and novelty to which we are delivered over. The power of repetition, an allusion to Freud’s death drive, is not accidental and not to be underestimated. Lefort continues to note the restrained, not to say timid, character of the response of “progressive intellectuals” in the face of the Stalinist aggression in Germany in 1953 and then in Hungary in 1956. Many “progressives” actually believed, or forced themselves to believe, that the rebellion against Soviet imperialism was fomented by the CIA. (In the spring of 1999, around the time of the tenth anniversary of the massacre of Tiananmen Square, the New York Times reported that the Beijing government had announced that the student movement was “masterminded by United States imperialism.”) However, by the time of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the ability to defend Soviet action had worn thin; even the French Communist party, as well as many progressives, did not approve of it. Nonetheless, their disapproval was studded with strange reservations: They distrusted the Czechs’ taste for freedom, they saw signs of “antisocialism everywhere,” forgetting that they did not believe at all in the reality of socialism in the “people’s democracies.” Permit me to remark in passing that Lefort’s critique of the timidity of the Soviet critics pales before that of Martin Malia’s in his The Soviet Tragedy, where he presents in detail, and not without a certain malice, the endlessly reported illusions of American Sovietologists: the good old days before Lenin died; the Bukharin option of gradual industrialization (the road not taken); the Gorbachev reforms, and so forth. Of all the kindly observers of the Soviet

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Union that Malia writes about, nothing tops the 1944 remarks of Henry Wallace, the vice president of the United States, when he was about to take a trip to Soviet Asia. Wallace speaks of his great anticipation in approaching the Siberian experience, of the forty million people who have taken the place of the seven million, mostly convicts, who miserably existed there under imperial Russia. He argues that the detractors of Russia must pause before the fact of Soviet Asia today. He proclaims: “I shall see cities; I shall feel the grandeur that comes when men work wisely with nature.” Wallace is speaking here of Siberia! As Lefort tells us, the grip of the imaginary is not easily loosened. Returning to his own earlier positions, Lefort, mindful of Nietzsche’s injunction to practice severity toward oneself, tells us that “I lacked audacity” (PFM, 130), which is to say, at that time, the audacity to make a serious critique of Marxism. Before beginning our discussion of Lefort’s conception of totalitarianism, let me make a brief detour. His continuing commitment to Marxism and his mesmerization by the image of the proletariat as “the universal class” acted as obstacles to any analysis of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, in his 1963 article “La Politique et la Pensée de la Politique,” he argues that these are not the only reasons. Taking the Algerian war as a case in point, Lefort argues that far from rendering the war intelligible, Marxism generated a systematic misrecognition of events. During the years of the Algerian war, “a left intellectual had confused as essential his objectives with those of the F.L.N. In the struggle for national independence, he recognizes the class struggle; in the will to detach themselves from colonialism, he sees the will for socialism.”3 The specificity of an anti-colonial revolution made by Algerian nationalists was occulted by being perceived only in terms of a “displacement” of the class struggle in the mother country; it was seen only as different from, or as a stage leading to, a revolution of European workers made in the name of universality. It is not as though the religious and nationalistic facets of the revolution were not seen; rather, they were interpreted as “merely the phenomenal form” of an essential revolution against the extraction of surplus value. One could multiply the contemporary examples of this misrecognition: for example, historians who study the rise of American trade unions, not in terms of what actually happened but rather what did not happen, that is, the formation of a working-class party. In this situation, reality is perceived only in its removal from a finality believed to be essentially inscribed in the historical process. The most recent, and perhaps most disastrous, example was the initial leftist sympathy for the Islamic revolution in Iran. Early on Lefort recognized that, evocations of materialism notwithstanding, the true center of Marxist theory was the Hegelian idea of his-

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tory as the self-production of Spirit, even if the “idealist” concept of Spirit is disguised in the overalls of the proletariat as a universal class. French intellectuals of the left “sought in vain from the other side of the Mediterranean the signs of historical reason.”4 The problem with Marxism is not, as Karl Popper has claimed, the proliferation of an infinite number of subsidiary hypotheses in order to save the theory; rather, it is a problem of perception. Through the lens of Marxism, the anti-colonial revolt—in this case the Algerian war—is seen as dissembling the essential revolution, which is the proletarian revolution; behind the appearances, the Marxists perceive the signs of the essence. Lefort does not dismiss the notion of class struggle; rather he disengages it from having the status of an essence in order to reinscribe it within a more complex and nuanced conception of the social field. He writes, “Perhaps if one were to consider the play of the relations of force more attentively, one would see that it is inseparable from a state of society of which the conflicts of interests give only a vulgar and incomplete image.”5 The elaboration of this notion of a state of society within which real conflicts of interests–class conflicts as well as others—are inscribed will become the central preoccupation of Lefort’s work for the next two decades. Already in this early essay, he saw that the fundamental mechanism of obfuscation in Marxist thought is the progressivist and teleological conception of history. In early chapters, I have shown Lefort’s critique and critical reappropriation of Marxism. Now let us simply note how this functions in the movement of his thought toward his mature conception of totalitarianism. When he remained too close to a Marxist problematic, he failed to see that the economic—the relation of forces and the social relations of production—is articulated within a symbolic dimension of the political; that is, within a regime. If one does not take into account the symbolic dimension of the regime, one will be led to a downgrading of the political dimension, in such a way that the “features of totalitarianism will always seem accidental” (PFM, 135). Lefort’s characterization of totalitarianism as a symbolic structure does not appear all at one time but comes about through a gradual series of efforts, each of which evidences more “audacity,” which is to say, he moves further away from Marxism. His 1956 essay “Totalitarianism without Stalin” marks a major milestone in this itinerary. This article reflects upon the Soviet system after the death of Stalin and the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR; it deepens his effort to think the nature of the Soviet state. In this essay, he goes beyond a critique of the Trotskyist contention that the USSR is a workers’ state suffering from a bureaucratic deformation. He writes, “As in dreams where every metamorphosis seems natural, in the trotskyist utopia, socialism turned into its opposite without losing its identity” (PFM, 53).

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Whereas before he characterized the USSR as a new form of exploitation based on the rule of a bureaucracy, Lefort now becomes much more specific and in the process moves closer to his mature conception of totalitarianism. He begins with a critical reflection on Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s “cult of personality.” In this form of critique, he argues that it is only Stalin that is put into question; it is a critique that would circumscribe the field open to critical analysis. A critique of this type would suppose an absolute separation between political life and social reality. Everything would be explained by Stalin’s paranoia and his pathological lust for power: We would view him as a monster coming from nowhere in order to rule over a society by fiat. Lefort writes, The good Stalinist who repeated for years that Hitler’s hysterical or diabolical features could have a social function only because they were an expression of the degeneration of German capitalism finds himself alone, as it were, in the face of the phenomenon of Stalin, with no other explanation than his intrinsic “evil.” (PFM, 60)

In this concept of the “cult of personality,” Lefort sees a futile attempt by his erstwhile henchmen to divorce both themselves and the “system” from Stalin’s “errors and excesses.” He notes that a cult is usually thought to be the creation of those who practice it: The cult of the Virgin Mary, for example, is not the invention of the Holy Mother herself. Nonetheless, in Khrushchev’s version, Stalin created his own cult; he, by himself, placed himself above the party and society. Lefort proposes to analyze the historical function of Stalin without, to be sure, neglecting the bizarre aspects of his personality. He argues that there is both a real and an imaginary dimension of Stalinism. Without immersing himself in the myth of “the good old days before Lenin’s death,” Lefort does see both a break and a continuity between Lenin and Trotsky on the one hand and Stalin on the other. In terms of the former, it was indeed both Lenin and Trotsky who built the all-powerful party by eliminating all opposition and by banning any intraparty factions. Both attempted to submit the trade unions to the party: I note here Trotsky’s extreme measure, which he proposed but which was not taken, of the militarization of labor. Nevertheless, their totalitarian measures were conceived of as being only temporary; they were, to use the title of Brecht’s play, Measures Taken that were unsavory but necessary. With the emergence of Stalin, these “measures” were regarded as permanent; they were conceived of “as if they constituted in themselves the essence of socialism” (PFM, 64). Stalin transformed what had been de facto measures into socialist values; he turned what had been temporary necessities into virtues.

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According to Lefort—and this is of central importance—it is not simply a question of “values” but rather a question regarding a social and economic process. After it had eliminated all opposition, the party apparatus then “directly subordinated the productive process to itself ” (PFM, 64). Lefort makes a critique of the conception of the Soviet Union as a form of state capitalism. It had been argued by some that the concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands was a worldwide phenomenon of “late capitalism”; using this interpretation, one could argue that the ruling strata of the Soviet bureaucracy played a role analogous to the concentration of power in the monopolies of the Western capitalist world. If one takes this position, then the claim of the Soviet Union to be the “motherland” of socialism is undermined, inasmuch as it would then be just another form of capitalism. Lefort argues that this interpretation forecloses any analysis of the specificity of the new regime—what he later calls an absolutely new structure. Clearly, one aspect of this new regime that does not have a counterpart in Western capitalism is the use of terror. We can observe that even before reading Arendt’s work, Lefort is in agreement with her. He views the use of terror in the USSR as not being only instrumental; it is not a means to suppress opposition. In agreement with Arendt, he argues that the terror intensified after all effective opposition had already been eliminated. This was the case in Nazi Germany as well. Terror was “constitutive of a new social force whose emergence presupposed a violent uprooting from the terrain of the old society and whose survival requires the daily sacrifice of new members to the unity of the already formed organism” (PFM, 67). In these societies, terror has two functions, one real and the other imaginary. On the one hand, it effects a homogenization of the entire population. The massification of the population, which Arendt thought to be the social precondition for the emergence of Nazi totalitarianism, is actually accomplished by the party in Russia. The homogenization of the population is the condition for the party’s subordination of the entire productive process to itself. The terror that is exercised over the dominant strata was not an accidental feature; it was inscribed in the development of the new class, whose mode of domination was no longer guaranteed by private appropriation, “which was obliged to secure its privileges by the ruse of a collective apparatus of appropriation and whose dispersal, at the onset, could be overcome only by violence” (PFM, 68). Using the phrase of Max Weber, it could be claimed that Stalin’s actions were irrational in the sense of not being purposely rational, as, for example, the destruction of the peasantry. One must ask: Purposely rational to what end? It was certainly not for the production of food; nevertheless, they were “rational” for the production of a new class. Concerning the rationality of Stalin’s

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action, Lefort makes a critique of the Trotskyist historian Isaac Deutscher, who claimed that the Stalinist period was analogous to the period of “primitive accumulation” in the genesis of capitalism. If this were the case, why at the Twentieth Party Congress could Khrushchev not have said, “Stalin did the dirty work for us”?—which would be to claim that Stalin, in fact, had accomplished the necessary process of “primitive accumulation.” Perhaps Khrushchev was cleverer than Deutscher, who “does not see that the idea of socialist primitive accumulation is absurd” (PFM, 70). The point is that the process of primitive accumulation gives rise to capitalist relations of production; thus to evoke it would be to admit that in the USSR the mode of production had as its end the extraction of surplus value, which would be to say that it was a capitalist society. This was by no means Deutscher’s intent. As Marx once remarked, primitive accumulation, the “original sin” in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, “is even more so in the eyes of a bureaucracy that must conceal its very existence as a class” (PFM, 71). I will now consider the imaginary dimension of Stalinism. This does not entail a turning away from the social process; rather, it means giving this process a new dimension. Lefort tells us that the Soviet rulers are a class of a different nature from that of the bourgeoisie. He returns to an idea that we have already seen in our brief glance at his Éléments d’une Critique de la Bureaucratie, namely, that the bourgeois class is the result of the activity by which individual capitalists extract surplus value in virtue of their relation to the means of production, whereas members of the bureaucracy extract surplus value only in virtue of their relationship to the bureaucracy, which is to say, to the state. In other words, the bureaucratic community is not guaranteed by the mechanism of economic activities; rather, it is established by “the integration of the bureaucrats around the state, in their absolute discipline with regard to the administrative apparatus. Without this state, without this apparatus, the bureaucracy is nothing” (PFM, 73). Within the capitalist mode of production there is a separation of the state and civil society. By civil society Lefort means substantially what Hegel meant, that is, the action of classes and social groups whose existence and conduct are not determined directly by the political activity of the state. The independent activity of civil society institutes a separation from the state. In the bureaucratic regime, this independence is abolished and civil society becomes absorbed in the state. Nonetheless, Lefort argues that it both “has” and “has not” been absorbed; he writes, “Paradoxically a separation is now re-introduced that in some respects is deeper than it was in any other society” (PFM, 73). While the real separation of civil society and the state has been abolished, in its place a new, imaginary, separation has been installed. Inasmuch as the bureaucrat

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owes all to the state as a whole, and since it negates him as an individual, it also “subjects him, qua anonymous member, to the irrevocable decrees of the central authority. The bureaucratic mind hovers over the bureaucrats, a divinity indifferent to particularity” (PFM, 74). Each bureaucrat may say, L’Etat, c’est moi [I am the state], but the state remains “an Other.” Its rules dominate like an unintelligible fatality; through the penetration and bureaucratization of all domains of social life and activity, the state becomes a ghastly Other that hovers over the life of the social. As we have already seen, one of the tasks of the terror is to engender “the unity of the already-formed organism.” This was Lefort’s first mention of the word “organism”; however, it is not the last time it will appear in his analysis of totalitarianism. He argues that the terrorist dictatorship effects an imaginary unity of society with itself, a unity in which every social division is effaced and is redescribed as an expression of the unified state. Let me quote at length Lefort’s conception of totalitarianism as given in his 1956 article “Totalitarianism without Stalin,” in which he writes: More specifically, it [totalitarianism] is not a political regime: it is a form of society, that form in which all activities are immediately linked to one another, deliberately presented as modalities of a single world; that form in which a system of values predominates absolutely, such that every individual or collective undertaking must necessarily find in it a coefficient of reality; that form in which, lastly, the dominant model exercises a total physical and spiritual constraint on the behavior of private individuals. (PFM, 79)

In this sense, totalitarianism claims to negate the separation of the various domains of social life—the political, the economic, the legal, the ideological, and so forth—that are characteristic of bourgeois society. Totalitarianism effects a permanent identification between these domains of social life. Thus we see that it is not merely a monstrous outgrowth of political power but rather a metamorphosis of society itself whereby the political ceases to exist as a separate sphere. Although in his later writings Lefort will change his mind about totalitarianism’s not being a regime, much, not all, of his later conception is outlined here, namely, the notion that the totalitarian project is that of masking all forms of social division. This project is brought about by the phantasm of a complete socialization of society, that is, an ideal unity of society with itself, a self-identity on the hither side of division and conflict. Nevertheless, since such a unification is impossible in reality, totalitarianism must effect an imaginary doubling of society on itself. Through the mediation of the party, the state, as it becomes immanent in society, is at the same time expelled to an imaginary

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dimension. The party’s task, as the bearer of the imaginary unity, is to “mask the irreducible fragmentation of activities and statuses, to represent in the imaginary dimension the continuities that reality rejects, a group whose true speciality is to have no speciality” (PFM, 81). In the totalitarian project, every form of activity is duplicated by a political functionary, someone who attributes an ideological dimension to work and who expresses the unity of the state and society. Lefort writes, “Everyone has his ideological double” (PFM, 81). The function of the political commissar is to give each role in society a new meaning; for example, in a factory the manager performs the technical functions demanded by the nature of production, while the commissar gives the work its socialist meaning; he reinscribes it as an expression of the Plan. Lefort remarks that “the double” need not be someone else; one can play the role in relationship with oneself, for example, the manager, the writer, the scientist, and so forth can also be a member of the party. Permit me to illustrate this with an anecdote: A friend of mine, not living in the Soviet Union but a member of the Communist Party, was an important biochemist. He told me that he did his research in the same way, following the same methods, as the other researchers in his field; however, when he was finished and had obtained and published his results, he rewrote his work employing the categories of Engels’s Dialectic of Nature. It was only as such that his work took on its “double significance”—and for him, at that time, its true significance. He related this story to me after he had given up this practice of doubling, realizing its absurdity. In a totalitarian society, all the activities of life, from managing a factory to scientific research to playing chess and so forth, are haunted by an ideological double. The state penetrates every aspect of society, or as Lefort argues, “It disguises society as the state.” Thus we can see both the real and the imaginary significance of Stalinism. It generated a new class and new conditions of exploitation, and it created a phantasmic image of society’s unity with itself. This form of society annuls the autonomy of the political by producing its simulacra in society; at the same time it reestablishes the governing apparatus’s domination over all activities. Thus we see that totalitarianism generates a “monstrous autonomy of the political” where the Party State is both internal and external to society (PFM, 83). Lefort’s conception of totalitarianism has not so much changed over the years, rather it has deepened and established new dimensions. He does change “what” he sees as fueling this “metamorphosis of society on itself,” this doubling by which the party, a real group and a new class, produces a phantasmic doubling of itself. In his 1956 article, he argues that what sets this process in motion is the existence of a new ruling class, one

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that cannot in any sense recognize itself as a class, one that must disguise itself as society, and disguise society as itself. As we shall see in Lefort’s later work, his conception of totalitarianism will be altered as he puts it into a dynamic relationship with the symbolic structure of modern society as such, and democracy in particular. For now, I will return to Lefort’s work in the late 1950s. To get a sense of how deeply his analysis of the USSR went against the grain of dominant currents of opinion in the French left at that time, permit me to cite at length an article in L’Express on 9 November 1956. Just after the Russian invasion of Hungary, Sartre, expressing his comments on Khrushchev, writes: Yes, one had to know what one wanted, just how far one wanted to go, to undertake reforms without trumpeting them beforehand, but to make them gradually. From this point of view, the most enormous mistake was probably the Khrushchev report, for, in my opinion, the public and solemn denunciation, the detailed exposition of all the crimes of a sacred personality [Stalin] who had for so long represented the regime, was madness when such frankness was not made possible by the prior and considerable raising of the population’s standard of living. . . . But the result was to discover the truth for the masses who were not ready to receive it. When one sees the point to which, here in France, the report has shaken Communist intellectuals and workers, one has an idea of how little prepared the Hungarians, for example, were to understand that awful tale of crimes and weaknesses, unaccompanied by any explanation, any historical analysis, any prudence.

Thus, Sartre “explains” the 1956 Hungarian uprising as being caused by the release of the Khrushchev report; the fact of Soviet imperialism never seems to enter his mind. As François Furet comments in his book The Passing of an Illusion, “If in his own self-examination Lefort ‘lacked audacity,’ this is in great contrast to Sartre’s ‘almost clerical prudence.’” Sartre was not alone in being blind to the totalitarian phenomenon.

Notes 1. See Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917– 1991 (New York: The Free Press, 1994); François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, tr. D. Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1951).

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2. The English translation of this article appears in PMF, 122–135. 3. Claude Lefort, “La Politique et la Pensée de la Politique,” in Les Lettres Nouvelles, 32 (1963), 19–70. 4. Ibid., 53–54 5. Ibid., 52.

11

Totalitarianism as Regime

In a 1980 article “The Logic of Totalitarianism,” Lefort reflects on the systematic denegation of the perception of Soviet totalitarianism on the part of the left intelligentsia.1 He questions from where this blind denial could have sprung and remarks that at first totalitarianism was a concept adapted by the right. Its definition, as it appeared in a 1933 edition of Le Petit Robert, basically says that it is a single-party state in which dissent is not permitted; it is also referred to as a God-state. This definition was written by Jacques Bainville, a conservative nationalist thinker and one of the founders of Action Française. The concept was advanced by the right—at least that part of the right that was not pro-Fascist. During World War II it became an epithet hurled at the Nazis. Nonetheless, by and large the USSR was not thought of as a totalitarian society. Martin Malia shows to what extent Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a captive of the “convergence thesis,” remained blind to the specificity of totalitarianism. After the conclusion of the war and the beginning of the Cold War, the concept of totalitarianism was used by a certain stratum of liberals to designate both Communism and Fascism. Nonetheless, on the left there was a massive resistance to this category, which was viewed as something forged in order to justify “Western imperialism” and to disarm any critique of capitalism. As an early reader of Arendt, Lefort noted that her analysis, and analyses similar to it, found little support in the France of this time. We must add that this phenomenon was by no means limited to France. In the late 1980s in New York, there was a discussion in which a “leftist” denounced me for employing such an “abstract” category (totalitarianism) because it homogenized so many differences; when I responded that he seemed to have no such problem using the “concept of capitalism,” there was no reply. Regarding the notion of totalitarianism, leftists became nominalists. Furet, of whom I will speak more later, is quite 207

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skittish about using the term. In The Passing of an Illusion, he writes, “In keeping with common practice, I have used the term ‘totalitarianism’ to describe the regime [the USSR] because it is the least inadequate.”2 Furet, his own reservations notwithstanding, critically surveys the fate of the concept in the hands of American social scientists who rejected it because it was not sufficiently scientific. It offended the social scientists’ “ambition to find the true causes of social functioning hidden beneath the interminable commentary that every society issues about itself. . . . They combine the ‘infra-structural’ approach with a fondness for the ‘little man’; they work the fabric of [Soviet] society from bottom to top. Thanks to the social scientists, the USSR was restored to the common context in which societies are judged.”3 In the context, it is clear that the last sentence is meant to be ironic; what it means to say is that thanks to the social scientists the specificity of the Soviet regime was ignored. Furet reaffirms what both Lefort and Leo Strauss have said: that the social sciences appear incapable of distinguishing different types of regimes. Perhaps in tandem with this incapability, Lefort provides another reason for the left’s blindness with regard to the concept of totalitarianism. He writes, “I would now dare to say that it is because this concept [totalitarianism] is political and the left does not think in political terms” (PFM, 277). In taking this position, Lefort is in profound agreement with the thought of Arendt, but his reasons for taking it are quite different from hers. For Arendt, the inability to think politically is consequent upon the “rise of the social” in modern society, by which she means the invasion of the “metabolism of the life processes” into the space of action. Arendt gives particular emphasis here to the notion of process. She claims that the intellectual translation of the process character of modern society gives rise to both social philosophies and philosophies of history, but it does not give rise to political philosophy. Employing the title of Hannah Pittman’s book on Arendt, The Attack of the Blob, we can say that for Arendt the denegation of political philosophy is an effect of “the blob,” that is, the life processes’ ability to annul the space of difference and plurality, the space in which political action and thought are possible. Lefort’s response, on the other hand, is characteristically more nuanced. He begins by pointing out a paradox. The left—and here he is speaking of the non-Communist left—believes in and also promotes state intervention in the economy in order to attenuate the unequal distribution of wealth caused by the operation of the free market; nonetheless, it fails to reflect upon the nature of the modern state, or, better put, it fails to extricate itself from this one and only mode of reflecting upon it and thus is not able to think politically. Lefort argues that the central problem of the left is that it has failed to think through the consequences of the separation between

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civil society and the state; not that this distinction has not been considered but rather that it is thought of in terms of a kind of epiphenomenon. The transcendence of the state vis-à-vis civil society is noted; nevertheless, the truth of this separation is founded on the level of civil society. This problem is not a problem of the “Marxist”; rather, it is a problem in Marx’s thought itself. According to Marx, the rise of capitalism and the dominance of the bourgeoisie give rise to a political illusion, namely, the illusion that the state expresses the common good, or a universal interest, when in fact it is an instrument of a particular class in civil society. These were the terms employed by Marx in his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. He argued that Hegel had given expression to the illusion that the state bureaucracy was invested with a universal interest, that in fact it was a universal class. As we all know—and as Lefort himself believed for a long time—according to Marx, it is the proletariat alone which is the universal class. This historical argument claims that the bourgeoisie effected a revolution by which the state was projected above civil society, thereby freeing the mechanisms for the extraction of surplus value on the level of the economy. According to it, the state is “the executive committee of the ruling class” because it represents the interest of Capital in general and not that of any particular capitalist. To the contrary, Lefort, in line with the thought of Tocqueville, argues that the centralized state is not the product of the bourgeoisie; in fact, by suppressing the power of the nobles, the state created the conditions in which the bourgeoisie could gain dominance and the operation of the market could become free. In this respect, we see that the left has inverted the relationship between cause and effect. While not diminishing the importance of this historical argument concerning the origin of the modern state, let us now turn our attention to another dimension of Lefort’s account of it. As we have seen in our detailed reflection on his article “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” and elsewhere, he does not conceive of the state as an instrument of civil society; rather he views it as “the place of the symbolic structure of the social.” Far from being a mere organ of civil society, the state is ineluctably linked to the social institution. He argues that “above all, one would have to recognize the symbolic character of power instead of reducing it to the function of an organ, an instrument, at the service of social forces which allegedly exist prior to it” (PFM, 279). Lefort argues that there are two possible consequences that flow from the left’s blindness to totalitarianism caused by its failure to think the political in terms of the symbolic form of power. The first is the revolutionary version, which argues that since the state is only the instrument of the ruling class, it must be destroyed. This position generates either sympathy for Bolshevism or, in its Trotskyist version, poses a revolutionary alternative

