Copyrighted material Acknowledgments. Notes on Contributors

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1 Contents Foreword Bernard Flynn Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors vii ix xi Introduction 1 Martín Plot Part I Claude Lefort, A Close Reader: Intellectual Influences and Dialogues 1 Claude Lefort: A Political Biography 15 Dick Howard 2 Lefort as Phenomenologist of the Political 23 Bernard Flynn 3 Lefort and Machiavelli 34 Newton Bignotto 4 Claude Lefort, Political Anthropology, and Symbolic Division 51 Samuel Moyn 5 Claude Lefort as Reader of Leo Strauss 71 Claudia Hilb Part II Interpreting the Political: Events and Political Thought 6 Claude Lefort, the Practice and Thought of Disincorporation 89 Gilles Bataillon 7 The Style Claude Lefort 107 Michael B. Smith v

2 vi Contents 8 Lefort, the Philosopher of Andrew Arato 9 Rethinking the Politics of Human Rights and Democracy withandbeyondlefort 124 Jean L. Cohen 10 Lefort and Tocqueville on the Possibility of Democratic Despotism 136 Steven Bilakovics Part III Symbolic Mutations: Lefort s Influence in Contemporary Democratic Theory 11 Thinking Democracy beyond Regimes: Untangling Political Analysis from the Nation-State 157 Marc G. Doucet 12 Lefort and the Symbolic Dimension 176 Warren Breckman 13 Democracy beyond the Political: Reconsidering the Social 186 Brian C. J. Singer 14 Lefort and the Fate of Radical Democracy 203 Jeremy Valentine 15 The Advent of the Aesthetico-Political 218 Martín Plot Index 239

3 Introduction Martín Plot The oeuvre Claude Lefort died on October 3, His oeuvre, a term dear to him, which developed over a period of six decades, is now more than ever an institution: it faces a closure that is also an opening. In his preface to Maurice Merleau-Ponty s L Institution-La Pasivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France ( ), 1 Lefort argues that Merleau-Ponty perfectly understood all the ambiguity proper to the notion of institution, thus taking it in its double sense the action that provides a beginning and a state of the thing established... but with this essential difference, that institution as foundation is not considered as the product of an act and that institution as establishment contains at the same time the possibility of its perpetuation...as well as the possibility of the reactivation of the instituting force. The philosophical scope of this reformulation of the concept of institution is explicit. Merleau-Ponty distinguishes immediately the problematic of institution from that of constitution (in the Kantian sense). He rejects, along with the idea of a constituting consciousness, that of a world in which nothing would be discovered that had not been constituted by its operations. Understood in this double sense, institution presupposes a non-coincidence between the institutor and the instituted. This is what makes him say that time is the model of institution. If institution is openness to, openness to is always produced on the basis of. 2 Originally formulated by Merleau-Ponty who himself had followed Husserl in his turn, since, as we are suggesting, there is no origin that is absolute and no closing that is final the model of the institution, of its temporality, of its openness to endurance, and to a generality that does not disassociate itself from the event captured with precision the core of the theoretical and interpretive sensibility characteristic of Lefort s political philosophy. 1

4 2 Introduction What we call his oeuvre is at the same time multiple but tremendously coherent, diverse but inhabited by the same style of formulation an interrogative and interpretive style, a style proper to the being of the institution. The notion, in the distancing it assumes from both constituent rationalism and the empiricist positivism that is its mirror opposite, provided Lefort with the key to the type of interrogation and interpretation of political and social phenomena that is so characteristic of his philosophy. The philosopher of political forms, the theorist of forms of society in the way of the Greek politeia, as he often pointed out did not see in them, however, abstract forms of reason but, rather, concrete forms of history. If, as we just quoted him saying, time is the model of the institution. If institution is openness to [and] produced on the basis of, this means that the study of forms of society cannot but be historical, cannot but assume a comparative and genetic attitude, cannot but become sensitive to both the mutation and endurance of political forms. In other words, the study of forms of society must attempt to understand the specific way in which they endure-by-changing and mutate-in-continuity; it should attempt to identify that with which they break and the way in which they are, indeed, both openness to and on the basis of. Lefort developed a comparative style of investigation. He viewed democracy in its contrast with totalitarianism and vice versa, and he viewed modern societies in their contrast with pre-modern ones and vice versa. In the framework of this interrogative and comparative investigation of political forms, there were two symbolic mutations that structured a significant part of his analyses: first, the democratic revolution and, second, the advent of totalitarianism. The first mutation established a discontinuity between the pre-modern notion of the body politic a notion that implied the idea of an organic understanding of the social, with its incorporation of power in one of its organs and its attribution of fixed, predetermined social functions, roles, and hierarchies and the emergence of a new form of society in which what is abandoned is not the element of flesh, of which all bodies, including body politics, are made, but the very idea of a an entirely transcendently given shape of the social. With the advent of this society without a body that modern democracy became, a new conception of power emerged, since the latter is no longer localizable in an organ capable of invoking its consubstantiality. In this mutation, a symbolic displacement thus takes place, one in which power is seen as an empty place. What does the disincorporation of power mean? Lefort asks. It means that political authority no longer enjoys an absolute legitimacy. Those who exercise

