IS A SYMBOL CREATED OR FOUND? Does it reveal the freedom of human creation or does it disclose the form of the world? This was a perennial question for the Romantics. While some denied the instituted character of symbols in order to assert their correspondence with reality, others defended the autopoietic power of the human creator. In his theory of the radical imagination and his insistence on society’s instituting creativity, Castoriadis was an emphatic heir of the latter camp. Yet, we should recall from chapter 2 that Paul Bénichou urges us to recognize within Romanticism “the ambiguity that is characteristic to this intellectual theme, and to make of the symbol both a human invention and a characteristic of being itself.”1 Claude Lefort, theorist of the “symbolic dimension” of the political, remained within this ambiguity. Indeed, many of the issues that came to divide Castoriadis and Lefort in the years after their intensive collaboration as cofounders of Socialisme ou Barbarie could be encapsulated in the contrast evoked by Bénichou. Where Castoriadis held that democracy emerged out of the exercise of human autonomy and further insisted that autonomy has the potential to become more and more lucid about its self-creating activity, Lefort came to believe that, even as democracy opened new circuits for the articulation and realization of autonomy, democratic power, indeed the political domain as such, remains unmasterable. Democracy, in Lefort’s mature view, is enigmatically poised between human action and a disclosure or unveiling of being. Hence, political philosophy, if it is to remain true to the indeterminacy and unmasterability of democracy, must preserve metaphorically the insight of religion, “that human society can only open on to itself by being held in an opening it did not create.”2 Lefort thinks autonomy as inseparable from its Other (the “outside” [dehors]); the immanence of the social is always shadowed by the transcendent enigma of its institution, and political discourse is always inflected by the language of theology even as it gropes for a secular speech adequate to the mystery of democracy.
To Castoriadis, this was all foreign, indeed anathema. Castoriadis bluntly equated religion with heteronomy, with the concealment of the human act of signification whereby social life is given form. To attribute the origin of the social institution to a transcendent extrasocial source is to stabilize the enigma of human self-creation, assign it an origin, foundation, and cause outside society itself. Autonomy, he insisted, requires the final overcoming of religious exteriority and “the permanent opening of the abyssal question: ‘What can be the measure of society if no extra-social standard exists, what can and what should be the law if no external norm can serve for it as a term of comparison, what can be life over the Abyss once it is understood that it is absurd to assign to the Abyss a precise figure, be it that of an Idea, a Value, or a Meaning determined once and for all?”3 Translated into political terms, Castoriadis’s vision of interminable questioning assumes an unbridgeable gap between religion as closure and democracy as openness to contingency and human self-creation.4
Bound by personal history and shared milieus, Lefort shared many of Castoriadis’s political and theoretical concerns: with historical indeterminacy, the symbolic construction of social reality, the equation of democracy with a permanent interrogation of the terms of our collective lives, the expansion of autonomy, and so forth. He even shared Castoriadis’s lack of personal religious belief. However, Lefort’s turn to the language of theology, the ultimate figure of heteronomy, in order to describe the situation of democracy indicates a significantly different trajectory as he moved beyond the Marxist commitments of his radical youth. Entanglements of theology and politics in Lefort’s thinking are nowhere explored with greater subtlety than in his 1981 essay “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” This seminal text will provide the following discussion with its point of departure and return as we trace the development of Lefort’s thought.
If it is illuminating to keep Lefort in dialogue with Castoriadis, then it will be equally instructive to set Lefort into relationship with Marcel Gauchet, his most brilliant student. Four years after Lefort’s essay, Gauchet cemented his reputation as a major thinker with the publication of The Disenchantment of the World, a magisterial book that offers an extraordinarily sweeping account of the emergence of modern democracy out of the collapse of the religious world. Gauchet’s course in the years leading up to The Disenchantment of the World strongly reflects the influence not only of Lefort but also of Castoriadis. However, the particular style of Gauchet’s engagement with the question of political autonomy’s relation to religious heteronomy signaled political commitments that depart from those of both founders of Socialisme ou Barbarie. An exploration of the theologico-political problem in Lefort and Gauchet thus allows us to mark way stations in the collapse of revolutionary politics in France and the accompanying reorientation of progressive French intellectuals.
French intellectual life in the late 1970s and 1980s was marked by so many announcements of “turns” and “returns” that one sometimes feels caught in a Paris traffic circle. Two stand out, not only for their lasting significance in the recent history of French thought but also for the manner in which they became twisted together. In 1976, a special issue of Esprit announced the “return of the political.” Of course, politics had never gone away, least of all in the politically charged atmosphere of Parisian intellectual life in the decades since 1945. What Esprit had in mind were indications of a revival of politics as an object of serious historical and philosophical reflection. Numerous thinkers who had earlier viewed politics from a Marxist perspective, that is, as an epiphenomenon of the social base, now looked to the “political” as a field of “power and law, state and nation, equality and justice, identity and difference, citizenship and civility.”5 In this revival Castoriadis and Lefort played major roles. As the cofounders of Socialisme ou Barbarie, the two staked out a unique ground in French political culture; but unique positions are often marginal ones, as was certainly the case with Lefort and Castoriadis. This changed in the mid-1970s, when an altered context created a new and receptive audience.6 For one thing, the events of 1968 loosened the hold of the French Communist Party, producing a fragmented left, including the short-lived Maoist Gauche Prolétarienne and the so-called Deuxième Gauche, which subscribed to the self-management politics that Socialisme ou Barbarie had articulated. For another, the Common Programme, the 1972 electoral alliance between the French Communist Party and the Socialist Party, drove many noncommunist intellectuals further away from the major left-wing parties. Further, the French publication of Alexander Solzenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago generated an “electro-shock” that jolted leftist intellectuals and produced what one historian has dubbed the antitotalitarian moment.7 The “Gulag Effect” yielded, among other things, the media savvy New Philosophers, who combined a hair-shirt-and-ashes rejection of their former leftism with bald claims that all forms of power corrupt equally. Though the New Philosophers tried to claim affiliation with Lefort and Castoriadis, both men stridently refused the compliment. Undoubtedly, however, the wave of antitotalitarian rhetoric renewed interest in three decades’ worth of serious philosophical and political writing by Lefort and Castoriadis. Their example proved instrumental in helping to bring political reflection—as opposed to political posturing—back into the orbit of serious philosophical discussion.
The ideological conjuncture that thrust political philosophy and, more specifically, sustained reflection upon the experience of modern democracy and its doppelgänger, totalitarianism, into the center of French discussion may be traced in the sociology and institutional history of Parisian intellectual life. Between 1971 and 1980 Lefort and Castoriadis participated in founding two new political journals, Textures and Libre, along with others, such as the anthropologist Pierre Clastres and Lefort’s students Marcel Gauchet and Miguel Abensour. Gauchet, who had studied with Lefort at the University of Caen in the 1960s, authored the article “L’expérience totalitaire et la pensée de la politique,” which dominated the 1976 special issue of Esprit on the return of politics. Further, in 1980, Gauchet collaborated with Pierre Nora in launching the journal Le Débat, which quickly became the most influential Parisian periodical during the 1980s. François Furet’s historical writings on the French Revolution broke with the Marxist school and explored the Revolution as modernity’s first experiment with democracy, and under Furet’s presidency the École des hautes études became the epicenter of this revival of political philosophy. Under Furet’s patronage, Lefort and Castoriadis were elected directeurs d’études at the École, Lefort in 1976, Castoriadis in 1980. Pierre Rosanvallon writes that their elections gave an élan décisif to political studies at the École.8 A monthly seminar on politics, history of political thought, and political philosophy began at the École in 1977. As Rosanvallon remembers, “What made this group special is that it linked together two different generations. There was the generation of François Furet, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Krzysztof Pomian, but there were also, from the very beginning, Marcel Gauchet, Bernard Manin, Pierre Manent, and myself.”9 In 1985 this same group founded the Institut Raymond Aron, a noteworthy tribute to the liberal political thinker who had long been overshadowed by his left-wing contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre. This institutional initiative was followed in the 1990s by the creation of numerous journals committed to political philosophy and the history of political thought.10
François Furet was the not-so-gray eminence behind most of these developments, including Lefort and Castoriadis’s elections to the EHESS.11 However, it would be a mistake simply to associate them with Furet’s efforts to remake the École in his image. Indeed, both diverged from Furet’s politics. Where Furet argued, in his highly influential work Interpreting the French Revolution (1978), that the Revolution’s search for “pure democracy” formed nothing less than the matrix of totalitarianism, Castoriadis championed direct democracy right up to his death in 1997. Although Lefort was closer politically to Furet, he nonetheless criticized Furet’s neo-Tocquevillean association of the Revolution with totalitarianism and emphasized instead its role in inaugurating the indeterminate, open social experience of democracy.12 Where Furet’s politics centered on the need for stable representative institutions, Lefort gave his support to the pluralistic activism of the new social movements that emerged after 1968. By contrast, Gauchet, who was a generation younger than Furet, Lefort, and Castoriadis, has commented that between himself and Furet there existed “that mysterious thing that is a deeply spontaneous accord.”13 With good reason, he was perceived as Furet’s protegé. In fact, Furet’s opponents blocked Gauchet’s election to the École until Furet strategically withdrew his support for Gauchet in 1990.
With some historical distance, it is perhaps not surprising that the return of political philosophy and, more specifically, of democratic commitments coincided with a notable return of religion in French thought. So long as Marxism’s social and economic model prevailed, the political domain could always be exposed as epiphenomenal in the last instance, while political philosophy could be dismissed as idealist. If, as Jacques Derrida once reminded us, Marx believed that “‘Christianity has no history whatsoever,’ no history of its own,” then it must be added that, for Marx, politics has no history of its own, and for exactly the same reason.14 Once the Marxist claim for the determinate role of the economic base collapsed, the field was cleared to see the creative and constructive role of cultural representations in forming the social world. Within such a constructionist perspective, both politics and religion could reemerge as irreducible systems of meaning that generate and not only reflect social-historical life. Yet that also brought these two symbolic systems into competition and threw up a series of questions. If we consider democracy as the domain of human self-determination and religion as the domain of human dependency, can democracy escape from its long entanglement in religion and quasi religions and establish its own autonomy as the self-instituting activity of human communities? Or must democracy draw on the otherness of religion to discover the meaning of democracy?