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like the one Lefort took when he was twenty-four years old. The second is the social-democratic version, which claims that with the support of popular forces the state can be made to serve the general interest of society. In this latter version, since the state is regarded as an agent of the common good, one does not see that the growth of bureaucracy is not an unmixed blessing. Won over to the idea that “the expansion of the state is good in itself,” the socialist left is unaware that while working under apparently noble motives, it is fermenting an ever-increasing separation between the administrative, regulatory, and policing power, which is to say, it is fermenting a bureaucratic stratum which, “despite its internal differences and conflicts, is separating itself off from the rest of the population” (PFM, 281). Both these positions view the state as instrumental vis-à-vis civil society. In words that sound very contemporary, Lefort is accusing the left of a failure to see the evils entailed by bureaucracy. His position regarding both bureaucracy and the welfare state is rather nuanced; he rejects the notion that the modern state is characterized by what Foucault and others refer to as “bio-power.” At a conference in Brussels, which he mentions in his article “Human Rights and the Welfare State,” Lefort criticized the proposal of M. François Ost which claimed that “our Western societies developed out of the model of the liberal Etat de droit, and that they now correspond to the model of the welfare state. . . . Henceforth, its [the state’s] primary task is to ensure the well-being of its citizens” (DPT, 22– 23). If this were to be the case, Tocqueville’s worst fear would be realized. In the final section of his book Democracy in America, he speaks about the features under which despotism may appear in the world, mentioning the isolation of citizens where “each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest.” Then he continues as follows: Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object were to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.4

This power works for the people’s happiness, but it also emphasizes that it must be the sole agent and the only arbiter of this happiness. It provides for the people’s security and foresees and supplies their necessities. It is a power that both manages and directs industry and also regulates the inheritance of property. Tocqueville goes on to ask: “What remains, but to spare them [the people] all the care of thinking and all the trouble of

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living?” Lefort reminds us that the above citations give voice to one aspect of the ambiguity and paradox of a democratic regime. The other paradox is that of personal freedom and its inscription within a democratic polity. While Lefort is sensitive to the problem posed by the growth of the welfare state with its anonymous tutelary power, he does not go so far as to believe that the growth of such a power represents a convergence between liberal democracy and totalitarianism, as some conservative thinkers have argued. In his thought, the welfare state is inscribed within a democratic regime, a regime in which there is no center of power. He writes, “Power becomes and remains democratic when it proves to belong to no one” (DPT, 27). In fact, political freedom survives only insofar as the guardians of public authority are forbidden to occupy the place of power. Thus we see that the conception of the state as a bio-power forgets the political nature of modern societies. Lefort does not think that the welfare state hides its other face, namely, the police state. He argues that this would be the case only if there were a master in the welfare state; and he claims that if a master did appear, the state would lose the disturbing ambiguity which characterizes it in a democracy. He writes, “The fact that there is no master means that there is a gap, which is deemed to be intangible, between the administrative power and political authority.” 5 For him, the modern welfare state is connected to the notion of rights, an aspect of his thought that I will consider presently. The expansion of the welfare bureaucracy is not a “good in itself” nor is it a harbinger of totalitarianism. One might ask just how much of a welfare state ought we to have? From Lefort’s perspective, this is a question not of the political (le politique) but rather a question of politics (la politique). It is a matter that must be debated and negotiated within the space opened up by the political. Continuing to chart Lefort’s interpretation of totalitarianism, I will turn to a 1979 article entitled “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism.” 6 Again he begins with a moment of self-reflection; this time it is more on a philosophical than a political plane. His practice of explaining to his reader how and why he moved from one position to another, while not unique among philosophers, is, nonetheless, worthy of note. It contrasts strikingly with the oracular and unexplained reversals of positions taken by other thinkers. Sartre, after writing the statement in L’Express cited above, writes an essay entitled “The Ghost of Stalin,” which denounces the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Foucault takes any number of incompatible positions, politically as well as philosophically, and he not only does not explain his motives but also denounces the very desire for such selfreflection, arguing that it evidences a police mentality. In the Introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, he writes, “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to

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see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”7 And Julia Kristeva has taken every imaginable political position, from that of a Maoist to that of a conservative, without ever explaining why she has changed her mind. As we have already seen, Lefort’s thought, though not systematic, does not contain any trace of an oracular tone. In “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” again it is a question of his relationship to Marxism and the route he took to get out of the Marxist problematic. He tells us that he was drawn to, “indeed enchanted by, the works of Marx” (PFM, 294). This enchantment was broken in both the philosophical dimension and in the political one; his training was neither that of a sociologist nor of a political scientist; rather, it was philosophical. While still on the lycée benches he learned from his teacher Merleau-Ponty, whom he characterizes as a thinker who had a gift for breaking certainties, for introducing complications where one had sought simplifications, “a thinker who refused the distinction between subject and object, who thought that the true questions were not to be exhausted in the answers, that they come not only from us, but are the sign of our interaction with the world, with others, with Being itself” (PFM, 294). Lefort reads Marx with a philosophical sensibility acquired from the thought of Merleau-Ponty; he begins to introduce complications into his reading of Marx. His is a reading that sets Marx against Marx himself. As we have already seen, Lefort does this by discovering the Shakespearean as well as the Darwinian dimensions of Marx’s work. As the reader will recall, the Shakespearean reading of Marx puts into question the role of the proletariat as a universal class, that is, as a class bearing within itself the promise of a society delivered from division. Another aspect of his altered thinking emerged from a reflection on his own political experience. He tells us that before the end of the war he had joined a Trotskyist group. While reflecting on his experiences within this group, he developed a deeper understanding of totalitarianism. He came to recognize that certain elements of totalitarianism existed within this small group, a group that was totally removed from any effective operations of power, in the sense of ruling under adverse circumstances. Lefort’s insight into this phenomenon was quite important, since almost all the critics of the totalitarian regime, and Lefort himself as we have seen in his 1956 article, tended to conceptualize and some, but not Lefort, to excuse the totalitarian aspects of the USSR, arguing that these were due to the exigencies of governing in bad circumstances, or the failure of revolutions in the West, or the hostility of capitalist powers and the ravages of war. Lefort had thought, until the time of Lenin’s death, that certain “measures” were necessary, whereas with the rise of Stalin these so-called measures had became structural dimensions of the new regime. He had also seen some of these same aspects appearing in his small Trotskyist group, a group that did not

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have any responsibility for governing. This led him to think that if these aspects could appear in such a small party, then all the “excuses” cited above must be put into question. What were the practices that evoked certain aspects of pretotalitarianism which Lefort found existing in this small party? Within the group, he watched as “a sacred space” began to develop; he also noticed that the exercise of power was predicated on an “ability to inscribe every external and internal fact in a mytho-history” (PFM, 296). It was “the history of the Soviet Union” that furnished the stock of “sacred episodes,” which formed a grid of interpretation through which all contemporary events were to be understood. (As a student involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement, I remember finding it curious that the Trotskyist “comrades” in the movement always judged it much more important to know, in minute detail, how Stalin had usurped the position of the “left opposition” in the 1920s than to attempt to understand the causes of the Vietnam War itself.) Lefort was alert to the function of this mytho-history. He was able to see that its role was to constitute a discourse that was fundamentally invulnerable, a discourse which he claims was “subject to error and rectification in fact, but not in principle” (PFM, 298). It is the discourse of no one; rather it is the discourse of the party, that is, the ideal body of the revolution “which transverses each of its members.” The contingent events of the world are intelligible “only by being carried back to the imaginary enclosure of history, of which the party is the trustee” (PFM, 297). The party is not simply a group of people attempting, in a purposely rational manner, to effect a change in society. The party is the assembly of a social space that is protected by a pantheon of immortals, from Marx through Trotsky to Mao and Che. Lefort argues that “at the foundation of totalitarianism lies the representation of the people as one.” Already we have encountered this conception of “the people as one” in Lefort’s reflection on the thought of La Boétie; now it comes to play a central role in his conception of totalitarianism. The party and a society ruled by the party are represented as bringing about a massive division between “the inside” and “the outside”; there can be no division other than that between the people and its enemies. However, within such a society there can be no internal division; the society must bear within itself the principle of homogeneity and selftransparency. This process engenders a certain paradox. According to Lefort, the paradox is the following: “Division is denied—I say denied since a new dominant stratum is actively distinguishing itself from the rest of society, since a state apparatus is separating itself off from society—and at the same time, on the level of phantasy, this division is being affirmed between the People-as-One and the Other. The Other, being the other of the outside” (PFM, 298).

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The unity of this society is depicted as a society without internal conflict, that is, without internal division; it is a society delivered from conflicts, be they of class, interest, gender, generation, and so forth. Lefort, as we have already seen in his reflections on democracy and his reading of Machiavelli, shows that such a society cannot be realized. We see that in the reality of the totalitarian regime, all signs of conflict are projected outside the unified body of “the people as one” onto the Other. This evil Other is at the service of foreign powers, whether they be the remnants of the ancien régime in league with foreign agents, or mad people, or Jews, or gypsies, or homosexuals—those who are not really part of the people. Let us not forget the “doctors’ plot,” which only Stalin’s timely death stopped from becoming a major anti-Semitic movement in the Soviet Union, or Cuba’s massive campaign against homosexuals. The unity of the people necessitates the transformation of real opponents of the regime into agents of the outside, the Other. When these enemies of the people have been eliminated, it is necessary for new enemies of the people to be invented. The pursuit of the enemies of the people is carried out in the name of “social prophylactics.” The very integrity of the body politic is what is at stake. It is as if the body had to assure itself of its own identity by expelling waste matter. Or as if it had to close in upon itself by withdrawing from the outside and averting the threat of an intrusion of alien elements. Lefort refers to this as “the logic of terror.” Through the incessant campaigns of terror against the Other, which is viewed as that which would disrupt the phantasmic unity of the People-as-One, the body politic continually constitutes its integrity. One can see here how Lefort’s conception of terror differs from that of Arendt and we will later return to this theme. For Arendt, terror is a consequence of the totalitarian regime’s conception of itself as a “movement”; it is terror which effaces all forms of institutionalization that would crystallize and solidify the “liquid” character of the movement. Arendt argues that terror is directed against worldhood, as she used that term in The Human Condition. In a certain sense, Lefort’s notion of terror is the very opposite of Arendt’s; according to her, terror has the effect of destroying solidification, whereas according to him it has the effect of bringing about an imaginary unity. In an early article, “Totalitarianism without Stalin,”8 Lefort thought that the phantasmic doubling of the party was at the service of a logic of dissimulation. The party must disguise itself in such a way as to dissemble its existence as a new ruling class. While he would still claim that this is the case, his reflections on the nature of democracy since that time have transformed his conception of the functioning of the totalitarian party. He argues that democracy is the symbolic condition in which power is disincar-

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nate, that is, the body of the king can no longer serve as the point at which the social unity can be figured; in this kind of a regime, the dimension of the “other” remains, but it remains without a determinate representation. Through the logic of unification effected by and through the totalitarian party, the empty place of a democratic regime comes to be filled on the level of the imaginary. In the totalitarian regime, on the level of a system of imaginary identifications, the separate status of the party does not contradict the notion of the unity of the People-as-One, since the party is identical with the proletariat. As Lenin would argue, the party is the consciousness of the proletariat. If one situates oneself within this phantasmagoria, there also is not a contradiction between the unity of the People-as-One and the omnipresent and omniscient power of the party; and, ultimately, there is no contradiction between the People-as-One and the possibility of a single leader, a great helmsman, the führer. Lefort writes, “Such a power, detached from the social whole, towering over everything, merges with the party, with the people, with the proletariat. It merges with the body as a whole, while at the same time, it is its head” (PFM, 299). As a system of imaginary identification is established, it runs through the identification of the people with the party, the party with the leadership, and the leadership with, employing Solzhenitsyn’s phrase, the Egocrat. The party is “an organ that is both the whole and the detached part that makes the whole, that institutionalizes it” (PFM, 299). This logic of identification is governed by the image of the body. Quentin Skinner, in his book Liberty before Liberalism, tells us that the “body” in an expression such as the “body politic” is only a metaphor.9 I have already indicated in my reflection on the “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” that this is not the case for Lefort, who argues that on the level of representation—and for him power can function only as represented—the image of the body is not a metaphor, inasmuch as it is through the image of the mystical body of Christ and its secularization in the doubling of the body of the king that the European monarchy constituted itself. The constituting aspect of the image of the body continues to function in the totalitarian regime; here the body of the egocrat, or of the führer, is the point at which society “sees,” imagines, its unity to be inscribed. Totalitarianism is a regime in the sense that it is not simply a way of governing or a set of institutions; rather, it is a way of organizing the social body, and even beyond that a way of being inscribed in Being. It is not a theory which is put into practice, nor is it simply something imposed on reality. I consider this point more deeply when I deal with Lefort’s critical remarks on Martin Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty analyzes the phenomenon which he names the touching-

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touched, that is, the experience of one hand touching another while the latter is touching a thing. At this time, it would be inappropriate to rehearse the details of this already celebrated analysis except to recall that for Merleau-Ponty this phenomenon is “a sort of reflection that the body effects on itself.” This analysis distances itself from a certain position within the phenomenological movement, a position held by Sartre but not limited to him alone. This position claims that there is a radical distinction between the first-person experience of the body, the body as lived, and the “objective body,” that is, the body as looked at, the body as object. While not denying this distinction, Merleau-Ponty, as he usually does, introduces some complications. He argues that between the subjective experience of the body and the objective representation of it there is a “sort of reflection” that engenders not a representation but rather what he refers to in The Phenomenology of Perception as a body schema. The “body schema” is that which gives a unity to the body and tends toward the visual. Lefort is claiming that, on a social level, there is something like this “sort of reflection,” that is, a reflection that a society effects on itself. Sartre remarked that with the death of God we are on a plane where there are only human beings and things. Transferring this to a social level, it would be to say that we are on a plane where there are only human beings and the institutions that they have, consciously or unconsciously, created. Against such a position Merleau-Ponty argues that there is a “flesh of the world” which is neither subject nor object and which has no name in traditional philosophy. He tells us that the body is the place of the folding of the flesh on itself; it is the place of the sensible’s selfrevelation, that is, the place where the sensible and the sensitive cross, forming a chiasm. According to Lefort, there is also a flesh of history. Merleau-Ponty at times refers to the flesh as a “ray of being”; thus we may say that for Lefort there is a “ray of history,” that is, a directionality without a telos. There are prefigured possibilities which are indefinite without being infinite. Totalitarianism is a possibility inscribed in the dispositiv symbolique of democracy. Democracy is characterized by the loss of the king’s body with its doubled reference to transcendence. In such a regime the place of society’s inscription into the real remains an empty place; the erstwhile markers of certainty are effaced and “the people” become the source of legitimacy. Nonetheless, the identity of “the people” remains indefinite, and who is able to speak in its name remains in question. The democratic polity is structurally and permanently haunted by the possible loss of legitimacy. In which case, Lefort writes, “the distinction between power as symbolic agency and power as a real organ disappears. The reference to an empty place gives way to the unbearable image of a real vacuum” (DPT, 233). In this situation of lost legitimacy, those who exercise

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power are viewed simply as agents of “special interests” or as obsessed by a desire to impose their will. Power loses all reference to symbolic legitimacy. This conception of the empty place of the democratic regime was not yet developed when Lefort wrote Le Travail de l’Oeuvre Machiavel, but one can see adumbrations of it in this work. For example, when Machiavelli counsels a new prince not to form alliances with the nobles but rather with “the people,” this is because, as we have seen, the nobles will always see the prince as just one of them, that is, a real person with whom they play polo at the club; hence the prince’s symbolic function will be foreclosed. Certainly the loss of legitimacy which plagues a democratic regime is not the loss brought about by excessive personal familiarity; however, this is not to say that the action of the invisible ideology of the pseudo-familiarity of the entre-nous does not function to erode it. Nevertheless, by and large, what causes the erosion of legitimacy is primarily a failure to see that norms cannot be degraded to interests and that political judgment is not to be, or to be perceived as, an exercise of arbitrary willfulness. The totalitarian project desires to fill the empty place with the full body of society as incarnated in the party and in the leader. It seeks to reestablish the markers of certainty by creating an invulnerable discourse. Lefort argues that both Nazism and Communism are forms of counterrevolution against democracy. The logic of identification just described is at the service of establishing a central point of society’s presence to itself. He writes, “Both attempt, in one way or another, to give power a substantial reality, to bring the principle of Law and Knowledge within its orbit, to deny social division in all of its forms, and to give society a body once more” (DPT, 233). It is not a question of reestablishing something like the medieval monarchy, nor is it adequate to conceive of Communism as constituting a new religion. Lefort is extremely suspect of the notion of the totalitarian regime as a new religion, or as a “secular religion”—a notion that at times appears in Furet’s work. It must be emphasized that Lefort never underestimates the religious dimension of the political; this should be obvious on the basis of “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?”. On the contrary, he claims that to characterize the totalitarian phenomenon as a new religion misses its specificity and, at the same time, perhaps misrecognizes the role that religion does play in it. Totalitarianism is not a religion because, as we have seen, religion makes a reference to another place; it refers to transcendence, whereas the totalitarian regime precludes any reference to a transcendent pole of legitimacy. In fact, both Fascism and Communism were hostile to Christianity. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to view the Communist suppression of religion as an extension of the critique of “superstition or “obscurantism,” which was made in the name of the Enlightenment. In both the USSR and in China,

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the most aberrant, not to say pathological, forms of idolatry and superstition were not only permitted but also fostered, for example, the absurd disposition of Lenin’s body in the Kremlin; certain miraculous cures; and operations effected without anesthesia through the reading of Mao’s “red book.” The suppression of religion was due to the reference to transcendence that marks the religious phenomenon; religion points to a law that is not judged to be in the control of those who hold power. Above we cited Kantorowicz to the effect that in virtue of the doubling of the king’s body it was possible to contest the actual decrees of the real king in the name of the King, that is, the king’s second body, his body of grace. If we conceive of Communism as a religion, we miss one of its central phenomena, namely, its attempt to close society in on itself and to make itself the master of the symbolic order, that is, to foreclose the symbolic order as such. In “Le Mythe de l’Un dans le Fantasme et dans la Realité Politique,” an article concerning the transcendence of the symbolic order, Lefort writes, When we speak of symbolic organization, symbolic constitution, we seek to disclose beyond practices, beyond relations, beyond institutions which arise from factual givens, either natural or historical, an ensemble of articulations which are not deducible from nature or from history, but which order the apprehension of that which presents itself as real.10

For Lefort the symbolic order cannot be placed within society since it is that which establishes the very conditions of sociability; this folding in of the social on itself attempts to effect a condensation of Power, Law, and Knowledge. All of which is not to say that the religious sensibility plays no role in the construction of totalitarianism. Rather it means that in a totalitarian regime all reference to altereity is suspended. Nonetheless, we do see that what is reactivated in its totalitarian form is the essentially religious “quest for a mystical union and in the representation of a body, part of which—the proletariat, the political party, the leading organ, the egocrat—represents both the head of the people and the people in its entirety” (DPT, 234). The conception of a mystical body that we have seen in the Christian theologico-political continues to play a role in totalitarianism, but it does so without reference to “another place.” Within the phantasmagoria of totalitarianism, Lefort locates another image, one that is combined with and in tension with the image of the body; it is the image of the machine. Society is represented as a vast organization in which every part is continuous with every other part, with each part acting on the other in a kind of “mechanical causality.” There is no empty place between any of the parts; thus the distinction of the public and the private is effaced. The totalitarian project would politicize everything from playing chess to

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dancing. In this society, the feminist slogan “the personal is the political” is taken quite seriously, which is not the case, happily and for the most part, when it is used in a nontotalitarian regime. I know a man who was expelled from the Communist Party USA because when he was asked to dance by a black woman, he refused; his explanation that he did not know how to dance was insufficient. I know another man who was expelled from the same party for “womanizing.” Totalitarian societies in their essence are “defined as organization and the organizable” (PFM, 301). As is well known, Heidegger was attracted to Nazi totalitarianism; within that regime there was nothing that corresponded to “the rose which exists without a why,” which Heidegger, citing Meister Eckhart, speaks of elsewhere. Within such a regime, the militant is both an organ of the body of “the People-as-One” and at the same time a part of a machine; using a frequently employed metaphor, “he is as it were ‘a driving belt’ and, at the same time, an ‘activist-mechanist’ who makes decisions concerning the functioning and the production of society” (PFM, 301). Lefort tells us that these two images do not merge and that there is a tension between them. Inasmuch as the image of the machine does not obey the logic of identification which is constitutive of the image of the body, the image of the mechanical organization of society constitutes a threat to the body politic since it makes “the social appear at the boundaries of the inorganic” (PFM, 301). The image of the machine attaches itself to the bureaucracy. As Lefort has observed, the constitution of the image of the body, of the People-as-One, is consistently menaced by the “malevolent other,” which in reality is the phantasmic name given by totalitarianism to the currents of division and conflict which exist in every society. Thus the image of society as a vast machine, organizing the organizable, is haunted by an everthreatening chaos, of elements “likely to destroy or sabotage the laws of socialism” (PFM, 287). Lefort argues that the roots of this conception of a completely organizable society date back to the French Revolution, a revolution which was based upon the idea of creating an altogether new society and a radically new human being. It claimed that both of these were to be created on the basis of a tabula rasa and that this would lead to an absolute “new beginning.” Lefort argues that within the totalitarian sense of doubling, a very interesting epistemological quandary is imposed upon both the militant and the bureaucrat. Since the party is identical with society and also above society, the militant is both a part of the machinery and its director. She or he is the agent of the plan which is the transparent exposition of all social labor. In virtue of the plan, society must be organized in minute detail; however, the plan, in spite of its claim to self-transparency, cannot be articulated adequately in its parts. Lefort claims that in contradiction to

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the claim of self-transparency, secrecy appears and there is “a radical uncertainty for each individual, whatever his rank, as to the reasons for the decisions taken at the top and as to the limits of his own authority” (PFM, 289). All genuine competence, be it as a manager, engineer, or whatever, is suppressed by the manager’s or engineer’s political double, that is, the commissar; and what exactly and concretely he or she is to do to implement the plan remains a mystery that is subject to “change without notice.” In his book Chinese Shadows, Simon Leys gives us a sometimes hilarious description of the attempts of a party militant to interpret the abstract dictates of the party, and the “not so funny” situation of his being designated one day a “hero of socialism” and the next day a “saboteur,” though he was doing the same thing on both days.11 The confusion of this militant on the micro level reflects the confusion of the party on the macro level. On the one hand, the party, with its legitimating ideology of historical materialism, claims to be involved in a radical process of historical creation. On the other hand, as Lefort argues, the claim to total mastery through the party’s ability to organize everything creates a radical unhistorical society in which the unknown and the unpredictable—that is, the indeterminate—are the creation of outside enemies. One recalls that, in his reading of the Discourses, he underwrote Machiavelli’s understanding of Rome as a historical society because it was open to the event, to the unexpected. Machiavelli contrasted the historical Roman society with the nonhistorical societies of both Sparta and Venice. In Lefort’s analysis, totalitarian societies, their vaunted historicism notwithstanding, are closer to the societies of Venice and Sparta than they are to Rome. In fact, Lefort frequently compares totalitarian regimes to “societies without history.” If we consider his depiction of the “mythichistory” of the revolutionary heroes in the sacred episodes of the October Revolution, we see that “novel events” were conceptualized by being “carried back” to a sacred space and time. This manner of viewing society recalls one of the anthropologists’ descriptions of “primitive,” premodern societies spoken of above. This phenomenon could be explained by the fact that Lefort views totalitarian societies as counterrevolutions against the indeterminacy of democracy; he argues that they are established in order to stave off the uncertainty, caused by “the disappearance of the markers of certainty,” that characterizes the democratic regime. From reading both Soviet and Chinese histories, we know that there were frequent and murderous purges against the bureaucracy and that prosaic reasons were given to explain them—for example, that Stalin and Mao feared the growing strength of the bureaucracy—whereas we know that what both of them truly feared was the possible emergence of a rival. The so-called cultural revolution was touched off when a party organ refused

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to publish a piece written by Mao; and Stalin feared the bureaucracy because his own road to power was attained through it. In addition, Lefort argues that, on the level of the imaginary, the purposefully rational functioning of the bureaucracy comes to contest the mystical unity of the people projected onto the body of the leader. The so-called convergence thesis was predicated upon the prediction that the image of the bureaucracy would efface the mystical image of the leader; this in turn would leave the totalitarian society with a large welfare-state bureaucracy, which would not be essentially different from what was developing in the Western democracies. As we well know, no such convergence ever took place. The constitution of the imaginary body of the People-as-One, whose function was to occult the fact of social division and to project all conflict outside society and onto a malevolent Other, was an attempt to reestablish the lost markers of certainty. Like the theologico-political of premodernity, it gives a body to society; however, this body is without a reference to “another place.” In the thought of Lefort, the another place of religion gave expression to the noncoincidence of society with itself, to an exteriority vis-à-vis itself. The totalitarian project would close society in upon itself, thereby effecting a condensation of the dimensions of Law, Power, and Knowledge. Each of these dimensions, in its own way, testifies to society’s divergence from itself. I will begin with the theme of Law. The question is frequently posed as to whether law is by convention or by nature, that is, by nomos or by physis; this question is at least as old as Greek philosophy. We have already seen that Lefort’s thought cannot fall on either one or the other side of this disjunction; clearly he subscribes to the break, instituted by Machiavelli, from classical political philosophy. The modern polity cannot anchor itself in a conception of nature as ordered and hierarchical; this possibility has been foreclosed, not only by Machiavelli but also because, beginning with the thought of Descartes and Spinoza and continuing through Darwin and Freud, the notion of finality has been excluded from our conception of nature. Nietzsche tells us that if we wish to return to a theological conception of nature, it is a monkey that would block the door. In his book The Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor shows that this return would be thwarted not only by the Darwinian monkey and the doctrine of natural selection but also by the notion of nature’s cruelty and perversity as presented in the work of the Marquis de Sade. Since Lefort defines modernity as the loss of the “figure of the other” which is situated in an invisible world—a figure whose intentions would be legible in the visible order—he does not inscribe himself within a traditional conception of natural law, conceived of as the will of God encoded in the operations of nature. As we have already seen, if one claims that the law is not by nature, it does not follow that it is by convention. Lefort writes:

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The distinguishing feature of democracy is that, whilst it inaugurates a history which abolishes the place of the referent from which law once derived its transcendence, it does not thereby make law immanent within the order of the world, nor, by the same criterion, does it confuse the rule of law with the rule of power. (DPT, 39)

The democratic regime does not reduce the law to convention; nonetheless, it does remove it from the providence of a supreme judge who would decide with certainty, that is, someone who would have “the last word.” Having shown that through religion the ontological experience—an experience through which society finds itself held in an opening that it did not produce itself—is given an imaginary interpretation, it would seem evident that Lefort would not return to the content of naturallaw theory but rather to the experience that gave rise to this theory in the first place. A remark of Hans Jonas appears to testify to this experience. In a lecture at The New School for Social Research, Jonas said that were he to meet Hitler in an afterlife, he would like to be able to say to him: “You were wrong!” Not simply: “You were defeated,” or “You were evil,” but “You were wrong!” In this situation, what would be meant by “wrong”? It could mean that your “theory” and practice are not only revolting to any normal human being but also are not in accord with something that is given in man’s experience of society, of Being. It is to this experience that Lefort draws our attention; it is the experience of a first law, a law that is never given as present. In the ancien régime, this law was situated in “another place,” whereas in a democratic regime, it is situated in a debate as to what is legitimate and what is illegitimate, a debate without any ultimate guarantor and without end. Inasmuch as the totalitarian regime attempts to close society in on itself, there is a condensation of Law, Power, and Knowledge; there is an attempt to make the law present in the figure of the party, or the egocrat. The party, and ultimately the egocrat, rules in virtue of an infallible knowledge of the laws of history; the führer rules in virtue of an instinctual knowledge of the law of race; nonetheless, neither the “law of history” nor the “law of blood” constitutes a reference to transcendence, since each is interpreted infallibly by those who are presently in power. In its Communist version, the party represents a “scientific” knowledge of history. A Chinese student told me that the work of Karl Popper was enthusiastically received in dissident circles in China. I had supposed him to be referring to The Open Society and Its Enemies, but he said “no,” that it was Popper’s work in the philosophy of science that interested them. Since its knowledge is scientific, the position of the party is considered unassailable. As is well known, Popper argues that the nature of a genuinely scientific proposition is that it is falsifiable, thus under-

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mining any condensation between knowledge and power. The adventure of knowledge and its ineluctable relationship to ignorance, which is eloquently expressed in Socrates’ speech in The Apology, would be annulled within the totalitarian regime. In discourses ranging from linguistics to genetics, it was “the great helmsman” who always had the last word. The totalitarian equation of law and power, through the mediation of knowledge, does not have as its consequence a rejection of law, that is, a rule by fiat as in classical tyranny; rather, it has as a consequence the feverish attempt at legitimation. As Lefort shows in his 1999 book La Complication, the 1938 Soviet constitution guaranteed to the Soviet “citizen” all the rights granted to a citizen in a “bourgeois democracy,” for example, freedom of speech, freedom of property, freedom of association, and so forth. Nevertheless, all these rights were granted with the following qualification: It is the true socialist free speech, the true socialist property, and so forth that are guaranteed. It is made abundantly clear that it is the party, and only the party, that decides what is “the true socialist speech, the true socialist property,” and so on. The same phenomenon is seen in the Nazis’ race laws, with their Byzantine complexity regarding the codification of who is, or is not, a Jew. In Alain Resnais’ beautiful film Monsieur Klein, one is presented with a picture of this merging of the theater of hell with the theater of the absurd. The totalitarian regime does not eliminate “the rule of law”; rather, it circumscribes it within the orbit of power. The logic of this circumscription becomes intelligible as the basis for the thesis that totalitarianism, with its counterrevolutionary character, is engendered by the flight from the uncertainty introduced by the disincarnation of society within democracy. The thought of Lefort borrows from, and transforms, certain aspects, but only aspects, of the thought of Lacan: His theory of totalitarianism can be recast in Lacanian psychoanalytic terms. According to Lacan, the symbolic order is the order of the signifier. As is well known, Lacan derives his linguistic concepts from the work of Saussure, for whom language is a system of differences without positive terms, which is to say, a signifier is what it is only by its reference to a system of signifiers which is essentially absent. The possibility of speech, the syntagmatic ordering of signifiers, is essentially indefinite. It is in principle impossible to determine in advance what can be said in a language. For Lacan, desire, which exists on the level of the signifier as mediated through the symbolic order, is not subject to fulfillment, since each object of desire exists within a metonomic system of substitutions. All these aspects of the indeterminate are what totalitarianism wishes to annul, born as it is from the dissolution of symbolic legitimacy. It is out of the fear engendered by society’s perception of itself as fragmented (morcelée) that “we see the development of

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the fantasy of the People-as-One, the beginning of a quest for a substantial identity, for a social body which is welded to its head, for an incarnated power, for a State delivered from division” (DPT, 20). This development transpires on the level of the imaginary. According to Lacan, the imaginary, in contrast to the symbolic order which is characterized by its reference to absence and indeterminacy, is specular and characterized by a “subject” mesmerized by its own image. The imaginary does not simply refer to seeing as opposed to speech; rather, it is characterized by a particular kind of seeing, a seeing that does not recognize but rather misrecognizes. Nevertheless, the imaginary does not give rise to error but to illusion. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud makes the distinction between an error and an illusion in terms of the role played by wish fulfillment in the constitution of an illusion. According to Lacan, the ego is constituted on the level of the imaginary; the prototype of this constitution is the child’s recognition, her misrecognition, of herself in front of the mirror at the age of eighteen months. Prior to this event, the child experiences a failure to coordinate the movements of her body. The child has the experience of what Lacan calls “the body in bits and pieces” (le corps morcelé ). The “recognition” that the child effects through the identification with the mirror image is efficacious in overcoming this state of distress; nonetheless, by engendering this integration which was lacking heretofore, it brings about a misrecognition: In spite of the importance of this imaginary identification for the child’s development, the identity of a human being is not established by a specular identification with an image. According to Lacan, human “identity” is established in the symbolic, not in the imaginary, register; one takes on a human identity by assuming the name of one’s father. The ascension to the name of the father (nom du père) is effected by submission to the “no” of the father (non du père), that is, by the passage through the Oedipal drama generated by the interdiction against incest. The child thus assumes an identity which, like the language he speaks, transcends him on every side, since he is no more the origin of the kinship system in which he takes his place than he is the origin of the language that he speaks. The child exists in the domain of the Other. As we have seen, totalitarianism wishes to abolish the Other. Through the imaginary identification with the image of the Peopleas-One, totalitarianism seeks to foreclose the symbolic order and with it the dimension of the Other. Such a foreclosure is possible on the level of the individual: It is called madness. Although the actions of totalitarian governments abound with analogies to the ravings and antics of madmen, Lefort does not pursue this manner of argument, and for a good reason, namely, if he were to propose such analogies, it would lead to psychologism. Although there is in his work an intertwining of psychoanalytical

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and political discourses, there is not a reduction of one into the other; as noted above, psychoanalysis does not function as a grand narrative in his writings. The most striking dis-analogy between the madman and the totalitarian project is that while madness is indeed possible, the totalitarian project is not; this is because every conceivable, not to mention historical, society is in fact articulated in terms of divisions, conflicts, interests, oppositions, and so forth. In the totalitarian project, the impossibility of effacing social division shows itself in “the re-appearance of a cleavage, deeper than in any other regime, between the discourse of power and the people’s experience of their situation” (DPT, 234). The attempt to efface all altereity is an operation of the imaginary performed upon the symbolic order; it is an effort to eliminate the efficacy of speech. It wishes “to abolish the distance between enunciation and utterance [l’énonciation et l’énonce], and to be imprinted on every subject, regardless of the signification of words” (DPT, 234). Eventually this imposition becomes transparent, and the party that pretended to incarnate society ends up existing at its periphery. For example, consider the “Polish Workers Party,” which was composed exclusively of cops and bureaucrats. When the social division reemerged, both democratic aspirations and the ancient religion began to appear. At this moment, “democratic demands” and Christianity are intertwined in a historically specific circumstance, and beyond this factual connection, a symbolic connection between democratic institutions and Christian faith manifests itself. According to Lefort, both of them are demands for the legitimacy of the dimension of the Other: on the one hand, democracy, because it is the statement of the irreducibility of social division and the exteriority of society to itself; on the other, Christianity, because in a totalitarian society, as a response to the fantastic attempt to compress space and time into the limits of the social body, there reappears “a reference to an absent body which symbolizes a time-span that can be neither appropriated, mastered or reduced” (DPT, 235). As we have already seen, both Christianity and democracy recognize an unmasterable dimension of the Other. Lefort concludes a 1983 article “The Logic of Totalitarianism” by arguing that we should be aware that the totalitarian system is not achieving its ends; that, more than any system, it is contradicted by experience, which makes it all the more important to “appreciate its coherence at the level of fantasy” (PFM, 231). In the former Soviet Union, the extravagant contradiction with experience expressed itself in the figure of the dissidents, with their demands for human rights. It is on this aspect of Lefort’s thought that I will now focus my attention. His conception of rights touches upon both democratic and totalitarian regimes. Not in any sense

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could this conception be viewed as a deductive system. Nevertheless, while his thought is by no means systematic, all his major concepts are, employing Merleau-Ponty’s phrase “intertwined.” Using the language of The Visible and the Invisible, we would say that in Lefort’s thought there are clusters of concepts, meanings in “tufts and thickets.” The family of concepts, for example, society’s nonidentity with itself; the empty place; the disincarnation of Knowledge, Law, and Power; and so on, are all active in his conception of rights. We have already encountered them in his interpretation of Dante’s The Monarchy, where Lefort argued that rights, with their quasi-universality—that is, their horizontal universality—were linked to the ambiguous limits of the notion of sovereignty; whereas in the totalitarian regime, the suppression of rights is justified by a claim to absolute sovereignty. His 1980 article “Politics and Human Rights”12 begins with a reflection on the discourse of human rights enunciated by the Eastern Bloc dissidents and the response that it engendered in the West by both apologists and critics of the USSR. Curiously enough, the disparate interlocutors often share a common ground in their interpretation of rights, namely, that human rights fall outside the political. Up to a certain point in time, the dissidents said that their demands for rights had nothing to do with political matters and that they did not want to involve themselves in politics, that they had no political program to propose and no new party to form. In their own self-representation, for the most part, these dissidents were demanding the kind of rights without which there is no freedom or security for the citizen: the rights of the individual. Even those who were historically “apologists for the USSR” were quick to join this discourse; they shared the common assumptions of both “the individual” and “the non-political character” of rights. Lefort notes that the General Secretary of the particularly Stalinist French Communist Party protested against the arrest of dissidents; he protested against the arrests of people for “having the wrong opinions.” Lefort remarks, “Who bothers to ask him [the General Secretary] if the defense of human rights is the expression of an opinion?” (PFM, 242). They do not ask what the political implications of this opinion are; rather, their protests against the Soviet Union’s suppression of dissidents are based upon calculative notions. According to them, the Soviet state has a right to defend itself against “wrong opinions,” but they would prefer it not to be done at this particular temporal junction. They argue that the suppression is unnecessary at this time; thus there is merely a disagreement of fact. On the other side, resolute “critics of the regime”—here Lefort is referring to the “New Philosophers”—made an unconditional defense of human rights, but this defense was accompanied by a pure and simple refusal to think about political matters. For the most part these critics “elaborate a reli-

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gion of resistance to all power, and turn the dissidents into modern-day martyrs” (PFM, 244). By conceiving of rights on a purely moral plane, they are unable to think the difference between a democratic regime and totalitarianism except as a matter of the degree of oppression. Regarding Lefort’s relationship to the “New Philosophers”—Bernard Henri Levy, Andrew Glucksman, et al.—as political thinkers he was not particularly in agreement with them; however, he did sympathize with them as a sociological phenomenon. He was well aware that, by attacking the timidity apropos to criticizing left totalitarian states, they were breaking the incredible hegemonic force that Marxism had over most of the French intellectuals. Against all these positions, Lefort argued that human rights are political; in fact, he claimed that rights are constitutive of politics. If rights are generated by the exteriority of society to itself, then one must conclude that the suppression of rights in totalitarian regimes is not based upon calculative reasoning; rather Lefort claims that, in reality, it is the essence of the regime. Following from this, he adds that “one must refrain from granting them a reality in our own society” (PFM, 260). By this he does not mean that rights are often violated in democratic societies, since this is perfectly obvious, but that rights exist in a democratic society as generative principles. Their reality is symbolic; they may not be equated with “positive institution” by which they could be empirically described and actually enumerated; for example, rights cannot be equated with those enumerated in the American Bill of Rights. Such an enumeration of rights could be carried out in the ancien régime, where they were applied to specific groups in society, namely, the clergy, the peasantry, and so forth. As we have seen in Lefort’s critique of the Marxist notion of human rights, he argues that in modernity there is a disincarnation of rights, for although rights animate specific institutions—courts, bodies of the law, and so on—they nonetheless testify to the gap left open by the disincarnation of the social. Notwithstanding their incorporation into specific legal institutions, rights remain essentially indeterminate, that is, their meaning is always open to an interpretation without the possibility of finality. Of course in the United States, the Supreme Court is a “final arbiter,” but its decisions are always subject to revision; there is the Constitution but occasionally it is subject to amendments. Since we are speaking of a democratic society, it should be observed that the symbolic dimension of right is manifest “both in the irreducibility of awareness of right to all legal objectification, which would signify its petrification in a corpus of laws, and in the establishment of a public register in which the writing of law—like any writing without an author—has no other guide than the continuous imperative of a deciphering of society by itself” (PFM, 260). Lefort sees an essential connection between rights and the aware-

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ness of rights; it is not simply a question of “knowing one’s rights” under a given set of constitutional and legal arrangements, since this is an empirical question. As we all know, a person may be ignorant of his or her rights, but this is easily remedied by means of a lawyer. Lefort means by “awareness of right” that one has a sense that right refers to a pole beyond what is actually inscribed in positive law. By this he does not mean having an “appeal to a higher law’” which would be inscribed in the hearts of men. Hegel had shown us that the “law of the heart” gives way to the “frenzy of conceit.” Such a conception would inscribe rights in the individual; it would view them in a moral dimension, exactly the position that Lefort is opposing himself to. By the “awareness of right” he means that one is conscious of being inscribed in a polity, where there is a symbolic space in which all laws are subject to being called into question. This questioning is not done in the name of possessing a knowledge of a higher law; rather, it takes place within an ongoing debate concerning the nature and extent of justice. In this situation, there is a deep awareness that after the present discussion there will not be any absolutely final conclusions; using Lacan’s familiar phrase, there is the realization that a “subject supposed to know” does not exist, that no one possesses Justice. This awareness is not a knowledge but rather a form of democratic sensibility, a sensibility perhaps well illustrated by an anecdote. A close friend of mine, Jerome Kohn, was Hannah Arendt’s graduate assistant at The New School for Social Research. One day Arendt told him she had just read a book by a man (I think she was referring to John Rawls) who claimed to know what justice was. She asked my friend the following: “Quite apart from whether or not his [Rawls’s] claim was justified, do you think it would be a good thing to know what justice is?” She said that, for her, it would not be a good thing, since justice is something that we think about, talk about, debate about; it is not something that we know. A democratic polity may not claim to incarnate justice; rather, it makes a sign toward a transcendence of the present legal incarnation of right. The dimension of right is not real; it is symbolic. According to Lefort, to ignore the symbolic dimension of right would be to “deprive oneself of the means to understand the meaning of demands whose aim is the inscription of new rights” (PFM, 260). It is in the name of rights that workers rebel against terrible work conditions; that women object to secondary status; that homosexuals denounce their oppression; and that environmentalists attack the degradation of the natural environment. Nevertheless, at least prior to the successful struggles of social movements, these rights are not inscribed within any legal documents. Lefort argues that they are inscribed in “the flesh of the political”; they testify to a vague sense of justice and reciprocity, or of injustice and the breakdown of social obligations. He writes, “The awareness of right and its institutionalization are ambiguously

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related” (PFM, 260). He distinguishes, but does not radically juxtapose, conflicts based on interest and those based on right; conflicts of interest are resolved on the basis of power through a process of negotiation. As we know, state power, considered as the real power of the state apparatus, is based on conflicts of interest; regional and sectional interests are played off one against the other. The politics of the state of New York are explicable only in terms of the recurring conflicts of interest and their negotiations between upstate and downstate; for the most part they are resolved without appeal to the principle of justice, for example, if you give us your vote for “this” we will give you our vote for “that.” Whereas, faced with the demands for or a defense of a right, “it [the state] has to respond according to its principles, according to the criteria of the just and the unjust . . .” (PFM, 265). If the state responds to “the demand of a right” in terms appropriate to “the recurring conflict of interests,” it then runs the risk of losing its symbolic legitimacy. If this happens, the state is viewed in the eyes of its citizens as merely a cynical manipulator of interests. In the United States, the civil rights crisis of the 1960s involved considerable negotiations; nonetheless, when President Johnson was confronted with the alternative of signing, or not signing, the Voting Rights Act, he knew full well that signing it would be against the “interests” of the Democratic Party, since it would open the possibility of the Republican so-called Southern strategy, which in fact it did. To the President’s credit, he signed it anyway; and he did this not in the name of interest but of justice. The moralizing critic analyzed by Machiavelli in The Prince will always look for interest “behind” the claims of justice; indeed, in every instance the question of interests is subject to debate. Nonetheless, the debate would become pointless if there were nothing else but interests—a point that is usually not understood by the “radical” critic. Likewise, if there is absolute corruption without any gesture toward justice, then the concept of corruption loses its meaning. According to Lefort, the struggle for new rights is essentially plural; the failure to recognize this plurality has led the left to view the struggle for rights as the “phenomenal form” of a class struggle. Already I have noted that many years ago he had criticized the left for trying to view the Algerian Revolution as a form of the class struggle; now he is criticizing them for attempting to manipulate the demands for rights in order to institute its “old program” of the total transformation of society. Carried to the point of absurdity, the argument claims that the persecution of homosexuals is somehow linked to the suppression of private property in the means of production; the converse is equally bizarre, namely, that common ownership of the means of production entails the liberation of homosexuality. These absurdities are attested to in the case of Cuba. In a democratic society, social movements do not tend to fuse to-

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gether. Lefort argues that whatever their affinities and convergences may be, they are not dominated by the image of a People-as-One. Thus we must resolve to abandon the idea of a politics that would compress collective aspirations in the model of “an alternative society,” or—what amounts to the same thing—“the idea of a politics that would stand over the world in which we live and allow it to be struck by the thunderbolts of a Last Judgment” (PFM, 266). The phantasm of the final struggle is linked to the notion that the agent of social change is viewed as the People-asOne. Lefort insists on the plurality of the movements for rights, and this does not lead him to a denegation of the unity of society or to a celebration of pure plurality. Let us recall that in his critique of Marxism he insisted that the class struggle, a notion that he retains while rejecting only its metaphysical baggage, always takes place within the same society. If one rejects the totalitarian phantasm of the People-as-One, this does not necessarily deliver one over to the idea, proclaimed by certain strains of liberal contract theory, of pure diversity. Lefort argues that “if we adopt this view, we replace the fiction of unity-in-itself with that of diversity-in-itself” (DPT, 232). The intractability of social division and conflict does not eviscerate the unity of a society; nevertheless, it is not a unity that is achieved or achievable. We should say that in a democratic society, there is a “quest for unity,” which bears within itself a latent common identity and “relates to itself through the medium of a power which goes beyond it; simultaneously, there are many different forms of sociability, forms which are not determinable, not totalizable” (PFM, 271). Thinking that employs Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a hyper-dialectic, by which he means “a dialectic of unity and plurality,” a dialectic without synthesis, clearly has political implications. To use Lefort’s phrase describing the politics of Machiavelli, the political practice that hyper-dialectical thought invokes is a “politics of risk.” Or, in the terminology of Max Weber, a politics of responsibility rather than an ethic of ultimate ends. Certainly this does not lay out a political program, since that is the work of politics (la politique) and of political judgment, not of political philosophy. The political practice based upon the hyper-dialectic does nonetheless exclude certain political programs, namely, those based on illusory conceptions of the nature of society. Naturally, it implies the rejection of the totalitarian project, and what Martin Malia calls “integral socialism,” by which he means the elimination of the market, along with the abolition of private property and the suppression of the profit motive. What is not so obvious is that this sort of political practice excludes both anarchism and the conception of a selforganized society. I will begin with the conception of a self-organized society. Lefort elaborates an objection that is both conventional and by no means unique

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to him—in fact, he does not even have much enthusiasm for it. It is simply that a modern society is too complex to be subjected to spontaneous selforganization; centralized bodies of decision making which are remote from the general population are inevitable. Can one seriously imagine the monetary policy of the United States or, for that matter, the water system of New York City, being subject to direct democratic control? While Lefort is in accord with these positions concerning the impracticability of selfmanagement in a complex society, he is wary of some of its conceptual moves, recognizing that this position taken a step further could end up being not only an argument against anarcho-syndicalist societal selfmanagement but also against democracy itself. He argues that this realist position “confuses the exercise of competence with the exercise of power,” whereas he wishes to make a distinction between them. Competence can be exercised directly on things, on matters to be managed; it can also be enacted in the “shadowy regions of the organization” (PFM, 263). As we have seen over and over again, power can be exercised only as represented; it is essentially a public and symbolic phenomenon. Furthermore, such a position tends to underestimate the properly political movement that gives rise to the “problems” that are to be solved by experts; for example, an environmental movement in its demands for rights generates questions that only experts can address, for instance, how exactly can one eliminate acid rain? In this situation, we see that the expert exercises competence but not power. The political practice based upon the hyper-dialectic also rejects the political practice of the anarchist. Lefort’s objection to anarchism is more serious and philosophically more interesting than his argument against the self-organized society. He claims that the anarchist has succumbed to the sweet seduction of the good society, that is, a society in which social division and conflict would be completely overcome. He writes, “Whoever dreams of the abolition of power secretly cherishes the reference to the One and the reference to the Same.” She or he imagines a society that would accord spontaneously with itself, a place where a multiplicity of actions would be transparent to one another, a society that would unfold in a homogenous time and space. Such a society is one in which ways of producing, of living together, of communicating, of associating, of thinking, of feeling, of teaching, and so forth, would all express a single way of being. Lefort goes further and tells us that the idea of a society that would be spontaneously in accord with itself, in which all conflict can be predicted and resolved in advance, is in fact a phantasm of an omnipotence generated by the actual exercise of power. The reader may recall “the old anarchist” in Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh, who pictures a society in which all the workers will drink beer and eat hot dogs under the beauti-

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ful trees in the park. At the moment of truth, precipitated by the iceman Hickey, who throws cold water on all their illusions, Hickey tells us that perhaps the elderly anarchist would really like to drink our blood. Lefort seems to be in accord with Hickey when he writes, “What is the imaginary realm of autonomy, if not a realm governed by a despotic thought?” (PFM, 270). It should be noted in passing that anarchist groups have been known to generate the same sort of micro-bureaucracies that Lefort described from his experience with the Trotskyist group. In a chapter on totalitarianism, a discussion of rights in a democratic polity appears to be less odd if we recall that Lefort has repeatedly argued that there are aspects of the democratic experience that are legible only after a reflection upon totalitarianism; that totalitarianism is intelligible only as a flight from, and a counterrevolution against, democracy. If, as he claims, the ontological status of rights is that of the extrinsic relation of power to itself and of law to itself, then we can read the essence of totalitarianism as an attempt to enclose society in upon itself, thereby suppressing the very notion of rights, or transforming them into “true” rights where the arbiter of truth is the party, which is the place where society coincides with itself on the level of the imaginary.

Notes 1. This article appears in English translation in PFM, 273–291. 2. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, op. cit., 37. 3. Ibid., 495. 4. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 Vols., tr. H. Reeve, revised and corrected by F. Bowen and P. Bradley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 316. 5. DPT, 29. 6. This article appears in English translation in PFM, 292–306. 7. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, tr. A. M. S. Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 17. 8. This article appears in English translation in PFM, 52–88. 9. Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 28. 10. Claude Lefort, “Le Mythe de l’Un dans le Fantasme et dans la Realité Politique,” 43 (translation mine). 11. Simon Leys, Chinese Shadows (New York: Penguin Books, 1978). 12. This article appears in English translation in PFM, 239–273.