5 Martín Plot 3 it are put in a position of a constant search of legitimacy. The parties pluralism is thus not reduced to being an artifice at the service of the selection of leaders...[a] society that is no longer able to being incarnated cannot give to itself the image of an organic unity: it recognizes itself as irreducibly plural. 3 For Lefort, the philosophical practice of interrogating and interpreting the institution of the social thus requires focusing on reflection on the political forms of society. These political forms, being themselves the very institution of the social, perform three intertwined operations that Lefort calls mise-en-forme, mise-en-sens, and mise-en-scène; that is, they give shape, institute meanings, and stage society for itself. In this framework, for Lefort, modern democracy became the form of society in which the periodic renovation and enactment of political and social conflict are revealed as constitutive (one should say institutive) of the way in which society confronts the enigma of its own institution. In modern societies the people become the source of all political legitimacy, but the people remain in a state of indeterminacy, a state only threatened by the totalitarian gesture towards embodying a complete self-transparency of the social. Democracies institute themselves as openness to and on the basis of the unpredictable and indeterminable character of modern society. In contrast to many political philosophers of his generation, Lefort found no reason to reject the very specificity of the practice of political philosophy. At the same time, his understanding of this practice was quite original, since it ignored, in a multiplicity of ways, the separation usually recognized between philosophical inquiry and the disciplinary boundaries imposed by the positivist hegemony on the social sciences of our time. Therefore, in a way, we could say that Lefort s oeuvre of political philosophy does not belong to philosophy if to practice philosophy is to withdraw from events and to speculate about forms of universal validity considered independently of their socio-political existence. On the other hand, this oeuvre remains incontestably philosophical, since it does not concern itself only with particulars qua particulars, thus denying the inscription of the event in a genesis of meaning that endures, that sediments, that is reactivated in and is a promise of further events. 4 As part of an introduction to a quite interdisciplinary collective volume on his work, it is thus interesting to briefly examine Lefort s insistence that the field of political philosophy on the one hand and those of political science and political sociology on the other radically differ. Lefort often claimed that political philosophy deals with the classic concern with the form of society in the tradition of Plato s politeia, 5 while, on the other hand, political science and political

6 4 Introduction sociology relate to a domain which has been delineated in response to the imperatives of positive knowledge and which is, as such, circumscribed and distanced from other domains which are defined as, for example, economic, social, juridical, religious, aesthetic, and so on. 6 The question, however, is more complex than that as Lefort himself recognizes, in particular during his many references to thinkers such as Machiavelli, Tocqueville, or Weber, whom he consider classics in the sense of Merleau-Ponty; that is, thinkers whose oeuvre remains active as obligatory steps for those who want to go further, [because] they retain an expressive power which exceeds their statements and propositions....they are recognizable by the fact that no one takes them literally, and yet new facts are never absolutely outside their province but call forth new echoes from them and reveal new lustres in them. 7 In the end, Lefort s articulation between the questions posed by political philosophy and those of political sociology and political science is, of course, everywhere in his oeuvre. When Lefort chooses to describe the central characteristics of the theologico-political or the totalitarian forms of society, he devotes all his attention to phenomena such as the two bodies of the King or the Party claiming to embody the People-as-One. In all his analyses Lefort focuses both on the political the form of society, the overall social style of a given regime and on those particular types of actions and relationships which are defined by those forms of society as falling into the sphere of politics. Although Lefort emphasizes that in studying forms of society there is no need to dwell on the details of the institutional apparatus, 8 he nonetheless does proceed to outline the meanings of the institutional constellation implied in modern democracy. First, the disincorporation of power is recognized in the form of a periodical redistribution of power subject to rules that regulate universal suffrage. Second, this periodical redistribution of power implies the institutionalization of conflict, and the staging of conflict on the political pole shows that, in modern democracy, division, not unity, is constitutive of society. 9 Third, this two-sided phenomenon of disincorporation of power and institutionalization of conflict implies that the locus of power becomes an empty place, and thus cannot be fully represented only mechanisms and men and women circumstantially exercising political authority are visible. Fourth, the disincorporation of power has further implications: it disentangles the spheres of power, law, and knowledge that is, power is now irreducible to knowledge and law as much as law and knowledge are no longer reducible to each other or to power. And all this, finally,

7 Martín Plot 5 means that democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty. The book This volume offers a comprehensive view of Claude Lefort s work and its relevance for contemporary political thought and democratic theory. This is a necessary task, since the English-speaking world has been much slower than its Continental European and Latin American counterparts in acknowledging such relevance. The translations of quite a few of Lefort s major works and the generation of secondary literature addressing his scholarship have also been notoriously slow. This is a surprising deficit that is quickly being remedied: new English versions of his work are appearing, such as Michael B. Smith s just released outstanding translation of Lefort s Le travail de l oeuvre Machiavel, 10 new editions of previously translated works are rumored to be on their way, and a first major work on Lefort in English appeared a few years ago and has already had a widespread impact beyond the Anglophone world: The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political, by Bernard Flynn. Lefort s prolific scholarship made him central to a broad set of debates. In his earlier work as a Trotskyist, he started developing an openly critical perspective on the Soviet Union and what he then described as the bureaucratic forms of domination 11 characteristic of Eastern and Central Europe. These early works made him a pioneer in the French and Continental attempt to preserve the emancipatory project while abandoning the Soviet model as example and banner. These early years were, for him, a period of intense writing and political activism. In that context, he critically engaged the dominant philosopher and public intellectual at the time in France: Jean-Paul Sartre. Moreover, during those years Lefort, together with Greek French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, co-founded the influential journal Socialisme ou Barbarie. It was precisely during this early stage of his work that Lefort started developing his theory of totalitarianism a unique approach that became his first major contribution to 20th-century political philosophy. Together with the classic work by Hannah Arendt, 12 Lefort s essays on totalitarianism as a form of society should be regarded as the most influential theorizing ever formulated on the totalitarian phenomenon. Lefort s understanding of totalitarianism, together with his contrasting of this political form with the central features of the democratic experience, was the basis of his second major influence on contemporary political thought and practice. It was during the arguably most

