Andrew Arato
Some of our significant political concepts are secularized theological ones. Not all of them. Some major religious-political concepts are theologized profane ones. What is crucial is that nontheological concepts like territory and population can also be theologized, as in “sacred homeland” or “the people.” Such is the main effort of political theology, the preservation and imposition of concepts and figures of thought in political theory inherited from mono the ism, however transformed. It can only be countered by the further secularization and disenchantment of political concepts, the preservation or the reestablishment of their secular and rational character.
Why should we engage in this secularizing effort? This essay will first argue, using the example of Carl Schmitt, that positive reliance on political theology not only can have a profoundly authoritarian meaning, but is helpful in disguising and misrepresenting that meaning. Second, I will try to show that taking this topos seriously does not commit a thinker to a political theological posture. As demonstrated by Claude Lefort, political theology can be thematized in order to go beyond it. Lefort is important for my essay because his concept of democracy as the empty space of power clearly draws the line of distinction with not only totalitarianism, as he stressed, but with all modern forms of dictatorship. Finally, I will argue that, without uttering the word, a political conception can be deeply theological with similar consequences as self-admitted versions. At a time when one can no longer openly argue for dictatorship as Schmitt still could in the 1920s, disguising the authoritarian disguise itself, namely political theology, can preserve its meaning and function. I will try to develop this point through a critique of populist politics in the version introduced by Ernesto Laclau, who explicitly advocates not only the construction of “the people” in an entirely voluntaristic manner, but filling the empty space of power by leadership incarnating a subject that does not exist.1
By political theology, I do not mean only a politics that preserves the entire substance or structure or substantial contents of theology in secularized forms.2 Mindful of Hans Blumenberg’s powerful if ambivalent critique,3 I do not identify political theology with the assertion of causality for theological origins, even a hypothetical one as in Weber’s “Protestant ethic” thesis, or with the claim of substantial structural identity of theological and “secular” concepts, as in Karl Loewith’s Meaning in History. Neither Weber’s nor Loewith’s conceptions are primarily political. Not being theories of politics, they are not political theologies. Neither causality nor substantial identity is sufficient or necessary to indicate the presence of political theology. I find Blumenberg’s idea of “reoccupation” only of the questions and not of the answers of theology powerful, but only with the proviso that for that reoccupation, the “transformed” linguistic resources and structures of monotheistic religion play a key role (as he is forced to admit).4 Thus I believe one can speak of partial identity of substance, in addition to the reoccupation stressed by Blumenberg. This step leads not to the rehabilitation of political theology that he feared, but to a diagnosis of its presence in modern and contemporary political thought. In his fear of political theology, Blumenberg went too far toward trying to argue that there is really no such thing at all. With this reservation, the shift of emphasis from substantial identity to the legitimating function of reoccupation remains important. That was already the role of the “king’s two bodies” doctrine in the variety of forms explored by Ernst Kantorowicz.5 The famous Schmittian thesis concerning the secularization of theological concepts also implied the mobilization of political theology in the sense of “reoccupation” for purposes of legitimation.6
Carl Schmitt’s Constituent Power and Political Theology
“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (Political Theology, I. 37). This statement of 1922 cannot be taken literally, at least as a description, in light of Schmitt’s Die Diktatur, published a year earlier.7 In that work, Carl Schmitt based his understanding of one of the two key concepts, commissarial dictatorship, directly on the Roman model linked to republican practice, rather than on any theology. The very concept of dictatorship is Roman, of course, and even the idea of sovereign dictatorship, if not the concept, made its appearance in Rome in the traditional treatment of the decemvir episode as recounted in Livy, as well as the dictatorship of Sulla.8 Schmitt’s use of the word “all” is therefore revealing. I believe that he may very well have used it as a normatively charged justification for his own turn to political theology, and his transformation of originally republican concepts into theological ones.
Arguably, that turn had not yet begun in the 1921 work that has even been represented as a critique of sovereign dictatorship.9 That interpretation implies a radical shift in the 1922 Political Theology that is hard to explain or justify. After 1922, the issue is in any case moot, and it is certainly incorrect to claim, given the text of the 1928 Verfassungslehre,10 that Schmitt could adopt the concept of the constituent power of the people only as he freed it from the connotations of his earlier notion of sovereign dictatorship.11 In the Verfassungslehre, Schmitt adopted the very concept of constituent power worked out in Die Diktatur, linked to sovereign dictatorship, and equally important, to political theology.
There is little question that Schmitt understood the historical introduction of sovereign dictatorship in political theological terms. The key figures in Die Diktatur were Cromwell and Rousseau, where one is theological in the traditional sense but on the borderline of the sovereign dictatorship already hinted at by radical Protestant thought in En gland, while the other breaks with the tradition and turns to political theology. The appeal to divine authorization is sincere in Cromwell, and the clue to his quasi-monarchical sovereignty, while in Rousseau (following Machiavelli), religious justification proper is only a noble lie. It is otherwise with political theology. Here in Rousseau, according to Schmitt, “the politicization of theological concepts, especially with respect to the concept of sovereignty, is so striking that it has not escaped any true expert on his writings” (Political Theology, I.46). According to Die Diktatur, Rousseau’s general will has godlike dignity uniting power and justice; it is an unlimited and illimitable legislator, the source of the laws of the state as God is of the laws of nature; it is undivided, and indivisible, indestructible, morally pure, incapable of error or even of willing a wrong (Die Diktatur, 118–19). This is distinguished from the will of all, the empirical will, and the people who can err, and thus the whole construct is an implicit transposition of the language of the king’s two bodies (if, pace Blumenberg, not the precise substantial structure!) from the monarch to the people. Both the figure of God the Father and the Christological metaphor of Kantorowicz are present in this theologically mixed depiction. Nevertheless, the sovereign of Rousseau’s political theology, whose will is the general will, is said to surpass the theologically legitimated absolute monarch in its legislative capacity unlimited by either a law of succession or divine and natural law (Political Theology, I.36).12
Rousseau’s conversion of theological to political (-theological) omnipotence or at least unlimited legislative power was not, as far as Schmitt is concerned, the final form of the political theology of the constituent power. As he correctly noted, Rousseau does not fully unify the will, and has a need to distinguish the authority of the wise législateur with a divine mission but without power, from both the power of the people that may not be wise and the power of the dictator that relies on external authority (Die Diktatur, 125ff.). Schmitt thought another step was essential: the unification of dictator, législateur, and, I would add, sovereign(ty) in a concept of sovereign dictatorship (ibid., 126), a step that he sees fully developed in Sieyes’s notion of the pouvoir constituant (ibid., 137ff.). Here all the theological motifs are restated with full force and are even radicalized: absolute creativity, absence of limits, priority to all organization, infallibility, persistence. The relation of the constituent to the constitué is said to be exactly analogous to Spinoza’s pantheistic distinction of natura naturans and naturata with its immanent rather than transcendent conception of the divine (ibid., 139).13 The constituent’s power is an infinite, inconceivable, inexhaustible ultimate foundation (Abgrund) that produces ever-new forms and organs.