Karl Marx certainly thought the answers to these questions were clear. The young Marx fully embraced the Young Hegelians’ critique of religion, which he believed demolished religion at the level of religion’s own self-understanding. But he was convinced that his radical analysis led further down, down to religion’s cause in something other than itself, down to the root that nurtured religious illusions. And he went still farther in his campaign against religion by applying the Young Hegelians’ model directly to the political realm. Hence he declared the liberal state, the “atheistic state, the democratic state,” to be the pure essence of the Christian state.15 Turning to the most advanced model available, the American republic, Marx claimed that the state stands over society as heaven does earth; the sovereignty of the citizen rests on a Christian logic of incarnation that separates the individual from human species-being; the abstract universality of rights displaces the concrete universality of man’s participation in collective social life. Marx regarded communism as the last great act in the history of secularization, returning the transcendent political state to its immanent place in society and removing the final obstacle to man’s recovery of his alienated humanity.16 The leap of faith was to be surpassed by the leap into the kingdom of freedom.
It is an irony of history that Marx’s radical secularizing impulse has been almost fully eclipsed by the commonplace that communism itself was a religion, albeit an ersatz, secular collectivist faith. One would reasonably expect that as the authority of Marxism collapsed and leftist intellectuals turned to support one form or another of liberal democracy, there would be a double liberation from theology: not only from traditionalist ideas of the bond between religion and social order, but from (alleged) secular religions like Marxism. The story in France was not quite so simple. Take, for example, François Furet’s final book, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century. The title immediately situates the analysis of communism in the framework of religion, for it refers unmistakably to Freud’s main essay on religion, The Future of an Illusion, an allusion that is even blunter in the French title, where Furet’s passé d’une illusion exactly mirrors Freud’s avenir. Furet concludes that the collapse of the socialist dream undid a covert theological code by which the twentieth century had sought historical certainty. As he writes, “At the end of the twentieth century, deprived of God, we have seen the foundations of deified history crumbling.” The apparent triumph of liberal democracy does not bring comfort, however: “history has become a tunnel that we enter in darkness, not knowing where our actions will lead, uncertain of our destiny.” A democracy stripped bare of illusions proves itself to be an object of anxiety, because Furet judges this disenchanted condition “too austere and contrary to the spirit of modern societies to last.” Democracy needs utopia, “a world beyond the bourgeoisie and Capital, a world in which a genuine human community can flourish.”17 Furet’s book thus ends ambiguously. He hopes that democracy’s inventiveness is not at an end, but he worries that it remains susceptible to dreams of historical redemption. If the exit from communist illusion has proven terminable, democracy’s own exit from religion seems interminable.
Already in the late 1970s, the strident denunciation of totalitarianism was a central feature of Furet’s critique of the French Revolution and the “revolutionary catechism” that he believed linked the French and Bolshevik Revolutions in the political imaginary of the French left. However, the ambivalence was also already there. Furet’s insistence that the French Revolution was modernity’s first experiment with political democracy was accompanied by a diagnosis of the slippage of the discourse of popular sovereignty into coercive civil religion and the Terror.18 This mix of assertion and apprehension was in fact common to many French intellectuals in the late seventies, the “antitotalitarian moment” when the ideological hold of Marxism definitively broke and many leading leftist intellectuals turned toward a democratic politics of a decidedly more pluralistic, quotidian, and nonutopian sort. The apprehensiveness, if we may call it that, came from the paradoxical circumstances of this rediscovery of democracy. Consider a comment by Gauchet in 1988: “The more we are led to acknowledge a universal validity to the principles of Western modernity, the less we are able to ground them in a history of progress of which they represent the fulfillment.”19 Even more pointedly, Olivier Mongin, the editor of Esprit, recalls that it was “a bizarre period, when intellectuals increasingly distanced themselves from their self-image as proprietors of history and discovered democracy at the same moment when democracy was the object of increasing doubt.”20 Mongin’s observation refers to the fact that French intellectuals’ turn toward democracy coincided with a period of intensifying critique directed at the very foundational discourses and metanarratives—whether transcendental ethics, natural law, or the immanent rationality of the historical process—that had traditionally provided grounds for liberal democratic and revolutionary socialist politics alike.
Gianni Vattimo has identified the dissolution of philosophical metanarratives as the general precondition for the return of religion in recent philosophical discourse, because this situation has exposed the uncertainty and contingency of the process whereby the modern philosophical project was constructed on binary oppositions between the “rational” and the “irrational,” “faith” and “knowledge,” “secular” and “religious.”21 Vattimo’s observation helps to explain the striking fact that accompanying the widespread democratic reorientation of French intellectuals was a resurgence of the theologico-political problem in French thought in the 1980s. In 1988 Marcel Gauchet and Pierre Nora identified the “rehabilitation of the religious problematic” as a spectacular phenomenon within a culture where almost all the dominant intellectuals, whether under the sway of Robespierre, Marx, or Nietzsche, had long dismissed religion as a dead letter.22 Indeed, a French historian of the German secularization debate describes this as the third great reappearance of the theologico-political problem in the twentieth century, preceded by Carl Schmitt’s illiberal political theology in the Weimar period and then by progressive German political theology and Latin American liberation theology in the 1960s and 1970s.23 In contrast to those earlier moments, the French resurgence did not aim to reassert a theological language as a political strategy. Gauchet and Nora signaled the specific nature of this resurgence: “the return of religion as a central object of social theory and a legitimate object of laic reflection.”24 For lay thinkers, the goal was to assess the place of religion in the genealogy of political modernity. Yet this was more than an analytical question. The theologico-political question spoke directly to the paradoxical situation in which French intellectuals turned to democracy at the same moment that they perceived democracy’s loss of substance and foundation. A century and a half after Marx detected a political theology at the core of liberal democracy and called for the final radical secularization of politics, post-Marxist intellectuals turned to political democracy as the only possible vehicle for emancipatory politics; but they did so in circumstances that returned with less confidence to the question of democracy’s relationship to the ultimate figure of otherness.
In a 1975 interview Claude Lefort taxed his former comrade Cornelius Castoriadis for perpetuating Marxism’s dream of total revolution, a myth of a “society able to master its own development and to communicate with all its parts, a society able in a way to see itself.”25 This charge was not really fair, given Castoriadis’s repeated insistence that neither society nor the individual psyche can ever be fully controlled by autonomous human action. However, the comment reveals a tremendous amount about Lefort’s relationship to Castoriadis, as well as his commitment to a style of philosophizing that cleaves to the opacity, indeterminacy, and ambiguity of the social-historical world.
Lefort met Castoriadis soon after the Greek arrived in Paris. By then Lefort had been involved in Trotskyist circles in Paris since 1942. As Lefort relates in the 1975 interview, while still in his teens he had sought a “Marxism faithful to Marx, a radical critique of bourgeois society in all of its forms and linked to revolutionary action, a Marxism that manifested the alliance of theory and politics: an anti-authoritarian Marxism.”26 When his lycée instructor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the philosopher who would indelibly stamp almost every aspect of Lefort’s subsequent thought, heard him speak of his loathing of the French Communist Party’s heavy-handed manner, he immediately pointed his student toward Trotsky. Lefort’s ensuing enthusiasm for Trotsky proved short-lived. Joining forces with Castoriadis in 1946, he moved rapidly from an effort to reform Trotskyism from within to the founding of Socialisme ou Barbarie in the first month of 1949. Though Castoriadis and Lefort agreed that Trotskyism was not the proper way forward, the two had differences right from the start. Above all, Lefort was less interested in forming a militant organization than in fostering a forum for discussion and information. He was, he later admitted sardonically, a “petty bourgeois intellectual, a stranger to revolutionary action.”27 That did not mean he opposed revolutionary action, just the ambition of intellectuals and vanguard politicians to dictate the terms of working-class politics or deduce the proletarian standpoint from a globalizing theory of history. Hewing closely to Merleau-Ponty’s critique of any claim of absolute knowledge, he shied away from manifestos and programmatic pronouncements. Instead, he tried to develop a phenomenological account of the proletarian experience, one that would derive its categories concretely from the working class itself.28 In retrospect, he would judge that effort flawed by a lingering adherence to deductive criteria, but, whatever its weaknesses, it signaled a quite specific political outlook that brought him into conflict with Castoriadis.
Both Castoriadis and Lefort shared a critique of bureaucracy; indeed, their shared perception of the Soviet Union as a calcified bureaucracy established to extract surplus value from the Russian working class was the key source of their misgivings about Trotskyism. Moreover, both Castoriadis and Lefort recognized the need to radically rethink the nature of militant organization if Socialisme ou Barbarie were to avoid repeating in miniature the mistakes of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky. Nonetheless, Lefort detected in his comrade a persistent tendency to see the group as a new vanguard. The impulse to formulate a revolutionary direction and a socialist program seemed to flatly contradict the group’s insistence on the autonomy of the working class and its political struggles.29 Lefort first formulated this worry in an article published in Socialisme ou Barbarie in the summer of 1952 in which he underscored his faith in the political creativity of the proletariat.30 Responding sharply, Castoriadis denounced Lefort as a “spontaneist,” and, immediately afterward, Lefort and his supporters announced they would leave the group.31 Despite the affront, even as they parted, Lefort indicated his willingness to continue to collaborate; and indeed, he drifted back into involvement with Socialisme ou Barbarie. In 1958, however, the group opened a discussion aimed at clarifying its ideological and political direction. When a majority indicated a wish for a more structured organization, Lefort once again expressed his worries about repeating the slide toward bureaucracy. Castoriadis responded with an acidly polemical attack expressing the majority position. A second schism was unavoidable, and this time Lefort’s departure was permanent.32
Lefort’s 1958 break with Socialisme ou Barbarie coincided with his final adieu to Marxism. As he recounted in the autobiographical preface to the 1971 collection of his essays, Éléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie, the rupture “incited me to draw out the consequences of my political interpretation of totalitarianism, to rethink the idea of liberty, that of social creativity, within the framework of a theory of democracy that does not elude the division, conflict and unknown of history; to reject the revolutionary tradition in all its variants, a tradition in its own way just as oppressive, just as rigid as those which it combated.”33 Lefort’s departure from Marxism had, in fact, been a longer good-bye, and leaving Socialisme ou Barbarie lifted a self-censorship that had restrained him from exploring his doubts. In subsequent years he radicalized his earlier efforts to develop a phenomenology of the social.34 As he now saw it, the task of political philosophy was not to create a theoretical adjunct to revolutionary struggle, nor was it even to provide new or renewed normative foundations for democracy. Rather, the proper role of philosophy is to search for the formative principles of democratic pluralism or, put differently, to describe the conditions of modern democracy in its historical specificity. The process of reflection that led Lefort to this new sense of purpose has been described in detail several times, not least by Lefort himself.35 Rather than retread that ground, let us identify some key elements of his mature political thought and relate them to his disagreement with Marx.