8 6 Introduction significant global political transformations of the 1980s and 1990s the institution and reinstitution of democracy in Latin America and Eastern and Central Europe that his view of human rights and his notions of the modern dissolution of the markers of certainty, democratic power as an empty place, and the disentanglement of the basis of power, law, and knowledge were outlined. It is uncontroversial to state today that he was one of the few analysts who managed to anticipate that Central and Eastern European totalitarian and Latin American state-terrorist regimes would collapse due to the fact that the logic of human rights promoted the exhibition of society as divided and revealed the totalitarian conception of the People-as-One as a fiction. Lefort was a close reader. Many of his texts both his essays and his book-length writings are structured by close reading and dialogue with classic and contemporary authors in whose work he identified oeuvres still in the making: Machiavelli and Merleau-Ponty, of course, but also writers and thinkers as disparate as Étienne de la Boétie, Alexandre Solzhenitsyn, Karl Marx, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jules Michelet, George Orwell, Marcel Mauss, Pierre Clastres, Marcel Gauchet, and Leo Strauss, among others. The first section of the book focuses on this dimension of Lefort s work. As the limited list just offered suggests, the number of chapters needed to offer a comprehensive account of Lefort-asreader would have been too large to be included in this book. Thus, decisions were made. The section and the book starts with a politicobiographical text by one of Lefort s closest American friends and fellow political philosophers, Dick Howard. In this essay, Howard recreates some of the turns and events of Lefort s intertwined political writing and activism, from his early critique of the Central and Eastern European bureaucracies to his highly critical close reading of François Furet s The Passing of an Illusion and Martin Malia s The Soviet Tragedy, and from his early debates with Jean-Paul Sartre to his intense collaboration with Cornelius Castoriadis. The essay, in a sense, shows us the way for further exploration of Lefort s political thought and engagement, one that is only partially but also broadly covered in this volume. The section continues with Bernard Flynn s and Newton Bignotto s chapters. Flynn s text presents us with a portrait of Lefort as the political phenomenologist he was, but does so in a comprehensive way that goes beyond his strict phenomenological influences. Merleau-Ponty is, of course, there, punctuating the analysis, but Lefort the phenomenologist Flynn presents us with is the author of his own phenomenology, and is fundamentally the phenomenologist of the becoming anonymous of political power, as Flynn puts it. Lefort the political phenomenologist

9 Martín Plot 7 is thus not only the philosopher whose work further examines the potentialities of Merleau-Ponty s work, but also the one who finds phenomenological predecessors in both Machiavelli s and Marx s identification of conflict and division as constitutive of society a political phenomenologist who would ultimately remain faithful to the former rather than the latter, since it was Machiavelli and not Marx who managed to avoid the temptation of dreaming of a horizon in which human conflict would be overcome. Following Flynn s chapter s main conclusion, it is Bignotto who then assumes the responsibility of focusing on Lefort s fidelity to Machiavelli. For him, Lefort s Le travail de l oeuvre Machiavel recently translated and published in English, as has already been pointed out, as Machiavelli in the Making offers the key to the understanding of Lefort s major concerns and lines of interrogation. His close reading of Machiavelli and the literature about his oeuvre, which was Lefort s doctoral dissertation and which took him several years to complete, is our author s major book of political philosophy and therefore, not surprisingly, a fundamental aspect not only of his contribution to the study of the history of political thought but also and particularly of his introduction of the concept of modern political power as an empty place and as the locus of conflict and division. The last two chapters of the first section move us from Lefort s most broadly recognized major influences and close readings to two relatively underexplored, somehow unlikely, but nonetheless crucial interlocutors: political anthropology and Leo Strauss. In his text, Samuel Moyn offers a detailed account of a political philosopher s Lefort s fascination with political anthropology in general and with Pierre Clastres works on South American originary societies in particular. The centrality of this interdisciplinary encounter between Lefort s political philosophy and the practice of political ethnography should not be a surprise to those interested in his thought, since Lefort himself explicitly acknowledged such an encounter in the subtitle to and the essays included in his 1978 book Les formes de l histoire: Essais d anthropologie politique. The book followed the publication of Lefort s work on Machiavelli and preceded his engagement with Ernst Kantorowicz s The King s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, which, together with Lefort s interest in other historians works such as Marc Bloch s Feudal Society, points in the direction of one of Lefort s distinctive characteristics: his constant interrogation of the plurality of forms of society and his rejection of any teleological or exclusively philosophical understanding of the unfolding of history. Moyn s chapter thus shows how it was his collaborative work

