Theoria

The highly anticipated – for me, anyway – special issue on Claude Lefort in Thesis Eleven is now available to those with access to a decent library, SAGE online, or unscrupulous sorts who freely violate copyrights on behalf of others. I’ll comment on the papers anon, but, for now, the table of contents for the issue:

• Brian C.J. Singer “Introduction” (p. 3-6)
• Gregory Cameron “Naturalism and Ideology: Towards a Phenomenology of Political Discourse” (p. 7-18)
• Raf Geenens “‘When I Was Young and Politically Engaged…’: Lefort on the Problem of Political Commitment” (p. 19-32)
• James D. Ingram “The Politics of Claude Lefort’s Political: Between Liberalism and Radical Democracy” (p. 33-50)
• Mark Blackell “Lefort and Problem of Democratic Citizenship” (p. 51-62)
• Gilles Labelle “Can the Problem of the Theologico-Political Be Resolved? Leo Strauss and Claude Lefort” (p. 63-81)
• Brian C.J. Singer “Thinking the ‘Social’ With Claude Lefort” (p. 82-95)

From Singer’s introduction:

Why read Claude Lefort? Beginning in 1986, three of his books have been translated into English. Twenty years later his reputation in the Anglo-American 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 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.