At the same time, however, the very unclarity of the will of the people as the constituent power is interpreted theologically as expressing a hidden and never fully accessible divinity (ibid., 142). Since the will of the nation or the people is unclear, it can be misinterpreted and distorted, and therefore it takes an agency to rightly construe it, one that not only has the authority to interpret but has the power to impose as well. The role of such a church-like entity is all the more necessary because the empirical people is not the ideal one, and thus needs regeneration, and, as Lefort shows with respect to the Reign of Terror, this idea is then reduced to another: “the people must be extracted from within the people.”14 Many years before Schmitt popularized his concept of the political, his political theology anticipates the friend-enemy polarity, parallel to, even if not identical in substance to, the saved and the damned.15 This political theology could be said to be immanent; both friend and enemy are worldly actors. Admittedly, there is only partial identity of substance. While the friend is identical to the ideal people, the enemy is not identical to the empirical one that in part can be regenerated. But the empirical people is seen as contaminated by the enemy. Thus, while the external enemy can be excluded even from the empirical people, the internal one represents an entirely different task.16 The purified body of the elect is a not yet, an absence rather than a real presence. It cannot act, and must be represented, as the visible church represents the invisible one.17 Thus the idea of a “hidden God” appears in spite of Schmitt’s repeated criticism of the deist political theology he sees in the German Staatslehre, one that he describes derisively as a cloak-and-dagger drama (Political Theology, I.38; Die Diktatur, 27, 138), assuming an entity incapable of action behind a variety of political functions and institutions. Yet he himself has noted the absence of a personalist and decision-making quality in his central concept of the people (Political Theology, I.46). Where he differs from the German Staatslehre is that, unlike Jellinek et al., he posits the need to have an entity that can successfully identify itself with the people in order to have a popular decision at all (ibid., I.10, 49). That is where the biggest trouble lies.
“Extraction” and “regeneration” (and therefore proscription) as the production of the supposedly constitution-making subject are the highest tasks of sovereign dictatorship in Schmitt’s original interpretation, higher than even the production of the constitution. As I will show below, this idea will be taken over by Ernesto Laclau. In Schmitt’s case, dictatorship is still in the name of the true sovereign or rather its placeholder, the pouvoir constituant, and in appearance it is commissioned by the people. There is not, however, nor can there be, an actual act of commissioning by the ideal body of the people, whose general will is identified not as the fallible will of all but as one that cannot err. This will must be represented, empirically speaking, by the will of a minority or even of one man! (Die Diktatur, 120). If there is commissioning, or authorization, it comes close to self-commissioning or self-authorization. The empirical people is either not a person, unlike the monarch, with a will (Political Theology, I.48–49) or, less likely, it has a will that only corresponds to that of the monarch’s natural body, which could be in error. This is perhaps why the pouvoir constituant of the people is not initially identified with sovereignty as such, implying that the ideal unity is not a person with a will. Its sovereignty is at best latent, and its powers are given to, or rather taken by, the sovereign dictator. While the pouvoir constituant and sovereign dictator may not be omnipotent, they are both unlimited and illimitable.18
Thus, in sovereign dictatorship uniquely, and (I think) absurdly, dictatorship is exercised also over the entity that supposedly commissions it and is the source of its legitimacy (Die Diktatur, xix).19 How much difference does it make that this is supposed to be only dictatorship and not sovereignty itself? The temporal limitation Schmitt implies may turn out to be illusory as already in France in 1793 and then in Russia in 1918. It is true, with the regeneration of the people as expressed, legally speaking, by the full enactment of a constitution, even sovereign dictatorship is supposed to come to an end. Here, however, the classical concept of dictatorship is under strain because regeneration may be time-consuming, and who is to say when it is completed? Even the enactment of a constitution, as in 1793, need not mean full regeneration since the emergency definition of the gouvernement revolutionaire as in place “till the peace” refers to both the external and the internal enemy. The difficulty is even more clearly illustrated by the example of the dictatorship of the proletariat that has no strict time limits in any Marxian version. Even this motif, I should add, is theological, with the sovereign dictatorship exercised by a quasi-church waiting for “the end of time.”
The two Schmittian works that treat the constituent power are not fundamentally different in their conception. First, in both, the theory of constituent power is understood as the secularization of the notion of God as the “potestas constituens” (Verfassungslehre, 77). Yet, well before Blumenberg, both texts comprehend that political theology is not simply theology since the people can neither fully replace God nor create a constitution alone; nor is a constitution the whole of social life. And second, because here, as elsewhere,20 Schmitt sees no tension or fundamental contradiction between dictatorship and democracy, and even states that dictatorship is possible only on democratic foundations (Verfassungslehre, 236–37) in distinction to the republican but hardly democratic earlier theory of the commissarial dictatorship. The key here, obviously, is an understanding of democracy in plebiscitary terms as a fundamentally public possibility of acclamation. But most importantly, third, because the newer conception of constituent power is such that all the elements are still there that require dictatorship: the friend-enemy conception of the political requiring “the extraction of the people from the people,” the unclarity of the will, the disorganization of its agent, the possibility of error and falsification on the one hand, and the indivisibility, purity, creativity, incapability of error of the people’s ideal body on the other. I would even say finally that the need for a disguise for a fundamentally authoritarian politics was there in both texts. Originally this need was answered by the Roman concept of dictatorship, but in spite of Schmitt’s notable and sophisticated scholarly effort, this remained suspicious because of his own new concept of sovereign dictatorship, as well as the stubborn, more modern meaning of the same term as a permanent regime that Schmitt was in any case closer to conceding in the Verfassungslehre.21 There, the theologically constructed democratic language replacing the republican one is the main answer to the need for disguise.22
Political Theology as a Ladder to the Political
Political theology generally accomplishes the move from the king to the people within a “two bodies” doctrine. In the case of monarchy, the doctrine was developed primarily in a constitutionalist, or at least anti-absolutist, direction through the postulate of an abstract body transcending the will of an individual man, namely the king. Transferring the model to the people, however, its immediate implications are antidemocratic.23 As the distinction between general will and the will of all shows, the point here is to devalue, and abstract from what the population actually and empirically wants, to the benefit of another will. To Claude Lefort, this transference is accomplished by “the fantasmagoria of popular power” contemporaneous with, but in contradiction to, the invention of democratic politics in modern revolutions.