10 8 Introduction with Marcel Gauchet, as much as his critical but sympathetic reading of Clastres, that was crucial to Lefort s particular understanding of the notion of symbolic division, both in clear dialogue with, but also at a distance from, Jacques Lacan s concepts of the symbolic and the imaginary. Continuing with Lefort s critical but sympathetic engagement with contemporary political thinkers, Claudia Hilb s chapter concludes the volume s first section with a timely reflection on Lefort s frequent but rarely acknowledged by the secondary literature dialogue with Leo Strauss. Hilb s reading carefully identifies the numerous moments in which Lefort s thought seems to engage Strauss, and how it is precisely regarding crucial dimensions of the former s work that this engagement takes place. Lefort establishes a dialogue with Strauss on Machiavelli, of course. In the frequent references made after this original encounter, however, and particularly in his text Three Notes on Leo Strauss, published in English in Writing. The Political Test, Hilb shows how this dialogue occurs in relation to the central Lefortian themes of the recovery and defense of political judgment, society s impossible coincidence with itself, and their both parallel and contrasting views of modernity. Because the goal in this volume is to offer a comprehensive view of Lefort s work, the book is not only organized chronologically as it indeed was the sequence of texts belonging to the first section. Borrowing a word Michel Smith used in his chapter on Lefort s style, the second section of the volume is a sort of repentir, a sequence of chapters that revisits the entirety of Lefort s life as a thinker, this time approaching it from an entirely different but equally meaningful angle. In this section, the chapters address a central dimension of Lefort s work what he liked to call the thought provoking character of events. Lefort was not a philosopher exclusively concerned with the exegesis of texts. For him, political philosophy was at its best when engaged in interrogative dialogue with the world, when responding to events demand for interpretation. The section thus visits in several different ways the manner in which Lefort responded to this demand, and it begins with Gilles Bataillon s own interrogation of Lefort s oeuvre, an interrogation that addresses the complications of the unity in dispersion that this oeuvre so clearly manifests. Lefort was, as he himself observed, a writer, a philosopher, a writer thinker. Lefort was a writer whose first desire had been to become a fiction writer, and who had witnessed his first desire being redirected towards the practice of philosophical writing by his early encounter with a very special high-school teacher: Maurice Merleau-Ponty somebody who would later become so close to him that,

11 Martín Plot 9 as Lefort put it, he became one of the truest witnesses of [his] undertakings. 13 His way of responding to events demand for interpretation was thus that of a writer thinker, of a philosopher seeking to think what in events was itself seeking to be thought. 14 As his most recent translator, that is as somebody who, to use his words once again, has gone through the experience of coming to a thought that is not your own, and [having to] cover it as with your flesh and bone, it is Smith s pages on Lefort s style or, to put it better, on Lefort-as-style, on Lefort as intertwining of activity and passivity, as writer thinker responding to events, and to others writings/thoughts that are also events in the second chapter of the section that goes straight to the things themselves. And both Bataillon and Smith reveal, in one way or another, what the former calls Lefort s democratic temperament, that is, the elective affinity between his form of writing and the enigma of the interminable that is democracy. The section continues with three different articulations between Lefort s thought and recent political events and processes. This articulation is shown in the relevance his thought had and has for major contemporary social and political phenomena, as is revealed by Arato s analysis of Lefort s understanding of the advent of democracy in Eastern and Central Europe and South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s; by Jean L. Cohen s acknowledgment of Lefort s notion of human rights for further exploring democratic politics today; and by Steven Bilakovics Lefortian interrogation of the possibility of democratic despotism in our time. Arato, himself the theorist of the self-limited political transformations and constitutional processes of the 1980s and 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe, presents Lefort as the philosopher of the postrevolutionary paradigm of democratic transformation. Arato shows in his chapter how it is Lefort s notion of democracy that allows us to understand the way in which the round-table negotiations and the two-stage processes of constitution making in both regions avoided the reincarnation of power by revolutionary dictatorships. I called Lefort the philosopher of this new paradigm, says Arato, because his concept of democracy alone allows us to conceive how one can begin democratically where there is no democracy before, and it is here that Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, initially East Germans, and most impressively South Africans gave a fundamentally Lefortian answer, based on the idea that what is most fundamental about modern democracy is opening up the empty space and keeping it open. In their respective chapters, Cohen and Bilakovics offer consecutive analyses of two different contemporary social and political phenomena

12 10 Introduction that, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty s reference to the classics, fall within the province of Lefort s work, due to his work having inaugurated an entirely unique way of framing and interrogating the practice of social and political interpretation which continues to be relevant to further events. As the major processes of democratic transition in Latin America and Eastern and Central Europe proved, Lefort was right in claiming a fundamental affinity between the democratic political form and the dynamic of human rights to which it should be added that he was also correct in emphasizing that the very idea of rights was incompatible with the fusion of power, knowledge, and law characteristic of those regimes. Cohen s chapter pushes forward these notions and proposes to think the intertwining of human rights and democracy in the contemporary world, both with and beyond Lefort. In Bilakovics chapter, on the other hand, Lefort s understanding of modern democracy and its challenges is revealed against the background of Tocqueville s mild despotism of our times. In distancing himself from those interpretations of Lefort s thought that emphasize its indebtedness to Tocqueville s account of the advent of modernity and of equality as democracy s generative principle Bilakovics chooses instead to render visible the fundamental implications of Lefort s critique of the latter. For Lefort, Bilakovics argues, it is indeterminacy together with the ultimately impossible ability of even totalitarianism to sustain totality, to incorporate power, and to restore definitive markers of hierarchical certainty rather than equality that should be taken to be the generative principle of modern democracy. Finally, the third section of the volume focuses on Lefort s relevance for contemporary debates in the fields of democratic theory, radical democracy, and continental political thought. Since most of these debates have been significantly influenced by or have explicitly engaged with the work of Claude Lefort, this is a fundamental task. In the first chapter of the section, Marc G. Doucet reflects on the validity of Lefort s immanently political theory of democracy for an interrogation of democratic politics beyond the limits of the territorially based nation-state, and he assumes in implicit dialogue with Arato s argument in this same volume, in which he shows that the crucial Lefortian principle regarding democratic foundations is that of the inoccupability of the place of power, not that of the sovereign will of the people that the main difficulty is located in the paradox that resides at the heart of the democratic form: that it is incapable of accounting for its origins on the terms set by its own political order. The main question posed by the chapter is in the end approached from the perspective of