The impact of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is evident everywhere in Lefort’s writing: in his rejection of a neutral standpoint outside phenomena and in his effort to develop a self-reflexive relationship to an object that is already dense with meaning, to understand phenomena from their inside, to describe rather than prescribe, and to let conclusions emerge out of description. The phenomenological orientation is also evident in his attempt to describe the political as a mise en forme, a shaping whereby a society institutes itself as this society, an action that further implies the engendering of meaning (mise en sens) and a staging (mise en scène). This formulation translates the phenomenological vocabulary of Merleau-Ponty into political terms. In The Visible and the Invisible, the enigmatic masterpiece left incomplete at his death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty presents the “invisible” as the “lining” and the “inexhaustible depth” of the visible, the necessary and constitutive relationship between figure and ground, surface and depth, presence and absence. These are not static ratios, but chiasmatic exchanges in which the visible and the invisible intertwine and reverse. Nor is the invisible the nonvisible or “absolute invisible, which would have nothing to do with the visible. Rather it is the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being.”36 Together, the visible and the invisible form the “flesh of the world,” Merleau-Ponty’s key phrase designating the world as a horizon of general visibility in which the human is embedded as both seer and seen. Lefort, who edited and published The Visible and the Invisible after his teacher’s death, took over the notion of flesh as a central category of his political philosophy. The “flesh of the social” signifies the political principle of general social visibility.
With this formulation, Lefort distinguished himself from both academic social science and Marxism. The social sciences have developed as discrete disciplinary fields by taking the social field as comprised of just so many distinct objects—politics, society, the private, the public, the economy, religion and values, and so on. By contrast, Lefort searched for the “originary form,” the “political form,” by which the social acquires its “original dimensionality.”37 By the same token, where the Marxist grants the class struggle or relations of production the status of foundational reality, Lefort urged us to see that social conflict can only be defined as representing an internal division, a division opening within and defined by a single milieu. To convey what he means, Lefort opened his Essais sur le politique by invoking the concept of politeia or regime. “The word is worth retaining,” he wrote, “only if we give it all the resonance it has when used in the expression ‘the Ancien Regime.’” Used in that sense, regime combines the idea of a “type of constitution,” understood in the broad sense of “form of government” and “structure of power,” and a “style of existence or mode of life.” For Lefort, this definition of regime or “form of society” implies the “notion of a principle or an ensemble of generative principles of the relations that people maintain with each other and with the world.”38 In a fundamental distinction that he did much to propagate, Lefort distinguished “politics” (la politique) in the sense of partisan competition for power, quotidian governmental actions, and the normal functioning of institutions from the more primordial category of the “political” (le politique).39 The political in this technical sense is not a historical development imposed on a preexisting social order, but rather the formative principle of social experience itself. Lefort called the political “a hidden part of social life, namely the processes which make people consent to a given regime—or, to put it more forcefully, which determine their manner of being in society—and which guarantee that this regime or mode of society has a permanence in time, regardless of the various events that may affect it.”40 In brief, the political is Lefort’s translation of the visible and the invisible into political terms. Marcel Gauchet formulated this even more clearly when he wrote, “the political constitutes the most encompassing level of the organization [of society], not a subterranean level, but veiled in the visible.”41
Lefort’s approach to the political reveals a strong methodological holism.42 The point is worth stressing, because the holism may easily be overshadowed by one of the most basic claims of Lefort’s mature thought, namely that division is an ineradicable and, indeed, constitutive dimension of the social. In insisting on division against a background of holism, two influences flowed together. As always with Lefort, Merleau-Ponty was key. If, as Merleau-Ponty insisted, reflection arises out of and against a background of unreflective being, then consciousness is always in relation to “brute being” (être brut), with no possibility of a position outside being and no power to master or totalize it. In a major 1961 contribution to an issue of Les Temps modernes marking Merleau-Ponty’s death, Lefort drew out the consequence that human subjectivity rests upon a constitutive division between reflection and the unreflective ground. Philosophical interrogation thus moves constantly in a circle between its own formulations and its encounter with a being that surpasses it. The philosophical démarche finds itself in an “ordeal of circularity that is one of constant and deliberate indetermination.”43 Brute being, the 1961 essay concludes, remains incommensurable with the “representations that science composes of it.” A philosophical spirit that takes these lessons seriously will renounce the “‘flat’ being offered to the dreams of a sovereign consciousness” and in place of this old Cartesian dream embrace “the wild spirit (l’ Esprit sauvage), the spirit that makes its own law, not because it has submitted everything to its will, but because submitted to Being, it awakens to the contact of the event to contest the legitimacy of established knowledge.”44 In later work Lefort would characterize this as a “heroism of mind” animated and “haunted” by the ‘impossible’ task of disclosing that which is—the being of history, of society, of man—and of creating, of bringing forth through the exercise of a vertiginous right to thought and to speech, the work in which meaning makes its appearance.”45
If the ontological position inherited from Merleau-Ponty dictated to Lefort that human subjectivity rests upon constitutive division, this conviction was underscored in the early 1960s by Lefort’s increasing interest in Jacques Lacan. As we saw in the previous chapter, this was precisely the moment when Lacan truly emerged as one of France’s maîtres à penser. Lacan’s insistence on a radical heteronomy within man’s psyche dovetailed with Merleau-Ponty’s ontology to convince Lefort that division is constitutive of human identity and immunize him against fantasies of overcoming this primordial alienation. In an interview Marcel Gauchet remarks on Lacan’s direct influence on Lefort. As Gauchet recounts, in Lacan’s seminar, newly shifted from Sainte-Anne Hospital to the École Normale Supérieure, Lacan spoke of “‘constitutive division,’ and Lefort took up the formula in order to transpose it into the political domain.” Gauchet pointedly separates this move from the more familiar examples of left-wing appropriations of psychoanalysis: “Here, it is not Freud with Marx, but Freud against Marx. In regard to Marx, Freud is the author who prompts one to conceive a certain irreducibility of human conflictuality.” Conceding that Freud’s own extrapolations from intrapsychic conflictuality to the collective level remained thin, Gauchet nonetheless notes that “the latent model of the irreducible character of psychical division, strongly accentuated by Lacan, supplied an effective lever by which to escape all philosophies of reconciliation. It permitted a number of authors to leave Marxism.”46 Lacan’s influence on Lefort is so clear that, some twenty years later, Slavoj Žižek could quite simply call Lefort’s theory of democracy a “Lacanian exposition.”47
Undoubtedly, Lefort’s engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis was positive. There was never even a hint of the kind of critique, let alone polemic, that Castoriadis directed at Lacan. Nonetheless, it seems clear that Lacan became serviceable for Lefort because Lacan’s idea of constitutive division could be integrated into Merleau-Ponty’s ontological critique of totalizing philosophies. In this sense Lefort had a model in Merleau-Ponty himself, who toward the end of his life perceived points of contact between his thought and psychoanalysis, particularly Lacan.48 The relative superficiality of Lefort’s engagement with Lacan may be detected in his rather imprecise usage of key Lacanian terminology. Of Lacan’s triadic distinction between symbolic, imaginary, and real, Lefort uses the imaginary in a strongly Lacanian way. However, as we will see shortly, his use of both the symbolic and the real did not remain faithful to Lacan. We might also note that Lefort could not have been oblivious to the various critical discourses that arose in the wake of Lacan’s break with the Freudian orthodoxy. For example, he acknowledged the influence of Piera Aulagnier, the post-Lacanian analyst who became Castoriadis’s wife in 1968. As we saw in the previous chapter, Aulagnier led a group of apostate Lacanians into the Organisation psychanalytique de langue Française in 1969. It was from Aulagnier that Lefort took the term mise en sens, which Aulagnier had developed in her work on psychosis and Lefort now applied to the shaping power of the social institution.49 Lefort maintained relations with the circles engaged in debating the Lacanian legacy in the 1970s, not only Aulagnier’s Quartrième Groupe but also groups aimed at bridging the schism, such as the seminar Confrontations, where Lefort presented what would become one of his most important essays, “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism.”50
When Lefort linked the terms mise en forme and mise en sens to a third term, mise en scène, his self-conscious deployment of a theatrical image tied the institution of the social to the order of representation. The process whereby society shapes its shared existence through self-production and reproduction is indissolubly united with the process whereby that life is represented or interpreted. Indeed, as Hugues Poltier writes, “society supposes the existence of a symbolic order and vice versa [reciproquement].”51Yet it is one of the most important claims of Lefort’s mature thought that society and its symbolic representation cannot coincide. One of the earliest formulations of this principle comes in a pivotal text published shortly after his exploration of “brute being.” There he explicitly extended the lesson of constitutive division from Merleau-Ponty’s ontology to his new thought of the political. “Society,” he wrote, “cannot become an object of representation or a material that we can transform because we are rooted in it and discover in the particular form of our ‘sociality’ the sense of our undertakings and tasks.”52 True to his renunciation of all philosophies of reconciliation, including of course Marxism, Lefort viewed conflict as fundamental to social experience; indeed, conflict’s appearance and operation belong constitutively to Lefort’s notion of regime. This is the great theme of Lefort’s opus on Machiavelli, which he began in the early 1950s and finally submitted to Raymond Aron as a thèse d’état in the early 1970s.53 Yet what Lefort saw in Machiavelli was the insight that if power is to master social conflict, such power must rely on a representation lifting it above the contest of interests. That is, power involves a symbolic representation of society that is not anchored in the real, but absorbs the inner divisions of the social into a figure of unity.54 The symbolic thus remains exterior or nonidentical to the social, even though the social world would be unimaginable without this symbolic institution.
One might say that this symbolic instance is imposed on the “real.”55However, it would be even more accurate to say that the symbolic gives society access to the real—first, to its own reality insofar as the symbolic creates a figure of the unity of the social, as well as a sense of the lawful and the unlawful and of the difference between sense and nonsense, and then, second, to the world more broadly insofar as the symbolic establishes ontological categories of the existent and the nonexistent.56 We can note that this sets Lefort at some distance from Lacan, who would distinguish between “reality,” which is what society designates as real, and the “real,” which is beyond symbolization, indeed even beyond the possibility of symbolization. Lefort’s notion of the real is actually closer to the Lacanian definition of a symbolically instituted “reality” than to the Lacanian “real.” A real beyond all symbolic orders is not a concern for him, nor does he thematize an unsymbolized and unsymbolizable real as a permanent source of disruption for the symbolic order in the way that is so fundamental to the political thought of Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek.