12

The Fate of the Concept of Totalitarianism after the Fall

In 1999 Lefort published La Complication: Retour sur le Communisme. I will begin with a comment on the book’s title. The reader will recall that twenty years earlier, in 1979, Lefort wrote “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” an article which began with a self-reflection on his path out of Marxism. He described his mentor, Merleau-Ponty, as “a thinker who had a gift for breaking certainties, introducing complications, when one sought simplifications.” This reference to Merleau-Ponty could be read as an introduction to the thought presented in La Complication. At the time of its publication, the contours of his thought on the genesis and the structure of totalitarianism are basically in place. This is by no means to say that it is repetitive; his earlier thoughts on totalitarianism responded to the new phenomenon of the emergence of totalitarianism and to the inability of the left to perceive it. This most recent book responds to the dominant interpretations of totalitarianism that have appeared since the implosion of the Soviet Union: Martin Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991; François Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the 20th Century; and a work which is addressed less critically, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. By demonstrating his divergence from these interpretations, Lefort’s own position is both deepened and clarified. In the Preface he tells us that his aim is “to show what is still repressed in recent interpretations which present the formation of the totalitarian regime as a digression at the core of the 20th century” (CRC, 5). Nevertheless, the two works primarily addressed, those of Malia and Furet, are not texts that operate on the same level. As the subtitle of Malia’s work suggests, it is a history of the USSR. Thus he deals with the totalitarian phenomenon basically as it functions in the formation and operation of the Soviet state; he does this without neglecting altogether the repre233

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sentation of the USSR in the rest of the world, particularly the United States. Furet’s work, as the subtitle also indicates, is a work on the idea of Communism, mainly in Western Europe and specifically in France. What they have in common is that they both employ a conception of totalitarianism and a notion of its significance in the twentieth century; Malia does so explicitly and Furet does so hesitantly and somewhat grudgingly, as I have already noted above. According to both authors, the totalitarian phenomenon is a thing of the past. Lefort immediately introduces some complications regarding this notion that “totalitarianism is a thing of the past.” The opening sentence of La Complication reads as follows: “Communism pertains to the past; in return, the question of Communism remains at the heart of our time” (CRC, 5). What Lefort wishes to discuss is the placement of totalitarianism in the past, as if it were a closed issue; for him this placement is extremely important. He poses the question: “What general theory of history underlies this periodization?” This raises the not unrelated question of political judgment. The first chapter of Malia’s book is entitled “The Historical Issue: A Time for Judgment.” He writes: “For the first time it is possible to see Soviet Communism as a closed historical epoch, with a clear beginning, a middle and an end.” Further on he evokes the wisdom of Hegel that “the owl of Minerva takes flight only as the shades of night are falling.” He claims that before the collapse of the regime, “we were always somewhere in media res.”1 This would seem to imply that one could judge only after Communism had become a “closed chapter.” While Lefort does not deny that the collapse of the regime does give us a certain privileged perspective on it, he certainly does deny that judgment cannot be effected, or is so only provisionally, in media res. Above I referred to his citation, in the Preface to The Visible and the Invisible, of the line of Kafka: “Things never give themselves to me at their root, but somewhere toward the middle of them.” This is to say, we are “always in media res.” According to Lefort, judgment is effected not in spite of our being in “the middle of things” but precisely because of it. He notes that it is anomalous that Malia would evoke the wisdom of Hegel’s owl, since, as we shall see, he is someone who believed that one of the “original myths” at the origin of Communism is the myth of the necessity of historical reason. Lefort asks: “If Communism is a ‘closed chapter,’ where is the book from which we can extract this chapter?” (CRC, 21). Political judgment does not require a pensée du survol (high altitude thinking) on a closed system. As we are well aware, two thousand years later there are still greatly divergent interpretations of the Greek polis; in fact, Lefort will argue that people have made judgments in media res that are more accurate than those of Malia. This poses a historical issue, since both authors gravely understate the extent of opposition

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and critique made by the independent left. As I have noted, Lefort has criticized the left’s blindness to totalitarianism, claiming that it principally came from the left’s inability to think politically; it was not due to the fact that history had not yet come to a “closed chapter.” Nonetheless, he was aware that this blindness was very far from being total; as an example, Lefort evokes the American art critic Harold Rosenberg, to whose thought I shall turn presently. For the moment, I will problematize the very notion of totalitarianism operative in both Furet and Malia. Let me begin with Malia. In his first chapter he argues that the eternal return of utopian hope, which is breaking through the façade of social-science rigor, brings us back to the premise that the key to understanding the Soviet phenomenon is ideology. “It is only by taking the Soviets at their ideological word, treating their socialist utopia with literalminded seriousness, that we can grasp the tragedy to which it led.”2 From this citation, the careful reader will observe Lefort’s divergence from Malia’s position with regard to the rule of ideology. Malia’s book is an extremely rich historical study, concerning which Lefort is by no means dismissive. Nevertheless, the theoretical scaffolding on which it is constructed can be presented abstractly and without caricature. It is as follows: The history of the Soviet Union is a tragedy. Why is it a tragedy? It is a tragedy because it was produced by the quest for the perfection of justice, equality, and peace “which is ‘socialism,’ and for that summum of Promethean technological power which defines ‘modernity.’”3 Malia argues that the socialist project is profoundly linked to the project of modernity; he puts a strong emphasis on the word project. Notice that the words “feudalism,” “absolutism,” “ancien régime,” “liberalism” are each used to indicate a type of regime which came after, or was simultaneous with, the existing regime, whereas the term “socialism” appeared one hundred years before any attempt was made to bring it into existence in 1917. It is important to note that it did not come into being in order to designate “an existing regime”; rather it was considered to be an alternative to “all existing regimes.” Even after 1917, “socialism” existed in the “radiant future,” since it designated no existing reality. From this Malia concludes, “So the full reality of socialism is reserved for the realm of faith, the belief in things unseen, the hope in things unknown.”4 Socialism is a messianic and, one might say, even a “quasi-magical” term. Basically, for Malia, socialism is a secularized form of messianism which became linked, through Hegel, to a theory of historical development. In addition, it became linked to an “equally charged and ambiguous term, democracy.”5 In the twentieth century, this brought about a combination of three things which all have very different historical origins, namely: constitutional government with the rule of law, which is, of course, much older than democracy;

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popular sovereignty, which is based upon “the will of the people”; and social justice, or social equality. In the writings of Rousseau and Kant, there is an exultation of the common man, and in Hegel’s thought there is a “quasi-deification” of Reason. Thus Malia argues that the word “democracy” loses its negative charge of quasi-mob rule or anarchy that it carried “from Plato to America’s Founding Fathers.”6 Linked to democracy, socialism became a political program with the thought of Marx. Until this point there is nothing exceptional in this aspect of Malia’s thesis. Malia goes on to claim that Marxist socialism is a form of secularized Christianity which thinks of itself as a form of science. He quotes approvingly Besançon, who writes, “Moses and St. John . . . knew that they believed. . . . [Marx and Lenin] believed that they knew.”7 The Soviet Union is the attempt to instanciate this utopia; it attempts to put “utopia in power”; nonetheless, it is a “failed utopia.”8 Using Berdiaev’s term, Malia refers to the Soviet regime as an “ideocracy,” that is, governance by an Idea. This idea was spawned by the Enlightenment’s notion of a goal to history, one that would lead to a rational and egalitarian society. Malia insists that the Soviet Union is a totalitarian regime, and on this point he is in accord with the thought of Lefort; however, his meaning of the word “totalitarian” is different from the meaning that Lefort gives it. Malia argues that in a theocracy, God does not rule directly but rather indirectly through his priests; and “in the secular ideocracy that was the Soviet Russia, the Idea of Socialism ruled indirectly, through its ‘vanguard party.’”9 Thus the “ideocracy” became a “partocracy,” that is, an all-powerful, oneparty state which was dedicated to the wholesale transformation of mankind and society according to the idea of socialism. Inasmuch as reality did not conform to the representation given to it by socialist theory, the party became not just the seat of knowledge but also the seat of will. By means of its will, the party will force “the real” to correspond to “the idea”; in order to accomplish this, it must be all-powerful and exercise central control over all aspects of life. Thus we see the tragic dimension of socialism. The Leninist adventure has turned out to be what has been called a “mistake of Columbus,” that is, “the Party set sail for socialism but instead stumbled on Sovietism, thereby landing Russia in an inverted modernity.”10 It is a tragedy in the sense that “it takes a great idea to produce a great crime.”11 According to Malia, Soviet totalitarianism was constructed by mistake; it had as its goal both justice and equality; instead it achieved the inverted modernity of party rule, a partocracy. I will now consider, in some detail, Lefort’s objections to Malia’s interpretation. I begin by stating that for Lefort the “Leninist adventure” arrived at exactly the land that it had set sail for, namely, a totalitarian state, by which he means that a totalitarian movement produced a totalitarian regime. He is not denying the occurrence of some unintended

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consequences; clearly, one would not argue that the Soviet state wanted to fill warehouses with things that nobody wished to buy. Nonetheless, the fact that “the state intended to be the incarnation of society” is something that was desired from the very beginning. As we have already seen, Lefort asked what was repressed in the current theories of totalitarianism, not what they overlooked. His employment of the psychoanalytic term is not accidental; he sees in these theories of totalitarianism a certain apologetic dimension, not in terms of the past politics of either Malia or Furet but of the historical appropriation of the totalitarian experience. He writes, “It is not disagreeable to see oneself designated now as a victim of a utopia, and of being offered the double image of innocence and repentance” (CRC, 23). To illustrate this dimension of his critique of Malia and Furet, Lefort turns to a 1955 article by Harold Rosenberg entitled “Couch Liberalism and the Guilty Past.”12 Indeed, Rosenberg is dealing with the past political positions of the people he addresses; he is referring to Whitaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, and Leslie Fiedler, but this aspect of the article is not relevant for Lefort’s argument. In making his case against these exCommunists and fellow travelers, Rosenberg employs certain moves, each of which is relevant for Lefort’s critique. He begins by summing up Fiedler’s position, a position which claims that “we have been guilty of being innocent” and this is not really such a bad thing after all, since we were tricked. In like manner, Whitaker Chambers pleads with Alger Hiss to confess to his role as a Soviet spy. It is argued that only by confessing will “we” terminate our culpability; Chambers laments Hiss’s refusal to confess as a defeat for all of “us.” In his book An End to Innocence, Fiedler writes that Hiss failed all liberals, and anyone who calls himself a liberal is not exempt, since “all liberals” had in some sense and “at some time” shared his illusions; he failed all of us who demanded that he speak out loud a common recognition of complicity. This sort of guilt is “the guilt of an essence,” since he confesses for the guilty “we” without an “I.” To the implied accusation of the phrases “anyone who calls himself a liberal is not exempt” or “all liberals,” note that Rosenberg’s response to this strange employment of “we” was to claim that “I never shared anything with Mr. Hiss, including automobiles and typewriters; certainly not illusions.”13 Fiedler then goes on to claim that at the bottom of their hearts, all liberals, (“we”) did not finally want him to admit anything; they “preferred the chance he gave them to say: ‘He is, we are, innocent.’”14 The notion of shared illusion also makes a reference to “a time of innocence.” By the logic of confession, “all the Communist fakers, fools and position-seekers of yesterday become not only ‘innocent’ but ‘generous and open-minded.’”15 If one abstracts from the polemical style, it becomes clear how this position is relevant to Malia’s position. Rosenberg’s second move concerns a falsification of history which is

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accomplished by the blurring of the distinction between Communists and the Independent Left. Recall Irving Howe’s remark that between the Stalinists and the rest of the left there is a “line of blood.” Rosenberg argues that in the reconstruction of history provided by the ex-Communists, it would appear that paying one’s dues to the party, and following its line with all its zigzags, was only a particular way of making a critique of capitalism, race relations, and American foreign policy, as if there were a continuum over, or under, Howe’s “line of blood.” He writes, “It is false to say that a belief in freedom, equality and individuality, induced adherence to the Red band with its underhand of party bosses, spies and masterminds.”16 For Rosenberg the liberal sentiment for radical equality and freedom was the “single intellectual mooring” that held against the power of the totalitarian “we”; it is this faith in liberty, equality, and individuality that forbade one from joining the party. Both Lefort and Rosenberg see, as Malia does not, that it is extremely anomalous to claim that the desire for freedom and equality could lead one to submit to the discipline and the authority of the party. Before continuing with Rosenberg’s argument, we should ask ourselves: How did one arrive at such a position? Lefort charges both Malia and Furet with intellectualism. We begin with a consideration of Malia’s thoughts on the construction of the Leninist program; it is a construction that runs through a theory of secularized religion and then deals with the writings of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. In itself this is not objectionable; nonetheless, employing Husserl’s phrase which Lefort cites, what it lacks is “a return to the things themselves.” Malia’s construction lacks a phenomenological dimension since it fails to “interrogate the phenomena, such as they present themselves and give themselves to thought” (CRC, 13). After citing Husserl, Lefort evokes again Marcel Mauss’s Essay on the Gift, where Mauss speaks of the notion of the total social fact. Lefort writes, “Mauss expresses the desire that “one would come to see the social things themselves in the concrete, as they are. . . . In societies, one knows more than ideas or rules, one knows men, groups and their behavior” (CRC, 14). Lefort cites Rosenberg so extensively because he is well aware that Rosenberg is not viewing the Communist Party as the instanciation of ideas running from Jesus to Hegel; rather, he is describing the behavior of the Communist Party toward the American Left that he actually experienced. According to Lefort, we may not limit ourselves to the ideological justification given by party leaders; rather, we must describe the “nature of this new institution,” that is, the Bolshevik Party. Returning to Rosenberg’s description, he argues that the intellectuals and fellow travelers who followed the Communists through the execution of the Old Bolsheviks, the extermination of the anarchists in Spain, the Stalin-Hitler pact, the sabotage of French and British resistance to the

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Nazis, the partition of Poland—all of which took place in public and behind no curtain of any kind—“were not ‘innocent,’ to say nothing of ‘generous and open-minded.’” He refers to them as scoundrels, as a type of middle-class careerist who was closed both to argument and evidence; they were impatient with thought. “These psychopaths of ‘radical’ conformity, whose ‘idealism’ was that of a sodden group of Philistines, are distinguished from the rest of their species by their more up-to-date smugness and systematic malice.”17 They have been gifted with a cynicism that had hardened their minds against any human plea or any evidence embarrassing to the party. Rosenberg concludes his article with the following observation: . . . the Communist intellectuals in America detested above all, not capitalism nor even fascism, to both of which the switching Party line taught them to accommodate themselves—their one hatred which knew no amelioration was toward the independent radical.18

Rosenberg’s last point, which speaks of the hatred toward the “independent radical,” is strongly underwritten by Lefort. Later in this work I will speak of Lefort’s own experience as an independent radical vis-à-vis the French Communist Party, part of which is his experience, after having given a lecture, of being brutally attacked by “Communist thugs” in the 13th arrondissement. In passing, let me remark that Lefort’s treatment of this theme through the work of Harold Rosenberg testifies to a certain modesty on his part, inasmuch as he could easily have substituted himself and his own writing and experience for that of Rosenberg’s. Now let me turn to François Furet’s work The Passing of an Illusion. As I have already noted, Furet shares with Malia a form of intellectualism, that is, the belief that the presence of Communism and the representation of the Soviet Union in the non-Communist West are explicable in terms of an idea, or an illusion. Furet is not speaking of the history of the Soviet Union—this is not his subject—nonetheless, both he and Malia share the view that a final judgment is now possible. Furet claims that the historian “is today sure of dealing with an entirely closed circuit of the modern political imagination” (CRC, 36). For reasons already stated, Lefort objects to this notion. In the Preface to The Passing of an Illusion, Furet argues that nothing was more foreign to the opinion of observers of the Soviet Union than “the possibility of a radical crisis in the social system established by Lenin and Stalin.”19 After reading this, Lefort writes, “In the manner of Rosenberg, I protest” (CRC, 37). He evokes a number of his writings: his 1956 article “Totalitarianism without Stalin” which I have already studied; a 1970 preface to Éléments d’une Critique de la Bureaucratie, in which he

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speaks of a crisis in the Soviet system; and a 1977 article, “Une Autre Révolution,” in which he wrote: “Totalitarianism constitutes the most effective system of domination, but it is also the most vulnerable”(CRC, 38). Indeed, Lefort did predict a crisis and the ultimate collapse of the totalitarian regime; however, he did not imagine it in the exact form in which it actually happened. It is not simply a question of having been right as a sort of point of honor; rather, it is that its quasi-predictive power lends credence to Lefort’s analysis. He argues that the Soviet regime repressed something that is of the essence of society, namely, its division and its noncoincidence with itself. As we know from Freud, there is always a return of the repressed. Lefort claims, and not only in terms of himself, that it was possible to see the fatal defects of the USSR long before the regime had become an “internally closed circuit of the modern political imagination.” Before proceeding further, I will attempt to understand what Furet means by “an illusion.” Lefort argues that in Furet’s work, rather than speak of one illusion, we should speak of “a conjunction of a number of illusions,” namely, a theory of history; a theory of science; a theory of the project to generate a radical transformation of society; and a theory of mankind’s deliverance from all evil, the latter being a form of secularized religion (CRC, 42). Lefort notes that these illusions all have different origins, namely, German philosophy of the nineteenth century; positivist rationalism; a moral voluntarism; and a quasi-religious faith in humanity. Furet tells us that the type of illusion he is pointing to is different from an illusion that springs from miscalculation, or from errors of judgment. He writes, “For people lost in history, an illusion of this kind not only gives their life meaning but offers them the comfort of certainty.”20 It is the kind of illusion which was impervious to repudiation by experience; in this respect, it was like religious faith, even though its object was historical. Many of the objections Lefort had posed to Malia’s work resurface in his reading of Furet; among them is his critique of their conception that totalitarianism can be viewed as a secular religion. Nevertheless, one of the many things that distinguish Furet’s analysis of the Communist illusion is the important role he attributes to the French Revolution. Among the illusions that condense in Furet’s work, Lefort judges as predominate “the possibility of a total transformation of the course of human history and the idea of a radical beginning”; both these notions were laid out in the French Revolution. He points to “the representation of a scene in which the great conflict between the hero-founders and the forces of conservation and reaction have already been played out” (CRC, 43). Furet goes on to tell us that Marx and Engels were the “inventors” of the idea of Communism,21 which is to say, the idea that will be instanciated in the USSR, along with the phantasm of it that will captivate so many intellectuals in the

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West. Lefort takes exception to this “false paternity of Marx”; in fact, this phrase is the title of a chapter in La Complication (CRC, 45). The reason for Lefort’s objection is certainly not that he wishes to defend “the honor of a pure Marx.” As we have amply seen, Lefort does not hesitate to criticize Marx, even Marx himself and not only Marxists. Recall his critique of Marx’s notion of human rights and also his criticism of the mode of discourse used in The Communist Manifesto; in both cases, Lefort entertains the idea of a possible link between certain aspects of Marx’s thought and the totalitarian regime in the USSR. There are two basic reasons for his objection to this notion of Marx’s paternity. First, he does not think that totalitarianism is the instanciation of an idea, neither the idea of a classless society nor the Fascist idea of a master race; rather, he argues that it is a mutation of the symbolic structure of democracy, that is, totalitarianism is a flight from the empty place that democracy entails. Second, he argues that in its reality in the USSR, and also in its phantasmatic existence in the West, the concept of the party plays a central role. It is not “Marx’s texts” which play the role of the place where society is identical with itself; it is not the truth of these texts which gives a “sense of certainty”; rather, it is the party that plays the role of giving a body to society. It is in submission to the party that “people lost in history” will gain a sense of certainty. This notion of the party is not a central idea in Marx’s writings; in fact, it is hardly an idea of his at all. Lefort cites Boris Souvarine, the celebrated historian of Bolshevism often referred to by Furet, who writes, “This idea [the dictatorship of the proletariat] is one idea among others that he [Marx] announces in a few lines, specifically in private letters . . . and in his critique of the Gotha program, but to which he never consecrated a chapter in his works, not even one or two pages” (CRC, 46). Lefort writes that Communists, thanks to Lenin, “manipulate Marx as they manipulate the facts” (CRC, 47). In Lefort’s reflection on this text of Furet, the interpretation of Marx’s texts does not play a significant role; rather, he is interested in what Furet considers to be the historical inspiration for the Communist idea, the revolutionary passion and also the democratic passion. Furet argues that the idea of Communism is born of the French Revolution; this revolution also gives birth to the myth of revolutionary voluntarism. He writes, “The revolutionary passion transforms everything into politics, which means that everything, starting with humanity, is part of history, and that anything can be attained with a good society once it has been founded.”22 The French Revolution and the religious passion and politics that accompanied it were quests for grace. Furet credits the French Revolution with having a “messianic conception of politics.”23 Lefort does not reject either the myth of revolutionary voluntarism or the idea that the myth of the

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French Revolution became the “grid” through which the Bolsheviks interpreted events in Russia; Trotsky, almost until the end of his life, interpreted the rise of Stalin through the prism of the Thermidor. Nevertheless, Lefort does have a certain reticence toward the idea of explaining the October Revolution, and the institution of the Bolshevik regime, on the basis of the French Revolution. As we have seen, he interprets the advent of the totalitarian regime on the basis of a mutation of the symbolic dimension of the political which is introduced by the democratic regime. The question that must be answered is: “What is the relationship between the French Revolution and the October Revolution?” As we have seen, Lefort used a text by Harold Rosenberg to effect a phenomenological critique of Malia’s thesis of “the Columbus mistake,” that is, the idea that totalitarianism is a failed utopia. By means of a historical reflection, he will now contest Furet’s effort to establish a continuity between the October Revolution and the myth of the French Revolution. Lefort notes that “an astonishing thing, François Furet, as well as Martin Malia . . . hardly mention February: October alone occupies them” (CRC, 54). In a certain sense, this is not quite fair to Malia, inasmuch as he does speak of “the well-known story of the eight months separating February from October” 24; nonetheless, he does so in only two pages of his book, in the course of which he writes, “In other words, this [October] ‘Revolution’ was a minority military action, not a mass event like the one in February.”25 Lefort points out that this “well-known story” has not been adequately reflected upon when one attempts, as Furet does, to establish such a close link between the October Revolution and the French Revolution; it is important to emphasize that the French Revolution was directed against the ancien régime whereas the October Revolution was not. The February Revolution was not directed by a political party; it was a spontaneous uprising of workers and peasants against an exacerbated exploitation which was a consequence of the prolongation of the First World War. It gave rise to a proliferation of revolutionary organs all over the country and thus led to a highly unstable relationship between the provisional government and the Soviets of workers and soldiers. Lefort again evokes Souvarine, who claims that no professional revolutionary, or party, had guided the masses in revolt; he writes, “No leader led the way” and, for its part, the provisional government was incapable of rising to the urgency of the situation. When Lenin arrives in Russia in 1917, he encounters . . . a space of wild democracy [démocratie sauvage] which has installed itself in the wake of the [February] Revolution—democracy, in the sense that the principles of elections and free discussion are everywhere recog-

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nized, but wild (sauvage) in the sense that it is incapable of regulating itself into a system of institutions, and that it will permit the party bureaucracy to capture a part of the energies invested in the creation of autonomous organs .(CRC, 41)

What each of these democratic organs had in common was their desire to break with the ancien régime. Faced with the situation of the “wild democracy” which was established after February, Lenin does the following: With a cadre of professional revolutionaries who were acting under the strict discipline of the party and were fully committed to its line, he infiltrates all the revolutionary organs and declares his minority party to be the majority (Bolshevik) party. Thus we have the “well-known story” of October and its consequences: the eviction of all other socialist parties from the government along with their subsequent persecution; the restriction of freedom of the press followed by its suppression; the subordination of all independent organs and finally their elimination; the concentration of all power in the hands of the party; the introduction of new measures to control all economic, administrative, juridical, and cultural aspects of life; and, finally, the creation of the Cheka, that is, the KGB, who are the secret police and the enforcers of terror. All these activities, which followed upon the October Revolution, did not go unnoticed at the time, either within Russia or outside it. They provoked Rosa Luxemburg’s violent denunciation of Leninism, and they mobilized a faction of old Bolsheviks—the fate of whom is well-known— who even after October were committed to sharing power with other revolutionary currents and maintaining freedom of expression. Nonetheless, “the party responds to its vocation which is to tolerate nothing, unless it is a necessity of fact, which is outside of it” (CRC, 61). Hereafter the party will organize all the forces of social life; it will incarnate the underlying true will of the proletariat, which may indeed diverge considerably from its apparent will. As we know from Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, the consciousness of the proletariat’s historical task can only come to it from the outside. When one asks why did the people follow Lenin in this repressive project, Lefort’s response is that in a situation of “wild democracy,” people had become fascinated by the “double attraction of a revolutionary machine and of the mystical body of the proletariat” (CRC, 64). Nevertheless, he is quick to add that his concern is not to distinguish between the good popular revolution and the bad totalitarian one, thereby fulfilling the illusions of anarcho-syndicalists everywhere, but rather to establish a different relationship between democracy and totalitarianism than the one proposed by Furet. He argues that what bars the type of continuity suggested by Furet is the fact that the French Revolution was made against the

