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LEFORT AND THE PROBLEM OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP Mark Blackell

ABSTRACT To interpret the possibilities of a Lefort-inspired theory of citizenship requires first that we depart from traditional liberal and republican theories of citizenship that conceive of the citizen’s attachment to the political order in terms of interest or virtue. A Lefort-inspired theory of citizenship must also reconfigure the object of citizen attachment from an ‘empty place’ of power to an ‘absent-presence’. The nature of modern democratic citizenship is framed in terms of ambivalence as a symptom of the symbolic order of democracy, and the precarious nature of political attachment in modern democracy is read as paralleling the precariousness of the symbolic order of modern democracy. In the face of this ambivalence, the possibilities of a Lefort-inspired theory of citizenship are conceived of explicitly not in terms of identification between competing political principles but in terms of a partial gesture of love to a metaphysical limit of democratic political society. KEYWORDS citizenship theory • democratic theory • Claude Lefort • political attachment • political ambivalence

As a theorist of modern democracy, Lefort is noticeably unconcerned with the question of citizenship. In an era of growing challenges to the nation-state from both globalizing pressures and from local forms of group identity, the problem of citizenship demands to be addressed. To this end, my article will explore Lefort’s mature theory of the symbolic order of modern democracy and ask what can be said about the nature of modern democratic citizenship from within such an approach. The problem of citizenship is essentially a problem of political attachment (see Beiner, 1995): what is, what can be, and what should be, the nature of citizen attachment Thesis Eleven, Number 87, November 2006: 51–62 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd DOI: 10.1177/0725513606068775

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to the political order? The problem demands that we examine both the object of attachment and the subjective nature of the citizen’s attachment to that object. Lefort’s thought is clearly more helpful in our concern over the object of democratic citizenship as he points out that this object must ultimately be an empty place. I am particularly concerned with how we might think the central tension in his thought: between the self-foundational nature of democratic regimes and their continued formation in relationship to an outside, a realm beyond an autonomous democratic society. My claim will be that exploring the nature of citizenship in Lefort forces us to reconfigure the object of attachment from an ‘empty place’ to an ‘absent presence’. In exploring what this might mean for our understanding of the subjective nature of citizens’ attachment to democracy, I argue that the democratic citizen is characterized by an ambivalence of attachment to the political order, raising a particular subjective dilemma that corresponds to the dilemma of a precarious symbolic order of power. Exploring the nature of the democratic bond in Lefort cannot help but bring us to an exploration of the problem of its precariousness and of what it ought to be. Lefort does not address this problem of subjective attachment. In conclusion, I will suggest a problem with seeing the bond the citizen has with the political order in terms of psychological identification with competing principles of liberty and equality. In my interpretation, Lefort’s work poses a question for citizenship theory: is the gesture of love towards a metaphysical horizon fully eradicable in modern democracy? THE ERASED CITIZEN? Lefort presents his project as a revival of political philosophy in the face of the positivism of political science, and of the social sciences more generally. His call to revive political philosophy is not a revival of the philosophical concern with the essence of man (1988: 217). He rejects the Platonic aspiration to know the nature of the soul and its relationship to the just and unjust regime. He wants to revive the political philosophy of antiquity but sees the ancient concern with knowing the singular Good as impossible in the political philosophy of modern democracy that has rejected the markers of metaphysical certainty. Lefort is interested instead in the classical concern with types of political regimes and their organizing principles. His expressed goal is to understand ‘the principle of internalization’ (1988: 218) whereby societies form themselves and understand themselves. This is a concern with the principles that are formative of social space, that are linked to the symbolic order of power rather than the traditional social scientific concern with the given facts that are already present in social space. Unlike a positivistic social science, that seeks to unearth social facts that are seen as merely given, political philosophy self-consciously asks about meaning generation in relationship to fundamental principles.

