Modern or contemporary democracy has developed a relation to power distinct both from that which could have existed in our societies under absolutist monarchies and from that which appeared, in the twentieth century, with totalitarian regimes—both as concerns the relation of citizens to power and as concerns the relation to power of the holders of State power themselves. These two dimensions make it possible to characterise political forms, according to a concept elaborated by Claude Lefort, who took a particular interest in what he calls the “putting into form” of the political, which is always a “putting into meaning”—a symbolic operation.
The great resonance of Claude Lefort’s thought is doubtless due to the fact that the author of L’invention démocratique (The Democratic Invention) carried out this philosophical work with particular acuity, and created a number of concepts that have become “classical” for approaching the “difference” of modern democracy in comparison with other political forms: “disincorporation” of power, “bodiless” power—power without a body designated in advance to occupy or hold it; power that thus becomes an “empty place,” “unappropriable” by any individual or group, occupied only transitorily; power whose “foundations” themselves do not cease to be interrogated, under the effect of a “dissolution of the markers of certainty”; political form that does not seek to absorb within itself all “conflict” and all social “division” but to give expression to conflict and to dissipate the fantasy of the capitalised One, of a society entirely unified under the aegis of a State itself governed by a single party or by a supreme leader, an “egocrat.”
We have listed here some of the most famous themes and concepts of Lefort’s political reflection, and this article intends to return both to an essential moment in their conception and conceptualisation and to an angle of approach to this long “history” of political forms: the angle of the “theologico-political,” which is inseparable—for reasons to which I will return—from a reflection on “the image of the body” projected onto the political plane, and from the analysis of processes of “identification” and “division,” of “incorporation” and “disincorporation.”
This moment, and this specific “angle,” are those that mark a series of fundamental articles by Lefort, written in the same years: “Droits de l’homme et politique” (“Human Rights and Politics”), published in the journal Libre in 1979; “L’image du corps et le totalitarisme” (“The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism”), published in 1979 in the journal Confrontation, both taken up in 1980 in the collection L’Invention démocratique (The Democratic Invention). And “Permanence du théologico-politique?” (“The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?”), with a question mark (this is important), published in 1981 in the journal Le Temps de la réflexion, taken up in 1986 in Essais sur le politique. XIXe-XXe siècles (Essays on the Political. 19th-20th Centuries).
This last text is particularly dense and, it must be said, difficult, to such a point that one does not know exactly what to conclude from it as to the relations between democracy and, then, “the theologico-political.” And I would like to dig a little into this difficulty, before returning to what it may induce as to Lefort’s interpretation of the relation between society and the State, and to the critical resources, still topical, of Lefort’s thought.
The difficulty of reading and interpreting the article “Permanence du théologico-politique?” stems, it seems to me, from the fact that Lefort intends to think two things at once: on the one hand, he invites us to recognise fully what he calls “the adventure of disentanglement” between the political and the religious in modernity, to take the measure of its consequences; and, on the other hand, he emphasises that philosophy or, Lefort writes, “philosophical thought,” must also “preserve a difference (…)” which “is not at the disposal of human beings; which does not occur within human history and could not be abolished within it.” What then is this mysterious “difference” which “does not occur within history” and which seems then almost to echo Heidegger’s “ontological difference,” as the condition of an “opening to the world” or indeed of the world that nonetheless remains irreducible to any worldly “being”? The “mystery” thickens with an immediate reference to the very object of religion, of “all” religion, in a very dense formula:
“That human society has no opening upon itself other than as caught within an opening that it does not make—this, in its own way, all religion says, just as philosophy does, and before it, although in a language that the latter cannot make its own.”1
This “opening upon itself” that society “would have,” then, but only because it would itself be “caught” within an opening “that it does not make,” seems to refer to the whole series of “privative” concepts that Lefort uses to grasp a condition of modern, democratic politics: the consciousness of an “unmasterable focus” that arouses, in democracy, the demand for new rights; the idea of an “unappropriable” power, of an “unsurpassable” division, of an “impossible-to-bridge” gap between the real and the symbolic, etc. The incursion into what Lefort designates as “the theologico-political labyrinth”2 is a way of sounding this “limit” and this “opening,” by going to “hear” something that religion may have been able to / has been able to say, even if it is not a matter of saying it again in the language of religion, but indeed, strictly, in that of philosophy. And even if, above all, by this it is not a matter of denying the separation of religion and politics its legitimacy—quite the contrary.