13 Index Note: The letter n followed by the locators refers to notes in the text. absolutism, 138, 141 action, 1, 4, 12n.9, 39, 40, 43, 91, 94, 95, 98, 109, 111, 114, 122, 131, 143, 176, 194, 198, 233 political action, 38, 39, 164, 195, 205, 234 advent, 9, 10, 55, 76, 97, 160, 194, 218, 220, 223, 225, 228, 237n.32 Adventures of the Dialectic (Merleau-Ponty), 61, 69n.33, 233, 238n.42 aesthetic, 4, 15, aesthetics, 21n.2, 224, 229 aesthetico-political, Agamben, Giorgio, 202n.20 alterity, 110, ambiguity, 1, 113n.5, 150, 170, 173, 176, 182 3, 195, 212, 215, 220 America, 136, 141, 144, 154n.16, 195, 200, 227 anthropology, 7, 51 70, 180 appearances, 28, 42, 59 Arendt, Hannah, 5, 12n.12, 20, 22n.12, 82n.3, 96, 100, , 121, 201n.12, 207, 226, 230 2, 237n.29, 238n.40 aristocracy, 136, 140, 146, 151, 202n.25 Aristocratic society, 140 Aristotle, 25, 79 Aron, Raymond, 25, 47n.2, 82n.4, 94, 96, 100, 104n.2, 105n.24, 107, 166, 179 association, 128, 137, 142, 146 7, autonomy, 25, 59, 166 7, 176 7, 183, 193, 233 Badiou, Alain, 175n.50 Being, 28, 74 5, 235 body politic, 2, 30, 138, 142, 147, 220 1, 229, 234 Bolshevism, ultra-bolshevism, 232 bureaucracy, 17, 102, 182, 205 capitalism, 57, 97, 103, 200, bureaucratic capitalism, 17 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 5, 6, 16 21, 85n.42, 114, 116, 121, 176 8, 181 Catholicism, 227, 237n.24, 237n.36 charisma, 214 charismatic, 119, 226 Christianity, 29, 65, 222, 227 Christ, 29, 147, 234 Christendom, 227 Christological, 225 city, the, 40, 45, 76 81, 82n.6, 84n.23, 236n.9 civil society, 59, 117, 128, 180 Clastres, Pierre, 6, 8, 21n.3, 22n.9, coexistence, 61, 64, 181, 187, 189, 191, 193, 197 8, 224, 226 Cold War, 127, 157, 159, 232 command, 26, 43, 54, 59, 66, 138, 147 communism, 20, 53, 80, 100, 101, 232, 233 Communist Party, 117 Euro-communism, 18, 21n.7 conflict, social, political, 3 4, 7, 12n.9, 25 8, 98 9, 119, 179, 189, 192, 204, 208, 215, 227 class conflict, 30, 43, 45, 57 Constant, Benjamin, 118 constituion, political, 9, , 138 in the Kantian sense, 1 contingent, contingency, 29, 43, 53, 149, 159, 162, creation, 120, 128 human creation, 85n.42, 176,

14 240 Index decision, 58, 110, 124, 157, 209, 211 Schmittean, demands, political, 125, 126, 129, 158, 159, 163, 170, 207, 211, 213 democracy liberal democracy, 144, 204, modern democracy, 2 6, 9 10, 29, 74, 77 81, 85n.42, 97, 99, 101, 103, 114, 119, 137 8, 145 7, 151, 167, 182, 190, 196, 220 4, 227 8, 231, 236n.7 parliamentary democracy, 233 radical democracy, 10 11, 165, representative democracy, 98, 116 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 103, democratic legitimacy, democratic regime, 137 8, 148, 153, 158, 168, 186, 189, 194, 204, 213 democratic revolution, 2, 30, 76, 138, 147 9, 152, 165, , 204, 205, 209, 221, 223 democratic theory, 5, 10 11, 118, 167, 224, 237n.32 despotism, 9, 10, 98, , 195 dialectic, 53, 56 8, 61, 119, see also hyperreflection, hyperdialectic dictatorship, 115, , 122n.4, 127, , 237 revolutionary dictatorship, 9, 115, 118 discontinuity, 2, 139 discourse, social, political, 30, 41, 164 5, 177 disembodiment, see also embodiment disentanglement of spheres of knowledge, power, and law, 6, 114, 129 division, social, 24, 27, 28, 31, 44, 62 4, 69n.36, 79, 97, 152, 161 2, 165, 179, 191 2, 201n.7, 207 domination, 5, 17 18, 39, 42, 58 9, 74, 79, 80, 99, 127, 140, 206 7, 210, 226, egalitarian, egalitarianism, 61, 137, 138, 227 elections, , 122, 130, 145, emancipation, 80, emancipatory project, 5 embodiment, 121, 138, 151, 207, 214, 223, 227 see also disembodiment empire, 111, 117, 142, 227 empty place, of power, 3 7, 30 1, 122, 130, 147, 152, 164 5, 170, 172, 182, 204, 210, 212, 214, 223, 224 enemy, 31, 95, 110, 115, 119, 122, 214, 215 Engels, Friedrich, 57, 118 Enlightenment, the, 29, 113n.3, 153n.3, 229 epistemologico-political, equality, 10, 56, 63 4, 78 9, 83n.16, 97, 99, 101, 127, 129, 134, , 166, 171 2, 189, 194 6, 201n.7, 207, 213, 226, Europe, 5, 29, 34, 37, 47, 154n.16, 221, 225, 227, 228 Central and Eastern Europe, 5, 6, 9, 10, 16, 118, 120, 125, 127, 227 Southern Europe, 118 Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 97 event, events, political, 9, 40, 147 expression, political, 21n.1, 109, 138, 158, 159, 192 3, 218, 224 6, 237n.25 facts, social, historical, 4, 40, 90, 94, 97, 102, 103, 111, 146 faith, 22n.9, 29, 30, 101, 107, 140, 199, 236n.7 fascism, fascist regimes, 44, 58 9, 153, 215 fiction, 6, 9, 59, 115, 118, 120, 173, 180 political/legal fiction, 118, flesh, the element of, 2, 160, flesh of the social/political, 29, 77, 96, 160, 164, 196 flesh of the world, 31 Flynn, Bernard, 34, 52, 180, 183, 238n.46