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The first thing that strikes me about Lefort’s formulation of his project of reviving political philosophy is that he doesn’t seem to pay much explicit attention to the need to think about different forms of the soul (a central concern of classical political philosophy) to go along with the concern with forms of government. I think that Lefort remains ultimately interested in what we might call forms of political subjectivity relative to different regimes. For example, in his relatively recent ‘Reflections on the Present’, he notes that: Democracy does not allow itself to be reduced to a set of institution and rules of behaviour for which one could provide a positive definition by means of a comparison with other known regimes. It requires people’s adherence. And this adherence, or approval, isn’t necessarily formulated in strictly political terms. (2000: 266)

Yet rarely does Lefort try to formulate what the symbolic order of modern democracy might require of democratic political subjects. This is curious given that ancient political philosophy conceived of the inquiry into the city and the inquiry into the soul as two aspects of one concern. But can we revive political philosophy without explicitly reviving the concern with the ‘soul’ (or subject) relative to the city? If not, then where does Lefort’s inquiry into the nature of the symbolic order of democracy get us in terms of our understanding of the modern democratic forms of subjectivity? The problem seems to be that Lefort’s account of the symbolic order of democracy presents us with so abstract a notion of the forming of political space that it is difficult to relate it to a key aspect of democratic political society: the forms of subjectivity required as part of the citizen’s very attachment to the political order. It is worth asking if Lefort can be said to fit into the traditional ways of conceiving of the modern democratic bond in citizenship theory, that is, either in terms of interest or virtue. It is a cornerstone of liberalism from Hobbes to Locke to utilitarianism that modern liberal democratic societies are held together through the pursuit of individual interest. The political bond is primarily a rational one that is there to preserve individual interests, even if that rational bond is initially motivated by fear (for an account of the liberalism of fear see Shklar, 1989). The historical accuracy of this account of the emergence of liberal thought aside, Lefort’s conception of the symbolic order of power in modern democracy is more of a meta-description of the processes by which political societies form themselves. The political, as the reference to a power that grants legitimacy and shape to society, is always present even if it is understood, as in democracy, to be purely symbolic. Lefort would presumably refuse the too quick assertion of individual rational assessment of interest by way of description of the nature of the bond of democracy; the liberal conception of the political bond in terms of individual interest is ultimately a liberal vision of how political society ought to be unified.

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What of the Marxist variant that sees the democratic bond in terms of class interest? Class interest and class conflict are constituent features of modern democratic society for Lefort but the interest of the working class is not itself the basis for a larger democratic political unity. The moment that class identity, and the interest that it is based on, is presented as the unifying power in political society, the unifying horizon of political society is then potentially represented within social space. In Lefort’s terms, this moment amounts to a denial of the purely symbolic nature of democratic power; we are presented with the possibility of the embodiment of the people in a representative of the working class that lies at the core of the totalitarian travesty made possible by modern democracy. Class conflicts and the conflicts of other forms of group cleavages are indeed constitutive of modern democratic societies, but they are so only because of the empty, or purely symbolic, nature of democratic power. Class interest, then, doesn’t explain how the democratic citizen is fundamentally related to the democratic political order. A working citizen’s attachment to her class and the battle for substantive equality may be vital for democracy, but only in so far as that battle takes place within a wider attachment to a sort of symbolic emptiness of power. The nature of this latter attachment is unclear. Perhaps it can only manifest itself negatively in terms of a refusal of embodiment of power. Is this a particularly modern democratic form of civic virtue, following the long tradition of civic republicanism? Civic virtue remains a central trope in the attempt to account for the nature and promise of modern democratic society. Whatever the virtue is that theorists focus on, virtue in general is always some form of excellence instilled in the individual, that is intrinsically tied to social and political institutions, practices, beliefs – to an ethos. While the recourse to virtue may rightly be associated with civic republican critics of liberalism such as Michael Sandel (1996), it is also central to the moral idealist strain of liberalism that is in tension with a political proceduralism or constitutionalism (for examples see Macedo, 1990; Galston, 1991; Berkowitz, 1999; on this tension see Rosenblum, 1989). Liberal virtue theorists tend to present a catalogue of virtues and vices required of a democratic citizen as a result of the various goals of liberal democracy, the goals of the liberal market economy, or as a result of role-specific goals (such as for political leaders). On the whole, these virtues tend to act to balance each other out, allowing for the continued coexistence of the often competing goals of liberty and equality, pluralism and unity, political idealism and political practice, etc. In a certain sense, Lefort’s theory of democracy does open up the possibility of a virtue theory of citizenship. The symbolic shift in modern democracy to an empty place of power ushers in the legitimate, even constitutive, tensions in modern society between claims made on the basis of democratic power or voice, on the basis of social scientific knowledge, and on the basis of appeals to rights. Given this, modern democracy seems to require of the citizen that she be open to

