Singer

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INTRODUCTION Brian C. J. Singer

Why read Claude Lefort? Beginning in 1986, three of his books have been translated into English. Twenty years later his reputation in the AngloAmerican world still remains limited. In contrast to many other French theorists of his generation, he was never the object of a fashionable enthusiasm. In France his repute was and is far greater. Since the 1970s he, more than anyone else, is considered responsible for the present interest in the ‘political’ – an interest that corresponded and, no doubt, contributed to the demise of Marxism – rendered all the more acceptable as Lefort, a former animateur of Socialisme ou Barbarie, was associated with the independent left. The political, as revived by Lefort, can be said to consist of what first appeared, at least in France, as three relatively ‘new’ lines of investigation: a close reading of the classics of political philosophy, a critical analysis of real socialism as totalitarian, and an opening to the question (and not just the critique) of democracy. In the Anglo-American world where Marxism always had far less – and political philosophy far more – purchase, and where the critique of totalitarianism was commonplace, such topics could hardly appear quite so novel. It is perhaps symptomatic that Lefort’s most important reading of classic political philosophy, his sprawling work on Machiavelli, as well as his two books on ‘real socialism’, have yet to be translated. With regard to the question of democracy, the English-speaking reader faces a different problem: the topic is familiar, but the terms of analysis are not. According to Lefort, democracy is to be understood in terms of the ‘symbolic’, as instituting a ‘symbolic order’. This means that a proper comprehension of democracy resists both empiricism and idealism, democracy being neither fact (a set of institutions) nor norm (a contractual ideal), nor ‘between facts and norms’ – which is not to say that, as a symbolic order, it does not have ‘reality effects’, or that it is not preferable to other political regimes. But precisely because its relation to the real and the ideal is consequent to its symbolic character, democracy often proves very different from, and even opposite to, what one says it is or ought to be. There is another reason that Thesis Eleven, Number 87, November 2006: 3–6 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd DOI: 10.1177/0725513606068771

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might explain the difficulties of reading Lefort. Generally, talk of the symbolic suggests the terms of structuralism or post-structuralism; and in truth, he has had a palpable influence on the post-structuralist wing of those writing under the banner of radical democracy. Lefort himself, however, never really took the post-structuralist plunge, maintaining instead a certain fidelity to the more adventurous outposts of phenomenology represented by his teacher Merleau-Ponty. This is not without relevance to his conceptualization of the symbolic and, more particularly, the symbolic character of power, understood as constitutive of the presentation and representation of the order, coherence and sense of collective life. In effect, once the symbolic order becomes knotted around the place of power, in contrast to post-structuralism, the centre holds, even when emptied by what he calls the play of division characteristic of democracy. Such then are the challenges, but also the opportunities, of reading Lefort. One finds a radical and radically different understanding of democracy. And with such an understanding, one will want to consider totalitarianism in different terms, and to read the canon differently; one may even begin to read a different canon. Above all, one will wish to reconsider the nature of the ‘political’, and how it comes to circumscribe, and to be circumscribed within, the larger societal totality. When soliciting articles for this issue, we sought to avoid exclusively exegetical papers. In terms of the interpretation of Lefort, the recent book by Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort. Interpreting the Political (2005), published after the articles here had been written, is to be highly recommended. Our ambition was rather different: less to think about, than to think with Lefort. The opening article by Raf Geenens looks at the move from the critique of bureaucracy, characteristic of the earlier Lefort of Socialisme ou Barbarie, to the concern with democracy proper that led to the critique of totalitarianism. This move is examined through an examination of Lefort’s comments on the ebbs and flows of political commitment. Ultimately the article analyses the necessary tension between politics (la politique) and the political (le politique) – a tension that reflects the inevitable divisions of representation that the dream of proletarian unity behind the critique of bureaucracy would abolish. Greg Cameron’s article poses the question of Lefort’s relation to phenomenology, not the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, but that of Husserl, particularly the Husserl of The Crisis. This move may appear somewhat surprising, but the distinction between politics and the political can clarify what is at stake. Had the article addressed Merleau-Ponty, the temptation would have been to consider only the relation to politics (one thinks of Humanism and Terror or The Adventures of the Dialectic). By choosing Husserl’s Crisis, the article raises instead the question of phenomenology’s relation to the political, and by implication, the relation of the