Lefort’s emphasis on the symbolic institution of the social distanced him still further from Marxism. In a major essay in 1974 he criticized Marx for failing to recognize the symbolic institution. Collapsing the social institution into the real, Marx treated social division as a primary social datum. What is negated in such cases of epistemological realism, Lefort argued, is “the articulation of the division … with the ‘thought’ of the division, a thought which cannot be deduced from the division since it is implicated in the definition of its terms. What is negated is the symbolic order, the idea of a system of oppositions by virtue of which social forms can be identified and articulated with one another; what is negated is the relation between the division of social agents and representation.”57 True to his roots in phenomenology, which had always tried to overcome dualisms between the subjective and the objective, Lefort insisted that he intended neither to “assert the primacy of representation” and thereby fall into the illusion of an “independent logic of ideas” nor to fall into a “naturalist fiction” by adhering to an analysis of social mechanisms. “We must appreciate,” he continued, “that it is the social space which is instituted with the division, and it is instituted only in so far as it appears to itself. Its differentiation through relations of kinship or class, through the relation between state and civil society, is inseparable from the deployment of a discourse at a distance from the supposed real, a discourse which enunciates the order of the world.”58
Lefort’s claim that Marx had located social institution at the level of the real unmistakably echoes Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Marxist orthodoxy in Adventures of the Dialectic. Nonetheless, Lefort’s appeal to a symbolic order created out of a system of oppositions would seem to align him with the structuralist position. There is without question a structuralist influence operating in Lefort. We have already seen that he was receptive to Lacan; even in the early 1950s he was very interested in Claude Lévi-Strauss, and he periodically taught seminars on structural anthropology. The authors of the two major book-length studies of Lefort rightly note that it is only in the early 1970s that Lefort introduced the concept of the symbolic in the “technical sense” that would henceforth be a key to his political interpretation of societies.59 Yet it is necessary to proceed with caution. In his 1981 article on the theologico-political, in one of his most pregnant discussions of the symbolic, he indicates that he does not use the term in the way the social sciences understand it, but in the sense that the symbolic governs access to the world.60 While it is not entirely clear which social sciences he means, it seems reasonable to assume that he is speaking of the structuralist model that was still powerful at that time. In a published discussion with colleagues at the Collège de psychanalystes in October 1982, Lefort underscored the complexity of the story: “is it not time to stop imputing to Lacan the invention of the notion of the symbolic? Some give the impression that one fine day Lacan came along and that notion of the symbolic was born. The notion of the symbolic is much older!”61
Certainly, Lefort’s engagement with the notion of the symbolic was much older. Indeed, one of the first of his articles to draw wide attention was a critique of Lévi-Strauss’s attempt to appropriate Marcel Mauss as the forerunner of his own symbolic anthropology. Even though Lefort chastises Mauss for ignoring Marx, his assessment of Mauss is mainly positive. He describes Mauss as “one of the most representative authors of our epoch,” a figure dedicated to developing a “new rationalism” that does not “explicate a social phenomenon by relating it to another phenomenon judged to be its cause, but links all economic, juridical, religious, and artistic traits of a given society and [attempts] to comprehend how they conspire in the same meaning.”62 Taking aim at Lévi-Strauss, Lefort insisted that the ideal of mathematizing the symbolic relation was foreign to Mauss. Even more important, Lefort claimed that Mauss sought the signification of symbols, not the strictly internal relations of symbols between themselves. That is, Lefort read Mauss as a phenomenologist of the social world who tried to understand the immanent intentions of conduct without leaving the plane of the lived. Lévi-Strauss, by contrast, drained social life of its unmasterable complexity and reduced lived experience to a raw material for the construction of a symbolic logic.63 Already in this criticism of Lévi-Strauss we see hints of the chiasmatic relation between the social and its symbolic representation that the later Lefort will describe, along with a rejection of reductionism, whether of a materialist or an idealist kind. Indeed, what we see is the same tension we observed in Merleau-Ponty, whose work in the 1950s rested on an expressivist theory of the symbolic even as he opened toward the constructivist view entailed in structuralism.
What is really striking in Lefort’s early anthropological essays is that, despite his avowed Marxism, he already has a strongly formulated idea of symbolic institution. For example, in a 1952 essay addressing the question of historicity in societies “without history,” he wrote: “an individual life is highly symbolic with regards to cultural becoming, in that [the symbolic] shows [this individual] what sorts of possibilities are given to humans, what relations link them to the group and what these relations tend toward, what perception of the past and of the future the institutions furnish them.”64 Lefort’s final answer to the apparent absence of temporality in primitive societies is that stagnation is a specific mode of instituting historicity and temporality, a mise en forme that establishes a manner of coexistence, comportment, and collective practice.65 One sees a similar sensibility at work in Lefort’s 1952 attempt to outline a phenomenology of proletarian experience, which depicts the proletariat’s productive activity extending to the production of social life in its entirety. These ideas emerge in close engagement with Merleau-Ponty, who was at that time working out the ideas on institution that would become the subject of his 1954–55 lectures.66 Castoriadis was, as we saw in the preceding chapter, reluctant to acknowledge that Merleau-Ponty influenced his own thinking about the institution of society; but, with Lefort, Merleau-Ponty’s impact is palpable. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is hard to tell how to assign priority—to the teacher or to the student—because their relationship might itself be taken as an intricate example of chiasma. At any rate, the continuity from this early thought to Lefort’s mature ideas is patent.
Hugues Poltier notes that despite the heavy usage of the term symbolic in Lefort’s later work, it is not easy to define its meaning exactly.67 This seems true, but I would suggest that it is not because of a lack of rigor on Lefort’s part. Rather, his concept does not remain restricted to the abstract and reduced notion advanced by structuralism but instead carries with it expressive and affective dimensions as well, not to mention a spatial dimension, at least in a negative sense insofar as symbolic exteriority creates the interior social space. Moreover, to expand a point already raised, Lefort’s concept of the symbolic stands at some distance from Lacan’s. For Lefort, the symbolic is a dimension, suggesting that it is not all there is to the social whole. It is not simply the system of signs tout court. Finally, to cite Lefort’s most famous claim about modern democracy, if modern democratic society’s quasi representation of itself remains an empty place, it is empty not because it is structured by lack or incompletion, which is the transcendental condition of the symbolic in Lacan’s system, but because modern democracy institutes the symbolic dimension of power as empty.68 This is a point made forcefully by the young Slavoj Žižek, when he insists that, “it is misleading to say that the ‘democratic invention’ finds the locus of Power empty—the point is rather that it constitutes, constructs it as empty; that it reinterprets the ‘empirical’ fact of interregnum into a ‘transcendental’ condition of the legitimate exercise of Power.”69
The impurity of Lefort’s symbolic is well illustrated by his claim in “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” that “both the political and the religious bring philosophical thought face to face with the symbolic.”70 Both offer responses to the basic ontological experience of constitutive division, of humanity’s noncoincidence with itself. Religion, however, interprets this as a division between the visible world and the invisible world of God or gods. As Bernard Flynn writes, “The doctrinal content of religion is a dramatization of this experience of noncoincidence.”71 Flynn proposes an appropriate formula for understanding “the religion of premodernity”: it 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.”72 The symbolic is not, necessarily, contrasted to the imaginary as it would be by a Lacanian. For Lefort, the question is rather one of disentangling the imaginary from the symbolic through the course of history. If Lefort has an anthropological constant, it is that societies are symbolically instituted, which means that the domain of the political necessarily comes forth with the social institution. However, as Dick Howard has noted, the political may “be lived in a mode of non-recognition, through a concerted effort to avoid the decisions and divisions that it consecrates.”73 A discourse on the political as such, based on recognition of society’s nonidentity with itself, emerged only in recent history. Such a discourse was not repressed in premodern society, it was simply impossible, because it was not symbolically enabled. Of premodern societies, Lefort asserts that “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.”74
Lefort’s mature thought rests upon an argument for the emergence of the place of the political, the possibility of disentangling the symbolic, imaginary, and real, and living in the condition of indeterminacy that opens up once this disentanglement is underway. This entails a theory about the transition from premodern to modern society, from premodern forms of politics to modern democracy, and from the religious to the political. Yet the potential role played by both the religious and the political in the symbolic institution of society makes the story of their relationship particularly fraught. Indeed, to return to key terms in Lefort’s vocabulary, the chiasmatic exchange between the near and the remote, between social visibility and its invisible lining, establishes points of contact between politics and religion. This is the case not only because both are constituted by specific forms of exchange between the visible and the invisible, but because throughout their long mutual history they have been intertwined as the visible and the invisible of each other.
The interrogative title of Lefort’s major essay on religion and politics suggests this relationship. Indeed, one of the main arguments of “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” is that religion reveals something fundamental about the political. Or, more precisely, religion reveals an insight that philosophical thought should try to preserve, namely the
experience of a difference which goes beyond differences of opinion … the experience of a 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 which means that their humanity cannot be self-contained, that it cannot set its limits, and that it cannot absorb its origins and ends into those limits. Every religion states in its own way that human society can only open on to itself by being held in an opening it did not create.75
Even if the political philosopher cannot accept the language in which religion expresses itself, he or she learns from the religious the “experience of alterity in language, and of a division between creation and unveiling, between activity and passivity, and between the expression and impression of meaning.”76
Lefort aims this object lesson in exteriority at the political hubris and fantasies of social homogeneity that he considers the shadow side of modern democracy since the French Revolution. This recourse to otherness links him, in a way, to a broader strategy within the antitotalitarian discourse of French intellectuals in the late 1970s and 1980s. One sees this in the outright appeals to divine transcendence in the religiously inflected works of thinkers within the orbit of the new philosophers such as Maurice Clavel, Christian Jambet, and Guy Lardreau.77 Among poststructuralist theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe or the post-Marxists Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, the deconstruction of stable identity—of persons, communities, and meaning—revealed an otherness that might provide a prophylaxis against a totalitarianism that seemed to lurk in all forms of politics. Among the various voices sounding this ground note, perhaps Jacques Derrida offers the most revealing contrast to Lefort.
Derrida entered this arena belatedly with Specters of Marx in the early 1990s. Numerous reviewers have accused Derrida of falsification or cynicism for claiming there that deconstruction had always “remained faithful to a certain spirit of Marxism.”78 He had in fact hinted in that direction for years; but, as he explained at a conference in 1981, he had remained silent so as to avoid contributing to the “anti-Marxist concert” of the post-1968 years. His strategy, he reported, was marked in his writings by a “sort of withdrawal or retreat (retrait), a silence with respect to Marxism—a blank signifying … that Marxism was not attacked like such and such other theoretical comfort. … This blank was not neutral. … It was a perceptible political gesture.”79 It was the triumphalism of the post–cold war era that finally provoked him to defend Marx or at least a “certain spirit” of Marx. That is, Derrida rejected Marx’s determinist and foundational ontology, but affirmed Marxism’s longing for justice.