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competing claims of legitimacy that operate on the basis of distinct logics. Does Lefort’s theory presuppose a citizen who can balance a commitment to democratic will with an individualistic commitment to human rights, or balance a commitment to scientific knowledge with a faith in the legitimacy of democratic will? Or, is this ability to negotiate these potentially opposed forms of attachment epiphenomenal? Can we say anything more fundamental about the democratic citizen and her attachment to the political order? At the centre of Lefort’s mature theory of democracy lies the idea that, while power is always symbolically forming our political societies and our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to other types of regimes, in democracy this process is obscured by the fact that the power that is referenced is ‘tacitly recognized as being purely symbolic’ (1988: 17). It is purely symbolic in the sense that it no longer has the metaphysical certainty that it had when embodied in the sacred body of the king. This symbolic dimension of the political is revealed in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of the society appears and is obscured. It appears in the sense that the process whereby society is ordered and unified across its divisions becomes visible. It is obscured in the sense that the locus of politics (the locus in which parties compete and in which a general agency of power takes shape and is reproduced) becomes defined as particular, while the principle which generates the overall configuration is concealed. (Lefort, 1988: 11)

What this suggests is that the specific claims of scientific truth, and of individual and group rights, are epiphenomenal in that they are enabled by a primary, ongoing, and yet obscured forming of political society through a reference to an absent object in ‘the people’. These claims may be independent, but the formation of democratic society is not found in their opposition so much as it is in a logically prior negative principle: that democratic power not be fully embodied in society and that no figure or claim can act as a marker of metaphysical certainty. The idea of a citizen holding a civic virtue, in contrast, assumes the presence of some social good inscribed, as it were, on the political subject’s character. To speak of balances in the virtues of the citizen is to assume a given balance of social goods in the political community. It presents us with an account of democratic law, knowledge, and power as if they had a priori balances that express themselves as virtues of the citizenry. Lefort, by contrast, emphasizes the radical contestation that takes place in democratic society between social groups and authority claims. While democratic societies may require of citizens the intellectual toughness to live with the ambiguity of divided commitments, Lefort’s theory of modern democracy treats those divided commitments as ongoing projects that are expressive of the radically open-ended nature of political society. Rather than speak in terms of virtues, we might speak in terms of an existential disposition to the world. It remains to be seen what

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this disposition is in relationship to the central object of the political order: the empty place of democratic power. While one might adhere to a specific expression of democratic will in the form of an election result or even a public opinion, this is not an attachment to the purely symbolic order of democracy. It may reference that attachment, but it also hides the object from view by replacing the empty object with something concrete. WHAT IS THE OBJECT OF DEMOCRATIC ATTACHMENT? This brings us to an impasse in our attempt to formulate the nature of democratic citizenship in terms of Lefort’s theory of the symbolic order of democracy. We can’t fully assess the citizen’s subjective attachment to the political order without knowing what it is that she is attached to. To say that it is an attachment to an empty place of power presents us with a precarious account of the object of attachment and leaves us with little sense of the nature of the citizen’s bond with such an object. While Lefort emphasizes the empty place of power in democracy, this account is complicated by his recognition of the two fundamental dangers that confront modern democratic societies. On the one side lies the danger of totalitarianism through the re-embodiment of power in the body of the leader or the party. This is not, of course, a return to a pre-modern form of symbolic power because totalitarianism, like democracy, refuses all certain external metaphysical markers, or transcendent sources, of authority. Totalitarianism is a continuation of the ideal of radical autonomy in the democratic revolution. Totalitarianism differs from democracy in that it abandons the separation between the symbolic and the real. In other words, it seeks to symbolically institute itself through reference to a concrete social body in the totalitarian leader or the party. This filling of the empty place of power was Lefort’s greatest concern, coming out of the left and trying to address the problem of Stalinism as he did. On the other side lies the more insidious and less spectacular danger of the dissolution of the social in democracy, when ‘conflict between classes and groups can no longer be symbolically resolved within the political sphere’ (Lefort, 1988: 19). There are concrete dangers that we can see in both developed and emerging democracies. These include: the danger of proliferating and paralysing social divisions (even of civil war); the danger of a kind of disillusionment with democratic politics and the capacity of representative government to have any reference to a source of democratic legitimacy; and the danger of mass apathy. These dangers are ultimately manifestations of a failure of the democratic symbolic order to give presence to power even as it holds it as a kind of absence. So, on the one side lies the threat of totalitarian re-embodiment of power, while on the other side lie the various manifestations of a failure to give presence to the power of the people, leading to the dissolution of the social. Of course, these dangers

