Assignment: Thesis Research masters philosophy
Title: Democracy without Utopia : Claude Lefort’s Open Historical Horizons Name: Allegra Fairlie Curr Reinalda
Student number: 10024131
Email: allegra.reinalda@gmail.com Supervisor: dr. Robin Celikates
Reader: dr. Aukje van Rooden Completion date: 31/10/2017
Democracy without Utopia :
Claude Lefort’s Open Historical Horizons
ContentsIntroduction …….. p3
Chapter 1. The Political and Historicity …….. p13
Lefort’s Social Ontology: Historicity with or without History Lefort’s Political Theory: the State and the Other
Lefort’s Epistemic Methodology: The Question of Regime
Chapter 2. Modernity Multiplied : The Appearance of the Historical Society …….. p27 A Break in Time : Interpreting the Revolution as Event
The Revolutionary Event Continuity across the Break
Machiavelli’s Modernity : The Possibility of a Historical Discourse Multiple Modern Moments
Chapter 3. History, Creation, Indeterminacy …….. p45 The Indeterminate Society
The Debate with Arendt
The Indeterminate Society as Natural? The Indeterminate Society as Normative? Coda …….. p59
Democracy without Utopia :
Claude Lefort’s Open Historical Horizons
‘For we act only under the fascination of the impossible: which is to say that a society incapable of generating—and of dedicating itself to —a utopia is threatened with sclerosis and collapse. Wisdom— fascinated by nothing—recommends an existing, a given happiness, which man rejects, and by this very rejection becomes a historical animal, that is, a devotee of imagined happiness.’
— E. M. Cioran. History and Utopia 1
‘If the horizons are closed, if neither the past nor future are seen as transcendent it is above all because men do not have distance between them, because they are obsessed with their similarities and their grouping.’
— Claude Lefort, ‘Société "sans Histoire" et Historicité' 2
Lefort and the historical society
Democracy’s empty place of power, the positive evaluation of the uncertainty and contingency of modernity and the irreducibly representative form of the political are all central themes for Claude Lefort. While these themes seem to have been transmitted into the air of contemporary political theory they have not necessarily been thematised under his name. Especially in the the English language context Lefort’s name most often appears as a
Cioran, E M. (2015) History and Utopia. trans. Richard Howard New York: Arcade Publishing, p99
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Lefort, Claude. (1952) ‘Société "sans Histoire" et Historicité' in Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, Vol. 12,
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pp110-111. Later republished (1978) in Les formes de l’histoire: Essais d’anthropologie politique. Paris: Gallimard. (my translation)
vague invocation of these themes without itself being taken up as an intensive site of scholarly activity. I leave aside the issue of the adequate or inadequate attribution of debt to 3 Lefort’s work. The interesting question is rather, ‘why does Lefort resonate in this way?’ My first answer to this question is that his work allows us to outline a commitment to democratic regimes which neither sounds a post-political triumphalist tenor nor needs to be accompanied by sighs of resignation. Crucially, his theorisation of democracy is also free from the short, heady breaths of utopian anticipation.
This is not to say that Lefort’s work provides grounds for the out and out condemnation of the utopian impulse. In fact, he persistently links the democratic moment - the de-escalation of hierarchical social forms and resulting indeterminacy of social relations based on a principle of human equality - with a historical spirit. Yet a historical society for Lefort is not a society which is on the path of realising a telos or of mastering itself through reflexive self-understanding. It is better described as a society which relates to itself through the reflective engagement with its past and its future. This reflective engagement is manifest at two levels. Firstly, it implies that the cultural forms, understood in the most general and abstract possible sense as the totality of social, political and economic institutions of a society, stage a difference in time. That they make manifest that this society has changed and will continue to change. For Lefort, political bodies that are subject to periodic contests for leadership are an excellent instance of such an institution. But so too are more stable institutions like the judiciary. As Arendt saw, it is in societies which see that they are subject to constant contingency and novelty that the preserving ballasts of a codified and abstract body of law is necessary. Secondly, the reflective engagement with history implies that change becomes the explicit subject of discourse within a society. This conviction is present in one of Lefort’s earliest essays, at which I will look at extensively in chapter one, when he writes; ‘What is proper to a historical society is that it envelops the event and has the power of converting it into a moment of an experience, in such a way that it figures as an element within a debate that men pursue amongst themselves.’ To make clear what this might entail, let us move 4 away from overly abstract expressions for a moment in order to picture one of the historical societies Lefort often has in mind, the Florentine republic of Machiavelli. It is there, within the Oricellari gardens, that Machiavelli speaks with youth of the City and teaches them that to act well, to stage a political conflict, is to interpret the events of the past and present, to contest interpretations given by authority and to form one’s own through discussion and
There are, of course, many notable exceptions. For example the works which appear in my bibliography.
3
Lefort, ‘Société "sans Histoire" et Historicité' in Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, p102.
debate. Contemporary democratic life is for Lefort similarly traversed by a constant and shared interpretive labour. However for us, in contradistinction to those contemporaries of Machiavelli, tradition does not so much hold the trump card as does an unknown future. That is, the question ‘What are we?’ is not only accompanied by ‘Where have we come from?’ but also ‘Where are we going and where should we go?’. We do not set our course with reference to the events of Rome but according to an unknown future. To take up a key term from the final phase of Lefort’s oeuvre, this makes modern democratic societies radically indeterminate.