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ancien régime, whereas the October Revolution was fought against the situation of “wild democracy.” There is also the fact that the French Revolution issued in the disincarnation of society, while the effect of the October Revolution was to give a mystical body to “the people as one.” Lefort writes, “Moreover, it is a mutation at the interior of a new political space. But this is not identifiable to the extent that one could make of it the product of an idea, or of a chain of ideas” (CRC, 65). At this point in La Complication, Lefort wishes to “complicate an idea” which is by no means limited to Furet, namely, the filiation between the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins. Furet claims that the war not only gave the Bolsheviks power in Russia but also finally “allowed them to emerge as the successors to the Jacobins and the Paris Commune.”26 One of the central theses of Furet’s book is that before the Second World War, the principal form of the Soviet Revolution’s legitimation was “to place itself in direct continuity with the French Revolution.”27 Furet claims that “by virtue of this imaginary lineage, Lenin’s Soviet Union took the reins of human progress and assumed the spot that revolutionary France had been keeping warm for it since the late eighteenth century.”28 From this point of view, Lenin is the Robespierre of the proletariat. In Furet’s text, this identification is recognized as being “imaginary” and even “absurd”; he sees it as an ideology. Nevertheless, in another sense Furet participates in it himself when he employs his notion of a lineage which passes from the French Revolution’s revolutionary passion to that of the Bolshevik Revolution; however, his intent in using it is not apologetic but rather explanatory. Nonetheless, in order to underline the novelty of the totalitarian regime, Lefort will exorcize the “Jacobin ghost.” He is not averse to viewing some aspects of the French Revolution in light of the October Revolution, nevertheless, to do so in the opposite direction is problematic; his concern here is that the historian runs the risk of a mis-recognition of the novelty of Communism. According to him, the point of divergence between the two revolutions is the place of the law. He writes, “What one calls the Jacobin dictatorship demands the dissimulation of the position of a dictator, a man or a group, who elevates himself [or itself] beyond the law” (CRC, 67–68). As we have seen, in Lefort’s analysis of the discourse of Robespierre, he emphasizes that Robespierre calls down upon the head of his adversaries the charges of conspiring against the republic and its laws. This mode of discourse shows that the revolutionary desires to leave, at least apparently, an open and empty place of power; each who pretends to speak in “the name of the People” is susceptible to the accusation of being a usurper who would try to occupy the place left empty by “the death of a king.” Robespierre could not legitimate the Terror even under the cult of the supreme being; in this respect, the Terror bore within itself the mark

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of its democratic origin. This is not the case with Lenin, who claimed that the scientific notion of dictatorship bases itself on “a power which knows no limit, no law, no rule, absolutely nothing restrains it, and it founds itself on violence.” He continues by arguing that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a power conquered and maintained by violence, a violence that the proletariat exercises on the bourgeoisie; it is “a power which is not linked to any law” (CRC, 69). Against the Jacobins, the enemy hurled the accusation of being a dictatorship; this was an accusation that they vehemently denied, whereas Lenin wrote that there is absolutely no contradiction between the Soviet democracy (socialist) and the recourse to personal dictatorial power” (CRC, 69–70). In an essay in History and Class Consciousness, Lukacs celebrated the complete disjunction between revolutionary power and law. Victor Serge, who was by no means an orthodox Leninist, was so caught in the grip of enthusiasm for the October Revolution that he ends his novel The Birth of Our Power with a joyful scene in which the law books of the university are burnt by the revolutionaries in order to keep warm. In contrast to this, Lefort argues that in the French Revolution, “the rights of man are covered over during the Terror, but the symbolic rupture from the ancien régime is not effaced” (CRC, 73). This aspect of the French Revolution problematizes Furet’s effort to link its revolutionary passion to the October Revolution. Lefort shows that even under the Terror, there was no attempt to effect a condensation of law and power, a condensation which is precisely what is accomplished by the October Revolution. In this Leninist revolution, the place of power is full; it is occupied by a single party which is viewed as the incarnation of the people and whose word becomes law. In this totalitarian society, there is a flight from civil society, namely, the open space in which power and interest both diverge and conflict, a space in which opinions and beliefs circulate and modify one another, thus escaping any totalizing view from above, “a space that keeps the voluntarism and constructivism of the directors of the state in check”(CRC, 52). Lefort contends that the passion of the October Revolution is not a prolongation of that of the French Revolution; rather it is a specifically new kind of passion, that is, a modern type of passion. I will now consider one of the other positions which Furet claims would link the French and the October Revolution, what he refers to as the “democratic passion.” Again there appears to be the same ambiguity in Furet’s text: On the one hand, he attempts to analyze an ideology, an illusion, obviously, one that he does not share; on the other hand, he himself seems to participate in the very illusion that he wants to discredit. Furet is fully aware of the opposition between democracy on the one hand and Communism and Fascism on the other. He writes, “The great secret

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behind the complicity between Bolshevism and Fascism remained the existence of that common enemy which the two opposing doctrines would downplay or exorcize with the idea that it was on its last legs: quite simply, democracy.”29 It would appear from this statement that there exists an intractable opposition between Communism and democracy. Nonetheless, Furet, like Malia, takes Lenin’s self-representation of the October Revolution with a “literal-minded seriousness.” Lenin spoke of Communism as the realization of true democracy; he and his disciples considered the aim of the revolution to be the realization of the democratic promise through the emancipation of exploited workers. Lenin was convinced that the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and the party would be “a thousand times more democratic than the most democratic of parliamentary republics.” He also argued that Communism remained more true to “the autonomy of the individual” than any liberalism.30 Lefort is astonished that Furet finds a “parentry of intention between Communism and Democracy”(CRC, 74); he questions whether it is at all reasonable to view the Leninist discourse as a “vehicle for the principles which had generated modern democracy” (CRC, 76). Lefort attributes these ideas to Furet’s idealism which takes Lenin’s discourse at its word rather than seeks the intentions which revealed themselves in the Bolshevik practice, for example, the Leninist elaboration of a theory and practice of an allpowerful party which is finalized toward “the destruction of the autonomy of the individual and of all modes of sociability . . . that escape the mastery of the party, and of all opposition within the interior of the party itself” (CRC, 77). This criticism elaborated by Lefort applies well beyond the case of Furet; it extends to all those, including the thinkers of the Frankfurt school, who would view socialism as an immanent critique of democracy, which is to say, a critique of the existing society in virtue of its failure to incarnate the very principles on which it was founded. This is not to say that there is not such a thing as immanent critique, for example, the civil rights movement was an immanent critique of existing American democracy; also Lefort’s theory of the generation of “new rights” shares much with the notion of an immanent critique. The point to be made here is that Leninism, and the movements connected with it, may not be viewed as an immanent critique, since “what they will” is not a realization of the democratic promise but the contrary of it. As we have amply seen, in Lefort’s thought Communism is intelligible only on the basis of the democratic revolution, though this does not imply that it forms with it a common matrix. Lefort attempts to find the implicit philosophy of history which impels Furet to place the notion of “revolutionary constructivism” at the center of his analysis of the “Communist idea.” His concern here is that the

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concept, namely, “revolutionary constructivism,” is being used to characterize modernity as such; if this is the case, then it is liable to efface the lines separating various modern political regimes. Lefort believes that he is “able to recognize in the argument of Furet, the trace of a current of thought of which the work of Leo Strauss is the source” (CRC, 80). I already have considered the encounter between the thought of Lefort and that of Strauss; nonetheless, in this context, it might be beneficial to return briefly to it. According to Strauss, modernity begins with the wholesale transformation of the concept of nature; its central figures are Galileo and Bacon, and on the political register, Hobbes. In this respect Strauss is in accord with, and not differing from, Heidegger’s notion that in modernity nature becomes an object to be dominated. This changed status of nature is given expression in Bacon’s famous motto “Knowledge is Power,” a phrase that would have been unintelligible to the ancients, for whom knowledge of nature does not transform nature but rather transforms the mind that contemplates nature. For this manner of thinking, the contemplative life is the highest form of human existence, since in this way of life the mind comes to be like what it knows. As Aristotle writes, “Man is not the best thing in the universe.” In the dimension of political philosophy, the ancients present the city as being inscribed within the hierarchical order of the cosmos which is finalized toward the perfection of its citizens within the community. The hierarchy, both of nature and of the city, is not the product of “the will of man”; in fact, there really is no concept of will in the ancient philosophy. However, in modernity, the transformation of nature into an object to be dominated and in which no finality can be discerned, the city is reduced to an assemblage of individuals who are all of an equal nature and who are all in possession of the same rights. This destruction of natural finality brings about “the ascendancy of the will,” which is to say, “constructivism.” As we have seen in Strauss’s reading of Machiavelli, “the will” becomes the master of fortuna. While Lefort credits Strauss with reactivating the ancient concept of “a political regime,” he nevertheless faults him for not thinking of modern democracy as a new type of regime, that is, for thinking of it only privatively, as if it were the debris left over after the destruction of the ancient city. In relationship to his own project of thinking about the specificity of different types of modern regimes, Lefort’s worst suspicions are realized in Strauss’s preface to his book Liberalism Ancient and Modern, in which he argues that while liberalism and Communism radically disagree with regard to “the way” to their goal, both nevertheless pursue the same goal of “a universal and classless society or, to use the correction posed by Kojeve, the universal and homogenous state of which every adult human being is a full member.”31 And Strauss continues:

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One could go further and say that much of what goes now by the name of conservatism has in the last analysis a common root with present-day liberalism and even with Communism. That this is the case would appear most clearly if one were to go back to the origin of modernity, to the break with the pre-modern tradition that took place in the seventeenth century.32

This universal state, with all its members bearing the same rights, is viewed as the product of a “constructivist will”; in Strauss’s thought concomitant with the celebration of the will there arose the deification of the notion of History, a notion which replaced that of natural right. This view is also shared by Furet, who argues that it was “in the nineteenth century that history replaced God’s omnipotent role in man’s destiny, but only in the twentieth century that the political follies [passions] born of that substitution would emerge.”33 Ironically, the critique that Lefort brings to bear against Strauss, and implicitly against Furet, is basically the same as his critique of Marx, namely, the conception of the modern society of right as being a “society of individuals.” According to Marx, after the “breakdown” of community and authority, the rise of capitalism creates a situation in which “all that is solid melts into air” and what is left are individuals with rights and opinions. Lefort’s response to this view of the individual is that essentially “the liberty of opinion” does not transform the individual into the proprietor of her or his opinion; rather, it puts her or him in contact with the opinion of others and thereby renders possible a diffusion of opinions in a more or less extended space which is, in fact, indeterminate; it engenders the modification of opinions through contact with one another. “The right to speak and to listen, the right to write and to read, are indissociable” (CRC, 83). The rights of the individual do not enclose him or her in a private space; rather, they engender new forms of sociability, new styles of life which require new political institutions. On the level of political philosophy, they demand an effort to conceptualize novelty rather than to think it in terms of privation. If modern society is conceived of as merely being a space involving the interaction of many individuals, then modern democracy will be viewed as the product of a contract entered into by rootless individuals, and totalitarianism will be seen as a product of a “revitalized voluntarism.” As we have shown, in Lefort’s thought these conceptions (contract and revitalized voluntarism) do not accord with either a phenomenological or a historical analysis of the genesis of democracy and totalitarianism. In both these conceptions, what is lacking is a sense of the inscription of a subject into “the field of the political” which is intelligible neither as the product of a contract nor as a project effected by the will. Reflecting on

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Lefort’s critique of Furet’s notion of the instanciation of the “Communist idea,” it could be argued (although Lefort does not do so) that Furet has not followed the path that he himself laid out at the beginning of his book Interpreting the French Revolution, in which he described “conceptual history” as that which takes a “step back,” and the historian of an epoch breaks “the hold of the dominant ideas” of this epoch on his own analysis. While certainly not being an apologist for Communism, Furet, because of his epistemological commitment to the understanding of Communism as the instanciation of an idea, or of an illusion, will remain in the grips of Communism’s own self-representation, which is to say, the promises of the autonomy of the individual, of justice, of equality, and so forth. Even though Furet sees perfectly well that the Leninist project belies such ideas, nonetheless, since he has envisioned these practices as instrumental means finalized to achieve certain announced ends, he has not interrogated these practices themselves as containing within themselves implicit finalities. He views these practices only as “not attaining” the end of their stated raison d’être, whereas for Lefort it is not that they do not succeed in achieving the end that they claim to desire; it is rather that in “a positive sense” they are successful in doing something else, that is, creating an allpowerful state and enclosing society in on itself insofar as this is possible. Again we see Lefort’s criticism of the notion that Communism is a “Columbus mistake,” a notion that is presented in dramatic form in Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon. The character in the cell adjacent to Rubashov is referred to only as Rip Van Winkle; he has spent the last twenty years in solitary confinement in an unnamed country, probably Spain, for having taken part in a Communist insurrection. When he is released from prison he is put on a train, supposedly for the Soviet Union. In the first week he is arrested for some unspecified minor infraction; Rubashov speculates that perhaps his comrade had put a wreath on the wrong grave. Rip Van Winkle’s explanation is to insist that he had been put on the wrong train and that in fact he is not in the Soviet Union at all. Given the history of the concept of ideology, it is surprising that neither Furet nor Malia seem to be struck by how odd or curious it is to take an ideology at face value, that is, in a “strict literal-mindedness.” From Marx through Mannheim to the Sociology of Knowledge, ideology has always been conceived of as masking, as hiding something, and thereby as being something other than what it gives itself out to be. We see that Lefort’s interrogative practice is much more in keeping with the history of the concept of ideology; rather than taking it at its face value he is practising what Paul Ricoeur has called a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” The Communists espoused certain humanistic ideas: autonomy, freedom, social justice, and so forth; these ideas were also shared by the non-

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Communist left and by large portions of the population in general. Even Merleau-Ponty in the 1950s wrote an article entitled “Their Values Are the Same as Ours.” Nevertheless, these “ideas,” whether illusions or not, did not lead all who shared them to a “mystification of the Soviet Union and to a justification of terror.” As Aristotle has said, “Things do not differ by what they have in common.” So we might ask what distinguishes those who followed the “party line” from those who, even sharing the same “ideas,” did not? What is hidden behind the ideas in one case and not in the other? Lefort’s response is: Their love of discipline in action and discipline in thought; their love of authority (which culminates in the cult of the supreme leader); their love of order, of which the organization furnishes the criteria; their love of uniformity, which they satisfy already by the spectacle of their unanimity. These are the traits which compose the new type of man. . . . A type all too ready to be deceived (CRC, 136).

Lefort wants to look “beneath” the ideas, to a new political anthropological type, a type of whom it can be said, quoting La Boétie, “They have not so much lost their freedom as gained their servitude.” Lefort’s practice of interrogation is not unlike Nietzsche’s practice of genealogy; it is a question of discovering not so much the truth or falsity of a set of ideas but rather what form of life, what desires, do such ideas and beliefs express and promote. He looks for the “infrastructure” of the “Communist idea” in a type of political subjectivity born of the distress that is consequent upon the discovery of “the empty place at the center” of the democratic polity. It is a subjectivity born of “the strange reversal of freedom and servitude which is effected under the charm of the One” (CRC, 137). In the period of history presently under consideration, the name of the One has become “the name of the party” (CRC, 137). Furet’s historical arguments, which he employs to show both the prestige that was accorded to the “Communist idea” and the status that the image of the Soviet Union held in the West, cannot at this time be considered in great detail except to say that, in general, they have two historical stages. In the period from 1917 to the Second World War, we have seen that the illusion surrounding the “Communist idea” was based upon an imaginary lineage between the October Revolution and the French Revolution; during this period its privilege was based upon the Soviet’s opposition to the First World War. In rich historical detail, Furet shows how the war’s unanticipated ferocity, its duration, the massive loss of lives, and the economic ruin it wrought all functioned to de-legitimate the parties that had supported it. The Bolsheviks not only opposed the war but also ad-

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vanced a “revolutionary defeatism” in Russia, and they were unique in putting forth a “grand narrative” which explained the war. Against Hobson’s theory, from which Lenin lifted a large part for his own argument, Lenin claimed that imperialism is not a policy put into place by nations but rather a stage of capitalist development, in fact, the highest and last stage of capitalism. Furet argues that once the extent of the catastrophe became known, “the memory of having participated in it assumed the form ‘never again.’ It was this ‘never again’ that made people receptive to the October Revolution.”34 The USSR’s opposition to the war and the explanation of it cast the Bolsheviks as a symbol for the virtues and missions that were betrayed in August of 1914. The war and its aftermath of hostilities between capitalist powers also functioned as excuses for the “excesses” of the Soviet regime and the failure of its policies. Malia points out that the phrase “war Communism” was coined après coup in order to achieve a distance from the implementation of the party’s program which had been announced years before the war. This program’s cruelty and economic irrationality were, in hindsight, attributed to the exigencies of the war rather than to the program itself. According to Furet, from the time of the Second World War to the “end of the affair” in 1989, the Communist illusion is promoted on the basis of “Communism as anti-Fascism.” Before Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, which completely surprised Stalin though he had been warned of it from a dozen sources, “Communism as anti-Fascism” had taken two different forms which did not replace one another but rather alternated according to the changed Soviet tactics. The first form was the disastrous conception of “social Fascism,” which claimed that the social democrats were no better than the Nazis or perhaps even worse. The argument is the following: The Fascists were an open expression of a stage of capitalist development, whereas the democrats and the social democrats were only a veneer of capitalist domination. In the second form of “Communist as anti-Fascism,” the strategy changed and no longer identified all nonCommunist parties as being the same. It was willing to concede that “liberal democracy” was not exactly the same as Fascism; consequently, it was willing to defend coalitions at least temporarily. This was the period of the popular front when unity with democratic parties was not precluded, especially if the Communists could dominate the front. The grand narrative of “Communism as anti-Fascism” has some chapters that it tried feverishly to efface, paramount among which is the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact; this period was retrospectively and falsely reconceptualized as a temporary expedient in order to “gain time.” All of these “illusions” were put in place in order to cover what is now well-known, namely, the war against the peasantry, the execution of the “old Bolsheviks,” the

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great purges, the forced labor of millions, and on and on. Lefort never contests Furet’s historical details: the extent of simply false information circulated in the West on events in the Soviet Union; the representation of anti-Fascism involving a considerable revision of the role of Russia in the Spanish Civil War; the estimation that the USSR under Stalin killed more of its own citizens than were lost to the Nazis in the Second World War; the truth of the historical struggles of the Russian people against the terrible suffering inflicted on them by the Germans, while keeping from them the truth that it was to defend Mother Russia and not Communism that they resisted. In his disagreements with Furet, Lefort contends that “illusions and mis-information” are not sufficient conditions to explain the attraction to “the mystique of Communism.” Again referring to Souvarine, he argues that “those who wanted to know could know. The question is that so few wanted to know” (CRC, 111). Beginning with France, Lefort asks, “Who can seriously pretend, in our day, that the leaders of the Communist Party of France were, at that time, victims of an illusion concerning the Soviet Union?” These leaders knew and have not stopped knowing, in some detail, at least the essentials of what the dictatorship in the Soviet Union was; nevertheless, the strategy of the party and of the fellow travelers was to stigmatize in advance all sources of information that could have burst open any of these illusions. In my discussion of Lefort’s reading of La Boétie’s writings, I have basically shown what his response would be to the question “why so few wanted to know,” or, to put it another way, “wanted to be deceived”; it was the charm of “the name of the One,” which is to say, the Name of the Party. Once more we see the problem of Furet’s intellectualism; he seems to think that if one believes certain ideas, then one will join the party. Whereas for Lefort the party, that is, the actual organization, is not simply the beneficiary of some preexistent beliefs or, in this case, illusions; on the contrary, it is by means of the inscription of a certain type of the left into the party that the ideological illusion is produced. After noting that Arendt’s position with regard to the role of ideology is not always very clear, Lefort does find support for his position in The Origins of Totalitarianism where he refers to at least one of the strains of her thought on the relationship between ideology and party organization. With regard to both Nazism and Communism, she argues that once the propaganda slogans are integrated into a “living organization,” they cannot be simply eliminated without wrecking the whole structure. She notes that the assumption of a Jewish world conspiracy was transformed by totalitarian propaganda from an objectively arguable matter into the chief element of Nazi reality. Her point was that the Nazis first acted as though the world was dominated by the Jews; then they needed a counterconspiracy to defend themselves. For

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them racism was no longer a debatable theory with dubious scientific value; rather, it was being realized every day in the functioning hierarchy of a political organization whose framework was such that it would have been very “unrealistic” to question it. In the same vein, Bolshevism no longer needed to win an argument regarding the notions of class struggle, internationalism, or the unconditional dependence of the welfare of the proletariat on the welfare of the Soviet Union. Arendt writes, “The functioning of the organization of the Comintern is more convincing than any argument or mere ideology can ever be.”35 Earlier she had written, and indeed this is Lefort’s point against Furet and Malia, “The true goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion but organization.”36 If one can speak of an illusion, or an “idea of Communism,” it certainly is not that which leads one to the party, since it is itself generated by the organizational proceedings of the party. Arendt argues that the party produces a reality which is “a world fit to compete with the real one, whose main handicap is that it is not logical, consistent and organized.”37 This “ideological world” is better than the real one; as Lefort would argue, it has no empty places. He writes, “Arendt suggests to us, therefore, that the construction of reality is indissociable from the construction of a collective body” (CRC, 131). At this point, he could have evoked her famous metaphor of the onion where each skin is in touch only with the ones next to it, and by the time one gets to the center the system of assumptions is so completely removed from “common sense” reality that it appears almost delusional, and at the same time, it is completely removed from any possible contestation. She understands that to question the importance of race, or the centrality of the class struggle, would be for those at the center of the party (onion) to appear to be mad. For them it would be similar to “questioning the existence of the world.”38 Both Furet and Malia have compared the “Communist idea” to a “secularized religion”; and, as we have seen, Lefort vehemently objects to this since it fails to note, or at least sufficiently to underline, one of the most fundamental features of totalitarianism, namely, its immanence, that is, its rejection of all reference to transcendence. Nevertheless, he does agree that there are religious aspects to both the notion of totalitarianism’s desire for a quasi-mystical body and to the religiously practiced ritual of assent to an established doctrine. Pascal wrote, “Down on your knees, then you will believe.” Arendt notes that after the war the Allies were hard put to find a single German willing to admit that he had ever been a convinced Nazi, whereas she judged that about 90 percent of the population were more or less sympathetic. Even after taking into consideration self-serving lying, Arendt still claims that this denial relates to a real experience; she argues that the doc-

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trine, the “idea,” was so fully “realized in the party organization, that when the latter ceased to exist . . . its content [the doctrine] ceased to exist as an independent doctrine. It lost its intellectual existence.”39 In his disagreements with Furet and Malia, this is exactly Lefort’s point, that is, it never was an idea, or a doctrine; rather it was always inscribed within a “collective body” and was always an effect of practices and organizations. In Lefort’s practice of a hermeneutic of suspicion, he looks for what ideology masks, but, unlike the Marxists, he is not looking for a conjunction of forces in the social relations of production of which the ideology would be the mere superstructure. On the other hand, he does criticize Malia for giving such scant attention to the social forces that were produced by, and sustained, the Communist regime for seventy years. Lefort’s attention is directed to what he calls the symbolic structure of the regime, which is not identical to either an ideology or an illusion. We have already spoken of this notion, but it would perhaps be beneficial to look briefly at his most recent elaboration of it since it is so central to his thought. In the Soviet Party’s self-representation, it presented itself as a regime in which the distance between ruler and ruled had been eliminated. Nonetheless, in reality, one observed the operation of an all-powerful and omnipotent party state. In considering this gap between appearance and reality one could be tempted to oppose the “appearance” of the regime to its reality; this was the fault of the Marxists and also of Foucault. In so doing one runs the risk of “underestimating the efficacity of representation” (CRC, 185). As Lefort has shown us, power can function only as represented, and this representation is not an illusion; it is not epiphenomenal but efficacious. He writes: In one sense, one can speak of a symbolic efficacity; in another sense, of an enterprise of the imaginary [l’imaginaire]. The two terms seem contradictory. The one [the symbolic] makes us recognize the insaturation of a system which articulates itself in the ruled regulations between groups and individuals, in which the shared notions of the ‘real,’ of the ‘true,’ of the ‘normal,’ impose themselves; the other [the imaginary] makes us understand that the vision of the One sustains itself by a furious denegation of the social division and revels in a phantasm. If language fails us in trying to characterize the totalitarian phenomenon, is it not because it leads us to the limit of the nameable? (CRC, 185).