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are related, as disillusionment and exacerbated social conflict tend to result in a move to a totalitarian solution to the problem of democracy. The power of the people must be empty, in the sense of never being embodied, or made fully present, in social space, but nonetheless still be a symbolic point of reference. As Lefort notes, under the sign of democracy, ‘It would be more accurate to say that power makes a gesture towards something outside, and that it defines itself in terms of that outside’ (1988: 225). But what is the nature of that outside and of the gesture towards it? Clearly the outside can’t be assigned to ‘to the gods, the city, or to holy ground’ (p. 226). But nor can it be eliminated such that society with its divisions can refer solely to ‘an inside that can be assigned to the substance of the community’ (p. 226). The empty place of power must not be a mere absence; it must be a kind of absent presence. To understand the symbolic order of power in modern democracy we must emphasize the particular tension between absence and presence. Democratic society, in so far as it is able to negotiate the twin dangers expressed above, must be symbolically formed through recourse to an absent presence, an organizing principle (the power of the people) that is both empty in the sense of not embodied and yet somehow present as a symbolic reference point and object of attachment by democratic citizens. Lefort also begins to complicate his general formulation of the empty place of power, that cuts off all metaphysical markers of certainty, when he concerns himself with the question of the theologico-religious element in democracy. Lefort sees modern democracy as inaugurating a form of selfreferential political society that breaks with the divine, with absolute markers of metaphysical certainty that anchor society. If the markers of metaphysical certainty are gone, does this mean that the search for metaphysical truth is absent from the democratic adventure? The closest answer comes in his essay on ‘The Permanence of the Theologico-Political’. His goal in this difficult essay is to assess the implicit or explicit claim made by numerous 19thcentury thinkers, from Michelet to Hegel to Tocqueville, that the religious persists within the modern democratic enterprise. As Lefort notes, many ideologically diverse thinkers in the 19th century ‘looked at the religious for the means to reconstitute a pole of unity which could ward off the threat of the break up of the social that arose out of the Ancien Regime’ (1988: 249). Ultimately, Lefort argues that these 19th-century thinkers miss the novelty of the modern democratic, symbolic ordering of power as refusing markers of metaphysical certainty. Yet Lefort also admires such thinkers as Michelet for their implicit openness to the symbolic ordering of society, precisely the thing that is needed in a revival of political philosophy. As Lefort notes, religion and philosophy share a concern with the experience of ‘a difference that is not at the disposal of human beings’ as well as concern over how ‘human society can only open on to itself by being held in an opening it did not create’ (1988: 222). Modern philosophy may refuse the terms of religion, but it is still animated by a concern with self-limitation, with the limits of the

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realm of appearances, with the invisible in the visible. So the 19th-century thinkers Lefort is referring to are right to demand that the philosophical account of society acknowledge its debt to religion. The political shares certain aspects with the religious in the sense that both ‘bring philosophic thought face to face with the symbolic’; both ‘govern access to the world’ (1988: 222). The political, as the concern with the symbolic formation of society, is never identical to the theological but the question of the metaphysical is built into its inquiry. There is a paradox in the philosophical concern with the symbolic order of modern democracy: it is simultaneously a concern with radical autonomy and immanence of power while also involving a gesture to an external realm beyond the social and to an invisible structuring of meaning. The metaphysical question as an incomplete and ongoing concern is implicit in the examination of ‘a division which institutes common space, of a break which establishes relations, of a movement of the externalization of the social which goes hand in hand with its internalization’ (1988: 225). AMBIVALENCE, IDENTIFICATION, AND LOVE This interpretation of Lefort suggests that the object of democratic attachment is not entirely an empty place of power. Rather, it is an absent presence that operates across the division between the visible social realm and the invisible, metaphysical realm. A revival of political philosophy and of a political sociology that seeks to examine the symbolic order of society cannot but be concerned with an ambiguous object and its varied manifestations. What can we say of the citizen’s orientation to such an absent presence? If there is a divided object of democratic attachment, we can legitimately expect a division in the bond between citizen and political order. The central point to emerge out of a Lefort-inspired examination of the nature of the citizen’s attachment to democracy is that it is fundamentally ambivalent. The citizen must both remain committed to democracy as structuring of social space and conflicts while at the same time sceptical and dismissive of attempts to fix the will of the people within social space. This is an ambivalent attachment: it demands both a deep attachment to the notion of the people and a deep suspicion of it at the same time. Lefort does not, to my knowledge, explore this possibility. It is one, however, that is explored in some of the very post-revolutionary thinkers that Lefort is concerned with in his essay on the theologico-political. I will briefly focus on Benjamin Constant, whose response to the French Revolution brings him to theorize the absent presence of power in modern democracy as well as the ambivalent nature of the citizen’s attachment to democracy. We see this ambivalence most clearly in his essay, ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’, where he contrasts the moderns and the ancients in terms of their expectations about the exercise