There is always a relation to the future and, to be sure, this relation can always have a utopian tint. The interrogation of events reveals a contingency which makes the unknown events of the future loom twice so tall over the present. In the sort of historical societies which follow the French Revolution, this contingency is partly assuaged by utopianism, of which there are two intensities. The first, strong, version of utopianism insists on plotting a exact course through the future in order to realise a desired state of affairs. This imagined scenario is in fact so desirable that it will be a final state, with no further alterations necessary. This reveals that it is not only the injustices and prejudices of the present which rankle the utopian but the relentless indeterminacy of living in a historical society. Utopianism in this strong sense has to be understood as an exit from the historical condition. This sort of utopianism has a precise genealogy in modernity which Lefort addresses under his critiques of Jacobinism and totalitarianism. But to leave it at that is not adequate, for surely there is something else to utopianism. It is a spirit of restlessness which is critical of the present order of things. In this second sense, utopianism is, as Cioran notes in the epigraph, an exemplary sort of historical spirit for it is constantly stoking the fires of discussion, critique and debate. These two registers of utopianism are not easily set apart from one another. Lefort, in a passage commending Tocqueville for his insights on the matter, writes that he is
‘analysing a process which is intimately bound up with the democratic experience in order to reveal its dangers. Not only does utopianism fail to see the origins of those dangers; it tries to actualize 'the great and imposing image of the people', and it even wants that image to accompany the lives of individuals, because it is motivated by a desire to pluck individuals from their anonymity and
to relocate them in the bright light of a communal space in which everyone and everything can see and be seen.’5
Here Lefort has slipped from describing Tocqueville’s anxieties and warnings about a then hypothetical society to painting a picture of the far-from hypothetical societies bequeathed by communism in the twentieth century. Totalitarianism eradicates the spaces in which people interpret events together and, in Lefort’s interpretation, this leads to a deadening of the historical spirit. To understand the complexity of Lefort’s social theory of modernity is to understand that some of the desires to which historical experience gives rise actually imply the annihilation of historical spirit. Most of Lefort’s commentators have noticed the constant proximity between totalitarianism and democracy in his thought, a proximity that is often described as a heuristic device for illuminating the particular characteristics of them both. This is correct, but only partially. As the above discussion should make clear, this proximity is also very real. Totalitarianism is a possible interpretation of the historical society’s experience of indeterminacy. It is one which Lefort does not choose. In contrast to communism, for Lefort democracy does not appear as a thwarted landing on which we have become snagged nor as a promissory note. On the other hand, this does not mean that he asserts that democracy appears as the end-state of a civilisational process. Lefort’s commitment to democracy does not entail a triumphalism about the present or about the future.
Lefort and political philosophy
If there is something triumphant with which the name Lefort can be associated, it is the so-called ‘return’ of the political within philosophy. This return is not only characterised by a renewed attention to and appreciation for the activities (accompanied by their specific ethical themes and functional analytics) which take place within that sphere of modern society we call politics. More than this, this return is, at least in the continental tradition of philosophy, associated with a new conceptualisation of the total social form. That is to say, the return of political philosophy signals an elevation of the political from an adjective attached to the sphere of politics, to a central mode of social institution. In Lefort’s work the political encompasses both the institutional and the experiential aspects of a particular form of society. That is, it combines a form of government, a particular structure of power, and a Lefort, Claude. (1988) ‘Reversibility : Political Freedom and the Freedom of the Individual’ in Democracy and
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style of existence. This last element indicates that, for Lefort, the political is not constituted solely by the domain of the state and the relationship people have with the empirical site of power, but rather indicates the forms of relationality which criss-cross the social body at all levels, as well as the sense of reality accompanying the world.
One of Lefort’s central convictions is that we cannot know the political as if it were an object of empirical research, a field of objectifiable relations or an element in a symbolic structure. Yet philosophy is in a privileged position to get close to it and discern its traces. It can do this by interrogating different forms of society. Forms that are revealed through temporal discordance, that is, the discordance of a society with itself across time. The historical is, therefore, the trace we have of the political; it is through the discordance between past, present and future that the creative elaboration of a society is revealed. Anyone familiar with Lefort’s work must be aware of its deep engagement with historical events and writings. The contemporary whom this summons to mind is Foucault, but Lefort’s approach is less that of the historian of archives than that of the writer. It is with a literary sensibility that Lefort reads the world. Bernard Flynn, one of Lefort’s best and certainly most comprehensive interpreters, puts it well when he writes;
‘In his thought, there is not, on the one hand, “experience” and, on the other, theories or philosophies “about experience”; rather, there is an intertwining of the quintessential experience of an epoch with the texts of those authors who are most sensitive to the novel dimensions of the experiences of a given time and place.’6
The implications of this are that both historical material and the question of history steadfastly accompany Lefort’s political philosophy. Historical events are not didactic embellishments to an already worked out conceptual system, they are the kernel from which any more conceptual reflection must unfold. We cannot, he writes, ‘deprive the discourse of its moorings to time and place, and make it speak the timeless language of metaphysics.’ 7 Perhaps it is not so strange then that Lefort had difficulties calling himself a philosopher. He refuses to leave these texts behind in order to speak a purely conceptual language. Arendt, who also paid such exacting attention to political phenomena, always insisted that she was
Flynn, Bernard. (2005) The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern
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University Press, p.xix.
Lefort, Claude. (2012) Machiavelli in the Making. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Evanston, Illinois:
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not one. Lefort’s position is more ambiguous. While rejecting the social sciences as a home for his thought, he claimed never to have found it easy to count himself as a philosopher. 8
A reason which I would postulate for Lefort’s distance from philosophy, and particularly that sort which calls itself political, is that the platonic predilection for control is utterly foreign to his approach. The return of political philosophy in the analytic tradition, prompted by the publication of John Rawl’s impressive Theory of Justice, inspired a flurry of activity which gravitates out from the rational gaze of the philosopher and is projected onto the world of events and actions. While the attempt to interrogate the legitimacy of institutional arrangements is no doubt a noble one, the presumption that this offers up a truth accessible only to philosophical enquiry is not. As Margaret Canovan puts it; ‘indeed, the attempt to draw up prescriptions for ideal states or societies implies a lack of respect for the business of political action 'as it actually is carried on.’ 9
Neither is such a controlling impetus foreign to the philosophical tradition home to Lefort. Lefort came of intellectual age at a moment when a privileged role was ascribed to the intellectual in bringing about a total transformation of society. The marxist emphasis on praxis as the unity of theory and practice assigned intellectuals the role of revolutionary understanding and, more importantly, bound them to the subject of history, the proletariat. 10 Today, communist parties no longer exercise the stranglehold on the progressive intellectual and the university scene that they once did. Nonetheless, there is a persistent echo of praxis in the displaced militancy of today. Intellectuals may no longer have the Party but they have not necessarily lost the self-importance of their historical mission. In this respect, Lefort’s 11 approach remains unconventional and is not readily celebrated given that many intellectuals are either still trying to act as adjuncts to any (temporary) subjects of history that appear, or
Lefort, Claude. (1983) ‘How did you become a philosopher?', p82 in Montefiore, Alan. (1983) Philosophy in
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France today. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
Canovan, Margaret. (1983) ‘Arendt, Rousseau, and Human Plurality in Politics’ in The Journal of Politics, 45.2,
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p298.