In totalitarianism the “imaginary” phenomenon of the One bars access to the “symbolic” which is the place of social articulation; and yet the social division exists even though the language that would name it is barred. Here there is an attempt to efface “the principle of a separation

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between the places where action, knowledge, imagination exercise themselves in testing the limits” (CRC, 185–186). Lefort is in agreement with Arendt that the totalitarian regime is not merely a system of institutions; they both argue that it strikes a blow at the very foundation of human existence. According to Arendt, it attacks the capacities for both spontaneity and for thought and judgment which are for her the defining features of the human condition; thus it distinguishes itself from all previous forms of tyranny. For Lefort “one of the distinctive traits of the totalitarian regime is that the party’s monopolization of the means of coercion, of information and of indoctrination is not contestable” (CRC, 187). He argues that the internal articulations of a society are effected by the symbolic order which is not situated in society; rather, it indicates a place which exceeds the limit of society, which is to say, it gestures toward the other which indicates a movement toward the outside. Even in the most extreme despotism, where the king has the status of a demi-god, the image of power placed in his person does not efface the trace, the mark, of a relationship to the outside, to “another place”; Lefort evokes the doubling of the body of the king which, as we have seen, bears the trace of transcendence. The disincarnation of power in modern democracy effaces the figure but not the dimension of “the other.” The place of “the other” remains, but it remains as an empty place. The source of legitimacy is to be found in “the people,” but the people remain indefinite and are not subject to configuration. Totalitarianism, like democracy, effaces the dimension of the other viewed as “another place”; but, unlike democracy, it attempts to fill this empty place, which is to say, give a figure, a body, to the place of power and thereby efface all relationship with the exterior. In the body of the party and finally in the body of the leader, the totalitarian regime attempts to reincarnate the place of power. In central Baghdad, there is an immense statue of an arm holding a sword; the sculpture is based upon a cast of the actual arm of Saddam Hussein. I will now consider in more detail Lefort’s reflections upon Arendt’s conception of totalitarianism. I have already indicated that there is an agreement between them regarding this phenomenon. Recall that before, when he evoked her work to support his critique of Furet and Malia, he remarked that her “notion of ideology is not always clear.” It is from the space of this unclear region that Lefort’s critical reflections on her thought emerge. Before considering them, I will note the “family resemblance” between these two thinkers. Beginning in his 1985 article “Hannah Arendt and the Question of the Political,” collected in Democracy and Political Theory, Lefort notes disapprovingly the lack of attention to her thought in France due to the hegemony of Marxism at that time. Their two common interests, which established a point of contact between them and also put

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them at a considerable remove from most of their contemporaries, were a passion for political philosophy and an interest in producing an analysis of totalitarianism. Both thinkers emerge from the phenomenological tradition: For Lefort it is Husserl and Merleau-Ponty; for Arendt it is Heidegger and Jaspers. Both were convinced as to the novelty of the totalitarian phenomenon and its irreducibility to traditional forms of tyranny. We have already seen that they both oppose Furet’s and Malia’s contention that Communism is a failed utopia, that is, a “Columbus mistake.” Nonetheless, their conceptions of totalitarianism differ in significant respects; these differences center on differing conceptions of law and ideology. Lefort writes, “Arendt declares that it [totalitarianism] breaks down the fundamental alternative recognized by political philosophy since Antiquity, that is: between regimes submitted to laws and regimes without law; between legitimate power and arbitrary power” (CRC, 193). Thus for her it is in its relationship to the law that one will discover the essence of totalitarianism. She claims that this type of regime does not replace one set of laws with another; it does not establish its own consensus juris, since it believes that it can do without it and still not resign itself to the tyrannical state of lawlessness, arbitrariness, and fear. Totalitarianism can do without a consensus juris because “it promises to release the fulfillment of law from all action and the will of man; and it promises justice on earth because it claims to make mankind itself the embodiment of the law.”40 In the identification of man and law, it annuls “the gap” between legality and justice. Arendt claims that this identification between man and the law has nothing to do with the notions of either lumen naturala or the voice of conscience in natural-law theory, since in both of these notions it is God who is the source of obligation. The theological tradition has “never made man the walking embodiment of the law. On the contrary, it [the source of authority] remained distant from him as the authority which demanded consent and obedience.”41 Until this point there is a clear agreement between the two thinkers; Lefort has also emphasized the “immanence” of totalitarianism. He is in accord with Arendt on the point that the identification of man and law constitutes the denigration of the position of the Subject and, as a result, the faculty of judgment is abolished. Nonetheless, when Arendt asks what is the content of this law which becomes incarnate in man, she responds by arguing that, in her interpretation of totalitarianism, “all laws have become laws of movement.”42 In the Fascist regime it is the law of Nature, that is, the law of race; in the Communist regime it is the law of History. In both regimes the law is not given as a transcendent imperative, for example “thou shall, or thou shalt not,” to which the subject can accord or not; rather, the law is given on an empirical level. It is not the Nazi regime that decrees that inferior races are

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to be eliminated; rather, it is the working of the laws of the movement of Nature that inferior races must perish; the regime simply accords with the laws of Nature. In a like manner, it is not Stalin who commands the elimination of the bourgeois class; rather, it is the law of movement of History itself. This idea is expressed well in the Maoist slogan: “That which is falling, that must be shoved.” One might ask, where does this conception of the law of movement come from? Arendt argues that it is a development of the thought of both Darwin and Marx: Darwin because he introduced the notion of history into nature with his theories of evolution and natural selection; Marx because he introduced the notion of “labor” as the motor force of history. According to her, labor is the metabolic life process which takes place between man and nature; life is a natural biological process whose true abode is in the shadowy confines of the home. For her the thought of Darwin and Marx converges, she writes that “Engels could not think of a greater compliment to Marx’s scholarly achievements than to call him the ‘Darwin of history.’”43 We note in passing that Lefort’s objection will not take the form of a problematization of Arendt’s conception of the thought of Marx; nevertheless, we have seen that his reading of Marx does indeed diverge from hers. In his interpretation of Marx, there is a “Darwinian dimension but also a Shakespearean dimension.” Her assimilation of Marx’s thought to Darwin’s tells only half the story; it might be added that her interpretation of Darwin is quite bizarre inasmuch as the Darwinian universe does not entail a natural finality due to the fact that natural selection always operates by chance. Arendt argues that in the ideologies of totalitarianism, the traditional concept of law is transformed into its contrary; it goes from expressing the framework of stability within which human life and motion can take place into “becoming the expression of motion itself.” The law of motion becomes a “law of killing” through which anything that impedes the movement of nature or history must be eliminated: Dying races are destined to perish; reactionary classes are cast into “the dustbin of history.” In these ideologies, it is claimed that the totalitarian ruler does not decide on the course to be taken but simply executes the laws of nature or of history; this “helping along of the laws” takes the form of terror. In a totalitarian regime, terror takes the place of positive law. Arendt writes, “If lawfulness is the essence of a non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination.”44 Terror is the realization of the law of movement. For Arendt, positive law in nontyrannical governments has the function of erecting boundaries between people and establishing roots of communication between different perspectives proposed by unique, irreplaceable individuals; it facilitates the continuity of a community constantly put at risk by the

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birth of new individuals, that is, by the birth of what she calls elsewhere the newcomers. Thus we see that positive law is the guardian of plurality and that totalitarian terror substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men “a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimensions.”45 With a certain similarity to Lefort’s thought, Arendt has a vision of the totalitarian One as a monstrous creation achieved by the elimination of plurality and the difference of perspectives that are implied by the fact of birth, that is, of new beginnings. She goes on to argue that the motive force of terror is ideology, be it the ideology of Communism or that of racism; however, this would seem to contradict her passages cited above by Lefort which claim that the goal of propaganda is not persuasion but organization. Although there is a tension, there is not, strictly speaking, a contradiction, inasmuch as the aim is not to convince people of the truth of ideology but rather to make it an effective reality by organizing a world in terms of it. Arendt tells us that the goal of totalitarian education “has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any”;46 what is salient for her is not the content of the ideology but rather its logical form. An ideology is the logic of an idea and, under this aspect, she claims that any ideology bears the seeds of totalitarianism. According to her, there are three characteristics of ideology: First, ideologies claim to have a total explanation and they are concerned solely with the motion of the process of development; second, they are independent of all externality, which is to say, they are impervious to any modification on the basis of experience and they reject appearances for a principle “hidden behind appearances”; last, they proceed by a process of deduction from an axiomatically accepted premise and develop with a “consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality.”47 Hitler was renowned for his “ice-cold reasoning” and Stalin was notorious for the “mercilessness of his dialectics.” Arendt observes that what appealed to the totalitarian movement was not the ideal content of the ideology but rather “the logical process that could be developed from it”; its inner compulsion is the “tyranny of logicality against which nothing stands but the great capacity of men to start something new.”48 Lefort objects to this latter point in the name of the uniqueness and historical specificity of totalitarianism. He writes, “The totalitarian phenomenon, judged at first [by Arendt] to be incomparable, sees itself finally as derived from an ideology which carries to its last degree the process of the alienation of thought in logic” (CRC, 198). According to him, Arendt, by overstressing the “law of movement,” which is to say, the process character of logical thinking, misses an important aspect of totalitarianism. He emphasizes that Communism, in its own self-representation, is based on the laws of

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history; nonetheless, it also insists on situating itself at the end of history. Lefort argues that Arendt’s insistence on the frenzied character of movement leads her to ignore the role of the party as giving unity and stability to Soviet society; she sees that the totalitarian destruction of a regime of law annuls plurality to the benefit of One man of gigantic proportions, but she does not see that the One is a figure of immobility. Totalitarian ideologies claim that they have resolved the conflicts that were at the heart of historical change; nonetheless, they are not content to present themselves as “regimes superior to liberal democracy, rather Nazism and Communism announce the resolution of the conflicts which have torn the modern world apart and have always, in one form or another, torn humanity apart” (CRC, 199–200). One sees that the party is a figure of a unity beyond division, it is closed to all novelty, to the event; its function is to assimilate the indeterminate shock of events and to negate “things that just happen.” The regime in which movement is celebrated and which constantly speaks of engendering a new society effects itself under the sign of a refusal of history. “It excludes the thought that the lines of the future are not already imprinted in the present” (CRC, 203–204); this is reminiscent of a description of Balinese society as a society in which the future is as determined as the past but is simply a not-yet past. Above I have noted Lefort’s agreement with Machiavelli, who contrasts Rome to Sparta, favoring Rome because of its openness to the event and viewing Sparta as a society closed in on itself. With regard to their conceptions of both history and temporality, the thought of Lefort differs from that of Arendt. Lefort does not understand why Arendt fails to notice that the Bolsheviks seek to “enclose themselves in fortresses.” (Recall Machiavelli’s discussion of fortresses which he viewed as being “protected against time.”) Lefort supposes that in Arendt’s denunciation of the laws of movement her aim is not only the totalitarian enterprise and, beyond it, the doctrines of Marx or Darwin; he senses that it is also a denunciation of the “new mode of temporality which characterizes modern societies” (CRC, 204). He sees the problem as follows: Arendt wants to insist on the absolute novelty of totalitarianism and, at the same time, to derive its most essential feature, “constant motion,” from an experience that is essentially modern. It is as if she sees totalitarianism as simply being modernity writ large, even though in her own analysis she constantly underlines the claim of totalitarianism’s uniqueness. Lefort argues that in Arendt’s thought, the critique of totalitarianism nourishes itself from her critique of the mentality of modernity; it situates itself in a prolongation of the critique of modernity which includes modern science. Indeed, it is extravagant to refer to Darwin’s theory of evolution as an ideology when in fact it is the basis of all modern biology. Lefort sus-

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pects her of wishing to retain an ancient conception of history which in turn would be linked to a classical conception of politics; for the ancients, history is the narration of great deeds and events, which is to say, Action. In Arendt’s terminology, it is “action” which escapes the necessity imposed by the life processes, since it is discrete and not anchored in any “process.” Action is the product of novelty which is itself consequent on birth, that is, on the arrival of newcomers. Arendt sustains this conception of action by means of the relationship that she envisions between, on the one hand, the biological fact of birth, which introduces novelty, and on the other, the regime of law, which bears the trait of stability. According to her, the law protects the community from disturbances which come about because of the impact of the arrival of novelty; she argues that there is a division between the order of beginning and the order of stability. Lefort objects to this division, claiming that it is based on a three-fold abstraction. The first abstraction is the idea that biological birth constitutes an absolute beginning. He contests this notion, claiming that the child is always born into networks of already constituted meaning; children find themselves “always already” having begun, which is to say, born into the symbolic order. Recall Lacan’s joke: When the moron is asked how many brothers he has, he replies “four”: Joe, John, Pete, and myself. Responding in this manner he is not wrong: He is a brother before ascending to the position of “a subject” from which he could say that he has three brothers. The second abstraction is the idea that the law stabilizes natural events. Lefort also objects to this notion, since for him the law, and not only positive law, begins perhaps with the interdiction against incest which is constitutive of all modes of human coexistence. Recalling his discussion with Pierre Claustres, we have seen how his notion of the law is essentially constitutive of society itself. The third abstraction is the idea that society’s development proceeds either in a process-like manner or is effected by a series of discrete, at times heroic, actions. Against this view of society, Lefort argues that a society gradually integrates, or fails to integrate, the tensions that are capable of modifying its equilibrium and undermining the legitimation of its laws. He senses that these abstractions are what lead Arendt to the idea of the division between “a radical new beginning” and the notion of “stability”; they cause her to overlook certain tensions in society which would, in time, lead to a reconfiguration of the political order. Lefort writes: The triple abstraction permits the eluding of the question of history. That is to say, the gestation of new modes of legitimacy and new styles of existence which operate in the thickness of the social, under the juridico-political surface—a gestation which can only be deciphered

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après coup and without one ever being able to explain it by only one order of factors. In brief, the theme of birth or that of the faculty of beginning has so enchanted a certain number of Arendt’s readers, that it does not conceal certain objective processes but rather it conceals changes which always work in a society and of which the effects, when they converge thanks to unpredictable circumstances in order to produce a mutation, reveal that they had some sense, that is to say, they were bearers of signification and indicated a direction. (CRC, 207–208)

Thus we see that Lefort’s conception of history is not that of imposing the law of stability onto the brute fact of birth; also it is not the recounting of actions that would pretend to be absolutely unique; and certainly it is not a process similar to the life processes. His notion of history is that of the transformation of significance which begins from an “always already” existent thickness of meaning. It is his contention that this sense of history only begins with modernity; nonetheless, his notion of modernity does not have the sense of a “myth of progress” but rather the sense that history is irreversible. Lefort is in agreement with Arendt’s attempt to refute a philosophy of history according to which the path of history leads inevitably from one stage of society to the next; however, in his eyes she goes so far as “to denounce the belief proper to modern man that there is a movement which, without concerning ourselves with its finality, has a value in itself” (CRC, 208). At this point, I will make a brief digression to Lefort’s 1998 article “La Sens de l’Orientation”; I do this to show that it is Lefort’s ontology that leads him to object to the emphasis that Arendt puts on the “miracle of beginning,” namely, birth. Lefort objects to the radical opposition between the stability of the “world” and the novelty of beginning. The article is subtitled “La Recherchs sur la Phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty,” and his reflection begins with a theme that seems far removed from political philosophy, namely, a revisiting of Merleau-Ponty’s objection to the concept of “sense data,” a theme that begins in his Structure of Behavior and runs through The Visible and the Invisible. Basically, Merleau-Ponty objects to the idea that perception is the combination of absolutely passively received sense data which the mind organizes in function of a system of categories or laws of association; this is a notion common to both empiricism and Kantian critical philosophy. According to Merleau-Ponty, the dichotomy between passivity and activity is not faithful to our experience of perception; he argues that to perceive is to take an active orientation toward the world. He writes, “Consciousness is not originally an ‘I think’ but an ‘I can.’” Lefort continues this thought when he writes, “The essential, it seems to me, is that perception and movement suppose the power of giv-

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ing direction to all things, of situating all things in an actual or virtual space, and this in such a manner that the senses can accord themselves in taking a position towards the object.”49 Thus we see that to perceive is not merely to register the object on the retina; rather, it is to take up an orientation toward it. Nonetheless, this “taking up an orientation” is not the act of a subject toward an object; rather, it is a participation in an original “movement of existence.”50 As we have already seen, the flesh is neither subject nor object but the place where there is “a reversibility of the sensate and the sensitive.” If the sensitive body “interprets” the sensible world, then it does so on the basis of what Merleau-Ponty calls “an inspired exegesis.” If I am to feel the texture of a piece of cloth, I must touch it as it directs my hands; banging on it with my fist will not disclose its texture. The hand that opens the door does so by prefiguring the shape of the doorknob. Here we see that Being is not, as Sartre claims, an inert “in itself” on which the negating movement of consciousness can impose its meanings as if by decree. In order to orientate oneself, one must pick up a style by means of which one has a “sense of.” Both Merleau-Ponty and Lefort seize upon the polyvalence of the French word sens used as both “meaning” and “direction,” as in the street sign Sens Unique. It is not difficult to understand how this reflection on the ontology of perception plays itself out on the register of political philosophy; the statesman is not one who initiates absolute novelty into a stable world but someone who “has a sense of history,” who can “orientate him- or herself” toward the events of the time. Political action is not the introduction of radical novelty; rather, it is a “picking up of a style” of the events into which one is inserted. In Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli, we have seen that the successful political actor is one in whom there is a concordance between his temperament and the exigencies of the political world in which he lives, which is to say, a capacity to orientate himself. It is Lefort’s contention that Arendt has conflated two essentially heterogeneous phenomena: on the one hand, the theories of history as the movement of necessity to which the individual and his or her powers of judgment and spontaneity must be subjected; and on the other hand, the restless movement which exists in all domains of society, that is, the kind of movement that Tocqueville discovered in America and which Lefort sees as an essential characteristic of modern society as such. Notwithstanding their ideology of creating a new society and a new man, Lefort compares the restless movement of Western democracies to that of the Soviet Union; he writes, “the nature of its [the USSR] institutions makes it appear as a blocked society [société bloquée] in which there is no movement that escapes the control of the party, which is occupied with fixing the norms of all sectors of activity” (CRC, 209).

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In a section of La Complication entitled “The Perversion of Law,” Lefort continues his critical reflection on Arendt’s thought; nonetheless, his intent is more than merely polemical inasmuch as a novel aspect of his theory of totalitarianism emerges from it. He argues that Arendt’s emphasis on the “laws of movement” blinds her to the extent to which the Soviet regime sought to institutionalize itself as a coherent and permanent system of politics, which is to say, the extent to which it tried to consider itself as a legitimate regime. In the Soviet regime’s attempt to accomplish this goal, a certain conception of law will play a major role. The reader will recall Lefort’s claim, in his analysis of Robespierre’s terrorist discourse, that Robespierre was incapable of institutionalizing the Terror; even his last desperate attempt to institutionalize it by invoking the cult of the supreme being was doomed to failure. Lefort, in both his discussion of Arendt’s thought and his analysis of Soviet law, demonstrates how the Soviets were “successful” at this institutionalizing where the French revolutionaries of the “Year Three” had failed. The Soviet Union was aware that the production of an elaborate penal code was essential to erect a state, which is to say, a permanent institution with the pretension to control all the activities of society. While viewing this penal code, Lefort is astonished at the amazing combination of the lawful and the arbitrary; the code is formed in such a manner that “anybody can be accused of anything,” be it of being an enemy of the people, or an enemy of socialism, or whatever. Nonetheless, he does not view this penal code as being either purely instrumental or “terrorism by another name”; rather he tells us that it is “constitutive of a social order” (CRC, 218), in default of which the Soviet’s system of domination would not be viable in the long run. He argues that any regime, no matter what type, is more than an ensemble of procedures since it must accord itself with the fundamental principles of the regime. In a democratic regime, there is, for example, the presumption of innocence and the right to a defense; a debate on the facts and a diversity of testimonies; and the authority of the judge, which is situated between and beyond the prosecution and the accused and is independent of all extrajuridical pressure—all of which is to say that justice is administered in the name of a third. The concept of the “third” in Lefort’s writings is not to be confused with the role that it plays in Levinas’s thought; in a certain sense, it is the opposite of it. Without entering into a discussion of the thought of Levinas, let me simply indicate its difference from Lefort’s. In Levinas’s ethical relation of the face-to-face, the demand of the Other is infinite; more than once he cites the line of Dostoyevsky, “Everyone is responsible for everything, especially me.” Here the third enters not as the Other but rather as “the Other of the Other.” For example, if I give all my food to the

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hungry children of India, then my own children may starve; nevertheless, in this situation it is the “third” which limits the infinite demands of the Other and establishes the practice of “finite justice,” even if it is a practice that is constantly haunted by the infinite demands of the ethical Other. In contrast, the genesis of the notion of “the third” in Lefort’s work comes in the wake of the writings of Freud as read by Lacan. As we have seen, Lacan argues that the dual relationship between mother and child is based upon the demand for love; it is situated on the level of the imaginary. The third is the intrusion of the law, which is to say, the name (nom) of the father and the “no” (non) of the father. It is the bearer of the interdiction against incest; it is the representation of the symbolic order which is the order of the always-absent signifier that disrupts the order of presence in the relation of mother and child. Recall Lefort’s critique of the anthropologist Kardiner’s attempt to view psychoanalysis as a positive science by attempting to make the interdiction against incest simply one observable law among others. Obviously Lefort is not interpreting the penal code of the Soviet Union on the basis of the relationship between mother and child; rather, he is using a concept, “the third,” which has its genesis in psychoanalysis. The “third,” as Lefort employs it here, represents the space separating civil society from the state apparatus; it is the gesture that “legality” makes in the direction of “justice.” This notion of the “third” precludes what Arendt has called the “identification of man and the law.” In the democratic administration of justice, what one observes is that the exercise of sovereignty does not detach itself from debates in public, that is, debates which lead to the formation of political rivals and imply the right to permanent disagreement; and, furthermore, it guarantees the freedoms of movement, of opinion, of expression, of information— in brief, “a civil life, a communication which is effected laterally between citizens and groups of citizens” (CRC, 219). What has become legible is “the empty space.” Conversely, what can be seen in the Communist administration of justice is “the absence of the third.” In such a regime, there is no neutral party between the accused and the state; rather it is a “dual relation.” It is through a consideration of this phenomenon that one may speak of a “perversion of the law”; according to Lefort, law “merits its name only if it evidences, in its application, the figure of the third” (CRC, 220). The dual relationship is a relationship of incorporation. It is what Lacan calls a “lure” on the level of the imaginary, as, for example, the child who mis-recognizes himself or herself in the representation in the mirror which is linked to the eyes of the mother; this imaginary identity of the ego is engendered by a mis-recognition. On the social level, the dual relation which forecloses the third is reproduced in the subject itself. Lefort evokes this representation to explain the self-denunciations made by the

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old Bolsheviks during the Moscow trials; here the incorporation of the dual relation makes one’s personal existence a function of the party’s granting one recognition as a part of it, as the Communist “we,” as the body of the People-as-One. Lefort cites Solzhenitsyn, who writes, “Always, the same leitmotif repeated in endless variations . . . you are as we Communists!” (CRC, 224). In Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty interpreted the old Bolshevik’s self-denunciation as “objective enemies of the party” as being a defense of their revolutionary honor, but according to Lefort, it is a sign of their imaginary incorporation into the party. He claims that the purpose of these self-accusations was not repentance but rather “the annihilation of the Subject” (CRC, 224). By his self-denunciation, the accused does not cease to be included in the “We that accuses,” since to stand outside the party would be to lose “the markers of the (supposed) reality and thus one’s own proper identity.” The party is not able to tolerate anything outside itself, and inasmuch as I am a member of the party this includes myself as well. The victim and the accuser are incorporated into the body of the party, and thus the terror is institutionalized. We observe that the USSR achieved what Robespierre could not. According to Lefort, this is because the terror of the Year Three bore within itself the trace of its democratic origins, which is to say, the place from which it emanated could not appear. This place could not give itself a name, whereas in the USSR it was given a name, the name of the party that would incorporate the power that society exercises on itself and without which it would lose its substantial identity and would unravel. The task of summarizing Lefort’s relationship to the thought of Arendt is indeed complicated. To begin with, he favorably evokes Arendt against Malia and Furet because of her argument that Communism or Fascism are not failed utopias but rather “the theory and practice of hell.” Nevertheless, at this time he also mentions that her position is not always clear with regard to the concept of ideology. She agrees that Communism is not the instanciation of an idea; she claims that it is the product of “organization,” with the monstrous aim of transforming the very source of authority. Again Lefort is in agreement with Arendt, inasmuch as she does not name the source of authority in nontotalitarian societies, where it could be the governance of God, the traditional mores of the society, and so forth. According to Lefort, the important point on which they agree is that the source of authority is not identical with man; rather, it is what Lefort refers to as “the third.” It is in their answers to the question of where authority comes from in Communist society that their thoughts begin to disagree. Arendt argues that it derives from the “laws of history” that have become the “laws of killing”; the party simply exercises what history decrees