In no other author does the “two bodies” scheme taken from Kantorowicz play a more important role than in the work of Lefort. This should not be understood as Lefort’s clinging to a medieval form of thought, to a political theology.24 In Lefort’s case, the effort produced not a political theology, but a process of learning from it that goes beyond its limits.25 For Lefort, political theology is a ladder to use and to leave behind. It is not an instrument to either disguise or justify domination as alternately for Schmitt, or the ever-present condition of the possibility of liberal democracy. The key here is the insistence on the symbolic dimension, and the idea of the empty space of (symbolic) power that political theology helps to discover, but under democratic regimes also to misconstrue. The insights nevertheless gained can be abandoned in a democracy only at the cost of authoritarian populism (if the space is filled), or worse: totalitarian re-incarnation (if the spatial position is entirely obliterated).26 The scheme is one of a no longer theological dualism; in other words, it is the affirmation of transcendence without a transcending entity that could be imagined as a body.27
Lefort first relied on political theology to show that, historically, the model of what he calls political science cannot account for the workings of power that require symbolic projections of legitimacy. Without this level, politics may be possible, but not the understanding of the political, defined as the activity and interpretation that establish and reproduce the most fundamental institutions of society.28 These institutions are founded in never fully accessible metanormative structures, deep-seated, unconscious assumptions that, without being normative themselves, determine the meaning of truth, justice, law within a social-political order as a whole. For Lefort, this idea of the political, very different from Schmitt’s friend-enemy polarity, is the key to different political forms or regimes. Lefort consistently maintains throughout that pure immanence—in other words, a purely human world or even society—is ontologically and historically impossible (Democracy and Political Theory [DPT], 229, 254). The “two bodies” metaphor is important to him in order to establish the space where counterfactual norms or symbolic metanorms that transcend the real could be located within a political model of legitimacy, initially a political theology. Even the will of a sacerdotal monarch thereby comes under what this will ought to be, in other words, under law. In the case of kingship for the efficacy of the symbolic, both the identification of the symbol with a body, and their constitutive difference are important. The king can represent unity both because he stands for much more than simply a concrete human body, and because he is also a human body. As the figure of Christ, he mediates, in other words, between the bodily and the symbolic, though as Blumenberg would stress for a different, more immanent end. Lefort is above all concerned with the survival of the modality of thinking that we have already seen in Schmitt, the replacement of king by the people’s two bodies.29 Here he notices, however, that the lack of an identifiable unitary body as in the case of the king can lead in the opposite direction: the search for a new embodiment.
Lefort’s analysis of Michelet in particular shows that, in the case of the people as well as the king, it was possible to postulate both symbolic embodiment and physical incarnation, thus the symbolic meaning as well as the presence of the symbol but without the full identity of these dimensions. The empirical people is again seen, as in Rousseau, as fallible and open to manipulation, here also open to demagogy and capable of senseless violence. Yet “the people” is seen as a subject and an actor in the streets and assemblies of Paris, moving the revolutionary process forward with intense energy. To Lefort, this construct represents adding yet another figure to the dualisms reconstructed by Kantorowicz, preserving a partially overlapping theological structure. It is Michelet who clings to a medieval figure of thought. According to Lefort, in spite of Michelet’s attacks on the theologians of politics, both monarchical and popular, his conception is a political theology. But he explicitly does not stay with Michelet and the people’s two bodies. Lefort speaks of the obvious weakness of Michelet’s argument that starts with but is not restricted to an “outrageous simplification of Christianity.” It is that very simplification that helps to produce the mistaken impression that democracy involves a mere repetition of historical forms (DPT, 248). Lefort, while learning from the genealogy of the two bodies, insists that democracy represents a fundamental break with it (DPT, 255). The gap between the symbolic and the real is now much greater and can no longer be mediated by a single subject with two bodies. The transcendent space is still there, but it cannot be occupied as long as democracy survives. This means two things: first, that there is no democracy without symbolic reference, one that cannot be reduced, as in the realistic theory, to the concrete description of its workings. Thus the lessons learned from religion and political theology should not be forgotten. It also means, second, that instead of replacing God by people, the theological notion of the people must be abandoned altogether. Thus we have to break with all political theology.
The key to the last step is Lefort’s analysis of the concept of the people in the French Revolution.30 “No more God-People” he exclaims, twice quoting Edgar Quinet.31 Lefort, while not entirely consistent in his usage, sees the people and popular sovereignty as paradoxical: in the moment of their emergence they either lose their identity and become anonymous, or dissolve in mere number and, more importantly, division (DPT, 227, 230–32). Given an only “latent” identity, as well as empirical multiplicity, and multiple dimensions, as a subject or subjects, the people can be defined only in a “juridical construction” (DPT, 230). By juridical, I think he means more than the legal equality of the members of democratic society, but also various more active possibilities: the people as the majority of an election according to various rules, or a referendum or any other participatory process procedurally provided for, including the diffuse processes of the public sphere that also must be legally constituted. As he has argued in several pieces dealing with the French Revolution, to insist on the people as the (prelegal, preconstitutional) subject of revolutionary politics leads to absurd paradoxes we have seen in Schmitt, like the idea of “the extraction of the people from the people,” or the project of the regeneration of the agent that is the very source of the authority of this operation, its own midwife.32 Or, “the people ask their delegation to give birth to them but the delegation is part of the people.” Lefort calls this idea “triply absurd” because it presupposes that the operation is needed because the people are crushed, yet able to delegate and imagine a freedom that they have never experienced.33
It could be said that the people in its very indeterminacy and latency as well as divisions means the empty space, but Lefort’s own analysis shows that it is difficult to restrict it to this merely negative meaning. Nor is it easy to replace normative foundations by an ontological conception of the symbolic. While the difference is subtle, Lefort does not simply restate the formulation of the German Staatslehre and Carre de Malberg of popular sovereignty as national, as merely another, symbolically elevated face of the state where the people or the nation appear as hidden God incapable of any embodiment by any political organ. For Lefort, following Furet, while the space is empty, in the Revolution at least there was a continual struggle to occupy it. Edmund Morgan has documented the same process for the English and American Revolutions.34 According to Lefort, it becomes impossible to say “which group, which assembly, which meeting, which consensus was the trustee of the people’s word.” At the moment when the existence of a new legitimate power is declared, fully united and self-identical, it becomes impossible to identify it. Yet the attempt is made possible by assertions of identity and unity. The failure of each claimant and the revolutionary terror directed at all of them are testimony that all such claims can only be usurpations in a democracy.35 I think Lefort is forced to admit this struggle not only on historical grounds, but also because he is not satisfied with a purely negative principle of legitimacy that would make modern democracy too precarious. Thus his rejection of the notion of popular sovereignty is equivocal. Yet it is this very semantics that produces the conflicts with and within the democratic principle as he has defined it. Emptiness is in itself not a normative desideratum, and popular sovereignty on the face of it implies a stronger normative figure: the rule of the whole people only by itself.
Lefort, I think, neglects the question of democratic legitimacy because to him it is the symbolic that on a deeper level determines which type of legitimacy is possible at all for a given regime. He puts the idea of popular sovereignty in doubt without seeking to replace it. The empty space of power means the symbolic establishment of division and contestation rather than unity and absence of conflict. As the key to the integration of democratic politics, it is defined above all by a discourse of a power that belongs to or is embodied by no one, and that defines the exercise of power as a periodic contest (DPT, 226). This symbolic structure leads to a scheme of plural legitimating possibilities, rather than the monistic scheme of populism based on popular sovereignty and identification. But he knows that only institutionalization allows the distinction of the democratic contest for power, from the use of violence on behalf as well as against attempted usurpation. Is such institutionalization possible without some at least implicit consensus on legitimacy?