Lefort long critiqued the intellectual simplicity and political stupidity this produced. See ‘Novelty and the Appeal
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of Repetition’ and ‘The Contradiction of Trotsky’ in Lefort, Claude (1986) The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Ed. John B. Thompson. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
See for example Bosteels, Bruno; et al. (2016) What Is a People? New York: Columbia University Press. Here
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thinkers as diverse as Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari, and Jacques Rancière are grouped together apparently under the question ‘What is a People?’. However, we learn in Bosteels’ introduction that what they have in common is already the outline of an answer; ‘what the texts brought together here have in common is demonstrating that people remains solidly rooted on the side of emancipation’. Furthermore it is hoped that ‘theory’ might ‘actually contribute to the sharpening of this political potential’ (p4).
attempting to lay the normative foundations of democracy. Again Canovan puts the matter 12 succinctly; ‘theory is no substitute for practice. This is something that comes hard to many political theorists, for the occupational delusion of thinkers is the belief that constructing a neat theoretical scheme is equivalent to getting something done.’ For Lefort, the tensions 13 and conflicts of democracy appear to the philosophy not as problems to be solved but insoluble paradoxes.
Thesis outline
So far I have given a general explanation for the first part of my title, namely that Lefort’s account of democracy is not utopian in the sense of wanting to dictate the terms of a good society or step out of the relentless pace of the historical one. I have also indicated that I think that it is these two sensibilities which make Lefort such an exceptionally interesting political thinker. But I would like to be more specific in explaining the second part of this title, ’Claude Lefort’s open historical horizons’, for this makes up both the major theme of this thesis and is, I believe, also one of the substantive philosophical innovations present in Lefort’s work. My central thesis is that Lefort, without directly mounting a critique of the philosophy of history, offers a way of conceptualising the historical society without relying on one. So far I have suggested that this is connected to his renunciation of both the gaze of the philosopher and the strategies of the militant. Yet it is more comprehensive than this renunciation. Cioran, who also drew a link between totalitarianism and his own youthful militancy, is still plagued by the dictates of a philosophy of history; either a society dance to the tune of civilisational development or perish in sclerotic stagnation. The quotation I used as an epigraph puts it starkly, you are in history or you are nothing.
This is not the case for Lefort, even though he is himself very invested in the historical society. In Chapter one I take up Lefort’s early work where he pursues a philosophical interrogation of the anthropological literature on the so-called ‘primitive society’. Often against the intentions of the authors through which he reads the primitive society, Lefort finds that these are societies that are not only not stagnant, but radically creative. Through
For excellent accounts of Lefort which take this point seriously see Breckman, Warren. (2013) Adventures of
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the Symbolic: Post-marxism and Radical Democracy. New York, NY Columbia University Press; Howard, Dick. (2012) The Spectre of Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press; Flynn, Bernard. (2005) The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press.
Canovan, ‘Arendt, Rousseau, and Human Plurality in Politics’ p298.
the insight into this creativity he develops a conception of historicity without history. The explicit engagement with Hegel is fleeting but the challenge to the role played by the non-historical society in rationalist theories of human history is lasting. This early essay shows Lefort’s innovation; he is not merely critiquing the teleological assumptions of a philosophy of history, he is establishing a distinct social ontology. In this ontology there is no pre-social social, that is to say, no society exists as a natural entity. All societies testify to the effort of culture and a symbolic institution. In addition to this, two other central characteristics of Lefort’s mature philosophy can be seen in his engagement with anthropology: his political theory and his epistemological methodology. The former becomes apparent in the way in which Lefort engages with the work of Pierre Clastres, who postulates that the primitive society institutes itself against the statist form. While acknowledging the creativity of the social institution, Clastres nonetheless seems to imply that it is a process that is somehow able to be manipulated through the conscious actions of men. Against this, Lefort’s political theory asserts that the alterity of the state sits beside a more primary and ineradicable alterity. Finally, the third part of the first chapter shows how Lefort’s epistemic methodology avoids establishing a teleological or causal account of historical change. All of the anthropological literature he deals with ends up identifying a break in which the historical society is inaugurated in materialist explanations. From the perspective of Lefort’s social ontology, these materialist explanations deny the symbolic (or political) constitution of social life. Let me illustrate taking as an example a recent book review which, while fairly typical of this approach, appears very intuitive. The review, which appeared in The New Yorker, discusses Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, a recently published academic book by political scientist James C. Scott. Here Scott asserts that there is a causal link between the cultivation of cereal crops (treated by the author as a ‘technology’) and the birth of the first states. From Lefort’s perspective, one does not make such an assertion as 14 a philosopher but as a social scientist:
‘It emerges from a desire to objectify, and it forgets that no elements, no elementary structures, no entities (classes or segments of classes), no economic
Lanchester, John. (2017) ‘The Case Against Civilization : Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?’ in
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The New Yorker, September 18, 2017 Issue. The article ends up in a similar paradox to that of Clastres. On the one hand, it acknowledges that there is a different set of imaginary significations at work in the primitive society and even attributes these to an intentionality of the community. On the other hand, it wants to pinpoint a materialist cause for the descent/ascent into ‘civilisation’; ‘The study of hunter-gatherers, who live for the day and do not accumulate surpluses, shows that humanity can live more or less as Keynes suggests. It’s just that we’re choosing not to. A key to that lost or forsworn ability, Suzman suggests, lies in the ferocious egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers.’
or technical determinations, and no dimensions of social space exist until they have been given a form.’ 15
What sort of technical innovations become significant to a society? How are they taken up? In what ways do they fit into an existing style of life or are allowed to disrupt it? To ground this discussion let us look at the arrival in the Americas of the Spanish. They entered into a maize-centric world. Not only was corn eaten through the Andean regions and lowlands, it occupied a central place in the symbolic universe of the civilisations and Peoples of the Americas. One of the few Mesoamerican texts to have survived destruction by the Conquistadors, the Popol Vuh, contains a creation story in which humankind is made from maize. Yet the Spanish went to great lengths to avoid eating maize. It was not enough for them to identify corn as a replacement staple for the wheat they were accustomed to; it did not appear as a source of sustenance for them. To put the matter succinctly, it is not enough to identify social change in the real, the philosopher must look at the symbolic forms which enable the real to appear as such. In this respect, Lefort’s epistemological methodology is closely bound to his social ontology.
The three lines of interrogation which I have mentioned so far — social ontology, political theory and epistemological methodology — are again present in my second chapter ‘Modernity Multiplied : The Appearance of the Historical Society’. Modernity is a privileged site in Lefort’s estimation as a space in which forms of action and reflexivity allow society to partially represent its ontological and historical divisions to itself. In this chapter, I am interested in developing an account of Lefort’s social theory of modernity sensitive to the fact that he does not posit a progressive or declinist philosophy of history. The chapter begins by carrying over the epistemological considerations developed in chapter one, namely, that there is not a definitive way of identifying historical change, either in the symbolic or the real. Nonetheless, Lefort’s way of reading history does sensitise us to certain moments of rupture in which a modern mode of historicity becomes apparent. I look across Lefort’s oeuvre to find different sites in which modernity emerges, namely, the Florentine republic of Machiavelli and the modernity inaugurated by the French Revolution. Does it imply a long duree account of modernity or can the early republic and the French Revolution be read as different modern moments? This ambiguous periodisation is furthermore compounded by Lefort’s reading of the temporality of modernity as characterised by both rupture and continuity, imbuing it with a non-teleological historical cadence.