There is much in this position that parallels the strategy followed by Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Laclau, and Mouffe in the 1980s. What really distinguishes Derrida’s intervention is his revival of Marxism’s messianic impulse. After all, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe had sought to “retreat” God—in the sense of both revisit (re-treat) and drive back—in precisely the same way as politics, God and politics both being associated with a monological philosophy of the subject; Jean-François Lyotard had believed that a paralogical democracy must be godless; Laclau and Mouffe had criticized religion as hegemonic discourse. Even as late as 1989, Derrida himself was reluctant to link his idea of justice to messianism. By 1993, though still rejecting any determinate messianic content, Derrida insisted on the messianic form as a latent dimension in the structure of promises.80 This too was not a sudden about-face for Derrida. Already, in his 1980 essay “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” Derrida had lamented his contemporaries’ hasty abandonment of Marxist eschatology.81 Moreover, Derrida’s periodic interest in deconstruction’s relationship to negative theology foreshadowed his messianic yearning for the totally other.82 Derrida’s references to Walter Benjamin’s notion of a “weak messianic force,” as well as his opposition to any attempt to represent the messianic hope, suggest, finally, the possible influence of a more specifically Jewish tradition, a complex issue that exceeds the scope of this brief excursus.83 Here it is enough to note that in Specters of Marx and subsequent work Derrida refused to tie the messianic impulse to a specific religion. Indeed, he vacillated between, on the one hand, treating the messianic as a general ontological form and, on the other, linking its universal form to the specific events of revelation in the three religions of the Book.84 Specters of Marx leans heavily on the former hypothesis, resurrecting a messianism without content, what Derrida calls the “messianic and emancipatory promise … as promise and not as onto-theological or teleo-eschatological program or design.”85
Separated from eschatology and teleology, messianism becomes a hope without hope, an impossible attachment to a democracy that is always à venir, always “to come.” This formulation offers a precise political counterpart to the play on à Dieu and adieu that animates Derrida’s The Gift of Death and other works of the 1990s. Hent De Vries presents the adieu as the core of Derrida’s return to religion insofar as it summons up all “the ambiguity of a movement toward God, toward the word or the name of God, and a no less dramatic farewell to almost all the canonical, dogmatic, or onto-theological interpretations of this very same ‘God.’”86 As with the figure of the adieu, the messianic topos allows Derrida to affirm the yearning for democracy, while avoiding any hint of “Sameness” or closure that might raise the danger of totalitarian thinking. It must be said that Derrida’s political position pays its dividends in paradoxes. While he reasserts Marx’s desire for justice, he essentially neutralizes concrete democratic projects because, given his terms, the attempt to represent the democratic idea, let alone realize it, threatens to prematurely close down the messianic longing for an otherness that is forever to come.
In the more recent essay “Faith and Knowledge,” this “messianicity without messianism” spills directly over into “religion without religion.” Derrida the atheist attempts to separate religion from fundamentalism, identifying the religious instead with “reticence, distance, dissociation, disjunction,” while naming futurity its temporal sensibility. This rather selective identification of religion with deferral and otherness serves his needs because they are precisely the qualities of the “democracy to come.” Religion and democracy thus intertwine as mutually implicating origins and goals. Indeed, the religious and the political prove inseparable: “The fundamental concepts that often permit us to isolate or to pretend to isolate the political … remain religious or in any case theologico-political.” Derrida presents this position as if it were opposed to Carl Schmitt, as if Schmitt had been forced grudgingly to acknowledge that his “ostensibly purely political categories” were in fact the “product of a secularization or of a theologico-political heritage.” Yet it was Schmitt who articulated and embraced that theological genealogy and tried to mobilize it as the ultimate source of the power of political concepts. Ultimately, despite Derrida’s effort to distance himself from Schmitt’s political theology by linking politics to the deferrals of religion instead of to its potencies, he and Schmitt both end up at the conviction that the significant concepts of modern politics are secularized theological concepts.87 Derrida’s entanglement with Schmitt returns us by contrast to Lefort.
Lefort’s claim that the philosopher should learn from religion would seem to identify him as another heir to Schmitt’s political theology. After all, the lesson about alterity that religion teaches to political philosophy appears to unify religion and politics so long as politics manages to resist the illusion of pure self-immanence and clings to a primordial knowledge of otherness. However, Lefort resists this kind of conclusion, arguing that it threatens to negate the meaning of the historical separation of democracy from religion. A position such as Derrida’s would lead us to the view that the appearance of a new representation of power that has no religious basis merely conceals the displacement and perpetuation of religious content. To be sure, looking at the practices of democracy since the French Revolution, Lefort finds ample evidence of democracy’s entanglement in religion. For example, from the Jacobins onward, democracy has been haunted by the Christian logic of incarnation, by the impulse to represent the nation as an actual being or, in Jules Michelet’s phrase, to imagine the sovereign “people” as the democratic Christ, and the desire to close the gap between the symbolic representation of power and the complexity of the real through the logic of embodiment lived on in twentieth-century fantasies of party, nation, class, race, and leader. Further, this desire to give a figure to social exteriority has been accompanied by the impulse to unite the existence of democracy in historical time with permanent duration. Hence the attempt to immortalize the institutions of democracy and, in the extreme instance, the “persistence of the theologico-political vision of the immortal body” expressed literally in mummification of the leader.88
Significantly, rather than take those entanglements as signs of democracy’s intractable reliance on religion, Lefort read them as phenomena of a transitional epoch. In fact, he insisted on the radical novelty of democracy, which lies in the open, indeterminate, and unmasterable social experience that it generates. Lefort traced this experience to a “symbolic mutation” in the order of power, wherein power underwent a radical “disincorporation” in the period of transition from monarchy to democracy. As we saw, Lefort held that in premodern society the noncoincidence of society with itself was dramatized as the relationship between human society and an other place. Within this imaginary relationship to symbolic exteriority, power itself is draped in the mantle of the religious. Inspired by Ernst Kantorowicz’s seminal work on the medieval image of the king’s two bodies, mortal and immortal, individual and collective, Lefort argued that the doubled body of the king served as the coupling link between the visible and the invisible.89 He saw this logic functioning right up to the collapse of the ancien régime, with the monarch representing the unity of the social in the unity of his own body. The radicalism of modern democracy thus lies in its novel disincorporation or disembodiment of power in the name of an egalitarian perception of social relations. Addressing this shift, Bernard Flynn writes, “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.” 90
Hence we arrive at Lefort’s best-known claim, that democratic power is a lieu vide, an “empty place.” Democratic power may be contested—indeed it depends on that contest—but no one can appropriate or incarnate it, nor can such power be “represented.” With the disembodiment of power goes a dispersal of power, knowledge, and law. They enter into contestatory relations, cannot be mastered by a single logic of representation, and are always in “excess” of each other. Modern democracy is thus marked by the simultaneous loss of foundation and the interminable search for foundation, the loss of a notion of legitimate power and the opening of an interminable debate as to what is legitimate. Democracy institutes a society in which division is not disruptive but constitutive of the social domain. Modernity thus enables the possibility for an explicit discourse on the political and recognition of the symbolic dimension as such, because, for the first time, people are symbolically enabled to distinguish between the symbolic and imaginary interpretations of the symbolic. As Lefort put it in a particularly condensed formulation:
of all the regimes of which we know, [modern democracy] is the only one to have represented power in such a way as to show that power is an empty place and to have thereby maintained a gap between the symbolic and the real. It does so by virtue of a discourse which reveals that power belongs to no one; that those who exercise power do not possess it; that they do not, indeed, embody it; that the exercise of power requires a periodic and repeated contest; that the authority of those vested with power is created and re-created as a result of the manifestation of the will of the people.91
The advent of modern democracy is nothing less than a metaphysical event, a tear in the tissue of human belief and symbolic order. Rather than proceed as Carl Schmitt (and Derrida) would to identify this symbolic change as concealing an underlying continuity with religion, Lefort emphasized the efficacy of the symbolic: namely that the appearance of a new power that disavows the religious does have the power to constitute a new practice. Accordingly, he endorsed Tocqueville’s insight that democracy is important not for what it “does” but for what it “causes to be done,” its power to arouse constant agitation in people.92 This means that democracy continually moves forward into the open, indeterminate, ungrounded space of political contestation. But, cautioned Lefort, the paradox of “any new adventure that begins with the formulation of a new idea of the state, the people, the nation or humanity is that it has its roots in the past.”93 Hence, in the unsettling early experience of democracy, people grasped at religious forms in an attempt to avert any further dissolution of the social. Moreover, the collapse of theological representations of the world symbolically encouraged the emergence of a misleading representation of society as a sui generis creation of human will. Thus the theological image of a unified divine will replicated itself in the image of society as a unified subject, a fantasmatic identification that underwrites the democratic slogan “vox populi vox dei” as much as it does totalitarianism’s dream of the “People-as-One.”94 Lefort detected a further impulse toward the restoration of the theologico-political in the psychical trauma that accompanied power’s disembodiment. In thinly veiled references to Jacques Lacan, Lefort’s essay “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism” suggests that subjects constitute themselves through a specular relation to the figure of power. The experience of democracy is thus akin to the individual’s transition from imaginary unity to symbolic division, and as with the “ordeal of the division of the subject,” so too is the traumatic loss of the substance of the body politic never fully overcome.95 It is hard not to think that, beyond the Lacanian inflection of this idea, Lefort’s detection of a traumatic core in democracy taps into the quite specific meaning of regicide within the French political imagination, wherein political modernity is tied to the destruction of the king’s body, political liberty primordially connected to crime.96
Although Lefort argues that in times of crisis, at weak points of the social, the theologico-political formation may reassert itself within democratic culture, nonetheless he asks, “Far from leading us to conclude that the fabric of history is continuous, does not a reconstruction of the genealogy of democratic representations reveal the extent of the break within it?” Rather than seeing democracy as a new episode in the transfer of the religious into the political, Lefort urges us to reflect on the process of democracy’s liberation from religion, what he calls the “adventure of their disintrication.” Like Castoriadis, Lefort insists on a division between religion and the new social experience of democracy. Lefort remains much more guarded toward the project of autonomy, however. To a much greater degree than Castoriadis, Lefort circumscribes autonomy by placing the self-determining power of democratic society into an agonistic relationship with the enigma of the opening of the social world onto itself. Clearly, Lefort means to tie the enigma of this opening to democratic practice and discourse; for the otherness of the social institution no longer comes from a figure of the Other, but inheres in the latency of all identities claimed within and for democratic society. Nonetheless, in the history of democracy the enigma of social institution has produced its share of civil religions, and, as Derrida’s example shows, the theologico-political remains capable of reactivation. Modern democracy may not conceal a religious core, but, from within Lefort’s terms, the persistence of the theologico-political signifies the “unavoidable—and no doubt ontological—difficulty democracy has in reading its own story.”97 The adventure of disintrication seems tortuous and possibly interminable.