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and it accomplishes this with a maniacal logic whereby the members of declining classes must be killed. Nonetheless, Lefort observes that Arendt does not believe that “laws of history” exist, since she regards them as fictions, which is to say, it is the belief in the nonexistent laws of history which gives rise to Communism and forms the basis of its authority. On this point Arendt rejoins the thinking of both Malia and Furet. Malia argues that “only great ideas give rise to great crimes,” whereas Furet speaks of a “house of cards.” According to the three of them, notwithstanding prior indication to the contrary, totalitarianism is the instanciation of an ideology. In Lefort’s thought, on the other hand, the Communist regime enacts a perverse legal system which forecloses any reference to “a third,” that is, to any sign of transcendence; it institutes itself as a symbolically efficacious regime that does indeed hold society together for a time. Nonetheless at the moment of the regime’s demise, its former symbolic efficacity becomes particularly visible. Arendt’s characterization of Communist totalitarianism as a “frenzy of motion” could only be applied at the height of the Stalinist purges, or perhaps during the Chinese Cultural Revolution; no one would refer to the “period of stagnation” under Brezhnev as a society obsessed with motion. After the death of Stalin, Khrushchev and his comrades decided to end the terror, but only after bumping off Comrade Beria. If, as Arendt claims, terror is the essence of totalitarianism and lawfulness is the essence of nontotalitarianism, then the Soviet Union after Stalin could no longer be called totalitarian. We have already seen, particularly in his 1956 article “Totalitarianism without Stalin,” that this is not the case for Lefort, nor for many others. He does not consider “terror” to be the essence of the Soviet regime, nor does he view it instrumentally in terms of its eliminating any opposition. On the contrary, he argues that the terror was itself at the service of constituting the regime as a unity of the People-as-One; it accomplished this by expelling all division onto the “outside.” The phantasmic unification brought about by the People-as-One did not end with the cessation of terror; in fact, Lefort cites Khrushchev to the effect that the role of the party must be strengthened. Khrushchev wrote, “One would be wrong to believe that it is only necessary to control bad workers, it is also necessary to control the work of honest men, because control is above all order” (CRC, 233). To a certain extent Lefort seems to be in accord with Malia’s conception of a rhythm of reform and repression, inasmuch as all reforms eventually lead to a point at which the power of the party is threatened; and since this is an area that is “nonnegotiable,” one observes that there is an increase in the amount of repression. Khrushchev’s critique of the bureaucracy provoked him to see the necessity for “a more rigorous control of the party by the party: a dream” (CRC, 241–242). Gorbachev’s propos-

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als turned out to be impossible reforms: his idea of separating the party from the State while himself remaining at the head of both of them; his attempt to “delimit the functions of the party in reality, at a distance from those of the government which would draw its legitimacy from universal suffrage” (CRC, 242). Lefort argues that Gorbachev had profoundly misunderstood the nature of the party, since he wished to treat it as a “real institution,” to assign limits to it, to circumscribe its functions, and so forth; he did not understand that its function was to have “no limits,” that is, to be everywhere. The party is that from which there is no outside; if one were to limit it, then its symbolic efficacy of giving unity to the “Peopleas-One” would be destroyed. Once legitimate opposition was recognized in the USSR, the end of totalitarianism in Russia began to happen; this was the moment when an exteriority to the party was recognized and accepted. Lefort notes that when the party’s symbolic role broke down, the state apparatus also became paralyzed. The army was completely absent from this political scene, and the KGB and the directors of the militaryindustrial complex also played no role in these last days. Yeltsin walked into “a sort of institutional void,” a void created by the effacement of the image of the party as the People-as-One. Concluding this section on Lefort’s conception of totalitarianism, I am aware that I have had ample opportunity to show that he does not think that a system of beliefs, ideas, or illusions holds the key to the explanation of Communism or Fascism; of course, this is not to say that they are completely irrelevant. From Max Weber, Marcel Mauss, and others, we have learned that religious beliefs, when they are intertwined with economic practices, take on a significance which as simple beliefs they contained only latently. I have also taken into account the symbolic and imaginary dimensions in my analysis of social facts. Lefort writes, “In a general way, since neither political power nor the State, nor justice, nor moreover equality or liberty are real things, the question of their symbolic or imaginary function cannot be entertained a priori” (CRC, 246). Inasmuch as they are not real things or beliefs, they give a sense to humanity’s political life which can take on the character of inevitability. For example, Equality continues in the face of all sorts of empirical inequalities born of colonialism, slavery, sexism, racism, and so forth; nonetheless, if it were to be effaced, then these empirical inequalities would be effaced along with it. Equality or Justice, for example, are not simply beliefs; rather, they are what Mauss calls a “total social fact” which has political, juridical, moral, and psychological signification. In a similar manner, Communism and Fascism were not simply beliefs; they were also mutations of a symbolic structure. Now that the Communist and Fascist adventures are over, one must ask whether they were simply parentheses in history which have now

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been closed? Did they leave nothing in their wake? Lefort does not conclude La Complication with a prophetic tone. Recall that he had objected to Malia’s use of the metaphor of a “closed chapter” by asking, “Of what book is it a chapter?” In his universe of thought, there is no position that one could legitimately claim to occupy from which the future would be legible; nonetheless, one can interpret the “signs” in the present and the “traces” from the past. Returning to the question of whether the totalitarian phenomenon has left any traces, we see that in the thought of both Furet and Malia the answer seems to be “no,” whereas in Lefort’s thought one is not so certain. In the last chapter of La Complication, “Communism and the Constitution of a World Space,” he gingerly explores what perhaps will have been the signification of the event of Communism. “Event” here refers to a dated fact which bears within it a signification which eludes the particularity of the date as such. Lefort proposes an analogy with the significance of the First World War, which introduced into the world the idea of “total mobilization” whose significance did not evaporate with the Treaty of Versailles. What is it that Communism and its collapse might have introduced? It is not often observed that the formation of “a world space” has given us the resources to conceive, beyond cultural differences, political systems, and unequal economic development, one sole social condition. This is a condition that would imply a total mastery of human relations under the sign of the One; it involves the abolition of divisions, no matter what their manifestations, that have always implied an experience of the Other. It would be a system in which “the positions of the dominating and the dominated are effaced” (CRC, 250); it would not be a space of the interdependence of states but rather of the unification of the globe. We must not simply walk away from the fact that the image of a society unified under the sign of the One exerted a profound and lasting attraction on a significant part of the population of Western societies, that it was perceived as offering “a solution that was not announced by either democracy or capitalism” (CRC, 259). Without being either a Cassandra or a Pollyanna, it gives us something to think about.

Notes 1. Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, 4. 2. Ibid., 16 3. Ibid., 4. 4. Ibid., 24.

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5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 31. 7. Ibid., 44. 8. Ibid., 15. 9. Ibid., 137. 10. Ibid., 15. 11. Ibid., 4. 12. Harold Rosenberg, “Couch Liberalism and the Guilty Past,” in The Tradition of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 221–241. 13. Ibid., 229. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 232. 16. Ibid., 236. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 238. 19. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, vii. 20. Ibid., ix. 21. Ibid., x. 22. Ibid., 32. 23. Ibid. 24. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, 91. 25. Ibid., 93. 26. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 18. 27. Ibid., 66. 28. Ibid., 67. 29. Ibid., 24. 30. Ibid., 25. 31. Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), vii. 32. Ibid., ix. 33. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 30. 34. Ibid., 75. 35. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 32. 36. Ibid., 361. 37. Ibid., 362. 38. Ibid., 363. 39. Ibid., 363–364 40. Ibid., 462. 41. Ibid., 463. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 464. 45. Ibid., 465–466. 46. Ibid., 468. 47. Ibid., 471.

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48. Ibid., 473. 49. Claude Lefort, “Le sens de l’orientation,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours sur “L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl,” suivi de Recherches sur la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty, ed. Renaud Barbaras (Paris: PUF, 1998), 226–227. 50. Ibid., 226.

Conclusion

When writing a book on the work of another philosopher one wishes, above all, to be accurate. Taken to its most nightmarish extreme, the writer could find himself in the position laid out by Borges in his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In this story Pierre Menard begins by attempting to write something on Cervantes’ Don Quixote, however, in his passion for accuracy he ends by repeating Cervantes’ text word for word. If we recall our chapter on the theory of interpretation operative in Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli, we must admit that Pierre Menard was not, in fact, faithful to Cervantes’ thought. As we have seen in Lefort’s notion of interpretation, those who take the text as their sole object forget that the text itself has an object. The object, the “meaning,” of Lefort’s work is the illumination that it sheds on our political world. In the body of my study, I have often compared Lefort’s position with that of other philosophers within the tradition of European philosophy. In this brief conclusion, I will suggest some respects in which his thought could intervene in certain discussions that are taking place in the American context. Remaining on a high level of abstraction, I will discuss the ideal types of liberalism and communitarianism, theories of rights vs. theories of the good, as they relate to the debates concerning the nature of democracy. Liberalism, based on a theory of rights, is strongly universalistic. As stated in the American Bill of Rights, “We hold it to be selfevident that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Such a formulation obviously has onto-theological presuppositions. In modernity, we have witnessed a secularization of this position; however, none have been completely successful in establishing an ontological foundation that would replace the Creator after his disappearance with the “death of God.” To my mind, communitarians have been more successful at showing that the formal structure of rights theories does, in fact, contain historically specific substantive value commitments and thus is not as formal as its proponents claim. In Stephen Mulhall’s and Adam Swift’s book, Liberals and Communitarians, they cite Michael Sandel who argues that “Rawls’ substantive political theory presupposes a certain conception of the essential nature of 271

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personhood, a conception that rules out the possibility of a person’s being constitutively attached to her end.” I take this to mean that indeed there are certain types of people willing to enter into Rawls’s thought experiment of going behind a “curtain of ignorance”; however, that there could be an historical genealogy of the emergence of such types, and if this were the case, then the results of this thought experiment are far less universalizable than its proponents imagine. Communitarians are very apt at showing the historical embeddedment of our values, even when these values are represented as purely formal. Nevertheless, they have been less successful in avoiding a type of relativism which, if taken seriously, would have pernicious political consequences. For example, in a country which lacks a tradition of the respect for individual rights and does not have a constitution which would legally protect these rights, if a dissident is thrown into a prison or a psychiatric institution, do we have any justification other than our personal revulsion for objecting to his or her treatment? Indeed, totalitarian regimes have been vociferous in their insistence that all so-called values are strictly delimited in both space and time and that any objection to their treatment of their own people constitutes an unwarranted “intrusion into their internal affairs.” From the perspective of such regimes, the very idea of a “rights of man” is nothing other than an ideology of Western imperialism. Even if there have been incidents in which they have been so used, we cannot quite bring ourselves to conclude that an imprisoned trade unionist in China has no more rights than an inanimate object, and that as such his or her rights could not possibly be being violated. In Lefort’s thought, we do not see any effort to find a substitute for the lapsed onto-theological foundations of a doctrine of rights. As I have argued elsewhere in my book Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics, this is not so in the thought of Habermas, where the conception of language naturally finalized toward rational consensus functions as such a substitute. Because Lefort thinks within the phenomenological tradition, especially from the thought of Merleau-Ponty, there is no stark opposition between the brute fact and a purely formal essential structure. On the hither side of this radical opposition between the de facto and the de jure, Lefort acknowledges the historical and contingent origins of democracy, yet he does not enclose it within a particular “cultural context” which would diminish its normative dimension and its capacity for universalization. From his study of Dante’s thought, Lefort has learned that from the very beginning the spatial and temporal limits of the political were conceived of as being indefinite. The political, as the symbolic dimension of the social, is neither of the order of the strictly spatially and temporally localizable fact, nor is it of the order of the transparent uni-

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versality of an essential structure. There is not, on the one hand, facts considered as “one damn thing after another,” and on the other hand, a domain of universal value which is valid always and everywhere. Rather there is an intertwining of event and sense. The event presides over a certain space and time whose limits are not rigorously fixed. Returning to our example of the Chinese trade unionist, we see that his or her rights have not been violated in the same sense as they would be were she living in France, or the United States, where such rights are protected by law. Nevertheless, the union activist is not in the same position as, for example, a pious Islamic woman who wears a shadour and does not have any desire not to wear it. Her rights may not reasonably be said to be violated because she has not yet enunciated a right not to wear this ritual article of clothing. The Chinese activist does, indeed, make a gesture toward a formal system of rights, that is, the right which protects freedom of association; even if this system of rights has not been legally instituted in his country, it has already been instituted by humanity in another place, a place which is not absolutely foreign to him. As we have seen above, for Lefort the “idea of humanity” is not an abstract essence of which each of us is an exemplary instance; rather, it is a historical product of the overlapping of a context of meanings, of mutual interpretations, which have been made by beings who perceive each other as similar. The idea of rights attests to a space external to power. Rights are neither identifiable with the legally instituted constitutional rights which could be definitively enumerated in a particular country, nor do they inhere in the idea of human nature. Rights remain indefinite, both spatially and temporally, and they are intertwined with their enunciation. The mobility and indefiniteness of rights is attested to by a poster that I once saw in the Paris metro after the massacres in Tiananmen Square. Written in Chinese characters it read: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

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Index

Action Française, 207 Adorno, Theodor, 102 Advent and event, 44, 64–65, 74, 115, 139, 242 Alexander Severus, Roman emperor, 28 Algerian Revolution, 198, 199, 229 Alienation, 87–89, 147 American Revolution, 153 Anarchy, 46, 48, 107, 230, 231–32, 238 Ancien régime, 118, 150, 152, 168, 243; breakdown of, 167; French Revolution, 134, 139, 244; human rights, 227; king’s body, xxiv–xxv, 115–16, 131 Animality, 24, 41, 88, 161 Anthropology, 22, 83–90 passim, 94, 123, 154, 162, 220 Aquinas, St. Thomas, xiii, 107, 109 Arendt, Hannah, xx, 24, 33, 36, 53, 101, 152–58 passim, 207, 228; production metaphor, 32, 87; and “rise of the social,” xiv, xxviii, xxix, 208; and terror, 137, 201, 214, 257–58; and totalitarianism, xxi, xxvi–xxix, 155 —works: The Human Condition, 214; The Origins of Totalitarianism, xvii, 195, 233, 252–54, 256–63, 265–66 Aristocracy, 46, 47, 51; birth of, 48 Aristotle, xiv, 7, 22, 37, 70, 155; Lefort critiques, 121; Machiavelli diverges from, 15, 29, 41; quoted, 169–70, 180, 247, 250 — works: Poetics, 106; Politics, 27, 37, 46, 106; The Rhetoric, 23 Aron, Raymond, xxi Atheism, 122, 139, 147 Augustine, Saint, 106, 107 Austin, J. L., 31 Bacon, Francis, 247 Balinese society, 85, 259

Bateson, Gregory, 90; “The Value System of a Steady State,” 85 Baudelaire, Charles, xvi Being, 134, 156, 162, 191, 215, 222, 262; over Appearance, xvi, 114–15, 123; as “Great Object,” 149; history of, 142–44; indeterminacy/determinacy of, 64; man’s relationship to, 60, 120, 121, (prince’s) 38; modern experience of, 155; in primitive societies, 86; wild, 68 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 236 Bergson, Henri, xiv Beria, Lavrenti, 266 Besançon, Alain, 236 Bible, the, 13, 107, 123, 169 Bigot, M.: Marxisme et Humanisme, 87 Blind spot, 34, 69, 70, 208, 209 Body politic, xxiii–xxvi, 33, 110, 114, 214, 219. See also “People-as-One” Bolshevism, 209, 238, 241–46 passim, 253, 259, 265; French Revolution and, 132, 242, 244; and World War I, 250–51 Boniface VII, pope, 108 Borges, Jorge Luis: “Pierre Manard, Author of Don Quixote,” 78, 271 Borgia, Cesare, 14, 45 Brecht, Bertolt, 15; Measures Taken, 200 Brezhnev, Leonid, 266 Brown, Peter: Augustine of Hippo, 107 Buddhism, 100 Bukharin, Nikolai, 197 Callicles, 119 Capitalism, 89, 165, 187, 201–2, 251; critiqued, 207; rise of, 87 Caracalla, Roman emperor, 28 Cassirer, Ernst, 59 Castoriadis, Cornelius, xxi, 195 Cathar heresy, 107

279

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Catherine de Medici, 77 Causality, concept of, 90–91 Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 78, 271 Chambers, Whittaker, 237 Chateaubriand, François, 153, 155 Chile, 180 China, 186, 217–18, 220, 222, 266; Tiananmen Square, 179, 180, 197, 273; trade unions in, 272, 273 Christ, 110, 115, 116, 123, 141; birth of, 170; divinity of, 105, 113, 117; as historical person, 106; secularization of body of, xxiv, 108–9, 166, 215 Christianity, xvii, 13, 77, 100, 108, 142; democracy and, 225; doctrine of, 8, (Hegel on) 122, 123, 139; and Jesus as Son of God, 113; Lefort’s view, 98, 105, 110, 118; Machiavelli’s view, 12, 20, 21, 41; old Church, 116–17; premodern, 83, 89, 114, 139; prophetic, 106–7; and rights of man, 165; totalitarianism and, 217, 218; and virtue of poverty, 18. See also God; Religion CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 197 Cicero, 24, 41 Civil rights crisis (U.S.). See United States Class struggle. See Social conflict Clastres, Pierre, 83, 94–98, 260 —works: The Gualaki Indians, 94; Society Against the State, 94–95 Cold War, 26, 207 Commodus, Roman emperor, 28 Common good. See Good, desire for Communist Party/Communism, 186, 196, 204, 218, 222, 252; birth and novelty of, 241, 244; and Christianity, 217; “Communist idea,” 246, 249, 250, 253; Communist illusion (Furet), 240, 251– 53; vs. democracy/liberalism, 245–47; failure of, (“Columbus mistake”), 126, 249, 256, 266, 267–68; Fascism identified with, xxvi–xxvii, 207; French, 197, 226, 234, 239, 252; Italian, founded, xxi–xxii; “laws” of, xxviii, 258–59; regime of, 254, 264–65; and terror, 250, 258 (see also Terror); 20th Congress of, 199, 202; in U.S., 219, 238–39; values espoused by, 249–50 Communitarianism, 271, 272 Comte, Auguste, xiv

Conflict. See Social conflict Corruption, 27, 28, 53–54, 57, 229 Council of Trent, 77 Cows, in Nuer society, 88–89, 103–4, 125 Croce, Benedetto: What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel?, 75 Cuba, 214, 229 Cyrus II (the Great), king of Persia, 12 Czechoslovakia, Soviet invasion of, 197 Dante Alighieri, 117, 176, 177, 272; The Monarchy (Monarchia), 20, 55, 83, 105, 169–73, 181, 226 Danton, Georges, 138 Darwin, Charles, 212, 221, 257, 259 Death of God. See God Deleuze, Gilles, xviii, 141 Democracy, xix–xx, xxvi, 46, 47, 120, 152, 232; and Christianity, 225; distinguishing feature of, 222; empty place in, 178, 215; founders of, 132; genesis and fate of, 105, (end of regime) 48; Lefort’s view, 163, 214–15, 216–17, 231–32; modern, 157–59, 247–48, (political life in) xxv, xxvii; and rights, 168; socialism linked to, 236; vs. totalitarianism/ Communism, 155, 245–47; “wild,” 243–44 Democratic Party (U.S.), 229 Derrida, Jacques, xx, 48, 61–64, 65 —works: “The Force of Law,” xv; The Other Heading, 149; The Politics of Friendship, xv–xvi; The Specters of Marx, xv–xvi; Speech and Phenomena, 62 Descartes, René, and Cartesianism, xiv, 8, 65, 69, 142–43, 221; The Meditations, 77–78 Despotism/tyranny, 9, 31–32, 41, 46, 47, 173, 174, 255; conspiracy and, 57; isolation and, 210; in primitive society, 96– 97; revolt against, 48 Deutscher, Isaac, 202 Dialectic and hyperdialectic, 11, 23, 230, 231; of history, 34 Differance, concept of, xv, 63 “Disney effect,” 190 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 140, 263 Ecclesiastical states, 9, 19–20, 31, 41 Eckhardt, Meister, 219

281 I N D E X

Ego, the, xvi, 35, 224; and superego, 91 “Egocrat,” 34, 178, 215 Egypt, sultan of, 30, 31 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xix Empty place, xxiv–xxvi, 126, 148, 217, 218, 241; in democracy, 178, 215 Engels, Friedrich, 240, 257; Dialectic of Nature, 204 Enlightenment, the, xx, 112, 113, 123, 144, 150, 217, 236; critics of, 150 Epoche, 62, 67, 101 Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 88, 125 Event and advent. See Advent Express, L’, 205, 211

197, 221, 264; and “biologism,” 89, 93; and Oedipal complex, xviii; and return of repression, xxvi, 240 —works: The Future of an Illusion, 224; Totem and Taboo, 160–62 Froman, Wayne: “The Blind Spot,” 69 Fromm, Erich, 87 “Frontier thesis,” 181–82 Furet, François, 217, 235–38 passim, 254, 256, 266, 268 —works: Interpreting the French Revolution, 132–33, 134, 138, 249; The Passing of an Illusion, 195, 205, 207–8, 233–34, 239– 55 passim, 265

Family, the, 188, 191 Fascism, xvi, 126, 138, 143, 217, 245–46, 265, 267; Communism identified with, xxvi–xxvii, 207; Communism vs., 251– 52; defense of, xxi; German, xviii, xix, xxv; “laws” of, xxviii, 256; and “master race,” 241 February Revolution, 242–43 Ferdinand II, king of Spain, 7 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 32, 123, 124 Fiedler, Leslie: An End to Innocence, 237 Flaubert, Gustave, xvi Florence and Florentines, 43, 44, 49, 60, 83; love of, for Rome, 45, 54; Machiavelli criticizes, 41–42, 52, 53, 54, 57; pseudo-sages of, 11, 21, 70. See also Italy Flynn, Bernard: Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics, 272 Fortress mentality, 18, 23, 31, 34, 43, 52, 259 Fortune, 38, 45; vs. virtue, see Virtue/Virtu Foucault, Michel, xv, 66, 100, 189, 254; and power, 21, 32, 131, 210; The Archaeology of Knowledge, 211–12 France, 87, 115, 116, 207, 227; antiMachiavellianism in, 77; Communism in, 197, 226, 234, 239, 252. See also French Revolution Frankfurt school, 246 Freedom: vs. servitude, 172–74; in USSR, 223 French Revolution, 65, 116–17, 118, 147, 153, 177, 240, 241–42; Lefort’s analysis of, 132–39, 185, 219, 243–45 Freud, Sigmund, 91, 92, 101, 124, 131, 136,

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 5, 56, 61, 71, 72, 73, 97 Galileo, 247 Gasche, Rodolphe: The Tain of the Mirror, 61 Genet, Jean, xvi Germany, xvii, 18, 19, 20; Fascism in, xviii, xix, xxv; German philosophy, 240. See also Hitler, Adolf Gestalt, concept of, 90, 91; Merleau-Ponty and, xxii–xxiii, 64 Gingrich, Newt, 33 Glucksman, Andrew, 227 God: anthropological view, 123; belief in, xxv, 8, 13, 105, 106, 115, 142–44 passim, 164, 169, 173, (and miracles) 38; death of, 107, 113, 139–40, 147, 148, 192, 216, 271; Freudian view, 124; king’s body and, 108, 117, 177. See also Religion Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xiii Good, desire for, 15, 17, 41; common good, 21–22, (private interest vs.) 53–54 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 197, 266–67 Government: and civil society, 209–10; formation of, Machiavelli on, 47; premodern society and, 95, 96; three forms of, 46, 47; transcendence of, 92 Gramsci, Antonio, xxi, 59; The Modern Prince, xxii Greece, ancient, xx, 41, 65, 83, 144; Greek philosophy, 10, 105–8, 140, 221; polis, politeia of, xiv–xv, 95, 152–53, 154, 156, 234; Sparta, 45–46, 48, 50–52, 54, 55, 220. See also Aristotle; Plato

282 I N D E X

Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 213 Guizot, François, 154 Habermas, Jurgen, xvii–xviii, 22, 30, 101, 126, 138, 144–47, 197; and language, 74, 102–4, 145, 272 —works: Knowledge and Human Interest, 73, 145; The Theory of Communicative Action, 73–74, 102, 146 Halberstam, Michael: Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics, xxvii Hannibal, 23 “Haves” and “Have-nots,” 51. See also Social conflict Hegel, Georg W. F., xiii, xiv, 17, 76, 111, 144–46 passim, 172, 202, 228, 235–36, 238; and absolute knowledge, 119; and Christianity, 122, 123, 139; and history, 84, 87, 102, 104, 153, 154, 179, 198–99; and owl of Minerva, 56, 234; quoted, 85, 95 —works: Encyclopedia, 110–11, 122; The Phenomenology of Spirit, 86, 102, 110; Philosophy of Right, 209 Heidegger, Martin, xiv, 8, 61, 102, 115, 119, 120, 159, 256; and the Enlightenment, xx, 150; Fascism of, xix; and modernity, xx, 142–44, 156, 247; and Nazism, 143–44, 155, 219; quoted (on tourism), 183 —works: Being and Time, xix, 6; Die Beitrage, 144, 149; Introduction to Metaphysics, xix, 155–56; The Self-Assertion of the German University, xix Heraclitus, xxii, 11, 15, 106 Hereditary vs. “natural” prince, 10, 47 Hermeneutics, 61, 66, 72–73; hermeneutic nihilism, 50; of suspicion, 249, 254 Herodotus, 106 Hiss, Alger, 237 History: defined, 102; deification of, 248; governed by providence, 107; Habermas’s theory, 104; Hegel’s theory, see Hegel, Georg W. F.; laws of, xxviii, 256–57, 259, 266; Lefort’s theory, 261; Machiavelli’s view, 55; Marxist view, 87, 144, 154, 171, 257; philosophies of, 101– 2, 153–55; preinterpretation of, 132– 33; societies without, see Premodern/ primitive society; tragedy vs., 106;