Lefort, Claude. (1988) ‘The Question of Democracy’ in Democracy and Political Theory. Trans. David
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The third and final chapter returns to the topic of Lefort’s social ontology by taking up recent interpretations of Lefort which suggest that the historical society can be either grounded normatively or naturalised. Against these readings I assert that there is no given social form, latent and waiting to be discovered and developed by history. There is only social creativity.
CHAPTER 1: The Political and Historicity
Lefort's engagement with anthropology began very early in his intellectual life. Although it was written as early as 1952, the article ‘Société ‘sans Histoire’ et Historicité’ already shows the contours of Lefort’s mature philosophy. In the first part of the chapter my reading of this 16 article highlights the very innovative social ontology which can be found there and which becomes the basis of Lefort's concept of the political in later work. This ontology, which 17 asserts the essentially creative form of the social institution, is what makes the anthological work of Pierre Clastres such a fecund source of dialogue for Lefort. Yet if they do, to a 18 certain extent, share an ontology they do not share a political theory. Lefort cannot accept Clastres absolute break between statist and non-statist societies. Hence, in the second part of the chapter I show how Lefort’s political theory comes to be articulated against the background of his anthropological engagement. Clastres’ work raises a further challenge to Lefort’s thinking by posing the question of how and when the primitive world ceases to exclude history and the state. Regarding the question of historical change a deep shift can be seen in Lefort’s thought between his view in ‘Société ‘sans Histoire’ et Historicité’ and his mature thought. In particular, it is obvious that Lefort was still operating within a more traditionally marxist framework, as he employs the notions of work and praxis in order to account for the development of a progressivist sense of history. Over time, however, there is a deepening of his conviction that the movement through which societies change is something outside the grasp of the intentional efforts of members, as well as being irreducible to changes in the real. At the end of the chapter I consider the epistemological implications this presents to the philosopher asking after the origins of the historical society.
1. Lefort’s social ontology: historicity with or without history
Lefort concludes that so-called primitive societies are societies without history. Despite the unavoidable changes wrought by internal mutations and external threats or advantages, these societies do not understand themselves as different through time and they organise experience without marking distinctions between past, present and future. This is not, Lefort, Claude. (1952) ‘Société "sans Histoire" et Historicité' in Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, p93 (All
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translations in this chapter are my own). Later republished in Les formes de l’histoire: Essais d’anthropologie politique. Paris: Gallimard, (1978).
For a brief but concise summary of the import of this article for French historical through see Hartog, François.
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(2017) Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. trans. Saskia Brown. New York: Columbia University Press, p27. For accounts which emphasise the importance of the early anthropological works in their reading of Lefort see Moyn, Samuel. (2012) ‘Claude Lefort, Political Anthropology, and Symbolic Division’ in Constellations Vol. 19, No. 1; Geenens, Raf. (2008) ‘Democracy, human rights and history: Reading Lefort’ in European Journal of Political Theory, vol.:7(3).
Lefort, Claude. (2000) ‘Dialogue with Pierre Clastres’ in Writing: The Political Test (Durham, NC).
however, to suggest that they are passive societies, immersed in a reproduction of themselves in naturally given conditions. According to Lefort, the society without history not only does have a relationship with itself in time, it is very much a creative relationship; it “is able to plunge itself into repetition and, even while showing the conditions of a creative development, organise itself in function of non-development.” That is, societies without 19 history show all the signs of historicity.
Pursuing this question Lefort turns first to Hegel’s distinction between societies with and without history. He shows how awkwardly these societies sit in relation to universal history as sites from which history is inaugurated but which are not themselves historical; “The dialectic does not recover these peoples thanks to a final transcendence; it conserves them like a foreign body”. The paradox of Hegel’s rationalism is that the society without history is 20 both the origin of the historical society, and hence inside it as a beginning, as well as being outside it as a completely foreign configuration. Since it does not express itself through the dialectic of reason it “does not talk of itself and does not allow itself to be known. Since it has nothing to say: it is not”.21 What makes such a society so alien is that it lacks self-consciousness; it is unable to transform its various cultural, political and juridical expressions into self-referential representations. What Lefort identifies as the rationalist assumption is that societies without a reflexively cumulative self-understanding lack historicity. This produces a strangely negative image of the society without history, it appears insofar as the historical society emerges from it, but remains silent and closed in on itself. For Lefort, on the other hand, the silence of the society without history is something that not only suggests a particular form of being but one which can be read; “It is therefore that the past of primitive societies, even if it is indecipherable, is not just nothing. Its absence signals it and suggests a style of change that at least can be described”. 22
Since the rationalist approach gives a negative and paradoxical picture of the society without history, Lefort finds that the intuitions guiding his enquiry are better opened onto by anthropology, as it is here that he finds the idea that there is a proximity, rather than a distance or incommensurability, between societies without history and historical societies. This is particularly the case after the structuralist revival of anthropology, which aimed at a systematic science of the deep structures of social life, and ultimately of the human mind. Lefort’s project is not, however, guided by this scientific impetus. Rather, he approaches anthropology as a form of writing in which the markers of proximity and alterity are
Lefort, ‘Société ‘sans Histoire’ et Historicité,’ p93
19 Ibid, p91 20 Ibid, p91 21 Ibid, pp98-99 22
continuously displaced, and in which objective knowledge undermines itself. Lefort shares a second inclination with certain strains of anthropology, exemplified by Marcel Mauss, which do not merely present a functional system of institutions but figure the “movement through which and in which a social order is instituted.” A movement which is revealed through the 23 “inadequacy,” of behaviours in relation to their social rules as well as the conflicts which result from the possibility of multiple interpretations of these rules. For example, jokes are an interpretation of the social which reveal its rules as well as the latent conflicts resulting from them. That is, even in the society without history, people are not flush with their social context. Rather than presupposing integration Lefort is looking for the effort which goes into the re-affirmation of a highly complex but determinate social form.