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of sovereignty. If moderns have high expectations of respect for rights, their expectations of exercising democratic sovereignty are inherently limited. While sovereignty is seen as absolute in ancient republics, the individual in the modern republic is sovereign ‘only in appearance. His sovereignty is restricted and almost always suspended. If, at fixed and rare intervals, in which precautions and obstacles again surround him, he exercises this sovereignty, it is always only to renounce it’ (Constant, 1988: 312). This restriction and suspension of sovereignty is directly related to the institution of political representation. The institution of modern democratic political representation alters the nature of democratic sovereignty such that it becomes a ‘fiction’, ‘mere appearance’, and an ‘abstract supposition’ . . . and the spirit of the moderns is such that this apparent loss in sovereignty is expected. Exercising political will was ‘a vivid and repeated pleasure to ancient citizens, one that they were willing to make great sacrifices to preserve and that compensated for the loss of individual liberty’ (1988: 316). What we moderns have lost, then, in this shift in the nature of democratic sovereignty, is a distinct type of pleasure derived from the actual and ongoing exercise of sovereignty. We find in Constant a melancholic tone in his identifying this inevitable loss of the full presence of sovereignty as central to political modernity. But, most importantly, democratic citizens tend to be plagued by both weakness of conviction and fluctuating conviction, that is, by ambivalence of political attachment. Constant sees political modernity in terms that suggest a kind of incomplete form of attachment and we might wonder if such a perspective is implied by Lefort. Ambivalence is not exactly a political virtue nor is it precisely something that can be relied upon to sustain a political regime. It is more of a symptom of modernity or a characteristic disposition that structures modern democratic citizenship. Indeed, for Constant, in the absence of the passion of the ancients, modern political institutions must instil desire in citizens (see Constant, 1988: 328; see also Fontana, 1991: 112). What, if anything, marks the positive formulation of the democratic bond from the perspective of a Lefort-inspired political theory? Is it enough to follow the Lefort-inspired path of Chantal Mouffe, who argues that, given the radical incompleteness of democratic society and the impossibility of any references beyond the social, what sustains a radicalized liberal democracy is the citizens’ ongoing identification with the principles of equality and liberty? Mouffe notes that liberal democratic unity is an articulated project that ‘can exist only through multiple and competing forms of identifications’ (Mouffe, 2000: 56). The liberal democratic citizen is both preserved as an open-ended project (and thus radical) as well as unified through sustaining a tension-filled identification with the liberal discourse of modernity and its democratic one, that is, between the ‘equivalential’ logic of democratic equality and the ‘differential’ logic of liberty. She seeks to understand the project of ‘radical liberal democracy’