But then, what importance, what stake is there in seeking to preserve the idea of this “opening” or of this “work of the imagination that stages another time”? Why has Lefort engaged in the “theologico-political labyrinth”? It is this stake and this limit “situation” of the theologico-political that I would like to try to approach. My hypothesis is that Lefort’s problematisation of the theologico-political mingles three levels, not without tension at times: a historical plane concerning the modes of theologico-political figuration where it is a matter of following the transformations of these modes of representation of the One and the Multiple, in particular of the image of the body, of the body of the king and of the nation, but also of grasping democratic “disincorporation,” “bodiless power”; a quasi-ontological plane on the “opening” of society to itself, the non-closure, the “gap” between the real and the symbolic that must be thought and “preserved” (and this ontological approach, as I noted, awakens echoes both of Heidegger and of Lacan, Lacan who himself was inspired by Heidegger); and finally a political thesis, according to which the contemporary attempt at entirely absorbing this gap, and thereby “finishing off” a certain theologico-political duality, can give rise to totalitarianism, as an attempt to “form a body” in another mode—with an attention in fact directed essentially toward the Bolshevik, “Stalinist,” and post-Stalinist figure of totalitarianism; but as we shall see, “desymbolisation” can also follow another slope, less spectacular, one in which power becomes really empty as a symbolic instance of the collective, finds itself “privatised.”
Let us dwell on each of these levels. The first level implies reading and rereading the historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who were passionately interested in the modes of incarnation and incorporation of royal power, from medieval “political theologies” to the absolutist sovereign, but also those who approached the modern, democratic rupture, precisely as a rupture with royal incarnation and disincorporation of individuals: let us cite four essential names for Lefort in this regard: Michelet, Tocqueville, Marx, and Ernst Kantorowicz.
It would take too long to go through all these approaches and what Lefort gathers from each; we will operate only a few rapid reminders, beginning chronologically with the end. Lefort’s incursion into the theologico-political labyrinth seems linked to the reception of the magisterial work of Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, subtitled A Study in Medieval Political Theology. The French translation, Les deux corps du roi, will appear only in 1989, but Marcel Gauchet, who was then in contact and in discussion with Lefort, publishes in 1981 a very long article in the journal Le Débat, on Kantorowicz’s book: “Des deux corps du roi au pouvoir sans corps. Christianisme et politique” (“From the King’s Two Bodies to Bodiless Power. Christianity and Politics”)3.
The content of the work is today famous; Kantorowicz shows in it how the schema of incarnation, “Christology,” nourished the image of an individual body which, as a “mystical body,” can “incorporate” the body of all the faithful, “incarnate” therefore the multitude—which may be transposed as well toward the collective body of the Church as toward the individual (but “double”) body of the King. Kantorowicz makes it possible to grasp the long history of the modes of figuration of power through “the image of the body”—a body grasped through the fundamental theological schema of the “double body,” mortal and immortal, physical and “mystical,” earthly and divine.
These analyses could resonate, in Lefort, with his long acquaintance with nineteenth-century French historians who had never ceased meditating on the mystery of royal “incarnation” after the event of the French Revolution and that sort of radical symbolic rupture that the putting to death of the King represented. Lefort notes the tendency of historians who were nonetheless Republican or liberal, such as Michelet or Tocqueville, to approach this passage from the Ancien Régime to modern democracy, across these events, as a quasi-“religious” event.