The distintrication of the political from the religious is a central concern of Marcel Gauchet’s The Disenchantment of the World, published in 1985 to considerable acclaim and controversy. Yet Gauchet was optimistic that complete disintrication is possible. Indeed, he believed it was already achieved. If Gauchet’s thought reveals many deep debts to Lefort, his conclusions about the theologico-political problem differ fundamentally on precisely this most important point. In fact, despite Lefort’s impact on his student, the basic problem addressed in The Disenchantment of the World is framed in terms that sound more like those of Castoriadis. Gauchet followed Castoriadis in viewing religion as a “way of institutionalizing humans against themselves,” that is, as a form of human self-creation acting against autonomy. The core task of Gauchet’s book thus resonates with Castoriadis: to trace the gradual breakdown of religious otherness and the transfer of the instituting power from the extrasocial source to society itself.98 Strikingly, however, Gauchet’s conclusions took him in a political direction quite at odds with either Castoriadis or Lefort.99
Gauchet’s account of the emergence of modern autonomy remains anchored to an account of constitutive heteronomy or exteriority that imposes strict limits on his view of modern democracy. Hence, he steered sharply away from Castoriadis’s vision of direct democracy. However, Gauchet’s treatment of constitutive heteronomy led him away from Lefort as well. Lefort’s mature vision of democracy placed little emphasis on the actual institutions of government; rather, he focused on the sociopolitical dynamics opened by democratic contestation within a context of historical indeterminacy. Despite his renunciation of revolution, Lefort’s vision retains an element of the esprit sauvage he celebrated in his 1961 essay on Merleau-Ponty. By contrast, Gauchet’s account of a postreligious world anchors the symbolic dimension in the institutions of the state, which take on the character of a quasi transcendentality. Gauchet’s concern was less with the way in which the symbolic opens up an indeterminate space of democratic contest than with the way in which the symbolic status of the state creates the conditions for what he terms effective democracy. This preoccupation led him to increasingly embrace the principles of representative democracy and existing institutions of the state. From a youthful commitment to anarchism, Gauchet had become a liberal democrat at the time he wrote The Disenchantment of the World; in the 1990s he turned increasingly to a defense of what he considered the imperiled French republican tradition. Yet, as we shall see, the analytic framework he first developed to account for the exit from religion has proven to be a constraint in his ability to engage contemporary politics. A melancholic tone has come to inflect Gauchet’s writings, and its cause may be the limits of his political model as much as the actual state of politics.
Born in 1946 in Normandy, Gauchet already aligned himself with the left as a high school student. However, as he relates in an interview, early encounters with dogmatic communist school teachers immunized him against the pull of the Communist Party. His sympathies were with anti-Stalinist libertarian and anarchist tendencies like those he encountered in the pages of Socialisme ou Barbarie, which he had been reading since he was fifteen.100 At the university in Caen in 1966–67, a course with Claude Lefort on the “dimensions of the social field” proved a transformative experience for the young student. From Lefort he learned unforgettable lessons about the “irreducibility of democracy, the centrality of the political, the necessity to think together, from this point of view, democracy and totalitarianism in their ties and in their opposition.”101 In the same interview Gauchet emphasizes that at the time he was becoming “perceptibly more anti-Marxist than Lefort and Castoriadis.” Lefort still admired Marx and saw “between the lines of the explicit Marx a hidden Marx that remained to be recuperated.” Gauchet, by contrast, introduced what he calls “a consequential theoretical anti-Marxism” in “Sur la démocratie: Le politique et l’institution du social,” a long text that he and Lefort coauthored in 1971.102 In the early 1970s, this anti-Marxism did not yet mean a disengagement from critical radical politics. Indeed, it seemed to fit well with his anarchist convictions. During the 1970s Gauchet continued to collaborate with Lefort, for example in the short-lived journals Textures and Libre, undertakings that also involved the likes of Castoriadis and Furet. He also worked intensively with Gladys Swain, a friend from his student days in Caen and later his partner, on the history of psychiatry. This collaboration led to the publication of La pratique de l’esprit humain: L’ institution asilaire et la revolution démocratique in 1980, the first of a series of major works that Gauchet has dedicated to the intersection of the histories of democracy and modern subjectivity.103
By the end of the 1970s, Gauchet’s ideological trajectory had carried him from anarchism to liberalism, a development that culminated in his cofounding of Le débat with Pierre Nora in 1980. Gauchet’s itinerary shared something with many in his generation, affected as he was by the radicalism of 1968 and disappointment in its aftermath, and then the antitotalitarian moment, with its attendant anxieties about the power of the state. Yet where some—most notably the New Philosophers—chose to denounce the state in all its forms, Gauchet ended up endorsing one version of the state, the liberal democratic state, as the best possibility for safeguarding human autonomy. There was also a singular dimension to Gauchet’s political evolution, one that can be traced in yet another of the intellectual affiliations that indelibly stamped his thought.
Gauchet describes his first encounter with the work of the anthropologist Pierre Clastres as “one of the great shocks of my intellectual life.”104 Clastres formed a part of the milieus of the journals Textures and Libres up to his death in a car accident in 1977; his 1974 book La Société contre l’état exercised considerable influence on the antitotalitarian currents of French thought in the 1970s.105 The book articulated, as Claude Lefort put it, “the question of the political” at the heart of primitive society.106 Its radical claim was that such societies had made a preemptive choice against a power that might detach itself from the community. In the name of a thoroughgoing equality, primitive society rejected any form of internal division that might make possible the emergence of the state. This vision of an egalitarian society instituted against the state spoke directly to the anarchist sentiments of Gauchet; but he rapidly grew skeptical. For one thing, he was troubled by the fragile and anachronistic notion of such a choice. As he would later ask bluntly, “How can one be against something that does not yet exist?” Accordingly, he came to redefine Clastres’ thesis as “society against political division.”107 Even more fundamentally, however, he realized the insufficiency of Clastres’ ideal. If primitive society succeeded in creating a certain kind of egalitarian democracy, it was within an otherwise severely restricted context. That is, the price for the absence of masters was the exclusion of any possibility that the institution of society itself might become a matter for democratic discussion. “If there is self-rule [autogestion] on the practical level, in sum,” wrote Gauchet in 1975, “it is by a rejection of self-rule on the ‘theoretical’ level. It is thus radical democracy through the narrowest conservatism.”108 In other words, primitive society offered equality without autonomy.
In an effort to better conceptualize the nature of primitive society, Gauchet resorted to the basic insight that he shared with Claude Lefort, namely that division is constitutive of social existence as such. And he turned to religion as the most primordial form of division. As he recollected in 2003, he was reluctant to invoke religion in “Politique et société: La leçon des sauvages,” the 1975 essay that opened the breach between Clastres and himself. He recalled that at that time he was repulsed by religion and essentially ignorant of its history.109 Nonetheless, he detected in religion a way out of the impasses of Clastres’ model.110 Primitive society did not win its form of equality simply by neutralizing all types of division; rather, it expelled division from within the social body only to erect a more primordial division between humanity and the gods. Where Clastres had scarcely mentioned religion at all, it now became Gauchet’s key for unlocking the paradoxical secret that society’s self-creation lay in an originary act that placed the symbolic institution of society at an infinite remove from human agency.
Indeed, religion became absolutely central to Gauchet’s understanding of history and remains so up to this day.111 Following on the opening he had made in the essay “Politique et société,” he began to formulate a more elaborate theory of the role of religion not just in primitive society, but in the subsequent evolution of societies and the emergence of states. The 1977 essay “La Dette du sens et les racines de l’état: Politique de la religion primitive” marks a further significant development beyond the 1975 essay and foreshadows The Disenchantment of the World’s sweeping account of the birth of politics in religion, the dynamics of the great monotheisms, the specific role of Christianity in loosening the grip of religion, and the emergence of modern democratic autonomy out of this process of exiting from religion. This undertaking bears more than a passing resemblance to Max Weber’s theoretical account of the gradual formation of a self-sufficient secular sphere as the actualization of potentialities existing within the religious domain itself. However, the similarities are ultimately rather superficial. Where Weber had stressed the specific role of the Protestant Reformation in creating conditions that would eventually legitimate this-worldly pursuits and instrumental rationality, Gauchet situates Weber’s thesis within a much broader argument about the transformative effects of monotheism. Gauchet differs from Weber in another and still more revealing way. Weber never claimed that a religious, spiritual dynamic alone could explain the emergence of modernity, but Gauchet places extraordinary weight on historical transformation operating at the symbolic level. Indeed, in a published table ronde on his work, it is amusing to read Catholic theologians chiding him for neglecting material factors.112 It is as if, in the rush to shed all vestiges of the Marxian model, Gauchet ends up with an unapologetic idealist account of the unfolding logic of an idea. But it is not surprising. After all, as he recalled in a 2003 interview, his ambition was to create “a theory of history capable of effectively giving the lie to Marxism, not only by attempting to critique it on specific points … but by proposing an alternative vision.”113 But such an aim comes with an ironic price. For beneath Gauchet’s frequent insistence on the contingency of history is a historical model with a deterministic thrust.114 The rather unbending logic of Gauchet’s effort to surpass Marxism with an equally grand alternative theory gains in irony if we recall Gauchet’s additional debt to Weber’s great contemporary, Émile Durkheim. Gauchet’s depiction of religion centers on its social function, and, in doing so, it certainly reveals the strong traces of Durkheim, for whom religion serves as a system of communication and a means of specifying and regulating social relationships. Seemingly unaware of the deterministic element in his own theory, Gauchet mixed praise of Durkheim with the criticism that he had lapsed into a determinist account of the necessity of religion instead of viewing religion as a “free instituting operation arising from an act of creation expressing a decision of society.”115
The provenance and intentions of Gauchet’s concern with religion are signaled immediately in the subtitle of The Disenchantment of the World: “A Political History of Religion.” Indeed, consistent with his appropriation of Pierre Clastres, Gauchet viewed religion as political from its very beginning. Rejecting evolutionary models of religious development, he argued that religion received its fullest expression in primitive societies, when the instituting power was allegedly most fully removed from human society. For such a society, the founding power lies at an unfathomable distance in the past; the present is in a position of absolute dependence on this mythic past, and human activities adhere to their inaugural truth. Such radical dispossession enforces an “ultimate political equality, which, although it does not prevent differences in social status or prestige, does prohibit the secession of unified power.”116
Two great upheavals shook this originary form of religion, the birth of the state and the emergence of monotheism. Of the two, Gauchet considered the emergence of the state around five thousand years ago to have been the more epochal development. Where total dispossession had essentially neutralized the dynamics of group relations, the advent of political domination brought new instabilities and potencies into the heart of the collective process. Political domination also inaugurated a different relation between the visible and the invisible, for the distance between society and its origin now became a distance operating within human society between the dominant and the dominated, those who have the gods on their side and those who do not. Kings and priests could claim power through their access to and ability to interpret the invisible. The emergence of monotheism during the Axial Age (800 to 200 BC) introduced still another dimension of instability into the homeostatic form of primitive religion.117 Monotheism brought an infinite increase in the potency and otherness of the divine, now imagined as a god-subject whose will not only created the cosmos but also sustains it at every present moment. Gauchet based the central thesis of his book on what he called the “dynamic of transcendence” inaugurated by the formation of the subjectivized God. Far from dispossessing humans, transcendence makes God more accessible: foundation no longer belongs only in the remotest past but also in the present. This vision of the world as the object of a single will opens up possibilities for a human understanding of the creation and at least partial decipherment of that divine will. The representation of absolute otherness yields a de facto reduction of otherness. Hence Gauchet’s paradoxical formulation: “the greater the gods, the freer the humans are.”118