Division and conflict as ultimate principles no longer belong to political theology. Beyond the still theological dualism of ideal unity and empirical division, Lefort’s proposal involves an ideal framing of conflict, where plurality rather than even duality is the fundamental principle. This step can occur only with the defeat of the revolutionary imaginary in processes of transformation and institutionalization.36 As against a certain Schmittian interpretation of Lefort,37 I would argue that this notion is not incompatible with the ideas of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Conflict has to be institutionalized if it is not to mean dualistic friend-enemy relations or a pluralistic war of all against all, which, given the notion of popular sovereignty in the French Revolution, led to the Terror. Each, seeing itself as the people, sought to eradicate all others defined as the enemy what ever the appearances. To avoid such a logic requires fundamental rights and the separation of powers, as Lefort repeatedly states, and not only de facto social pluralism. But the model also presupposes a constitutionalist constitution, though not necessarily a written one. It requires a constitution having at least a minimal symbolic consensus, in any case more than a mere modus vivendi that may be the way it is first established, after revolutionary struggles, for example, or pre-empting these, but remains contingent on given constellations of power.38 The constitution presupposes and seeks to conserve social diversity rather than aiming at unity and unification. As to popular sovereignty, if one still wishes to retain the idea of bodies, than it must be the multiple39 rather than two or even three bodies40 of “the” people. It must involve the legalization of each supposed body. But the survival of the definite article “the” even here indicates the danger that a temporary incarnation expressing one valid perspective will be propagated and accepted as the only valid one. Even if Lefort is right that the claim itself is not a problem, claims and counterclaims of this type, each claiming to be judge in its own cause, if taken sufficiently seriously, can be adjudicated only by violence. Thus it may be best to go beyond incarnation altogether, as Lefort and Habermas both repeatedly suggest,41 and replace the idea of popular sovereignty by that of democracy that can be defined only in procedural terms, the notion of the people in the singular by a model of pluralistic legitimation. Such a model would have learned from political theology the importance of the political without replacing one theological scheme by another.
Populism as Disguised Political Theology
There is little question that Schmitt, both an analyst and adept of political theology, is partially right: sovereignty and the constituent power are commonly used as political theological concepts. But he neglects the possibility that these now secular concepts can be further secularized and thereby detheologized.42 The theory of populism of Ernesto Laclau heads precisely in the opposite direction. Taking a political category—namely, “populism”—that despite its well-known ambiguities and multiplicity of forms describes a shifting set of very real and very stubborn empirical phenomena,43 he theologizes it and strongly affirms the theological structure he secretly introduces.44 This can be shown precisely in relation to Schmitt’s political theology, which Laclau either assumes, without a single citation, or rediscovers in his desire to justify and disguise his own version of authoritarian politics. The frontier of antagonism of Laclau is Schmitt’s friend/enemy conception of politics.45 The stress on symbolic representation is a return to Schmitt. Above all, Laclau’s populism involves the extrication of the people from the empirical people by an evidently plebescitarian form of leadership. This conception is also squarely rooted in the theological “two bodies” conception, one that is explicitly affirmed (On Populist Reason [OPR], 170).46
As against the unmentioned Schmitt, Laclau seems to be relying only on Lefort’s idea of the people’s two bodies, traced by the latter to authors such as Michelet.47 But contrary to Lefort, Laclau refuses to leave this construct behind. While the “two bodies” conception applied to the people represents to Lefort only a ladder that must be thrown away once fully ascended, Laclau formulates his model of populism exactly in these terms. Thus, in spite of important points of contact, Laclau reverses Lefort’s emphasis precisely on the question of political theology.
The positive link with Lefort is not the trivial one having to do with equality and equalization mentioned by Laclau (OPR, 165).48 In fact, the notion of the political (le politique) as the activity that consciously aims at the institution of society, constantly redefining it, is inherited from Lefort (and with a slightly different terminology, from the more radical, revolutionary version of Castoriadis). Like Lefort, Laclau has little theoretical interest in politics (la politique), which he ultimately identifies with social action, defined as rule following or acting within unchallenged rules, or what he refers to as merely institutional action. The political, on the other hand, is seen as foundational and creative. But, and this is a big but, Laclau identifies the political with populism (OPR, 99, 117, 222, 231–32), even if occasionally and inconsistently populism appears as only one of its forms.49 It is in this context that Lefort is attacked for tending to identify populism with totalitarianism and both with the obliteration of the political. Note, however, that populism is not mentioned by the cited Lefort text, and it is Laclau himself who, rightly, applies to populism some of the features of Lefort’s totalitarianism: “power is embodied in a group … in a single individual … the development of the fantasy of the People-as-One etc.” (OPR, 165–66).
Laclau is undoubtedly right: populism and totalitarianism should not be conflated even if there are “totalitarian” forms of populism. Lefort’s concepts allow us to make the distinction between occupying the empty place of symbolic power, and obliterating the distance between the symbolic and the real. Totalitarianism does both, while populism only the former. But Laclau is also right to suspect that for Lefort the populist move in itself represents a threat to democracy.50 It is on this point that he wishes to refute Lefort.
And it is not only a question here of populist inclusion that can have the democratic effect of broadening the community of “citizenship,” the achievement of a democratic result by nondemocratic means.51 Laclau wishes to treat the means itself as a fundamentally democratic one in the sense of the construction of popular subjects. But this move represents insistence on the concept of popular sovereignty that Lefort subjected to serious critique, rather than on democracy. It is meaningless to say that democracy need not be understood as a form of regime. More deeply, Laclau abandons Lefort’s definition of democracy as the emptiness of the place of power and the process of institutionally securing its emptiness. The political space can be and even must be filled, at least “partially” (what ever that means), and emptiness reappears only on the ideological level as the “empty signifier” that only superficially—on the level of naming—keeps something of Lefort’s conception. The empty signifier’s stress is on unity rather than plurality. In all versions, it refers to the unification of heterogeneous demands around admittedly vague, symbolic contents that obliquely refer to a utopian condition of total social unity, homogeneity, and reconciliation. Such contents can be an idea like justice or equality, or a person like Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger and Juan Perón, but in all cases they must be carried and promoted by a partial social reference group—“the plebs” or the “underdog”—that identifies itself with “the people as a whole,” the populus.
The concept of a part that represents the whole is inherited from the Marx of 1843,52 who most likely was reflecting on and radicalizing the conception of Sieyes in “What Is the Third Estate?” But in Laclau it is no longer the logic of history that will turn the exclusion of “the plebs” or the “underdog” into the representative of the people as a whole. In effect, the alternative concept of democracy we get is one of the empowerment of a weakly identified subsection of the population through rhetorical devices bereft of rationality. Moreover, given the likely heterogeneity (at times confused with mere difference) even of the partial group, unification by an abstract utopian reference is depicted as insufficient. An empty signifier is a reference point, a name that constitutes reality, but it is not an agent or a subject capable of decision and action. Thus even when a populist movement is not immediately identified with the empty signifier of a leader’s name (as in “Peronism”), leadership seems essential (OPR, 99–100).53 Here we have an example of double embodiment, or the application of the king’s two bodies to the ideal body—redoubling it and bringing it back to a physical incarnation. Thus while the partial group embodies the whole, the leader embodies the partial group, with a “three bodies” conception as the result.