Lefort illustrates this by turning to the account of Balinese society given by Gregory Bateson. This is a society which exhibits an extreme systematisation of social life with the 24 goal of social equilibrium. For example, in order to forestall a disagreement between men escalating into conflict, the involved parties must officially register their situation and pledge to avoid addressing each other. Wars between groups are similarly annulled by the withdrawal of all involved parties into fortifications so intense that fighting becomes impossible. In short, Balinese society goes very far in formalising all sorts of interactions in order to keep confrontation at bay. This non-confrontational impetus is also present in its cultural forms. For example, music is arranged so as not to lead to a crescendo but to maintain itself as a concatenation of separate motifs. One might note that if it is far from Dionysian, there is also nothing of the Apollonian harmony. It is not oriented to a rationalisation of elements but to the maintenance of equilibrium. Chaos is not brought to heel, it is kept at bay. Above all, the systematisation of time seems to cast the individual adrift in an ocean of conflicting currents and unfathomable depths. Time is divided into different sequences of weeks and months of wildly divergent lengths so that “an event is situated simultaneously in relation to many systems of reference and, in some way, overdetermined.” This overdetermination reaches into the future itself so that, as Lefort 25 describes it, an individual shows “an incapacity to imagine an absolutely contingent future.” Central to Lefort’s understanding of the society without history is the mutual dependency between social determinacy and the foreclosure of history. To acknowledge the future or past as a time different from the present admits the uncontrollability of relations between men;
Ibid, pp94-95 23 Ibid, pp104-107 24 Ibid, p106 25
‘If the case of Bali is instructive, it is not mainly because it shows a stifling of conflict, but because the cultural putting into form (mise-en-forme) of a non-creative future, or in other words, historical castration, coincides with a state in which men find themselves strictly situated in relation to each other and defined by the links of dependence that unite them.’ 26
The example of Balinese society is certainly instructive in terms of the link displayed between social and historical determination. It is not, however, a prototype or ideal form for Lefort. That is to say, social determinacy need not express itself through the prohibition of violence in every case. Consider, for example, the Albanian institution of the blood feud which locks countless generations into the repetition of an original murder. Detailed in the Kanun, the ancient legal code, this institution binds together the members of the community into a rigidly patterned and highly prescriptive form of life. In Ismail Kadare’s novel Broken April, the narrator, a young man who was honour bound to commit a murder and who awaits his own bloody demise, reflects on the force of the Kanun;
‘as the weeks and months went by, Gjorg came to understand that the other part, which was concerned with everyday living and was not drenched with blood, was inextricably bound to the bloody part, so much so that no one could really tell where one part left off and the other began, the whole was so conceived that one begat the other, the stainless giving birth to the bloody, and the second to the first, and so on forever, from generation to generation.’ 27
What does the ‘bloody part’ of the Kanun express? It expresses a total regulation of the event. When a happening interrupts the usual course of things, in the form of a murder or a rape or another transgression against the community, it is made into the site of repetition. It will be avenged from one generation to the next, beyond the memory of the founding crime. What Gjorg comes to understand is that this is not an anomaly but expresses the total form of his social world. This is a society which is no more volatile, in the sense of being open to change, than that of the Balinese. In both cases conflict is regulated and interpreted in a way that maintains a determinacy of social relations.
Nonetheless, even a society like that of the Balinese, with its intricate architecture of cultural expressions, religious prohibitions, dictated social relations and legal forms, bristles with the “latent human conflict”. This conflict is indicated by a serpentine caste system which 28
Ibid, pp108-109
26
Kadare, Ismail. (2005) Broken April. London: Vintage.
27
Lefort, ‘Société ‘sans Histoire’ et Historicité,’ p106
dictates which forms of speech and bodily actions must be used to speak to someone from a higher or lower rank. Lefort also notes that the intricate system of gift exchange, which regulates reciprocity, also provokes anxiety and jealousy. Lefort argues that what is most 29 instructive about this example is not the “stifling of conflict but the cultural putting into form (mise-en-forme) of a non-creative future.” I will elaborate on this point in the third chapter, 30 and for now merely indicate that these strict and determinate set of social relations testify to a primary ontological creativity rather than repression.
The insight into the ontological creativity of the social institution remains central to Lefort’s thought but is significantly deepened and modified as it comes to be articulated under the name of the political. Although this is not a denomination he uses in the 1952 article, there is certainly an indication that Lefort is already thinking in these terms when he emphasises, as he does throughout the article, that a society puts itself into form (mise-en-forme). In later 31 work he will specify that it does this through the elaboration of a visible representation of itself (mise-en-scene) as well as the articulation of meaningful markers of human co-existence (mise-en-sens). There is in fact a remarkable proximity between the conception 32 of the social institution articulated by Lefort under the terms historicity, and later, the political. The former is defined by Lefort as “the manner in which men reconnect themselves in solidarity with each other to their collective past and future”. This generates a specific form 33 of life with its myriad cultural expressions, legal institutions, forms of behaviour and knowledge. Similarly the political refers “to the principles that generate society, or, more accurately, different forms of society.” The first point to be made about Lefort’s conception 34 of the political is that it is representative. These ontologically constitutive principles are not adequately explained by metaphorically linking them with the unconscious nor to the noumenal. That is, they are not buried deep in the breast of the social, but projected onto its visible surface. It is only by making a representation of itself to itself, that a society exists. Secondly, the political is always a unified representation. Even incredibly complex and openly conflictual societies refer to the same principles. Conflict is a form of relationality, hence conflicting parties must share a site from which to articulate their divergence. As
See Moyn ‘Claude Lefort, Political Anthropology, and Symbolic Division’ in Constellations for an account which
29
reads Lefort as seeing self-alienation and division in the primitive society rather than a seamless harmony enabled by the imaginary. Different parts of Lefort’s work give different accounts on this point.
Lefort, ‘Société ‘sans Histoire’ et Historicité,’ pp108-109
30
For an account that traces Lefort’s use of the term ‘the political’ to his engagement with the Center for
31
Philosophical Research on the Political founded by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy See Moyn, Samuel. (2015) ‘Concepts of the Political in Twentieth-Century European Thought’, pp13-14; Marchart, Oliver. (2008) Post-foundational political thought: political difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau.
Lefort, ‘The Question of Democracy’ in Democracy and Political Theory, (Minneapolis; 1988) p11 32
Lefort, ‘Société ‘sans Histoire’ et Historicité,’ p104 33
Lefort, ‘Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’ in DPT, p217 34
Lefort describes the social space; “this space is organized as one despite (or because of) its multiple divisions and that it is organized as the same in all its multiple dimensions implies a reference to a place from which it can be seen, read and named.” Thirdly, the political 35 enables a society to constitute itself in time and in relation to time. That is, it must have a relative permanence and it must facilitate a mode of temporality. As we saw in the case of Balinese society, such a mode need not establish distinctions between past, present and future. Historicity need not establish history and open itself to an interrogation of its changing form. Hence the final point that needs to be made about Lefort’s concept of the political is that, while it is constitutive of the social, it might not be recognized in the form of life it brings into being.