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political to the philosophical project that Husserl saw as characterizing the West. Once the political is conjoined with philosophy, it is not just a matter of asking fundamental questions, but of asking how it is possible to ask such questions. The next article considers Lefort in relation to Leo Strauss, though without giving way to the all-too-easy critiques occasioned by the politics of the latter’s contemporary disciples. Gilles Labelle’s claim is that Lefort’s position regarding the ‘theologico-political problem’ was elaborated in opposition to Strauss’ considerations on the same matter. At stake is whether modern democracy, by rejecting the certitudes of religion, tends to eliminate all that prevents the movement to political extremes, or on the contrary, as Lefort suggests, establishes new limits on its action by the institution of uncertainty. One may wish to further ask whether modern democracy, in eliminating religious certitudes, still retains the ‘place’ that such certainties had occupied, the trace of a metaphysical outside. With regard to this latter question, Mark Blackell answers in the affirmative. His article asks if Lefort’s work can be made to speak to the ‘passion’ that characterizes the ‘democratic bond’, that is, the subjective attachment that ties the citizen to the polity. Rejecting the more common characterizations, whether voiced in terms of interest, virtue or identity (not just ethnonational identity, but the more complex version, partly inspired by Lefort, of Chantal Mouffe), Blackell suggests that the democratic subject is formed of a constitutive ambivalence. If, however, that subject cannot, with any certitude, pose him or herself as a source of truth, the question arises as to whether, in order to ward off the specter of social disintegration, there must be a gesture to an outside that points to an ‘invisible structuring of meaning’. My own article suggests a certain gamble. As a thinker identified with the political, can Lefort also be made to speak of the ‘discovery’ of the social? The supposition is that the social, in line with the claims of Hannah Arendt, if for very different reasons, appears only with modernity or, more precisely, democratic modernity. Here the emergence of the social appears as a response to the difficulties, once law and knowledge no longer appear fused to power, of presenting the collectivity in the terms of political representation alone. The implication is that the ‘otherness’ that limits and, in the end, stabilizes the democratic political may belong to a gesture to an inside that remains, in its self-evidence, just as obscure as any metaphysical outside. The last article by James Ingram returns us to the political implications of Claude Lefort’s work by examining the divergent paths taken by two of his better known students, Marcel Gauchet and Miguel Abensour. Does Lefort, perhaps despite himself, ultimately participate in the movement to the liberal centre that has marked the last few decades of French intellectual life? Marcel Gauchet, in a recent book of interviews, claims that he broke with Lefort, in part because he saw the latter’s ‘faith in the creative effervescence of the margins’ as ‘a corruption of democracy’. By contrast, Miguel

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Abensour, whose books have not, unfortunately, been translated into English (though not dissimilar claims can be found in writers such as Jacques Rancière), would uphold a ‘démocratie sauvage ’, with its persistent, radically subversive potential. Rounding out this issue, on themes not too distant from those of Lefort’s, Andrea Brighenti turns to Lars von Trier’s film Dogville as an inspired model and metaphor for another kind of savagery – that of the totalitarian community that takes in and then enslaves the outsider. With wry observations of law, anthropology and social dynamics, Brighenti demonstrates how ‘the social’ can begin with endearing hospitality and end with punitive hostility. He concludes with some disturbing reflections on the question of the limits of punishment of those who abuse and enslave innocents. ***** The articles in this issue have been organized and prepared by our guest editor, Brian Singer. We value his collaboration. The origin of most of the articles was a conference organized by Singer under the auspices of the Canadian EPTC/TCEP Annual Meeting in London, Ontario, 29–30 May 2005.