“transcendental” vs. empirical, 55; universal, 55–56, 84 Hitler, Adolf, xvi, xvii, 141, 144, 200, 222, 258; and the USSR, 238, 251; Mein Kampf, xxvi Hobbes, Thomas, 17, 19, 134, 247 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 144 Holy See. See Pope, the Homer, xxii, 15, 144, 172 Howe, Irving, 240 Humanism, 8, 12, 50, 54, 114, 176; Marxist, 87, 89 Human rights. See Rights of man Hume, David, 66, 93 Hungary, USSR invades, 196, 205, 211 Hussein, Saddam, 255 Husserl, Edmund, xvi, 22, 27, 60, 63, 67, 101, 238, 256; and history, 55, 84, 87; Merleau-Ponty’s study of, 69 —works: The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, 84; Logical Investigations, xv, 62 Identity, xvii, 65, 178, 224; and difference, 71–72, 122, 139; and non-identity, 29, 78, 115, 150, 159, 177 Ideology, 249, 258; Lefort’s view, 49, 186– 92, 255; Malia’s view, 235–36 Image, the: in Freudian thought, 131; in Machiavellian thought, 21, 22–23, 25– 26, 34–35, (as foundation of power) 28–29, 34, 76 Immigration policy, xvi Imperialism, 87, 197, 207, 251, 272 Imperio. See Power Incest taboo, 92–93, 160–62, 224 Internationale, the, xvi Islam, 100, 273; Iran revolution, 198 Italy, 13, 19, 36, 38; Communist Party in, xxi–xxii; Florentine, see Florence and Florentines; hatred of, 77. See also Rome, ancient Jacobins, 132, 244–45 James, Henry: Portrait of a Lady, xviii James I, king of England, 109 Jaspers, Karl, 256 Jews and Judaism, 100, 170, 223, 252; and act of forgiveness, xvi John of Salisbury, 109

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Johnson, Lyndon, xix, 229 John the Baptist, 141 Jonas, Hans, 222 Justice, 110, 228–29, 267; origin of, 47 Kafka, Franz, 101, 160, 188, 234 Kant, Immanuel, 43, 74, 76, 93, 104, 143– 47 passim, 151, 178, 238, 261; Goethe quoted on, xiii; quoted, 177; transcendental reflection, 66, 100–101 —works: Critique of Judgment, 179; Critique of Pure Reason, 158, 160; Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 160; “Project for Perpetual Peace,” 176, 181–82; “What is Enlightenment?,” 112 Kantorowicz, Ernest, xxiv, 108–9, 117, 131, 218; The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, 20, 108, 171 Kardiner, Abraham, 83, 89–92, 93–94, 162, 264; The Individual and His Society, 89 KGB (Cheka), 243, 267 Khrushchev, Nikita, 200, 202, 205, 266 Kierkegaard, Søren, 68 King, the: law linked to, 109–10; philosopher king, 11, 32, 70 King’s body, xxiv–xxv, 110, 113, 115–18, 167; death of, 147, 157, 216; in a democracy, 178; doubled, 108–9, 117, 131, 177, 215, 218, 255, (as mediator) 114, 126, 133 Kissinger, Henry, 59 Knowledge, 37, 106; Absolute, 119, 123, 145; “is Power,” 247; and nonknowledge, 13, 21, 52, 70 Koestler, Arthur: Darkness at Noon, 249 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 104, 146 Kohn, Jerome, 228 Kojeve, Alexandre, 86, 94, 247 Kristeva, Julia, 212 La Boétie, Etienne de, 95, 119, 213, 250, 252; The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, 54, 172–78 Lacan, Jacques, xxv, 35, 92–93, 94, 124– 25, 260, 264; and symbolic order, 73, 118–19, 126, 177, 223–24 Ladurie, Emanuel LeRoy: Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, 107 Language, 66, 72–73, 168, 175–76; Haber-

mas’s theory of, 74, 102–4, 145, 272; poetic, 6, 56; vs. speech, 64, 119, 186, 223 Laplanche, J., xx; The Language of Psychoanalysis, 92 Law(s), 117, 159–61; Derrida’s theory (“the Force of Law”), xv; empirical genesis of, 93; of history, xxviii, 256–57, 259, 266; king linked to (but not subject to), 109–10; in primitive society, 97–98; questioned, 150; totalitarianism and, 217, 221–23, (Soviet) 263; of transcendence, 98; transgression of, 162 Lefort, Claude: works: “L’Alienation comme Concept Sociologique,” 87; “Une Autre Révolution,” 240; La Complication (CRC), 195, 223, 233–34, 238– 50, 252–56, 258–68; “The Contradictions of Trotsky,” 196; Democracy and Political Theory (DPT), 110–18, 121–26, 133–36, 150–51, 158–59, 210–11, 216– 18, 222–25, 230, 255; “Dialogue with Pierre Clastres,” 94; “La Dissolution des repères et l’Enjeu Démocratique,” 152; Eléments d’Une Critique de la Bureaucratie, 195, 196, 202, 239–40; Les Formes de l’Histoire (FH), 84–94, 151; “Genesis of Ideology in Modern Society,” 185, 187, 189; “Hannah Arendt and the Question of the Political,” 255; “Human Rights and the Welfare State,” 210; “The Idea of Humanity and the Project of Universal Peace,” 174, 181; “L’Idée de Personnalité de Base,” 89; “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” 178, 211–12, 233; “Interpreting the Revolution within the French Revolution,” 133; “The Logic of Totalitarianism,” 207, 225; “Marx: From One Vision of History to Another,” 87, 133, 185; “Le Mythe de l’Un dans le Fantasme et dans la Réalité Politique,” 118–19, 177, 218; “The Name of the One,” 172; “Novelty and the Appeal of Repetition,” 195; “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?”, 20, 105, 110, 113, 115, 122, 125, 187, 209, 217; The Political Forms of Modern Society (PFM), 87, 165–68, 178, 185–91, 196– 204, 208–15 passim, 219–20, 225–32;

284 I N D E X

Lefort, Claude: works (continued) “Politics and Human Rights,” 165, 226; “La Politique et la Pensée de la Politique,” 198; Preface to Dante’s Monarchy (“La Modernité de Dante”), 105, 169, 180, 226; Preface to MerleauPonty’s The Visible and the Invisible, 188, 234; “The Question of Democracy,” xx; “La Recherche sur la Phénomenologie de Merleau-Ponty,” 261; “The Revolutionary Terror,” 136; “La Sens de l’Orientation,” 261; “Société ‘sans histoire’ et historicité,” 84, 86, 94; “Totalitarianism Without Stalin,” 199, 203, 214, 239, 266; Le Travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel (TM), 5, 7–26 passim, 29–39 passim, 59–61, 65–72 passim, 75–78, 83, 92, 217; Writing: The Political Test (WPT), 94–98, 136–39, 176, 181–83 Leibniz, Gottfried, 143 Lenin, V. I., 138, 195, 215, 236, 238, 241; arrives in Russia, 242–43; death, xxi, 200, 212, 218; denounced, 243; quoted, 245, 251; and revolution, 245, 246; system established by, 239, 244, 249; What Is to Be Done?, 243 Levinas, Emmanuel, xvi–xvii, 10, 33, 150, 263; “Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de Hitlerism,” xvi Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 12, 92, 162, 172; The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 85, 160–61 Levy, Bernard Henri, 227 Leys, Simon: Chinese Shadows, 220 Liberalism, 271; Communist vs., 246. See also Rights of man Library of Congress, Report to, xiv Lilla, Mark, xv Livy, Titus, 43, 45 Locke, John, xix Lorenzo (de Medici) the Magnificent, 5, 36, 40. See also Medicis, the Louis XVI, king of France, xxvi, 117–18, 133 Lukàcs, György, xix; History and Class Consciousness, 245 Luxemburg, Rosa, 243 Lyotard, J. F., xxi Lycurgus, 46, 48, 50

McCarthy, Thomas: “Rationality and Relativism,” 73 Machiavelli, Niccolò, xxv, xxvi, 192, 217, 221; antiutopianism of, 50, 121; “Machiavellian” as term, 59, 76–77, (and Machiavellian myth) 76, 78; studies of, xx, xxi–xxii —works: The Discourses (D), 5, 7, 15, 60, (Lefort’s interpretation of) 40–58, 70, 220; The Prince (P), xxii, 60, 229, (Lefort’s interpretation of) 5–39, 40– 46 passim, 49–57 passim, 70 Maistre, Joseph de, 164 Malia, Martin, 230, 239, 246, 249, 251, 253; Lefort critiques, 240, 242, 254, 255–56, 265, 266; and totalitarianism, 207, 268; The Soviet Tragedy, 195, 215, 233–38 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 83 Manichaeanism, 107 Manent, Pierre, 15–16, 41, 121; quoted, xiv, xxiii–xxiv —works: “The Fate and Meaning of Political Philosophy in Our Century,” xiv; “Vers L’Oeuvre et le Monde,” 15 Mann, Thomas: Buddenbrooks, 189 Mannheim, Karl, 70, 249 Mao Zedong, 32, 141, 212, 213, 220–21, 257; anarco-Maoism, xvi; and the Red Book, 173, 218 Marat, Jean Paul, 138 Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor, 28 Marcuse, Herbert: Reason and Revolution, 191–92 Marion, Jean-Luc, 120 Marshall Plan, 26 Marx, Karl, xiv, 34, 65, 131, 188, 213; critiques Hegel, 209; and history, 87, 144, 154, 171, 257; quoted, 114, 202; Shakespearean reading of, 212, 257 —works, 153; The Communist Manifesto, 15, 241; Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 133, 187; German Ideology, 186; Grundrisse, 187; On the Jewish Question, 181 Marxism, xvii, 192, 255; and absolute knowledge, 119; class consciousness of, 70; and human rights, 227; Lefort critiques, 87–88, 91, 121, 195, 198–99, 212,

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230, 241, 248; Lefort influenced by, 84, 94, 196, (breaks from) 56, 89, 159, 166– 67, 186, 233; Machiavelli and, xxi–xxii; Marxist tradition, 20, 87, 146, (commitment to) xvi; unquestioned, xix Marxism-Leninism, 132 Mauss, Marcel, 83, 85, 267; Essay on the Gift, 238 Mead, Margaret, 83 Meaning, 60, 62–65, 68, 71 Medicis, the, 41, 57, 77; Lorenzo the Magnificent, 5, 36, 40 Mercenaries, 18, 19, 20, 31 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, xxv, 32, 60, 66– 68, 114, 125, 171, 179, 197; ideas of, 21, 68, (event and advent) 64–65, 74, 115, 139, (hyper-dialectic) 11, 230; language of, 57, 226, (terms used by) 29–30, 100, 120–21, 149; quoted, xiii, 6, 11, 65, 86, 89, 154 (see also works, below); Lefort as student of, xxii, 5, 94, 148, 212, 233, 256, 272; and schema, xxiv, 91, 112, 122, 216 —works: 44, 54, 69; “ The Eye and Mind,” 56, 61; Humanism and Terror, 265; “Metaphysics and the Novel,” 155; The Phenomenology of Perception, xxiii, 12, 216; “The Philosopher and his Shadow,” 69; The Prose of the World, xxii, 64; Sense and Nonsense, 155; Signs, 65, 69; The Structure of Behavior, xxii–xxiii, 64, 90, 261; “Their Values Are the Same as Ours,” 250; The Visible and the Invisible, xxii–xxiii, 10, 11, 64, 74, 178, 215– 16, 226, (Lefort’s preface to) 188, 234, (quoted) 66, 68, 75, 101, 155, 181, 261 Messianism, xv, 108, 235; Second Coming, 106 Metaphysics, 61–64, 71, 142, 143; destruction of history of, 6 Michelet, Jules, xxiv, 115–18, 131, 139, 154, 155; The History of France, 116 Miller, Arthur: Death of a Salesman, 192 Mirror, the, 35, 43. See also Image Mise-en-scène, 112, 115, 122, 124, 126, 133, 177 Modernity: advent of, 87; Arendt’s view, xxvii, xxviii–xix; European, genesis of, 105; Habermas’s view, 144–47; Heideg-

ger’s view, xx, 142–44, 156, 247; Lefort’s concept of, 140, 141, 148–49, 152, 156, 159, 183, 185–86, (Lefort defines) 221; in Machiavellian thought, 12; political, 126; and political discourse, 83; Western, 103. See also Premodernity Moses, 7, 12, 13, 56, 236 Mulhall, Stephen: Liberals and Communitarians, 271 Nabokov, Vladimir: Invitation to a Beheading, 135 National Socialism/Nazism, xxviii, 207, 217, 251; analysis of, xvii, xxvi, 201, 252–53, 259; Heidegger and, 143–44, 155, 219; Nietzsche and, 141–42; race laws of, 223, 256–57; resistance to, 239 Nehamas, Alexander: Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 70 “New Philosophers,” 226–27 New School for Social Research, 228 New York Review of Books, xv, 33 New York Times, 190, 197 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxiv, 18, 107, 139– 43, 198, 221, 250 —works: Beyond Good and Evil, 95; Ecce Homo, 70; “The Madman,” 113; The Twilight of the Idols, 147; The Will to Power, 70 Nihilism, 107, 126, 140, 150, 153; hermeneutic, 50 Nuer tribe, 88–89, 103–4, 125 October Revolution, xxi, 196, 220, 242– 46, 250–51 Odysseus, 102 Oedipal complex, xviii, 92, 224 Oligarchy, 46, 48 One, the, 158, 169, 171–76, 178, 231, 254, 268; immobility of, 259; as Party, 250, 252; people as, 185 (see also “People-asOne”); totalitarian role of, xxviii O’Neill, Eugene: The Iceman Cometh, 231–32 Ost, François, 210 Other, the, xxv, 16, 22, 118, 125–26, 149, 168, 174, 224, 263–64; as enemy, 135, 182; evil, xxvi, 214, 221; figure and dimension of, 150, 151–52, 158, 225;

286 I N D E X

Other, the (continued) Lefort’s view, 124, 155, 190, 191, 213; religion and, 115, 123; the State as, 98, 203 Paris Commune, 244 Parmenides, 106 Pascal, Blaise, 253 Paul, St., 141 “People-as-One,” xxvi, 213, 219, 221, 224, 230, 265, 267; the French Revolution and, 135–36, 137, 244; the führer and, xxvi, 215; the Terror and, 185, 214, 266. See also Body politic Philosopher king, 11, 32, 70 Piaget, Jean, 104, 146 Pitkin, Hannah: The Attack of the Blob, xxvii, 208 Plato, 11, 32, 105–6, 119, 141, 142, 155, 236 —works: The Apology, 223; The Laws, 46; The Republic, 7, 15, 37, 41, 49, 106, 120– 21, 157 Pocock, J.G.A., 106; The Machiavellian Moment, 105 Polish Workers Party, 25 Political illusion (Marx), 34 Political philosophy, 50; Christian, Machiavelli’s break from, 41; classical, 49, 110; lack of, xiv–xv, xxvii; modern, 83; The Prince as work of, 40, 55 Political realism, Machiavelli as inventor of, 92 Political science, xiv, 6, 21, 55, 110 Politics: of friendship, xv–xvi; of risk, 30, 52, 57 Pontalis, J.-B, xxi; The Language of Psychoanalysis, 92 Pope, the, 169, 170–71, 173; Boniface VII, 108; Holy See, 31, 32; papal states, 19 Popper, Karl, 199; The Open Society and Its Enemies, 222 Positivism, 30, 110, 115, 149, 164, 187, 240 Power; above society (imperio), xxv, 10, 33–34, 36, 40; “bio-power,” 210; different types of (Lefort’s view), 34–35; image as foundation of, 28–29, 34, 76; legitimate and illegitimate, distinction between, 95; Machiavelli’s view of, 9, 10–11, 31–35; in primitive society, 97–

98; symbolic status of, 131, 133; transcendence of, 26–27, 97; of two kings, 109; will and, 143 Premodernity, 83–98; defined, xxiii–xxiv, 125; European, 100–125; and language, 103–4 Premodern/primitive society (society “without history”), 83–90, 97, 100, 103– 6, 220; defining characteristic of, 94; described, 95–96; law in, 96–97; Lefort quoted on, 151 Principality, 46, 47, 48 Production. See Work Proudhon, Pierre, 171 Psychoanalysis, xxi, 168, 223, 225, 264; culturalist version of, 89; Lefort’s conception of, 91–92, 120 Psychoanalystes ( journal), 118 Quinet, Edgar, 116, 154 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R., 83 Rawls, John, 228, 271–72 Reductions, 62, 90, 91; phenomenological, 6, 67, 101 Reflection and hyper-reflection, 66–67, 69, 74, 100–101, 102 Regimes, xviii, 152; different types, 9, 120–21, (failure to recognize) 208; Lefort’s concept of, 110–11, 115, 120– 22, 133; mixed, 46, 48. See also Ancien régime Relativism, 26–27, 31, 75, 105, 146, 153, 155; radical, 103, 154 Religion: Lefort’s view, 113–15, 122–25, 148, 150; Machiavelli’s view, 20; primitive ritual, 90, 97–98; suppression of, 217–18. See also Christianity; God Republican Party (U.S.), 33, 229 Resnais, Alain: Monsieur Klein (film), 223 “Reversibility,” 29, 65, 89, 91, 120, 175 Ricoeur, Paul, 249 Rights of man, 165–68, 171, 176, 178–83, 248, 271–73; civil rights, see United States; Lefort’s view, 225–32; United Nations conference on, 180; welfare state and, 211 Robespierre, Maximilian, 136, 138–39, 244, 263, 265

287 I N D E X

Romanticism, xx Rome, ancient, 15, 60, 65, 170–71; army of, 28; Machiavelli on, 20, 30, 41–57 passim, 121, 220; as modern society, 83 Romulus and Remus, 12 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 155, 207 Root and Branch (anarchist journal), 26 Rorty, Richard: Achieving Our Century, xix Rosenberg, Harold, 235, 242; “Couch Liberalism and the Guilty Past,” 237–39 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 236, 238; Social Contract, 37 Ruge, Arnold, 122 Sade, Marquis de, 221 Saint-Just, Louis de, 138 Sandel, Michael, 271 Sartre, Jean-Paul, xvi, xix, 148, 205, 216, 262 —works: “The Cause of the People,” xvi; Critique of Dialectical Reason, xvi; “The Ghost of Stalin,” 211; “The Transcendence of the Ego,” xvi; What Is Literature?, xvi Saussure, Ferdinand de, 64, 119, 186, 223 Savonarola, Girolamo, 13, 26 “Schema,” xxiv, 91, 112, 122, 216 Schreimacher, 124 Second Coming, doctrine of, 106. See also Messianism Serge, Victor: The Birth of Our Power, 245 Sextus Empiricus, 70 Skepticism, 66–68, 69, 93 Skinner, Quentin: Liberty Before Liberalism, xxiii, 215 Social conflict, 22, 31, 33, 47, 192, 199, 229, 253; Machiavelli’s theory, 14–19, 49–53, 159; Marx’s theory, xxii, 121; precluded in primitive society, 86 Social contract theory, 17, 164 Socialism, 200, 210, 233, 235; “integral,” 230; Marxist, 236 Socialisme ou Barbarie (political group), xxi, 195 Society without history. See Premodern/ primitive society Socrates, 119, 223 Solon, 144 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 215, 265 Souvarine, Boris, 241, 242, 252

Soviet Union, xix, 180, 217–18, 249; apologists for, xxi, 226; compared to U.S., 155; Constitution of, 223; and “Czarist past,” 195; dissidents in/ rebellion against, 55, 197, 225–27; fall of, xvi, 132, 162, 265; French Revolution and, 244; history of, 220, 233–34, 237, 239; as “ideocracy,” 236; law in, 263; Lefort critiques, xxvi, 199–202, 205, 212–13, 240– 41, 262–64; post-Stalin, 266–67; Western view of, 250; in World Wars I and II, 250–52. See also Stalin, Joseph Spanish Civil War, 238, 252 Sparta. See Greece, ancient Spinoza, Baruch, 221 Spirit, 84, 102, 104, 123, 199 Stalin, Joseph, xxi, xxviii, 141, 226, 239, 257, 258; atrocities under, 252; complicity with/blindness toward, xix, 155; death of, 214, 266; and Hitler, 238, 251; Lefort critiques, 154, 200, 201–2, 204; rise of, 212, 213, 242; rival feared, 220–21 State, the. See Government Steffens, Lincoln, xxvi Strauss, Leo, xiv–xv, 11, 59, 115, 150, 152– 57, 208, 247 —works: Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 247–48; Natural Right and History, 152 Structuralist criticism, 71–72 Swift, Adam: Liberals and Communitarians, 271 Symbolic order, 73, 89, 92; Lacan and, 73, 118–19, 126, 177, 223–24; Lefort’s notion of, 118–20, 125, 126, 131–34, 139, 149, 177, 218 “Symbolic efficacity,” 12, 254 Taminiaux, Jacques, 183 Taylor, Charles, 141; The Sources of the Self, 93, 221 Technology, 8, 143, 155–56, 191 Terror: Arendt’s view, 137, 201, 214, 257– 58; function of, xxviii, 201, 203; French Revolution, 133–39, 185, 244, 245, 263, 265, (ends) 138; logic of, 135, 214; in USSR, 201, 250, (ends) 266 Theseus, 12 Third World, xxi Thrasymachus, 119

288 I N D E X

Tocqueville, Alexis de, xxix, 134, 154, 155, 183, 209, 262; and democracy, 120, 141, 182 —works: The Ancient Régime and the Revolution, 132; Democracy in America, 210 Totalitarianism: Arendt’s analysis of, xxi, xxvi–xxix, 155; conflict vs., 18; defined, 219; law under, 217, 221–23; Lefort’s view, xxv–xxvi, 34–36, 53, 95, 141, 162– 63, 199–205, 207–32, (after the fall) 233–68; meaning of the word, 236; as modern phenomenon, xxvii; as “new religion,” 217, 240; and People-asOne, xxvi; rise and fall of, xxi, 267, (doomed) 126; Soviet, xix, 207, 236, (ends) 267; and terror, xxviii, 137, 138; 20th-century, 31 Trade unions, 198, 272, 273 Transcendence, xvi–xvii; political, 34; of state/power, 25–26, 51, 92, 96 Transcendental, Kant’s definition, 144 Treaty of Versailles, 268 Tribunal, the, 48, 52, 53 Trotsky, Leon, 200, 202, 209, 212–13, 232, 242; and workers’ state, xxi, 195, 196, 199; Stalin, 196 Turks, the, despotic regimes of, 9, 30, 41 Tyranny. See Despotism/tyranny United Nations conference on Human Rights, 180 United States, 155, 208, 234; American Left, xix, 238; Bill of Rights and Constitution, 227, 271; civil rights movement, 156, 229, 246; Communism, 219, 238– 39; foreign policy, 238; “imperialism,” 197; Supreme Court, 227; trade unions, 198; Voting Rights Act, 229 USSR. See Soviet Union Utopianism, xx, 199, 235; failed, 236, 242, 256, 265; Machiavelli opposes, 22, 50, 121 Valéry, Paul: Reflections on the World Today, 182 Venice, 46, 51–52, 54, Vienna Circle, 149

Vietnam War, xix, 156, 213 Violence, 32; in French Revolution, 134; in Machiavellian thought, 10, 14. See also Terror Virgin Mary, cult of, 200 Virtue/Virtu, 8, 14, 19, 21, 22, 23, 45; Florentine lack of, 53; image vs., 28–29; of the prince, 13, 25, 38, 56–57; Roman, 50; struggle between fortune and, 12, 27, 36–37 Wallace, Henry, 198 War, 176; in premodern culture, 85, 95. See also February Revolution; Fortress mentality; French Revolution; Mercenaries; October Revolution; Social conflict Weber, Max, 146, 153, 186, 201, 267; and ethic of responsibility, 14, 30, 230; quoted, xxiii, 26, 77; “Politics as a Vocation,” 14 Welfare state, 210, 211, 221 Western society, 105, 144, 262, 268; capitalist, 201; image of USSR in, 239, 241, 250, 252; “imperialism” of, 197, 207, 272; modernity in, 103; premodern, xxiii–xxiv; secularization of, 112; and welfare state, 210, 221; Western man, xxi. See also United States Whitehead, Alfred North, xiv Whitman, Walt, xix Will, concept of, 247–48; and power, 143 Wills, Garry, 33 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xiv, 160 Work, xxvii, 86–87; production as, 87, 94; production metaphor, 32; principle of production, 86, 87 Workers’ state, xxi, 195, 196, 199 Worldviews, 77, 103–4, 142 World War I, 242, 250–51, 268 World War II, xxi, 207, 244, 251, 252 Writing (in metaphysical sense), 63–64, 65 Yeltsin, Boris, 267 Zarathustra, 141

About the Author

Bernard Flynn is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York, Empire State College, New York City and a longtime Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He is author of Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics published by Humanities Press in 1992 and has written numerous articles on the history of Philosophy, Phenomenology, and Political Philosophy. Currently he is working on a book concerning the body as political metaphor.

Consulting Editors

Robert Bernasconi Judith P. Butler † David Carr † Edward S. Casey † Stanley Cavell † Roderick M. Chisholm † Hubert L. Dreyfus † Lester E. Embree † Dagfinn Føllesdal † Véronique Fóti † Irene Harvey † Dieter Henrich † Don Ihde † Emmanuel Levinas † Alphonso Lingis † William McBride

J. N. Mohanty Maurice Natanson † Graeme Nicholson † Frederick Olafson † Paul Ricoeur † Tom Rockmore † George Shrader † Calvin O. Schrag † Thomas Sheehan † Hugh J. Silverman † Robert Sokolowski † Herbert Spiegelberg † Charles Taylor † Samuel J. Todes † Bruce W. Wilshire † David Wood

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