Clearly, Laclau explicitly rejects Lefort’s ban against embodiment. The king’s two bodies continue to operate in democratic societies, but now in terms of a triple scheme: the leader, the extracted groups, and the universal reference that is an empty name (OPR, 170).54 He does not understand embodiment only as an empirical phenomenon necessitated by the inability to identify the people or the pueblo, “a profoundly vague” concept.55 For him, embodiment in leadership is the highly desirable constitution of a popular subject that otherwise would fall back into mere difference.56 Why the filling of the empty space by leadership in this conception is said to be only partial remains unclear. Laclau does not have in mind the highly precarious and inevitably temporary nature of empirical attempts to embody, that remain open to critique precisely in the name of democracy. This was a logic described by Furet, Lefort, and Morgan, consistent with the concept of emptiness. The emptiness of the democratic space, reproduced by institutions and discourses, is deeply inhospitable to all and any efforts at embodiment. Laclau, however, unlike Morgan, is not only an analyst of the fictional use of the concept of the people; he is also an advocate of the fiction and of the political construction of fictions.57
As this conception is developed, the model of the political is contaminated. The process of “the extraction of the people” is incompatible even with the process of inclusion stressed by all ideologists of populism. Some are included, while others are immediately excluded, and worse. What Laclau constructs as equivalence among those who are different, and even heterogeneous, is possible only if a radical “frontier of antagonism” is constructed within society. Equivalence is attained only in common opposition to those who would deny otherwise heterogeneous demands. The political as the foundational is replaced by the idea of friend-enemy relations. The vagueness of the ideology is compensated for by the intensity of antagonism. The absence of real identity is made up for by affective, libidinal ties, “love” for the leader and love for all those whom the leader supposedly loves (OPR, 53–56, 82–83).
The conception is Schmittian also in its reliance on Hobbes. As sociology from Durkheim to Parsons has been at pains to point out, Hobbesian atomism excludes the notion of the social. The social is absent in Laclau as well. Atomized individuals (even if replaced by atomized “demands”) are united only politically. Referring to Hobbes, Laclau’s notion of leadership has exactly this function, even if he supplements the Hobbesian sword (OPR, 88, 100) with what he presents as Freudian love. This can be most clearly seen through his notion of representation. After calling Hannah Pitkin’s “still the best theoretical treatment of the notion of representation,” he proceeds (OPR, 159) to reduce her complex, fivefold theory of representation to one of its dimensions primarily, namely symbolic representation, reinforced by an element of Hobbesian “authorization view.”58 It is thus that he cites the notion that a dictator can be as or a better representative than an elected member of parliament because of his emotional, that is, charismatic, powers.59 As he knows, this was hardly Pitkin’s final word on the subject: rather, it indicated her critique of the reduction to symbolic representation. This critique is explicitly rejected by Laclau, who, in spite of a lame attempt60 to repeat Pitkin’s view of fascism as “the extreme form of symbolic representation,” in fact returns to precisely Schmitt’s protofascist understanding, derived from both the symbolic and institutional practice of the Catholic Church, derisively juxtaposed to mere interest representation, or Vertretung. The idea is that of a symbol or an official symbolically incorporating an absence, the cross for Christ, or the pope for the Church’s ideal body. When reinforced by the Hobbesian absolute authorization, this position combines the unlimited power of the “representative” with the emotional attachment of the represented.
Laclau rejects Pitkin’s idea that an empirical case of representation can be judged according to normative criteria (whether there are good reasons for accepting a given leader), and produces the purely Hobbesian counterargument that the criteria can be formed only within and by representation and never outside of it (OPR, 161).61 This argument, however, is false for any but the most closed and least differentiated society.62 Given Laclau’s refusal to ask normative and critical questions concerning the validity of a form of representation, it is futile and self-contradictory that he implies that there is a spectrum of possibilities between purely top-down and purely bottom-up forms of representation, that representation is a two sided phenomenon. The point is right, but he has no way to judge any option within this scheme as preferable to any other, especially as he abandoned Pitkin’s other forms of representation. With the assumption of Hobbesian “radical disorder” or radical heterogeneity, order and homogenization can only move from the representative to the represented. Since the latter’s very identity and unity is said to be constituted by representation, the idea of a two-way movement is a subterfuge. A reverse movement from the represented to the representative could only be satisfied by missing links such as accountability, whether electoral or judicial, or similitude, or public pressure and influence, and most radically by direct democratic devices such as imperative mandate and recall. All such mediations well discussed by Pitkin are missing if not in all populist movements, certainly in Laclau following the paths of Hobbes and Schmitt.
Hobbes is Laclau’s key not only forward to Schmitt, but also back to Lenin in the most voluntaristic version. He abandons not only the Marxian notion of class, as he should, but any plausible sociological alternatives (whether stratum, group, association, corporate entity, movement, etc.) seen as concepts with a content juxtaposed to empty, but constitutive, names.63 Thus we are left with what Merleau-Ponty called ultra-Bolshevism in reference to the early Sartre.64 Sartre in the 1950s argued in light of what he took to be the empirical situation of the working class that only the party can produce unity and universality where there is empirically only heterogeneity and particularism, a heap of dust or sand particles, separated rather than unified by primitive need (The Communists and Peace, [CP] 130, 216).65 Reproducing the Hobbesian argument that Laclau too will use, Sartre argued that the least division within the organ that unifies would reproduce the dispersion. The splitting up of the proletariat would mean the “breaking apart of popular sovereignty” (CP 228). Thus leadership becomes essential, logically that of ultimately one person, leadership that, according to Sartre, must incarnate the unity of the group that is an unattainable ideal even with the suppression of dissent and minorities he sees as essential (CP 216–17, 222–23). Collective consciousness is impossible as “group mind”; to exist, it must necessarily be incarnated in leadership. Leaders are dictatorial because the group has supposedly chosen them to exercise dictatorship over each member.
As Sartre had a real point against orthodox Marxism’s economistic or historical deterministic or even neo-Hegelian derivations of the unity and consciousness of the proletariat, Laclau has one against Žižek and Negri as well. A political theology of immanence based on a Hegelian identical subject object, or a Spinozian agency (proletariat or multitude) has no plausibility anymore, whether sociological or political. He is right in suspecting that the invocations of the proletariat or the multitude are not based on any coherent sociology of groups and movements. But the answer—to constitute exactly the same type of actor now called “the people,” a historical subject entirely voluntaristically, by uttering a name, as in magic, and embodying that name in a leader with emotional ties to the masses—is only somewhat less implausible and is definitely more dangerous.66 It is, in any case, a political theology.67 More importantly, politically, the construct reeks of manipulation, what Rosa Luxemburg as well as the young Trotsky strongly criticized as “substitutionism,” radicalized in Sartre’s “ultra-bolshevism” of a certain period.68 In 1905, Trotsky already accurately foretold the likely result: one-person dictatorship. It does not help that, contra Hobbes, the unification by the leader in Laclau’s version is supposed to be linked to the constitution of a revolutionary subject of action, rather than final outcome, namely “actual ruling” or regime. Here Lenin was more consistent and frankly admitted that the point of constituting a political vanguard was to establish a dictatorship (whether first the “democratic dictatorship” of workers and peasants, or later the party). At least, he believed that there was a logic in history that would make such a regime eventually obsolete along with the state. Laclau neither shares this optimism nor tells us why the elective affinity between dictatorial movement and dictatorship as regime should not be seen as very strong, even if the linkage is said to be not “automatic” (OPR, 100).