Christianity radicalized the effects of the monotheistic revolution. With the incarnation, the divine enters the world, introducing new and transformative tensions into the dynamic of transcendence: the enigma of the wholly other and the human form of the God-Man, inscrutability of the father’s message and the need to interpret the human voice of the son, hope in the beyond versus adherence to a here-below that had been graced by Christ’s humanity, world rejection and the imperative to act upon the world. So explosive were these new instabilities that Gauchet named Christianity the “religion for departing from religion.” Gauchet shared Lefort’s interest in the relationship between the incarnation and politics, but he gave a more detailed account of the instabilities that Christianity introduced into the institution of monarchy. Where pre-Christian monarchs could function as both priests and kings, occupying the meeting place between the visible and the invisible, Christ took that place once and for all. The Christian monarch could no longer aspire to be the perfect mediator. However, if the Christian king could not be what Christ was, he could at least be like Christ “to the extent that he made Christ’s absence present and symbolized his truth.”119 This preserved the sacral dimension of kingship, reinstating its mediating function between the beyond and the here-below. At the same time, the unbridgeable gap between Christ and the monarch meant that the legitimacy of the Christian ruler contained a destabilizing and transformative element. For the monarch represented not the point of meeting but the depth of separation between the two orders of reality marked as forever separated by having been uniquely consubstantial in Christ. Hence the sacral dimension of kingship derived from the management of the lowly world, but behind the apparent continuity of the sacral function Gauchet detects a great transformation. The monarch’s mediating activity shifted toward a domain removed from the Church’s control, the domain of justice. A great metamorphosis in the sacral function of kingship meant that the king emerged as the “archetypal mediating figure in the collective sphere, as opposed to the individual mediation between souls and God, guaranteed by the sacraments’ absolving power.”120
Gauchet followed Ernst Kantorowicz closely in dating this change to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when new symbols emerged of political incorporation, the state as a secular corpus mysticum and the notion of the body politic.121 However, Gauchet’s conclusion was much bolder than any found in Kantorowicz, for he identified this as nothing less than the birth of political modernity. As he wrote, the emergence of the king as the mediating figure of the human order was a “radical turnaround of the relation between power and society. The monarch gradually evolved from incarnating sacral dissimilarity into realizing the collective body’s internal self-congruence.”122 Political modernity deployed this symbolic reversal in two directions: the growth of a state oriented toward monopolizing collective organization and a form of political legitimacy based on a logic of representation. Political modernity thus replayed the paradox of monotheism—the dynamic of transcendence whereby humans become freer, even as God becomes greater—in the form of a tendency toward the democratic inversion of sovereignty.
The democratic inversion of sovereignty was from its very beginning inscribed in sovereignty understood as an idea of the modern State, as an expression of the new relation between power and society resulting from the completed revolution in transcendence. Once the split between this world and the beyond has caused political authority to take responsibility for representing and organizing collective-being, then individuals will soon exercise sovereignty, whatever royal trappings of authority remain. The State colossus is first strengthened, only to open itself up later to its subjects. By deepening the separation from its subjects, the State ends up being identified with them, in that those who submit to power will eventually claim the right to constitute it.
The dynamic of transcendence thus acted as the great agent returning the instituting power to human society, transforming a transcendent logic of legitimacy into an immanent-democratic one. The history of the transition from heteronomy to autonomy is “religious to the core,” writes Gauchet. If we have moved from being within religion to being outside it, our world nevertheless remains shaped by it. Hence, “If we have surpassed the religious, it has not left us, and perhaps never will, even though its historical effectiveness is finished.”123
It is not my purpose here to evaluate the merits of this argument or weigh it against the other great macrolevel attempts to explain the emergence of the secular world. Rather, I want to emphasize one important point, namely the significance of the book within the intellectual and political context of France in the 1980s. The history of the disenchantment of the world, I would suggest, served Gauchet as a vehicle for expressing a generation’s disenchantment with its former political commitments. A 1986 conversation between Gauchet and Pierre Manent published in Esprit is revealing. Manent was at that time just completing his book An Intellectual History of Liberalism, which depicts the history of liberalism as the protracted struggle of the secular city against the theologico-political problem, that is, the intertwining authority of the “religious sacred” and the “civic sacred.” Manent complained that Gauchet’s account of religion’s decline erased the role played by the great polemical struggle waged from Machiavelli onward against the political power of sacred monarchy. Gauchet’s reply had less to do with the relative historical merits of their respective positions than with contemporary politics: “a sober view of democratic development,” he instructed Manent, “conducted on the base of a religious genealogy, permits the simultaneous rebuttal of ultra-democratic optimism, blind to the obstacles that lie in its route, and of conservative pessimism, obsessed exclusively by the factors of dissolution and the inviability of an individualist order.”124 Far from being the “other” of democratic politics, Gauchet presents the theologico-political as the invisible container for the experience of democracy. A religious genealogy serves here in the normalization and stabilization of a liberal democratic order, cautioning equally against both direct democratic aspirations and the religious critics of secular society.
It is a sign of Gauchet’s intentions that for all the influence of Castoriadis, he entirely ignored the ancient Greek origins of democracy. This neglect fully inverts the democratic vision of Castoriadis, for whom the ancient Greek model of direct democracy remained the vital germ, if not the model for the modern project of autonomy. Against what he called the “metaphysics of representation,” Castoriadis championed an uncompromising Aristotelian definition of the citizen as “capable of governing and being governed,” and he devoted considerable energy to analyzing the institutional innovations of the first democratic regime.125 Gauchet, by contrast, entirely neutralized the value of the Greek experience. For one thing, he directed his general argument that humans are freer under monotheism against modernist or postmodernist celebrations of paganism, citing specifically Marc Augé’s celebration of polytheism, although one must also think of Lyotard’s identification of paganism with heterogeneity.126 For another, rather than consider Athenian democracy as a relative breakthrough to a new political form, Gauchet stressed instead how the polis remained embedded in a vision of a rational cosmos that acted as a constraint upon political innovation. Hence the political novelty of fifth-century Athens gets lost within its general participation in the religious transformations of the Axial Age.127 The point is not so much whether Castoriadis understated the limitations of Greek political innovation. Rather, the point is that, for Gauchet, the ancient experience of democracy apparently has no meaning for the advent of modern democracy or the future possibilities of democratic action.
In Gauchet’s genealogy, or—to use an even more appropriate Nietzschean phrase—his account of the birth of democracy from the spirit of religion, liberal individualism and representative democracy emerge as the natural heirs to the logic of Christian transcendence. As for direct democracy, Gauchet viewed it with the same suspicion as Furet. Indeed, Gauchet’s contribution to Mona Ozouf and Furet’s 1988 Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution argues that a totalitarian logic emerged when the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” fused the legal protection of individual rights with the exercise of popular sovereignty.128 The ideological reorientation of French intellectual life, which began with the rejection of Marxism and the affirmation of democratic commitments, here melts into the claim for a left-liberal consensus of the sort triumphantly presented in the 1989 bicentenary of the French Revolution, a commemoration so dominated by François Furet that he was anointed “roi Furet.”129 On the broadest historical scale imaginable, Gauchet’s ambitious book confirms that the “revolution is over.”130
In 1985 Gauchet seemed quite convinced that the exit from religion was complete. The instituting power had been successfully transferred from the extrasocial source to society itself. Religious belief, he conceded, may survive as a matter of private conviction, but it is no longer an active or relevant force in the political realm. As he claimed in 1984, “If God doesn’t exist, nothing happens.”131 There is, he wrote in 1998, a general consensus, even among believers, that society and politics are human creations. “In a word, we have become metaphysical democrats.”132 Nonetheless, it is crucial to an understanding of Gauchet’s concerns in the years after Disenchantment of the World to see that in his account, even if religion, understood as a positive structure of belief, has vanished, the structuring function of the religious continues to underlie modern democracy. The exteriority of the gods may have been overcome, but not exteriority itself. Rather, it has been transferred to the modern liberal democratic division between state and society, between society as the true source of the instituting power and the state that represents that power, both in the sense of governing in the name of the collective and in the sense of giving that collective a symbolic representation of itself. Transcendence in the age-old sense of an otherworldly power may have disappeared, but transcendence survives as a this-worldly structure. Far from diminishing our autonomy, so runs Gauchet’s argument, the “terrestrial transcendence” of the secular liberal democratic state guarantees it. Dispossession, which throughout history had been the precondition of humanity’s heteronomy, now becomes constitutive of our autonomy and the only true bulwark against totalitarian dreams of overcoming social division and fully mastering our history.
It is hard not to hear a certain kind of triumphalism in what Camille Tarot has justly described as Gauchet’s vision of a “reconciled modernity.”133 Yet the confidence expressed in The Disenchantment of the World proved shortlived. By the late 1980s Gauchet worried that modern democracy was moving in a self-destructive direction. Whereas Gauchet’s concern in the 1970s and early 1980s centered on an overweening state’s threat to liberty, his worries shifted as he observed the evident triumph of neoliberalism in America and western Europe. Since around 1990, he has maintained that the collective dimension of the political threatens to be fully eclipsed by hyperindividualism and free market idolatry. In what Gauchet has come to regard as a new phase of democracy emerging after 1968, the individual citizen bases his political sensibility strictly on the protection of personal rights, and his political horizon extends no further than the fulfillment of private interests. In such a regime the individual no longer recognizes his dependency on the institution of a collective power, or, at most, he sees that power as an instrument for the pursuit of individual interests. Indeed, faith in the auto-organization of the market makes the steering powers of the government seem unnecessary or counterproductive. In Gauchet’s pathos-laden formulation, it turns out that democracy operates against itself. He insists that he does not view this situation fatalistically, but maintains that the situation is open and holds out hope that democracies can recover a more robust sense of their collective nature.134 Yet this claim for openness and optimism seems at odds with the burdens of Gauchet’s historical model. At a certain level the speed with which Gauchet passed from a moment of confident synthesis to a sense that democracy is caught in a self-defeating impasse may be surprising, but at a deeper level this more recent pessimism seems to be the unsurprising outcome of the rigid theory of history that Gauchet developed in the 1970s and 1980s.