15 Index 241 forms of society, 2 5, 8, 11, 24, 79, 219, 220, 224 6, 229 Foucault, Michel, 30, 224 5, 237n.24 France, 5, 64, 95 freedom, 44 6, 59, 78 81, 85n.37, 97, , 117, 125, , , 144 5, , 167, 176, 209, see also liberty French Revolution, 21n.1, 114, 115, 125, 130, 207 Furet, Francois, 6, 20, 22n.9, 90, 101, 115 future, the, 18, 30, 43, 56, 61, 95, 102, 136, 141, 160, 181, 193, 226 gap, 83n.20, 95, 138, 145, 162, 165, 168, 212 ontological gap, 30 Gauchet, Marcel, 6, 8, 16, 21n.3, 22n.9, 52 70, 163, 167, 183n.7 genesis of meaning, 3, 221 gestaltic, 225 God, gods, 25, 29 30, 57, 64 5, 143, 146 7, 163, 183, 220 1, 223 4, 227, Gorbachev, Mikhail, 117, Gramsci, Antonio, 36, 102, 203, 205 Greece, ancient, 82, 85n.42 Guizot, Francois, 19, 97 Gulag Archipelago, 19, 100 Habermas, Jürgen, 125, 204, 214 Hegel, George W. F., 17, 27, 53, 58, 211, 212 hegemony, 3, 111, , 227, 231 Heidegger, Martin, 74, 201n.2, 209 Heraclitus, 111 hermeneutics of suspicion, 126, 134 heterogeneity, 44, hierarchy, 65, 80, 97, 137, 142, 148, 149, 206, 229 historicism, 73 4, 127 History, 40, 43, 80, 101, 152 Honig, Bonnie, 168 9, 172 horizons, 11, 42, 49n.45, humanism, 37, 127 humanity, 24, 84n.27, 103, 144, 189, 236n.13 human nature, human rights, 6, 9 10, 21n.5, , 158, 166, 186 declarations of human rights, 126, Hungary, , 120 Husserl, Edmund, 1, 42, 219 hyperreflection, 219, 231 hyperdialectics, , 227, 231, idealism, 38, 40, 101, 238n.46 ideology, 16 17, 19, 20, 57, 103, 109, 110, , 121, 125, 127 8, 131, 133, 205, 221 imaginary, 8, 24, 25, 30, 51, 52, 60 1, 64, 101, , 152, 159, 162, 178, 183, 198, imagination, 24, 30, 41, 52, 138, 176, 183, 194 immanence, 30, 127, 160, 177, 196 7, 200, 218 indeterminacy, 3, 10, 78, 81, , 132, 136 9, , 164, 176, 183, 192, 204, 207, , 235 indetermination, 35, 38, 44, 77, 92, 110, 111, 177, 208 individual, the, 28, 78, 97, 124, 132, 138 9, 142, 145, 150 1, 195 8, 234 individualism, 136, inequality, 78 9, 137, 171 2, 208 insecurity, 145, 149, 151 institution of the social, political, 3, 170, 178 9, 207 intertwining, 9, 10, 29, 108, 219, 226, 238n.46 invention, 93, 120, 129, 176 invention of democracy, , 126, 182 Jacobin imaginary, 203 Kant, Immanuel, Kantian, 1, 224, 233 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 7, 29, 91, 103, 162, 221 king s body, 30, 130, 163, 221, 223 Kojeve, Alexandre, 74