How do we sell such ultra-bolshevism69 today, in an age when dictatorship seems to be fully discredited? You can certainly not do so in terms of the language inherited from Lacan, like the concepts of objet petit a and mother’s milk, which seem to me unnecessary even to Laclau’s conception.70 These are, politically speaking, only curiosities that most readers will quickly forget. It is otherwise with the language of political theology, with deep roots in some versions of Marxism, and capable of mobilizing strong religious-type sentiments. It is indeed striking that religious movements and mobilizations do not already play a significant role in Laclau’s conception, though they would eminently qualify, at least as long as carried by subaltern agents. Political theology, however, treats as religious all the movements on which it focuses. There is, moreover, not a critical word concerning religion in Laclau’s text, and the political theologists he criticizes, mainly Žižek and Negri, are attacked only because they have the wrong political theology, based on immanence rather than transcendence (OPR, 239–44.). It is their followers along with other leftists who are the main target of a work whose language evidently does not seek to speak to populist movements and their potential participants: the addressees are intellectuals who are open to the secularized religious character of (some) movements, and who are invited to give up one political theology for another.
That Laclau’s political theology is of the transcendent type is already indicated by his revival of the king’s “two bodies” metaphor. The old image drawn from Sieyes and Constant, and repeated by Arendt and Lefort, that absolutism put the king in the place of God, and the revolution similarly replaced the king by the people is also repeated here, but this time with a positive evaluation. The people as a whole is a transcendent God; it is never present or visible in its full universality and completion. It is an absent or a hidden God, “an absent fullness” (85). It does not matter a whole lot that this is seen as failed or not full-fledged transcendence (244). Since Laclau assumes Kantorowicz’s Christological metaphor, that which is absent is and must be made present by incarnation. The people’s three bodies are present as different levels of embodiment. The plebs and the leader are representative symbols that make present the “fullness” that must remain transcendent. “The fullness of communitarian being is very much present for them as that which is absent” (OPR, 94, 223). It is in and by the name of the transcendent that the levels of incarnation are constituted, but only through incarnation can constitution by a name be successful. The ontological argument for the existence of God is reinvented in a nominalist form, “the people” is a name whose uttering establishes its reality (OPR, 105–6; 108). For this reality to be active, however, mediations are needed, and this is possible only through representative symbols that produce affective identification with bodies that can act. The invisible Church must be embodied in the visible one.
Act to do what? In this conception, populism, as noted, shares the logic of the political, or rather is that logic, and this consists in confronting and challenging the established institutions of society. This, however, is a critical but not yet theological function. The step to theological expectation, already contained in Marxian theories of revolution as shown by Karl Loewith, lies in the notion of a transcendent place, a new ordering of the social realm. “The fullness of the community is merely the imaginary reverse of a situation lived as deficient being” (OPR, 86). What Laclau shares with his forerunners is the idea of this political transcendence as a rupture with all previous orderings. Where he departs from them is the frankly assumed sociological emptiness of the notion, and the rather Kantian idea that transcendence can never be achieved: “a just society … exists only ideally” (OPR, 94). The goal is nothing, the movement is everything, even if Laclau would not appreciate the reference to Eduard Bernstein. That there is no concrete political project here (unlike in the case of Bernstein) is certainly not due to Laclau’s inability to conceive of one, but to the ideological heterogeneity of populisms, as well as the sociological heterogeneity of each populist movement drawing on incompatible demands that can never be reconciled in his own presentation. The vagueness of populist ideologies is one result, one that Laclau affirms without declaring his allegiance to any of them. The likely possibility of moving from one populism to another is explicitly admitted by Laclau’s theory of the floating signifier (OPR, 88, 129–38). This conception shows that on Laclau’s grounds it is impossible to normatively distinguish among different populist movements as long as, I suppose, they organize the underdog. From the point of view of any of them, the only defense against “floating” is rhetorical and emotional success. The very vagueness of the empty signifier, of a mere name, means scant mobilizing power without being embodied in groups and leaders with whom affective, rhetorically produced ties can replace the missing rationality. This is all the more important when key segments of the movement discover (as he is forced to admit) that their interests cannot be represented, that their demands must be suppressed.71
Religion in politics can play different and even contrary roles. It can serve authoritarian repression, but also the causes of liberation.72 Even the secular state needed the help of religion to be first instituted in North America.73 With political theology we face a potentially more dangerous enemy of freedom. It would be an exaggeration to claim that all modern political theology serves and disguises authoritarian politics. Margaret Canovan’s sophisticated analysis of the concept of the people, which ends with a surprising rehabilitation of myth and a frankly political theological appeal to faith and redemption in “secular” politics, receives its inspiration from Arendt rather than Schmitt, from council communism rather than Lenin.74 Her theology is that of the miraculous ruptures of freedom for which the admiring analyst can only wait in hopeful expectation. Not only is there no way to facilitate or engineer these revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary breaks in the continuum of institutional time, but there is little hope in their permanent institutionalization, or overcoming the straightjacket of normal politics.75 The best that can be done from this posture is to recommend a normalization of the role of the extraordinary in an ultimately procedural model, such as Ackerman’s.76 But when one totally rejects even this version of proceduralism and opts for an interventionist political posture, as do Schmitt and Laclau, the authoritarian consequences of political theology may be unavoidable, intended or not. To put a human actor like “the class” or “the people” or “the leader” in the place formerly occupied by theological or religious categories like “God” or “Christ” or “pope” means not only to endow the former with the quality of sacredness, but to attribute to them supernatural traits that the empirical referent cannot sustain. In the face of such constructs, not only the dehumanization of the inevitable enemies follows, but also the need to extricate the genuine agent from its empirical forms. Not only external, but internal enemies follow from the conception, one that thus entails authoritarian suppression. Not only the leader and his or her group, but the analyst participates in that suppression, at the very least by giving tools and useful disguises to a power that can never succeed if forced to act merely in its own name. Political theology, at least the type represented by Schmitt and Laclau, is what Machiavelli’s Prince was wrongly assumed to be: justification of dictatorship.77
Notes
1. Or that exists only as myth. See Margaret Canovan’s outstanding The People (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2005), which is admittedly less hostile to mythology in modern politics than I am. I do believe that her critique of the equally excellent Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People (New York: Norton, 1988), is unfair and incorrect.
2. Nor do I mean every possible use of religion and theology proper in politics, the broad meaning implied by the volume Political Theologies: Public Religions in the Post-Secular World, ed. H. de Vries and L. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). With the proviso below, I am using the term in Carl Schmitt’s sense of the secularization of monotheistic religious concepts for political theory and practice.
3. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), pt. 1. See also the strong introduction by Robert M. Wallace.
4. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” (New York: Picador, 2003), 74–80.
5. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (1957; Prince ton, N.J.: Prince ton University Press, 1981).
6. Certainly a better example than Blumenberg’s two other targets: Loewith’s theses concerning the origins of “progress” or Weber’s ideal typical derivation of the spirit of capitalism.
7. Carl Schmitt, Die Diktatur (Berlin: Duncke & Humblot, 1921). I am using the 6th edition Dictatorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014). Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
8. In Latin: dictator legibus faciendis et rei publicae constituendae causa (dictator for the making of laws and founding the republic).
9. See John McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chap. 3, esp. 133.
10. Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncke and Humblot, 1993).
11. Andreas Kalyvas, in Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 92–94, 97, 133, etc. The term sovereign dictatorship and the emphasis of the dictatorial pattern of constitution making do return in the Verfassungslehre, even if now less frequently given the change of topics (see esp. Verfassungslehre, 59–60).
12. This is still called omnipotence in Political Theology I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 43, but to be replaced already in that work by a theology of the miracle, understood as the exception.