2. Lefort’s political theory: the state and the other
By the time he returns to anthropology and the theme of the society without history in a 1987 article celebrating and critically engaging with the work of Pierre Clastres, Lefort’s theoretical vocabulary is fully developed. Clastres was a friend and contemporary of Lefort. Like the latter, he was to detect, at a relatively early stage, signs of servitude and domination in the communist project. As with Lefort, this realisation was a catalyst for pursuing the question 36 of freedom outside of marxist strictures and he did this through anthropology. Clastres’ best known work, Society Against the State, is an ethnographic work on the Guayaki people of South America. It is from his long association with these peoples that he formulates the 37 central claim of his work, namely that these societies reject the formation of a power separate from the community. In Lefort’s terms we can see how Guayaki communities put themselves into form (mise-en-forme) in order to foreclose the emergence of a power which would exist over and above the community. Briefly, to draw on Lefort’s sympathetic reconstruction of Clastres’ account, there are four principal mechanisms such a society deploys in order to do this. Firstly, the institution of chieftainship is exercised in such a way as to nullify command; and secondly, there is a violent inscription of the Law of equality on the bodies of adolescents during initiation ceremonies. This law states that no member of the community is worth more or less than another. In both cases power superficially takes on the form of externality in order to curtail that a truly separate power should arise. Thirdly, the mode of production forestalls the accumulation of wealth; and finally, wars maintain the
Ibid, p225
35
For a fuller account of Lefort and Clastres relationship see Moyn ‘Claude Lefort, Political Anthropology, and
36
Symbolic Division’ in Claude Lefort Thinker of the Political edited by Martín Plot.
Today, in English, the term that is used, as directed by the people in question, is Ache. As usual, French 37
stubbornly sticks to the older, and more problematic, terminology. However, since it appears in the literature I am dealing with, and because it still has contemporary valency in French, I am using the older term.
integrity of all tribes and therefore the “configuration of a diversified world”. Although one 38 concerns internal and the other external relations, both the productive system and war work to insure the equilibrium of this world without introducing a unifying power.
Lefort defends Clastres against a reading which would see him assert that such societies are societies without power. Although Clastres does sometimes use this formula in a pretty blunt manner, the overall sense of the text, according to Lefort, suggests rather that they are societies without a separate power. Nonetheless, even granting this interpretation, Lefort cannot accept Clastres’ conclusion. Lefort detects a moralising simplification in Clastres’ analysis of statist societies. That Clastres makes an absolute break in history according to the emergence of the state suggests “someone who wants to get to the root of evil and cut.” Nevertheless, both Clastres and Lefort understand that the political institution of a 39 society is connected to how it represents and generates power and, to a certain extent, they agree that this representation must refer to a unity. Lefort’s mise-en-forme suggests that the constitution of the social implies an ontologically creative movement through which a total world becomes meaningful and visible to its participants by presenting its elements as a unity. Similarly, for Clastres, societies without history are not naturally unified; they must unconsciously but intentionally organise themselves against division. While both thinkers agree that there is nothing natural about the society without history, Clastres’ stress on intentionality is very much at odds with Lefort’s understanding of the social institution. Even if Clastres avoids attributing the choice to a reflexive and self-conscious rationality there is the suggestion that the political can be known and that the generation of power is a process that can be mastered, or at least manipulated.
In his earlier work Lefort was not entirely impervious to such a proposition. In “Société ‘sans Histoire’ et Historicité” he states;
‘Stagnation is not a fact of nature but a fact of coexistence, it is already given in the manner in which men perceive themselves and comport themselves, that is to say, in a collective praxis.’40
The political does of course include a dimension of collective praxis, yet it also involves a subjection to that which exceeds it. The ‘Dialogue with Pierre Clastres’ reflects a very subtle change in Lefort’s thought. Here he states that the political “testifies at once to an
Lefort, ‘Dialogue with Pierre Clastres’ in WPT, p214.
38
Ibid, p217.
39
Lefort, ‘Société ‘sans Histoire’ et Historicité,’ p111.
elaboration and to a test of the human condition in given circumstances.” What is the force 41 that could subject the human condition to such a test? Does the notion of such a test gesture towards a transcendent dimension, something which exceeds the self-institution of the human condition? Or is it rather an effect created by a society which is unable to come to terms with its own self-institution? This is an ambiguous thematic in Lefort’s thought which deepens over the course of his life’s work. It reaches its most sophisticated explication in his 1981 article ‘Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’ where he suggests that philosophy and religion both testify to an experience of something which exceeds the human but which he refuses at the same time to name as the divine. Where Clastres thinks that the society without history is able to make power immanent, Lefort insists that the spectre of a supra-sensible power, experienced as absolute alterity, haunts every society. Even the immanent power of the Guayaki suggests an experience of transcendent power. The law that is violently imprinted on the adolescent body is not only generated within the community but “swoops down upon them from the outside.” The initiation ritual testifies to another world 42 which is everywhere present. One could say that it suffuses the experience societies without history have of the real, that is, of the visible world of plants, animals and men. It is thus acknowledged by societies without history; in fact, all speech and knowledge reference it. Yet if alterity is omnipresent, it is equally non-localisable. As Lefort puts it; “the other is not One.” 43
Clastres asserts that Guayaki communities refuse to allow themselves to become subject to a power distinct from them. Lefort’s point is that all societies are always already subject to a power which appears as (quasi)distinct from them. In fact, for the Guayaki this power is constantly present in the form of ancestors and gods who subject human beings to their will. Lefort understands this as an effect of the imaginary. This imaginary world is indeed partly ‘imaginary’ in the way we understand the term in everyday parlance, in that it attests to an ability of humans to create images in the mind and project their existence. Yet Lefort’s use of the term also indicates that any projections of the human mind attest to a more primary experience, that of an ordeal of existence in which the world is in excess of the humanly instituted;
‘Human beings populate the invisible with the things they see, naively invent a time that exists before time, organize a space that exists behind their space; they base the plot on the most general conditions of their lives. Yet anything that bears the mark of their experience also bears the mark of an ordeal. Once we
Lefort, ‘Dialogue with Pierre Clastres’ in WPT, p226.
41
Ibid, p225.