After all, Gauchet continues to rely massively on his hypothesis that our autonomy is to be explained through the process of leaving religion. The exit from religion continues in the present, he tells us in 1998; the political and anthropological forms that have emerged beyond religion never cease to be simultaneously haunted and supported by the vestiges of the religious form, he insists in 2002.135 Yet he claims that we have reached a new stage in this process or, more precisely, France has reached a new stage. (It must be noted that Gauchet’s work after Disenchantment of the World has become increasingly narrow in its focus on France, although he repeats a move made by a long succession of forward-looking French nationalists insofar as he transmutes this provincialism into universalism by insisting that France has experienced certain general trends of the modern world with particular intensity.) In this allegedly new historical stage, the political struggle against religion seems complete. Not only has the Catholic Church been pushed out of the political domain by the lay republic, but all reference to the divine has been fully excised. Yet this turns out to be a source of worry for Gauchet because democracy thereby loses the object—the ultimate other—against which it had defined itself. Again, Gauchet speaks here specifically of France, and he measures France’s current condition against a model of politics shaped mainly by the Third Republic.136 Militant secularism, he insists, galvanized the sensibility of the Third Republic’s champions and gave them a meaningful horizon of action and aspiration. Insofar as politics could pose as an “alternative” to religion, politics could undergo an elevation (sublimation) to a higher plane.137 Moreover, the republic could function as an alternative form of the sacred, as it did in Durkheim’s analysis, or as a supreme moral instance over all the religions, as it did for Charles Renouvier.138 The victory of the republic, however, turns out to be phyrrhic. With the complete triumph over religion, in the absence of its ultimate other, democracy loses its substance. Gone is the old spiritual energy of the priesthood of the citizen, the “moral majesty of the state,” and “sacrifices on the altar of public affairs.”139 Amplifying this sense of loss is the decline of secular substitutes for religion, particularly communism. With the definitive end of the “revolutionary faith,” we have lived through the end of eschatological history, a sea change that Gauchet dates very recently, effectively since the 1970s and especially since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.140 Like Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion, which appeared in 1995, Gauchet’s Religion in Democracy maintains that liberal democracy has become the unsurpassable horizon of our era; yet whereas Furet predicts that the austere and disenchanted world of liberal democracy will spawn new utopian dreams, Gauchet worries that it will only bring apathy and the citizen’s ever greater retreat from identification with the collective institution of society.
To repeat, Gauchet tries to present all this as a contingent development within the open horizons of “historical society,” his preferred term for the world that has emerged from the closed symbolic universe of religion. Yet this analysis of contemporary (French) democracy seems driven less by empirical study than by the internal logic of his theoretical model. The age of hyperindividualism, which has evidently grown to such a point that the collective power of society is imperiled, seems less like a contingent historical outcome than the next logical step in the dynamic of transcendence. In his historical analysis of French politics, Gauchet sees the period from roughly 1880 to 1914 as a crucial turning point. According to him, throughout the nineteenth century the power of civil society steadily waxed, meaning that the vital political question of the age was how the state could cope with this. The republican solution lay in the parallel growth of both society and the state; as society’s claims became more and more extensive, the state expanded to meet them. Democratic pressures strained the state, but they did not in the end topple the state’s edifice. Instead of accommodating individuals and social groups by descending down into the competitive jostling of society, the state grafted its authority onto its capacity to represent society as a whole. “In effect,” writes Gauchet of the state, “far from being weakened by the democratization of its principle (in the name of the general will) and by the liberalization of its exercise (in the name of particular beliefs), the latter found itself justified and reaffirmed. By its grace, political debate and action became the alchemical crucible of collective transcendence.”141 Later in the same discussion, Gauchet insists that although the order that holds people together is their own creation, “politics conceived as the deliberate arrangement of an artificial collective body in this way constitutes for humanity the sublime vector of a transcendent affirmation of its liberty.”142
So, to adapt Gauchet’s succinct formulation for humanity’s exit from religion to the new conditions of postreligious liberal democracy, the greater the state, the freer the individual. If this description bears any resemblance to the real situation of French politics, can it be any wonder that individuals drifted away from their republican vocation by the end of the twentieth century? Let us operate for a moment strictly within Gauchet’s terms. Just as the gods mattered less and less once their transcendence put them at an insurmountable distance from the space of human thought and action, so too, as the state’s distance from society grows, must the quasi transcendence of the republican state cease to have much hold on people. And then, too, just as the early modern king ceased to be a mediating figure between society and its extrasocial foundation and became instead the representative of the human collective body’s internal self-congruence, is it not a further logical step that the state as a quasi-transcendent symbol of the collective is eventually penetrated by the plurality of conflicts and desires that mark the actual reality of society?
In a 2003 exchange with Régis Debray, Gauchet worried that with the loss of the phantom form of religion France lost that “collective transcendence of which the nation and the state are the main incarnations.”143 The symbolic representation of the collective, he writes in 1998, permits the collectivity to “see and conceive itself”: the function of representation is “simultaneously specular, scenographic, and cognitive.”144 This capacity to comprehend our societies as coherent entities is what we lost along with the decline of religion, he asserts. Those readers inclined to regard politics as more than just an optical phenomenon may be mildly placated by Gauchet’s concession that the difficulty of gaining such a symbolic comprehension weakens the possibility of collective action.145 However, there is no mistaking that Gauchet’s emphasis lies on the legitimizing function of symbolic form and not on the transformative possibilities of collective activism. If a malaise has settled over modern liberal democracies, it may have less to do with the decline in the authority of a transcendent representation of the collective than with the extremely thin conception of democracy that prevails in those regimes. And here Gauchet occupies an ironic position, for, even as he tries to diagnose the symptoms of a decline in democratic energy, his entire theoretical account of the rise of modern democracy pushes toward exactly this impasse. There is an insidious self-confirming circularity in Gauchet’s assertion that the chief paradox of contemporary democracy is that the greater its triumph, the greater the indifference of its citizens.146 For Gauchet has identified the march of history with the realization of a strikingly restricted and minimal conception of democracy. Collectivity emerges in his work as an ideally homogeneous agent beyond which lies the chaos of unintegrated social conflict among self-interested individuals. He speaks frequently of collective action, but collective action seems more like a strictly symbolic performance transacted within the representational domain of transcendent democracy. He has almost nothing to say about actual social movements or agents, except when they seem to pose a threat to the alleged stability of the process whereby collective power is integrated into the symbolic realm of the political. He tells us in an interview that he never shared in “that faith in the creative effervescence of the margins. I never succeeded in seeing in that irresponsible radicality anything other than a corruption of democracy.”147 In Gauchet’s account both history and normative criteria channel social energies into a rigidly formalistic, homogeneous, and reified conception of democracy. It can hardly be surprising that people are less than motivated by democratic politics if this is all that democracy is. If democracy is against itself, that formulation has truth only if one accepts the narrow terms in which Gauchet has confined his thinking about democratic politics.
In La condition historique Gauchet describes himself as “veering to the right,” which he equates with rallying to “normal politics.” This turn, he acknowledges, involved distancing himself from Claude Lefort and what he calls “political inconsequence.”148 Lefort remained quite silent about the direction his student had taken, but another former Lefort student and erstwhile comrade of Gauchet’s showed no such reticence. In 2008 Miguel Abensour published an open letter condemning a man with whom he had once collaborated, for example in the journals Textures and Libre or in the production of an edition of Étienne de La Boétie’s Le discours de la servitude voluntaire and a series of accompanying essays. Abensour was provoked by La condition historique, where Gauchet identifies Abensour as a “revoltist” in an interview tracing his path leading toward the founding of Le Débat. The interview recalls that Abensour had drawn upon Lefort to theorize a conception of democracy stressing the utopian imperative and the “protests of the margins as the authentic vector of collective invention.”149For his part, Abensour’s open letter reaffirms what he had long drawn from Claude Lefort, namely that Lefort’s concept of democracy means more than simply a situation of permanent contestation.150 Rather, he argues, Lefort offered a robust theory of the uncertainty and indeterminacy of the democratic condition, an uncertainty that reaches down to the very foundations of the democratic order.
This is the essence of the démocratie sauvage with which Abensour had for years identified Lefort.151 In his letter against Gauchet, Abensour relinquishes this phrase in favor of “insurgent democracy,” but the political vision remains unchanged. In place of Gauchet’s image of a framework of quasi-transcendental democratic institutions, Abensour insists on the interminability of the democratic revolution. Where Gauchet identifies democracy with a specific political regime, Abensour recognizes democracy as a specific political institution of the social.152 In an insightful article from 2006, the political theorist James Ingram traces out the divergent paths of Abensour and Gauchet and rightly notes that both derive from Lefort’s ideas.153 Ingram attributes these derivations to the ambiguity of Lefort himself, whose political philosophy could lend itself to “radicalization or restoration, the deepening or limiting of democracy, awakening from an old ideological slumber or falling into a new one.”154 Yet I do not think Lefort is quite so equivocal. After all, Lefort’s idea of regime has little to do with a specific institutional arrangement, but with a specific mise en forme of social life. His praise of democracy, as he repeatedly emphasized, lies not in what it does, but in what it causes to be done; that is, its power to arouse constant agitation in people.
At the bottom of this interpretation of democracy lies Lefort’s understanding of the symbolic dimension. Lefort’s symbolic dimension is not a quasi-transcendental realm of representation. It is partially a specific space, or, to follow his own terminology, it is a place. But precisely because in modern democracy it is an empty place, it is both a place and no place. It is this ambiguity that links Lefort’s idea of the symbolic dimension of the political to an expansive conception of democracy as a social experience. It allows Lefort to describe the political in the dynamic terms of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Democracy contains potential for chiasmatic exchanges of the ruled and the rulers, the represented and the representation. The symbolic construct not only anchors the action of the democratic subject by relating it to an institutional symbol of the collectivity. Rather the symbolic creates transversal relations. The political mise en forme may well produce a certain kind of democratic subject, but democratic subjects potentially produce that political mise en forme in an open and reversible process. To be sure, Lefort backed away from Cornelius Castoriadis’s radical vision of autonomy when he insisted that the institution of the social is no one’s act. Yet, even if he thereby acknowledged a debt to the insights of political theology, Lefort nonetheless envisioned modernity to be most fully characterized by a démocratie sauvage, animated by an esprit sauvage, sitting tenuously atop brute being. Though he renounced the dream of revolution decades before his death in 2010, Lefort never rallied to “normal” politics, whatever that vague phrase might mean. Indeed, his description of the symbolic dimension of modern democracy could feed into radical democratic projects such as those we shall encounter in Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek.