Fixing Marx with Machiavelli: Claude Lefort's Democratic Turn

References

• D. Howard, The Marxian Legacy, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1988, p. 186.
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• Although these two “slogans” are indeed essential to Lefort's work, they do not reflect the depth and the originality of his work. See Oliver Marchart, “Division and Democracy: On Claude Lefort's Post-Foundational Political Philosophy” in Filozofki Vestnik, Vol. XXI (2), 2000, p. 51.
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• H. Poltier's Passion du politique, Geneva: Labor et Fides 1998 is the most comprehensive critical approach to Lefort and he rightly emphasizes the importance of Machiavelli in this transition. B. Flynn's The Philosophy of Claude Lefort, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 2005, published recently, also begins with a thorough analysis of Lefort's reading of Machiavelli. In my own application of Lefort to today's philosophical concerns, I too have tried to underline Lefort's “Machiavellian turn.” See my “The Uncanny Proximity: From Democracy to Terror”, Florida Philosophical Review, Vol. II, Issue 2, Winter 2002.
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• C. Lefort, Le travail de l'oeuvre machiavel, Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Hereafter M for parenthetical citations.
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• H. Poltier, Passion du politique: La pensée de Claude Lefort, p. 18.
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• See A. Camus, Between Hell and Reason. Essays from the Resistance Newspaper Combat, 1944–1947, tr. A. de Gramont, Hanover, NE: Wesleyan University Press 1991, especially pp. 120–124. Merleau-Ponty's responses to Sartre can be found in his Adventures of the Dialectic, Chicago: Northwestern University Press 1973.
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• See, for instance, E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso, 1983, chapters 1 and 2, for a summary of these different attempts.
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• G. Lukacs, “The Old Culture and the New Culture,” Telos Vol. 5 (spring 1970), p. 30.
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• M. Abensour, La démocratie contre l'état: Marx et le moment machiavélien, Paris: PUF 1997. See R-P. Droit's review in Le Monde, February 27th, 1997.
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• L. Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, tr. G. Elliott, London: Verso 1999, p. 3.
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• P. Manent recalls Lefort's presence and his contribution through Machiavelli within the French circles: “I do not know anymore if the pavement of the old hotel on rue de Touron was even or uneven, but I remember that Raymond Aron conducted his seminars there. I heard for the first time Claude Lefort. He told us about Machiavelli. The exact topic of his exposé escapes me today; I only remember his eloquence and my disagreement with him as a beginner. He had just published Le travail de l'oeuvre Machiavel, or he was about to. Machiavelli to me was what a flame is to a moth. The junction of philosophy and politics, union and conflict of politics and religion were my obsessions. I dove into [Lefort's] long work.” Manent then adds that twenty years later he has been “cured” of his original disagreement. See his ‘Vers l'oeuvre et vers le monde: Le Machiavel de Claude Lefort’ in La démocratie à l'œuvre. Autour de Claude Lefort, ed. C. Habib and C. Mouchard, Paris: Esprit 1993, p. 169.
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• As Bernard Flynn convincingly argues, Lefort's agreement with those who see Machiavelli as a novel thinker does not lead him to the same conclusions. Most take Machiavelli to be the first political scientist, appreciative of empiricism. But Lefort's project shows a more complicated reading. See Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort, p. 6f.
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• Radical Democracy needs a brief clarification. As I understand and apply it, it is the democratic turn for many Marxists—such as Lefort, Laclau and Mouffe—that combines the insights of twentieth-century Continental Philosophy with the Marxist agenda. Democracy is radical in the sense that it is ontologically and metaphysically groundless; it does not embody a particular ideal form. But its “emptiness”, as Lefort puts it, opens the path to a multiplicity of struggles and potential emancipations. To place Lefort within this movement, see A. Keenan, Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press 2003, pp. 1–8.
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• Lefort's Merleau-Pontian philosophical manifesto is in his Sur une colonne absente: Ecrits autour de Merleau-Ponty, Paris: Gallimard 1978. There, Lefort attempts to do philosophy without a foundational “column” based on his reading of Merleau-Ponty. Poltier, in Passion, dedicated an entire chapter to a close reading of this particular work (pp. 95–125). Lefort proceeds in a number of essays to defeat what he called realism and idealism. Realism, positivism and objectivism are all different names for the same problem: the neglect of consciousness. But idealism—and even Husserlian phenomenology—seems to neglect the world by using Cartesian categories. Against them, Lefort posits “thought” (pensée) as the difficult work of thinking from the inside. Hugues Poltier has painstakingly tried to clarify Lefort's philosophical position and has defined “thought” as the following: ‘thought’, by aiming at the world, encounters an exteriority that is already thought; and by aiming at ‘thought’ itself, it encounters an interiority that is already a sedimented experience of the world.” To sum it up, he cites Lefort's philosophical motto: thought is creating “a distance of Being within Being.” See Poltier, Passion, p. 104.
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• See also Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort, p. 6f.
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• C. Lefort, Les formes de l'histoire: essaies d'anthropologie politique, Paris: Folio 1978, p. 291.
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• Lefort, Les formes de l'histoire, p. 292.