42
Ibid, p226. 43
recognize that humanity opens onto itself by being held in an opening it does not create, we have to accept that the change in religion is not to be read simply as a sign that the divine is a human invention, but as a sign of the deciphering of the divine or, beneath the appearance of the divine, of an excess of being over appearance.’ 44
This is not a cultural form which is gradually elaborated as people tell themselves nice or scary stories about the parts of the world which appear to them as unmasterable. It comes into being alongside the political as a primal enunciation of the order of being. As we saw above, what Lefort calls the political is the symbolic gesture through which a society institutes itself by making a representation of itself to itself. The symbolic gives access to the distinction between existent and non-existent things without itself being able to be articulated according to it. While they are mutually dependent, the real and the symbolic never completely coincide. What Lefort refers to as the imaginary works to conceal the gap between the two, and in the pre-modern context it is remarkably effective. This is not to imply that it is somehow a second-order representation which lies like a mask or veil over a ‘real’ world. Rather, in the pre-modern context the symbolic and the imaginary cannot be definitively distinguished. In marked contrast, the imaginary is unable to affect this sort of definitive closure in the historical society. As we will see in the next chapter, when power loses its fully transcendent status, the bond between symbolic and real is, so to speak, loosened and multiple interpretations of the real emerge.
Lefort’s rejection of the self-directing capacity of the Guayaki is significant. It signals his distance from the idea that the self-instituting society can experience itself without recourse to any point of transcendence. That is, that it can know itself and experience its own self-instituting power. After emerging from a youthful commitment to the proletarian revolution in the form of the politics of autogestion and the critique of bureaucracy, Lefort comes to deeply question the possibility that a society can be delivered, once and for all, from its divisions in order to posit its own form and directions. Social division is constitutive in an ontological sense. Although Lefort always displays a most generous attitude when making this point in reference to Clastres, he is not quite so gentle when he encounters a similar position in on-and-off friend and former comrade Cornelius Castoriadis. The latter shared with Clastres the idea that there is an quasi-intentional form of human action which could bring a society into contact with its self-instituting capacity. If, for Clastres, this is the ritual of initiation, for Castoriadis it is politics, and it was certainly not the tribe, but rather the ancient polis, which furnished for Castoriadis such an image. In a 1976 interview in Telos, in which he discusses the significance of Clastres work, Lefort also refers to Castoriadis: “Castoriadis eventually affirms the idea of an overthrow which would make possible the ‘permanent and explicit
Lefort, ‘Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’ in DPT, p223. (Italics in original) 44
institution of society.’ This formula reintroduces the myth, inherited from Marx, of a society able to master its own development and to communicate with all its parts, a society in a way able to see itself.” In Lefort’s view this suggests an “effervescent society whose course in 45 principle escapes the controls of Power”. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to give the theoretical relationship between Lefort and Castoriadis the attention it deserves, it is worth noting that what Lefort seems to take exception to, is the projection of the society without power into the future. Lefort even goes on to suggest an affinity between Castoriadis’ vision and that of a “single, homogenous society” which is able to self-institute through a “totalizing knowledge”. Having relegated the anti-statist society to the past, Clastres’ vision appears less ambitious and more melancholy in comparison. Nonetheless, Lefort cannot accept the idea of a society which is able to intentionally set its own form.
3. Lefort’s epistemic methodology: the question of regime
Lefort shares Clastres' commitment to freedom, but not the anarchist inflection given to it by the latter. That is to say, Lefort does not so much associate domination with the agency of the state as with the absence of a space of reflection and contestation (civil society). In this sense, his interest in the emergence of the historical society borders on excitement rather than the foreboding which marks Clastres’ account of the emergence of the statist society. Yet there is a greater difference between them. Lefort finds it strange that a thinker such as Clastres, who has so rigorously established that the social institution resides in the symbolic, and who moreover, “has placed us in the presence of a system so closed that no event seems capable of unsettling it,” should end up identifying the emergence of the statist society in the real. Having established not just a principle but an intention of the society without a state to retain their immanent self-enunciation, Clastres is at a loss to account for what can only be seen, from the perspective of his theoretical view, as a failure, degradation or demise of the stateless society. In the end he defuses his explanation through a sequential chain. Population growth is seen to have favoured an increase in power of the chiefs which in turn provokes prophets to emerge and enjoin the tribes to migrate to the “Land without Evil”. Clastres poses that this experience cultivates for the first time a habit 46 of obedience and that hierarchical form of organisation emerges.
It should be noted that Lefort, in his early work, was not immune to the attempt to locate the emergence of the historical (or what for Clastres is the statist) society in the real. At the very
Lefort. ‘An interview with Claude Lefort’ in Telos no.30, (1976–7) p185.
45
Lefort, ‘Dialogue with Pierre Clastres’ in WPT, pp228-229.
end of ‘Société ‘sans Histoire’ et Historicité’ he turns to the concept of work as a mode of objectification through which a society inaugurates a progressive history;
‘work supposes a detour, a kind of distancing of others or again a respite in human struggle, thanks to which the elaboration of a new object that embodies a neutral relationship, can be accomplished.’ 47
This assertion sits oddly within an overall argumentation which asserts the symbolic form of collective life. From the perspective of the symbolic, work can only be inflected as a distanciation from or neutralisation of the communal relationship in a certain form of society; it cannot itself explain that form. Throughout his mature work Lefort not only rejects the Marxist conception of history as driven by modes of production, he suggests that it is not the only conception operating in Marx’s thought. In a 1978 Article ‘Marx: From One Vision of History to Another’ Lefort turns the question of Marx’s philosophy of history into an ambivalent site, suggesting that Marx had a number of conceptions of history operating throughout his oeuvre and that in some of these the symbolic is more primary than productive forces in setting the form of the social.
Lefort’s later engagement with Clastres on this point elucidates just how much distance he takes from the idea that a social change can be read through empirical sociological or economic processes or environmental factors. He accuses Clastres of taking up the “vanity of a high-altitude viewpoint [un point de vue de survol]” which not only takes the subject out of history, but places them nowhere. If Lefort’s attitude displays a humility of knowledge it is not just because, as the entire Kantian enterprise reminds us, reason always oversteps its boundaries and looks towards ultimate, and unknowable, principles. Rather, for Lefort, following Merleau-Ponty, there is a always already a prior imbrication of the subject in the world so that some things are revealed, and at the same time, some are obscured. In 48 keeping with a conviction which is as much existential as epistemological, Lefort proposes a different approach;
‘Instead of detecting the causes for the passage from one formation to another, don't we have to maintain — without ever forgetting that our interpretation is laid out within the horizons of our own culture and reminding ourselves what our
Lefort, ‘Société ‘sans Histoire’ et Historicité,’ p113. 47
For a detailed account of Lefort’s proximity to his teacher Merleau-Ponty on this point, see Flynn,
48
Bernard. (2005) The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press.