13. This formulation is slightly altered in the Verfassungslehre, 79.
14. Claude Lefort, “The Revolutionary Terror,” in Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 79, hereafter cited as DPT.
15. Schmitt has made this point himself in The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) after again denouncing the “superficial political theology” of the omnipotence of the state (Der Begriff Des Politischen [Berlin: Duncke and Humblot, 2002], 42–43). See Political Theology I, where he presented the theological conception of universal guilt, implying the division [Einteilung] of the saved and the damned, a model for the friend-enemy concept of the political (63–64).
16. In Concept of the Political, this idea is maintained in terms of the declaration and proscription of the internal enemy (46–47).
17. Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996).
18. The difference between omnipotence and being unlimited is that between theology and political theology, or between superficial and serious political theology.
19. Lefort points to a triple absurdity in “The Revolutionary Terror,” in DPT, 79. See note 33 below.
20. Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988).
21. See Franz Neumann, “Notes on the Theory of Dictatorship,” in The Democratic and Authoritarian State (New York: Free Press, 1957); and my “Conceptual History of Dictatorship (and Its Rivals),” in Critical Theory and Democracy, ed. E. Peruzzotti and M. Plot (London: Routledge, 2013), 208–81.
22. That it is a disguise still can be shown in the very terms of Schmitt’s own theory, his discussion of representation and government. In all states, there must be some who can say l’état c’est nous (Verfassungslehre, 207).
23. As already seems to be the case in Marsilius of Padua, that was perhaps the first to inaugurate the synecdochial move pars pro toto in his concept of the “pars valentior” (see Franz Neumann, “Types of Natural Law,” in The Democratic and Authoritarian State [New York: Free Press, 1957], 78).
24. Such a criticism would be right in the case of an author like Lior Barshack. See his “Constituent Power as Body: Outline of a Constitutional Theology,” University of Toronto Law Journal 57, no. 1 (2006): 185–221.
25. “Rather than seeing democracy as a new episode in the transfer of the religious into the political, should we not conclude … that the theological and the political became divorced” (Claude Lefort, “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?,” in DPT, 255).
26. I agree with Ernesto Laclau that Lefort tended at times to operate with the rigid alternative of democracy and totalitarianism, leaving no room for anything in between. On this, see below.
27. This transcendence is similar in my interpretation of the lifeworld of Habermas, with the proviso common to both authors that while any of its dimensions will be potentially open to reflection, there will always be others that must fundamentally elude us.
28. The best treatment of Lefort’s political thought is Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005).
29. On this, see also Morgan, Inventing the People; and Pasquale Pasquino, “Constitution et pouvoir constituant: Le double corps du people,” unpublished lecture (May 2004).
30. See Lefort’s 1980 essay “Interpreting Revolution in the French Revolution,” in DPT. This analysis relied on François Furet’s Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1978), with both predating Morgan’s partially parallel treatment in Inventing the People.
31. Lefort, “Edgar Quinet: The Revolution That Failed” (1983), in DPT, 134.
32. See Lefort, “The Revolutionary Terror,” in DPT, 79, as well as “Interpreting the Revolution within the French Revolution, in DPT, 107–8. Beyond François Furet, the most important source of this argument is Edgar Quinet (“Edgar Quinet: The Revolution That Failed,” in DPT).
33. Lefort, “The Revolutionary Terror,” in DPT, 79.
34. See Morgan, Inventing the People.
35. Thus Lefort, I think mistakenly, and in a contradictory fashion, at times sees the reign of terror as ultimately democratic (Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort, 138, 244–45) because it is directed at keeping the place of power empty, as against usurpations. But he equally says that the logic of the terror springs from the need to extract the People from the people (ibid., 135) that highlights the authoritarian dimension.
36. See my “Lefort as the Philosopher of 1989,” in Constellations 19, no. 1 (2012): 23–29.
37. See Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (New York: Routledge, 2005).
38. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2nd edition, 2005), whose notions of modus vivendi and overlapping consensus remain unsurpassed.
39. See Neil Walker’s essay “Post Constituent Constitutionalism? The Case of the European Union,” in The Paradox of Constitutionalism, ed. Martin Loughlin and Walker (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2007).
40. The “two bodies” conception becomes a “three bodies” one when the representation of the ideal segment of the people—“the plebs” or “underdog” in Laclau—becomes a problem to the representation of the people as a whole. This happens with Lukacs’s theory of the party, and Laclau’s concept of leadership.
41. For one of the many places in Lefort, see “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?,” in DPT, 255. For Habermas, see “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure” (1988), in Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), where what is left from popular sovereignty is only decentered and temporally disaggregated, multiple procedures of largely informal democratic communication. Its formal preconditions are fundamental rights, and the associations of civil society form its organizational basis. Habermas repeatedly rejects the idea that popular sovereignty should refer to a collective body, or will or even a subject of any kind (472–73, 486–87). His communicative, desubstantialized translation of “the people” is convincing, but it is unclear why this should be called sovereignty at all (see also, for example, Between Facts and Norms, 136, 185, 300–301). Decentering in Habermas is similar to Lefort’s empty place. They both explicitly reject embodiment, which Habermas ascribes to “republican” conceptions.
42. Such further secularization in the dimension of the constituent power is the focus of my project, tentatively titled “Post Sovereign Constitution Making: From Practice to Theory.”
43. Laclau’s attempt to show that all previous definitions of populism failed shows an astonishing neglect of ideal type construction, which allows the departure of empirical cases from some of the components of a constructed type. Useful ideal typical definitions of populism have been offered by Margaret Canovan (The People, 80–90), focusing on the dialectic of part and whole in the concept of the people, and Carlos de la Torre (Populist Seduction in Latin America [Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010]), stressing a Manichean view of social struggle, with both insisting on the role of embodiment by leaders. These definitions are not weakened by the fact that some movements called populist have a more pluralistic view of the social field, or that some do not have major leaders.
44. Admittedly, the use of religious metaphors and pseudorituals is characteristic of many populisms themselves. This is well demonstrated with respect to Latin American cases by Carlos de la Torre in Populist Seduction, 11–12, 15, 65, 207, and elsewhere. Curiously, Laclau entirely neglects the religious or quasi-religious appeals of many populist movements. In reality, the theological turn in his thinking universalizes this phenomenon, to all populisms, and indeed the political.
45. Again, this figure of thought is characteristic of what de la Torre describes as the Manichean reductionism of all populisms, involving the confrontation of the two fundamentally antagonistic camps of el pueblo and la oligarquia that are both constructed as closed, unitary, and homogenous (ibid., 65). Laclau reflects this constant of populist discourse, and rejoins thereby Schmitt’s friend-enemy notion of the political.
46. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), hereafter cited as OPR. The reference here to a variety of bodies, as against one under the old regime, makes little sense in Laclau’s conception, which stresses unification and single-person leadership. The only way to interpret this “variety” is as three bodies: the empirical people, the part that embodies its will, and the leader’s body that unifies the part that still has heterogeneity in a modern society.
47. Other analysts of populism have also found Lefort’s ideas useful, whether the critique of the notion of the people, or the idea of the empty space that embodied leadership is presumed to fill (see de la Torre, Populist Seduction, 139–40; and Canovan, The People, 60).