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• This connection to religion will be more obvious when we turn to Lefort's analysis of the decapitation of the King after the French revolution. But it should also be said that one of the most important of Claude Lefort's philosophical collaborators, since Castoriadis, has been Marcel Gauchet, whose work is even less known in America. Gauchet, who is the editor of the important journal “Le Débat,” has co-authored a number of essays with Lefort and they have worked together in the same political institution named after Raymond Aron. Gauchet's work—which one should also call radical democratic—is primarily dedicated to this very question of the rapport between democracy and religion. Whereas Lefort's writings focus on the decapitation of the king as the moment of separation between divine and human politics, Gauchet has written much more about the historical shifts and changes and has maintained that democracy is only possible after the “exit” (la sortie) of religion from politics. For more on Gauchet, see his La religion dans la démocratie, Paris: Folio 1998; La démocratie contre elle-même, Paris: Gallimard 2002. Marc-Olivier Padis has, in my view, written the best overall introduction to Gauchet's work. See his Marcel Gauchet: La genèse de la démocratie, Paris: Michalon,1996.
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• J-P. Marcos, “Les categories du politique“, in Filozofki Vestnik, Vol. XXI (2), 2000, p. 90. My emphasis.
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• Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1988, p 19. See my “The Uncanny Proximity: From Democracy to Terror”.
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• Q. Skinner, Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000, p. 25. See also Machiavelli's own letter and dedication, serving as a preface to the Prince(pp. 1–5).
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• N. Machiavelli, Selected Political Writings, tr. D. Wootton, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett 1994, p. 31. Emphasis added.
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• John Rawls spoke of “fact of diversity;” for Lefort, it is originary. It goes “all the way down.” Chantal Mouffe, refuting Rawls, refers to “axiological” diversity. Mouffe, “Rethinking Political Community: Chantal Mouffe's Liberalism”, an interview conducted by Lynn Worsham and Gary Olson, in Race, Rhetoric and the Postcolonial, ed. G. Olson and L. Worsham, Albany, NY: SUNY Press,1998, p. 175.
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• Marchart, “Division and Democracy“, p. 60.
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• Marchart speaks of an “ontological conflict” which takes place in any society and which would manifest itself through an “ontic conflict” that is modifiable (pp. 59–62). Poltier also simply repeats Lefort's position and insists that “despite the author of Capital…this conflict is unsurpassable” (p. 137). I am uncomfortable with the Heideggerian vocabulary that Marchart uses: especially since the ontological is not factual, a historical reading of class struggle would prove useless and the mere assertion on Machiavelli's part cannot serve as a sufficient basis for having found this ontological priority. I do not reject the fundamental fragmentation of society and I will try to show that there is a better way to prove it, thanks to Ricoeur's work.
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• See her Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli, Berkeley: University of California Press 1984.
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• Poltier, Passion, p. 130 and 134.
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• Tomaz Mastnak, “The Disembodiment of Politics and the Formation of Political Space: Questioning Lefort's Concept of Democracy“, in Filozofki Vestnik, Vol. XXI (2), 2000, p. 132.
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• M. Abensour, “Réflexions sur les deux interpretations du totalitarianisme chez Claude Lefort“ in La démocratie à l'oeuvre. Autour de Claude Lefort, ed. C. Habib, Paris: Esprit 1993, p. 99. See also Lefort, Invention, pp. 150–152.
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• Poltier, Passion, p. 139.
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• Marchart, “Division and Democracy“ p. 61.
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• Manent “Vers l'oeuvre et le monde“ p. 183.
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• Machiavelli, Selected Political Writings, p. 32.
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• See also Marchart, “Division and Democracy“. pp. 54–55.
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• Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, p. 217.
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• For this notion of ideology, see Ricoeur's Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. G. H. Taylor, New York: Columbia University Press 1986.
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• Configuration is the word Ricoeur uses to describe mimesis 2, from his Time and Narrative. Vol. 1, tr. D. Pellauer and K. McLaughlin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984, Chapter One. See also D. Kaplan, Ricoeur's Critical Theory, Albany: SUNY Press 2003, pp. 51–53. Lefort too speaks of symbolic configuration of power, see Democracy and Political Theory, p. 250.
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• Marcos, “les categories du politique,” p. 104.
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• Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, p. 255 and p. 230.
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• Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, p. 232.
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• C. Lefort, L'invention democratique: Les limites de la domination totalitaire, Paris, Fayard 1981, p. 151.
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• Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, p. 13 & p. 202. On the notion of gap in Ricoeur's work, see H. Venema, Identifying Selfhood: Imagination, Narrative, and Hermeneutics in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur, Albany, NY: SUNY Press 2000, pp. 30–35 and 160; see also Kaplan, Ricoeur's Critical Theory, pp. 137–138 and R. Kearney, Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic of Imagination, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International 1995, p. 72.
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• See also Marchart, ‘Division and Democracy,’ p. 67.
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• Poltier, Passion, p. 153.
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• See also Poltier, Passion, pp. 145–147.
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• Poltier, Passion, p. 156.
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• Lefort, Les Formes de l'histoire, p. 42; Howard, The Marxian Legacy, pp 190–198.
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• Marcos correctly points this out as well (98). See also Kearney, On Stories, pp. 102–188 and Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, London: Routledge 2003, pp. 23–109 for how the alien other gives a narrative unity to the “insiders.” See Jelica Sumnic-Tiha, “Savoir compter l'incomptable, savoir dire l'indicible ou démocratie selon Claude Lefort” in Filozofki Vestnik, Vol. XXI (2), 2000, p. 183 for the question of narrative unity in Lefort.
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• See Machiavelli, Discourses, in Selected Political Writings, p. 94.
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