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(Mouffe, 1996: 20) through a strengthening of identification with its principles of liberty and equality, which exist in a tension but which can be articulated together. It is worth mentioning Mouffe’s attempt to address the challenge posed by Carl Schmitt’s account of the political as ultimately securing its unity through the decisionistic assertion of the friend/enemy distinction. In seeking a different form of unity for radical liberal democracy, Mouffe looks to citizens’ ability to shift their orientation to others from enemies (whose exclusion from the political space is needed to affirm the unity in identity of that space) to adversaries. ‘An adversary is an enemy, but a legitimate enemy, one with whom we have some common ground because we have a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy: liberty and equality’ (Mouffe, 2000: 102). Here we have one way of appropriating Lefort to develop a theory of democratic citizenship. It is to assert and rely upon the identificatory attachment to divergent principles of liberty (based on the logic of difference) and equality (based on the logic of identity). Mouffe’s way of trying to escape Schmitt’s ‘democratic’ logic of identity is to assert the need for strong identification with divergent principles at one and the same time. The problem with Mouffe’s solution to the problem of citizenship is that identification is inadequate to the task of sustaining, and thus unifying in an ongoing fashion, a tension between two different discourses or principles. Mouffe’s assertion is that the bond of radical democratic society is not found in any overarching structure or meaning but in the process of citizens’ identity formation through divided identification. But what is identification? As a psychological mechanism, identification acts to tie one’s sense of self to some psychical object through sameness; the psychical action is one which asserts similitude – it is mimetic. Identification is, at least at some level, rooted in a process of making two presences the same, of bringing them into one common presence. The question then becomes how an identification with two principles, or discourses that must work in different directions, is possible. It seems to be possible, without radical division of the political subject, only in so far as there is actually identification with a tension itself, with a gap, an absence. But it is unclear how an identificatory attachment to a gap or absence does anything more than set up a division within the political subject that can find expression only in oscillating between attachments. In other words, it does not seem to resolve the problem of the fundamental ambivalence of the democratic citizen; it simply displaces that ambivalence. We need to return to an under-explored aspect of Lefort’s theory of democracy to begin to rethink the problem of citizenship beyond identification. The tension to be sustained – and thus unified in an ongoing fashion – is not one between equal and opposed logics within democratic society (that find a kind of isometric equilibrium) but between the very distinct realms of autonomous democratic society on the one hand and its metaphysical beyond on the other. One way that Lefort refers to this articulation

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between democratic society and its outside is in terms of the figure and the dimension of the other. Medieval monarchy conceived of itself in terms of its deep sacred relationship with a divine source, a transcendent other. Democracy in contrast negates the ‘figure of the other’ in that it refuses any kind of discrete marker of metaphysical certainty. But democracy doesn’t reject what Lefort calls the ‘dimension of the other’ (1988: 229) and in this it stands in opposition to totalitarianism that, as Lefort notes, ‘tries to suppress the dimension of the other through a representation of the People-as-One’ (1988: 235). This is to say that the difference between democracy and totalitarianism is not exhausted by the idea that totalitarian regimes embody power in social space, while democratic regimes make power an empty seat. We must include a difference in the regimes’ articulation of their relationship with an external world. By external world, I don’t mean simply their relationships with other states or types of government. I mean their relationship with necessity, with death, with an invisible realm beyond the visible, with the metaphysical realm – with all that marks a limit to their purely immanent account of their political sovereignty. What I find illuminating about this point of contrast between democratic and totalitarian regimes in Lefort is that their symbolic orders are separable by the fact that democracy preserves a questioning orientation to what are commonly thought to be non-political (or even pre-modern political) concerns. The question that we should be asking in reading Lefort on the nature of democratic citizenship is: how can the democratic citizen love the realm of the eternal, the invisible in the visible, and the dimension of the other even as she does so with full recognition of the partial nature of this gesture? Love is necessary precisely because it is not the psychological mechanism of mimesis or representation: it is the mechanism of bridging difference. This capacity of love to bridge the realms of the sacred and the profane was well recognized by Dante, whose conception of love (as picked up by 19th-century thinkers such as Michelet) Lefort ultimately criticizes in his essay on ‘The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’ But the point of Lefort’s criticism is essentially that their recourse to love in the political realm is such that it seeks to overcome the immanence of the project of modern democracy. This does not, however, mean that that very same project does not demand that we continue to ask about the nature of love – or more exactly the partial gesture of love – in response to the never-ending problem of the relationship to the internal-external relationship in the ongoing formation of modern democratic societies. Ultimately I think that Lefort does not erase the citizen. His thought implicitly demands of citizenship theory that it inquire into the particular nature of democratic love (rather than religious love transported into the political realm) to even begin to adequately address the decisionistic solution to the external-internal problem of the political in Schmitt. If we are to examine the double nature by which the political hides and reveals itself in modern democracy, we must ask:

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how is it that democratic citizenship makes a gesture of love towards a metaphysical beyond even as it obscures and refuses the object of that gesture?

Mark Blackell has a recent PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University in Toronto, Canada. His research concerns the foundations of liberal democracy, its symbolic resources and limits, as well as the nature of liberaldemocratic citizenship. He is currently a University-College Professor in Liberal Studies and Political Science at Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. [email: [email protected]]

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