48. This point is noticed, of all people, by Slavoj Žižek who for a moment seems to adopt the Lefortian conception of democracy, one entirely incompatible with his own Leninism (“A Leninist Gesture Today: Against the Populist Temptation,” in Lenin Reloaded [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007], 85). Many of Žižek’s critical points are entirely sound, if not the perspective that he himself represents. The notion that communism is not a populism, and that there is a fundamental difference between the Stalinist and fascist leader is untenable, and as far from Lefort as one could be (83). He should perhaps reread Lefort’s book on Solzhenitsyn, Un homme en trop (Paris: Seuil, 1976).
49. Laclau is quite explicit about this move: In his text “Populism: What’s in a Name?,” in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza (London: Verso, 2005), 47, he asks whether populism has become synonymous with politics, and writes: “the answer can only be affirmative. Populism means putting into question the institutional order by constructing an underdog as an historical agent—i.e. an agent which is an other in relation to the way things stand. But this is the same as politics.” (I thank Carlos de la Torre for this reference.) I think the text should have said the political, in spite of the fact that Castoriadis, who is being used without attribution, reversed the normal French usage and called the extraordinary version invented by the Greeks “politics” (la politique) (see “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy [Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1991]). It even goes too far to see populism, as does Žižek, as “long-term Fascist tendency” (“A Leninist Gesture Today,” 83).
50. Lefort, of course, could and would not deny the incorporating role of populism, by no means universal, that under a democracy would further extend the democratic logic. But with populist embodiment, the democratic institutions have been transformed in authoritarian directions, and the inclusion occurs in a polity that is not democratic. It is another matter that a future democracy could then rely on a more inclusive polity as a result. First, the populist transformation would have to be reversed.
51. This is the dimension stressed by many authors otherwise not sympathetic to populism, like de la Torre (Populist Seduction, 125–26). With this move, de la Torre is able to isolate a deeper reason for the populist phenomenon than crises whether due to development, the introduction or failure of import substitution, or the introduction or failure of neoliberalism. According to him, populism is rooted in the distance between the declaration of rights and of popular government, and the actual realities of Latin American politics where rights and participation are routinely denied to large segments of populations (124, 142–44). I take the following to be his conclusion, in spite of some serious ambivalence: “Populism will continue to challenge closed versions of democracy with authoritarian means that will further weaken democratic institutions” (216). Having identified populism with the political, Laclau never gives us an explanation of the type of politics populism represents.
52. Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: An Introduction.”
53. Thus the basically leaderless U.S. American version of populism does not fit into Laclau’s theory, even though he refers to it as a case.
54. This is not to be confused with a “multiple body” scheme such as that described in Neil Walker, “Post Constituent Constitutionalism?,” where each “body” of the people is given an organizational form, and where action is not understood as that of a hierarchically dominant body, as in Laclau.
55. de la Torre, Populist Seduction, 78, 139, 207.
56. This does not describe the situation of Solidarity with respect to Walesa or what Laclau produces as one of his examples, Mandela with respect to the ANC. Both organizations were highly organized even without their leaders (On Populist Reason, 100).
57. What he does can be most clearly seen in light of Margaret Canovan’s more honest and sophisticated analysis. I disagree with Canovan’s attempt to redefine fiction as myth, and thereby go beyond the conception of Morgan, which she somewhat misconstrues.
58. This is similar to what happens to Canovan’s antinomies in Laclau. Pitkin enumerated five forms: formal (authorization and accountability), symbolic, descriptive, and interest representation, which only in a genuinely synthetic version yield a normatively justifiable model (The Concept of Representation [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967], 209ff. and especially 225ff.). A normative perspective is explicitly renounced by Laclau, an attitude implicitly contradicted by his preference for symbolic representation.
59. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, 106–7.
60. What makes it extreme, exactly, if it does what symbolic representation is supposed to do, namely produce unity and identity? Pitkin has the answer, as against Laclau, namely the neglect of the interests and opinions of the represented.
61. This argument was already implausible in the case of Hobbes, whose sovereign could not be in the position, even according to him, to rule over the conscience of the subject. It is all the more ridiculous for Laclau to focus on modern settings.
62. If it were true, “misrepresentation” would be as meaningless, Pitkin argues, as the truly meaningless term “missymbolization.” But it is not. In that case, it would be impossible to criticize charismatic leadership within a movement. “Concerning symbols it makes no sense to ask for reasons of belief…. But concerning political leadership such questions do make sense” (Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, 110–11).
63. This is the point made over and over by Žižek in his polemic against Laclau (“A Leninist Gesture Today,” 83, 89). And, the charges of each against the other are correct. Žižek’s class that Laclau wishes to leave behind is an objectivistic myth, while Laclau’s people is a voluntaristic one that does not convince Žižek.
64. In the 1955 Les adventures de la dialectique (Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973]), Maurice Merleau-Ponty followed a critique of Sartre by his student, the young Claude Lefort, whom he went on to call “Trotsky’s Trotsky.”
65. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Communists and Peace (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969), hereafter cited as CP in the text.
66. Through the medium of Freud, Laclau adopts some assumptions of earlier crowd and mass society theories, even though modern studies of social movements have demonstrated that it is the already organized and associated who are the constituents of major movements.
67. That point was not made by either Lefort or Merleau-Ponty vis-à-vis Sartre. Castoriadis did make it with respect to Lukacs: “the Party here appeared as the embodiment of actual class consciousness. As always, spiritualism ended up by finding a concrete historical subject in which to embody the transcendental entity, which would otherwise have to remain what it really is: a ghost. So God becomes the Catholic church” (Paul Cardan [Cornelius Castoriadis], Modern Capitalism and Revolution [London: Solidarity, 1965]).
68. Rosa Luxemburg, “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy” (1904) http://www.marxists.org; Leon Trotsky, “Our Political Tasks” (1904) http://www.marxists.org.
69. Of course, I am using this concept only in an abstract sense. I do not mean to imply that Laclau speaks for any Marxist-Leninist groups, or even, like Žižek, dreams of the revival of explicitly Leninist politics. As my Latin American colleagues inform me, Laclau is publicly identified with the populist politics of Kirchner, Correa, and Chavez. It is all the more interesting that he gives an “ultra-bolshevik” defense of authoritarian populism after attacking Lefort for supposedly the same identification (not actually in Lefort). On Laclau’s contemporary political commitments and role, see Vicente Palermo, “Intelectuales del príncipe: Intelectuales y populismo en la Argentina de hoy,” Revista de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Católica del Uriguay RECSO Montevideo Uruguay, vol. 2 (2011): 81–102.
70. Žižek, himself Lacanian, pays precious little attention to these constructs in Laclau, and rightly so. They violate Ockham’s razor, or the principle of the economy of thought.
71. This is documented by de la Torre in Populist Seduction, for Velasco and Correa in Ecuador.
72. Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
73. John Witte, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), 74, 134ff., 137–38.
74. Canovan, The People.
75. While the conception is influenced by Arendt, who was no political theologian and did not believe in any myth of the people, it can be traced back to Walter Benjamin, who was one.
76. Witte, Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 118–21.
77. The point is frankly admitted by Schmitt in Political Theology I (German text, 55, 68–70). His defenders, busily and rightly refuting the charge of Nazism for the relevant period, tend to miss this feature altogether.