16 242 Index La Boétie, Etienne de, 6, 81, 91 Lacan, Jacques, 31, 52, 60 1, 69n.32, 74, , 183n.7, 188 Laclau, Ernesto, 11, 164, 171, 179, Latin America, 6, 10, 16, 118, 125 Latin American Southern Cone, 227 South America, 53 4 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 32, 52 63, 67n.9, 70n.41, liberalism, 78, 85n.29, 85n.32, 124, 130, 204 liberty, 44, 78 9, 124, 129, 138, 140, 144, 153, 166, 189, 193, 194, 199, 207 see also freedom literature, 38, 90, 92, 96, 102, 103 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 4, 6 8, 18 29, 34 50, 71 86, , , 121, 122, 179, 236n.11 fortuna/fortune, 42, 65, 108, 112 virtú/virtue, 26, 78, 79, 118, 136, 153 Malia, Martin, 20, 101 Manent, Pierre, 49n.36, 49n.44, 86n.46 markers of certainty, 5, 6, 130, 137, 147, 150, 165, 210, 223, 225, 227 8, 235 Marxism, 17, 21n.5, 23 4, 52 3, 60 1, 68n.17, 68n.19, 74 5, 90, 98, 118, 179, 181, 206, 215, 218, post-marxism, 203 Marx, Karl, 6, 7, 17, 19, 21n.5, 23 4, 30, 38, 43, 57, 60, 91, 96 8, , 127, 130, 179, 180, 205, 236n.11 Mauss, Marcel, 6, 96, 101, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1, 4, 6, 9, 11n.5, 15, 23, 28, 30, 35, 38, 40, 43, 60 1, 76 8, 84n.27, 89, 93 4, 96, 100, 104n.2, 108, 112, 160, 177, 181, metaphysics, 64 6, 111, 164 Michelet, Jules, 6, 19, 91, 97, 100, 102 3, 222, 236n.13 mise-en-form, mise-en-scène, mise-en-sense, 3, 29, 218, 222 modernity, 8, 10, 37, 44, 52 3, 56, 58, 72, 76 81, 83n.22, 84n.28, 114, 136 7, 145 9, 152, 171, 210, 221, 223, 236n.9, 237n.32 monarchy, 29, 146, 151, 154n.27, 220 Mouffe, Chantal, 165, Nancy, Jean-Luc, 236n.9 nation, the, 119, 148, Nazism, Nazi regime, 20, 44, 232 neoliberalism, 192 3, 193, 199, 214, 218 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 52, 59, 60 nihilism, 81, 151, 192 nobility, 149 One, the, 65 6, 81, 207, 218, 221 On the Jewish Question, 127 ontology, 43, 49n.44, 76 7, 80, 83n.22, 160, 178, 216n.24 ontological, 28, 30, 42, 54, 111, 149, 152, 159, 177 9, 183, , 198, 214, 216n.24, 235 ontological difference, 74 5 oppositional principle, 222 opposition, political, 31, 95, 97, 119, 200, 227, 233 oppression, 25, 45, 97, 122, 127 8, , 151 Other, the, 28 participation, 128, 131, 157 party, the, 4, 17, 25, 97, 170, 224, 233 past, the, 20, 24, 35 8, 41, 46 7, 95, 99, 100, 109, , 144, 181, 195, people, the, 3 4, 26 31, 43 5, 77, 80, 99, , 137 8, 142 9, 152, 158, 164, , 189, 195 7, 202n.14, 204, 207 9, , 221 4, 231, 233 People-as-One, 4, 6, 31, 152, 170, 213, 224 phenomena, social, political, aesthetic, 2, 4, 9 10, 38, 44, 85n.29, 97, 99, 116, 145, 218, 231

17 Index 243 phenomenology, phenomenologist, 6 7, 15, 17, 23, 38, 43, 77, 83n.22, 90, 96 7, , 137, 160, 162, 164, 180 1, 218, 221, 225 Plato, Platonic, 4, 25, 31, 140, 228 plurality, pluralistic, pluralism, 3, 8, 98, 115, 120, 190, 207 8, 227, 230, 233 Poland, 117 political, the, 3 7, 11, 11n.5, 16, 18 20, 22n.10, 23 33, 36 7, 40 7, 54, 56 60, 67, 73 85, 102, 110, 120 1, 126, 128, 130 3, , 163, , 176 9, 183, 186, , 201n.3, 203, 209, 213, 216n.24, , 227, 235, 236n.7, 236n.9, 236n.13 political actor, 43 political authority, 3 4, 168 9, 193, 229, 231, 237n.36 political forms, 2 3, 6, 10, 45, , 186, 197, 219, political freedom, 46, 81 political philosophy, 2 5, 7 8, 11n. 5, 16, 29, 34, 38 43, 47, 55, 74 81, 90, 100 3, 176 political regime, regimes, 15, 157, 167, 171, 189, , 236n.7 political representation, 62, 192 political science, 4, 41 2, 74 5, 98 political society, 36, 39, 79, 166, 212, 222 political sociology, 4 political theory, 10, 20, 37, 52, 56, 60, 205 political thought, 5 7, 10, 21, 22n.9, 36 42, 46, 51, 61, 74 5, 167, 179, 232 populism, 118, 131, 165, positivism, positivist, 2 3, 11n.5, 15, 17, 21n.5, 42 positivity, 99, 150, 197, , 235n.7 premodernity, 225, 228 primitive society, 52 66, 181 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 25 8, 34, 37 41, 94 proletariat, 17, 23 4, 95, 181, 233 proletarian, 17, 24, 97, 181 psychoanalysis, 52, 161, 178, 183n.7 public opinion, 138, 140, 142, 145, 154n.27 public space, 94, 128, 132 public sphere, 39, 238n.48 public speech, 93 4 Rancière, Jacques, 11, 171 2, 175n.50, 224 6, 229, 232, 237n.32 rationalism, 2, 38, 181 Rawls, John, 204, 214 relativism, 73 4, 79, 81, 83n.14, 83n.15, 98 9, 192, 196, 237n.4 religion, 29 30, 63, 70n.40, 75 6, 90, 132, 160, 176, 183, 194, 221 2, 236n.9 Renaissance, 15, 34, 37, 46 Republican Party, 227 republic, republics, 41, 45, 78, 99, 117, republican, 37, 99, 158, 164, 167, 195, 199, 200 republicanism, 46, 103 responsibility, 7, 128, 143, 175n.50 reversibility, , 234 Rome, ancient, 44, 98, 111 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 201n.3, 204, 214 Rosenberg, Harold, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 45, 57, 168, 236n.13 Russian revolution, 97, 100 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 5, 6, 16 17, 61, 232 3, 235n.7 Schmitt, Carl, 46, , 237n.24, 237n.36, 238n.48 secular, secularization, 29, 127, 146, 161 5, 177, 191, 221, 223 4, slave, slavery, 64, 91, 150 social, the, social bond, social contract, 168, 201n.6 socialism, 20, 22n.7, 137, 144, 151, 153 Socialisme ou Barbarie, 5, 16 20, 21n.1, 90, 94 5, 98, 104n.1, 176