questions owe to our own experience of the social — the exigency of thinking history when faced with the test of what I called the enigma of the institution?’ 49
For Lefort, the idea that political philosopher is aware of the horizons of a cultural history and its particular experience does not imply relativism as its central question is “what is the nature of the difference between forms of society?” Political philosophy is a comparative 50 investigation into the form of a society. Such a form is not one that corresponds to a social scientific or marxist conception of totality. That is to say, Lefort is not looking for the borders of a total area inside of which we can identify a particular society in all its relations, all its possible significations and modes of expression; much less for demarcated spheres - the economic, politics, aesthetics, religion - within which it might be more plausible to formulate a claim for knowledge of a total area. Rather than looking for the boundaries of a firmly delineated terrain he is seeking to
‘identify a principle of internalization which can account for a specific mode of differentiation and articulation between classes, groups and social ranks, and, at the same time, for a specific mode of discrimination between markers - economic, juridical, aesthetic, religious markers - which order the experience of coexistence.’ 51
As elsewhere in his work, Lefort appeals to the symbolic as a singular site. It cannot, however, be grasped in its singularity. Political philosophy approaches the symbolic by tracing two, seemingly contradictory, articulations of the social. The first articulation presents the social as so many sites of conflict and difference. Indeed, to speak of society appears at odds with a reality that appears as so many fractured and warring entities. And yet these conflicts are articulated only insofar as they make reference to the same meaning. The second articulation of the social appears through markers which distribute meaning over the entire social space. This does not imply that there is an absolute stability of meaning. In fact, insofar as this meaning is always deployed in sites of conflict, it is subject to change. For example, while we cannot make an absolute definitional claim on the principle of justice, any conflict gestures to a demarcation between the just and the unjust, of what is abhorrent to a sense of balance and what offends any proper proportion of losses, gains, injury and endurance. The principle of justice is both ultimately elusive but constantly palpable.
Lefort, ‘Dialogue with Pierre Clastres’ in WPT, p229.
49
Lefort, The Question of Democracy’ in DPT, p11.
50
Lefort, ‘Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’ in DPT, p218.
Just as Lefort rejects the idea that we can step outside the space of the social in order to know and name society as a totality, he also rejects the idea that the theoretical viewpoint can step outside of time in order to pinpoint its moment of inception. If the first tendency is often found in a materialist conception of society, the second is endemic to idealism. Lefort’s critique of Hegel in ‘Société ‘sans Histoire’ is that the dialectic assumes that the society without history can be identified as the starting point for a progressive history without itself having any relationship to time. The question of the social institution is located in an originary and traumatic alienation from nature. Lefort poses the question in a different way. Reflecting on the attempt to follow a path of interrogation opened up by Machiavelli, Lefort clarifies what is and is not his central problematic; “Machiavelli does not concern himself with the problem of the origin of the social.” Machiavelli leaves the problem of the origins of the 52 social to Hobbes and to other modern thinkers. For his own part, he knows that there has always been some sort of collective life. That is to say, and the point cannot be stated strongly enough, there is no pre-social human life. Asking the question of the origins of the social in the way the contractualist or rationalist philosopher does is to attempt to fix the enigma of the institution in a demarcated time before time, a clearing in the forests where there is nature but not history, where there are people but no society. Rather, what interests Machiavelli is an altogether different question: the origins of the city. What concerns him is, the emergence of a discourse in the social which interrogates the enigma of the institution. As I will show in the next chapter, the city is the space wherein the social institution lifts itself out of its imaginary fugue and catches a glimpse of its own wild impossibility. The city senses momentarily that it has laid its own foundations in the impossibility of the auto-institution and that it has done this on the hostile morass of an indeterminate natural world which, through the mists, appears intertwined with another, invisible world.
If Lefort posits a historicity without history he also engages with the primitive society without positing a a philosophy of history. The question of the city does not relegate the primitive society to the margins of humanity, nor does it incorporate it as a latent nucleus. It allows us to see the creativity of the social institution of both the historical society and the society without history. This accords with Lefort’s earliest epistemological intuitions, as set out in 1952; ‘Such a research cannot have the meaning of opposing stagnant society and history society. It is more about distinguishing two modes of historicity and allowing them to be compared. Stagnant society cannot be shown as a humanity within humanity but as singular configuration of elements that can be differently grouped.’ 53
Lefort, ‘Pensé Politique et Histoire’ in Le Temps Présent, (Paris; 2007) p853.
52
Lefort, ‘Société ‘sans Histoire’ et Historicité,’ p111.
CHAPTER 2
Modernity Multiplied: The Appearance of the Historical Society
Claude Lefort is most often associated, particularly in the English-speaking reception of his work, with an account of modernity which begins with the the French revolution. More than this, Lefort is interpreted as a theorist who traces an absolute demarcation between the pre-modern, understood as monarchical absolutism, and the modern read as a liberal, democratic political regime. In this account, the French revolution marks the appearance of an entirely new sort of society in which the future is an unknown domain and the present is indeterminate. This interpretation, largely concentrated on reconstructing Lefort’s historical and conceptual account of revolutionary regicide, is not incorrect but it is reductive. Jacques Rancière, a philosopher better known in the English-speaking world than Lefort, entrenches this view when he accuses Lefort of a catastrophic reading of modernity; “There is really no reason to identify such indetermination with a sort of catastrophe in the symbolic linked to the revolutionary disembodiment of the “double body” of the king.” In this reading Lefort is 54 not only guilty of over-emphasising, and indeed catastrophizing, the symbolic break, he is also read as providing a version of a secularisation thesis, that is, of surreptitiously ushering the theologico-political format into modernity through a trauma that cannot be eliminated. In this chapter I will present a more complex account of Lefort’s understanding of modernity through two paths of interrogation. The first returns to the impossibility of identifying the origins of the historical society, as explored in chapter one. Using the paradigm of event as advent, destruction and continuity, I theorise Lefort’s modernity as being irreducible to the displacement of the ancien regime by modern democracy. The second path follows a different route in opening a dialogue between Lefort’s earlier work on Machiavelli and his later work on the French Revolution. The latter is, after all, not the only account of the emergence of the historical society to be found within Lefort’s oeuvre. Published in 1972, Lefort’s thesis on Machiavelli, Le Travail de l'œuvre Machiavel, was only translated into English as late as 2012, and it is, at that, only a partial translation. In the English-speaking world few interpreters of Lefort have yet taken up the demanding task it poses. Even when it is brought into the play of Lefort’s other work there is an inadequate theorisation of what the relationship to the later works is. The second account of the historical society which emerges in Lefort’s work is given in this earlier work on Machiavelli. In this account, the visibility of historical time is linked to a detachment of knowledge from power and the concomitant appearance of an unbound form of discourse. While not necessarily in contradiction, the two Rancière, Rancière, Jacques. (1999) Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julian Rose. Minneapolis, 54