18 244 Index social movement, social movements, 129, 131, social power, 150, 195 6, 198 social science, social sciences, 3, 46, 74, 76, 161, 180, 190 social space, 30, 170, 180, 182 social sphere, 165, 170 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 6, 17, 19, 89, 96 7, 100, 122, 237n.19 South Africa, 9, 114, 117, sovereignty, , 133 4, 145, 148, 154n.27, 166, 214, 228, 230 popular sovereignty, 115, 133, 136, 138 9, 144, 147 8, 150, 166 Soviet Union, 5, 17, 31, 40, 117, 215, 232 Russia, 115, 117, 121 speech, 54, 91, 93 6, 102 3, 128, 154n.27, 177, 194 Stalinism, 17, 22n.9, 53, 58, 152 Stalin, 98 state, the, 17, 56, 58 9, 62 6, 110, 132, 136 8, 142 5, 148, 150, 152, 154n.26, 227 state of nature, 57, 152 Strauss, Leo, 6 8, 36, 48n.26, 71 86, 96, 100 2, 105n.41 structural, 180, 210, 225 structuralism, structuralist, 51 3, 56 7, 68n.17, 180 2, 184n.20 subject, subjects, 17, 30, 35, 60 5, 70n.43, 91 2, 104, 109, 115, 150, 160, 204, 209, 211, , 233, 235n.7, 238n.46 submission, 63, 194 suffrage, 4, 138, 148, 164, 186 symbolic, the, 8, 11, 18, 20, 22n.8, 26, 28, 42, 51 2, 60 1, 70n.41, 102, 127, 129, 138, 146, 161 2, 164, 169, 172, 177, , 184n.26, , , , 222 symbolic mutation, 2, 163, 221, 223 symbolic order, 129, , , Temps Modernes, Les, 94, 97, 166, 177 theologico-political, 4, 76, , 174n.24, 189, theology, 25, 40, 42, 57, 76, 162, 177, 224, 227 8, 234 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 4, 6, 19, 85n.37, 90, 97, 99, 102 3, 117, , 167, , 201n.14, 202n.25, 202n.26, 220 1, 236n.11 totalitarianism, 2 6, 10, 15 23, 31, 34, 44, 59, 61, 81, 90, 92, , 117, 121, 151 3, 161, 165, 170, 178, 192, 197, 199, 205, 208, 213, 215, 222 3, 226, 231 2, 237n.16 totalitarian regime, 31, 40, 44, 46 7, 121 2, 125, 129, 131, 224, 230 transcendent, transcendence, transcendental, 2, 28, 40, 55, 80, 138, 146 7, 177, 182, , 207 8, 218, 220, 224, , 236n.7 Trotsky, Leon, 23, 96 8, 115, 118 Trotskyist, 5, 21n.1, 21n.6, 25 truth, 18, 41 3, 62, 67, 72 3, 79, 81, 82n.6, 83n.15, 91, 104, 108, 122, 138 9, 192, 215, 219, 224, 228, 233 tutelary power, 137, 142 5, 153, 154n.26 two-dimensionality, , 235n.7 tyranny, 44, 74 5, , 145, 151, 195 uncertainty, 103, 139, 145, 151, 229 United Nations, 132, 157, 166 United States, 103, 139, 200 see also America universal, 3, 4, 23, 26, 43, 66, 110, 124 5, 134, 138, 143, 146 8, 151, 157, 159, 164 6, 196, 199, 208, universality, 24, 69, 120, 147, 212, utopia, 38, 64, 101, 132 values, 17, 39, 42, 54, 81, 98, 111, 189, 192 3, 199, 204 violence, 27, 39 41, 60, 112, 114, , 121 2, 139, 167 The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty), 28, 235n.1, 235n.7

19 Index 245 Weber, Max, 6, 82n.4, 96, 102, 226 welfare state, 144, 153, 200 Western societies, politics, 59, 127, 158, 168, 236n.9 Western philosophy, thought, 37, 65 6, 160, 219 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 18, 208 writing, the practice of, 5 6, 9, 15, 22n.10, 72 3, 93, 96, 100, 104, 109, 137, 220 Žižek, Slavoj, 11, 178, 180, 182, 204, 215, 217n.46