Hence a certain ambivalence on Michelet’s part with regard to what he nevertheless calls “the ridiculous mystery of monarchical incarnation.” On the one hand, Michelet sees in it a political regime that claims to be founded upon love, the love of the people for its king, the love of the subjects. Now, on the political and juridical plane, this implies leaving the way clear for the “arbitrariness” of personal relationships and the “humours” of the king. Lefort could have cited here Hegel, who spoke of the “arbitrariness of the heart” as opposed to Right, to law. Does this central place of the love expected from the subjects with regard to the king put the monarchical institution into communication with Christianity? There is no doubt about it for Michelet, who considers that all the institutions of the Ancien Régime were derived from Christianity.
Yet, on the other hand, Lefort sees at work in Michelet a certain “transfer” of the sacred characters attached to the king toward the Nation, the People. This is a frequent trait of theories of secularisation, that they “compensate” in a sense for the “institutional” withdrawal of Christianity, after the rupture with the Ancien Régime, by a “transfer” of schemas or notions toward the new instances of legitimacy—Republican, national, etc. In Michelet, this sacralisation of a secular instance, in this case… France itself, is particularly direct: “France has continued the Roman and Christian work. Christianity had promised, and she has held to that promise. Fraternal equality, postponed to the other life, she has taught to the world, as the law of here-below. This nation has two very strong things that I do not see in any other. It has both the principle and the legend, the broader and more human idea (…). This principle, this idea, buried in the Middle Ages under the dogma of grace—they are called in the language of human beings, fraternity”4. There we have the Republican historian transformed into an evangelist of France—which is not so rare, to tell the truth… The same thing is found in Quinet, and with another lyricism in Victor Hugo.
If Michelet analyses in fairly strong fashion the political theology of monarchical incarnation, Tocqueville, for his part, captures with greater acuity the democratic process of “disincorporation”: modern society is a society of individuals who no longer think their quality by reference to distinct social “orders,” as in the “society of orders” of the Ancien Régime; society is in principle and in fact more mobile, its markers are no longer fixed in advance; the demand for equality is inseparable from this “dissolution,” which has something irreversible about it, even for an aristocrat, but a lucid one, such as Tocqueville. Lefort adds to the analysis the idea that this dissolution of the orders gives rise, by reaction, to enterprises aiming at “re-incorporating” the individuals into “bodies” that are united—and often united by exclusion, Lefort adds, in view of two great enterprises of reincorporation: the nationalist enterprise and the totalitarian enterprise5.
In a sense, the thinkers of the nineteenth century find themselves face to face with the problem of the “individual” separated from the community, separated from “the One.” Tocqueville as well as Marx thematise this separation, which Marx attributes to the “corrosive” action of the bourgeoisie with respect to all the bonds supposedly “natural” or “sacred,” to which it substitutes everywhere the juridical, contractual, commercial relation—“cold cash payment.” One may ask whether Marx can be included in this framework of Lefort’s “theologico-political” reflection. One notes that these “theologico-political” interrogations coincide chronologically, in Lefort as moreover in Gauchet—but with inverse conclusions—with a reflection on the political character or not of human rights. Lefort dwells above all on the Marxian critique of human rights, which appears in the early text “On the Jewish Question,” and which translates indeed into a calling into question of the “separation of the human being from the community,” or of what Marx calls the “dualism” of bourgeois society: “dualism” between the abstract citizen and the concrete member of a differentiated and unequal civil society, “dualism” between society and the State. Now these “dualisms” make the modern (bourgeois) democratic State the true secularised “Christian State,” according to Marx. The duality of Heaven and earth is “realised” or “secularised” into the duality of the State and civil society.
Lefort estimates that in the movement of this interpretation, Marx is led to wish to “realise” a unity that risks sweeping away the “difference” between the individual and the community: he sees the rights proclaimed by the Revolution of 1789, the rights of man, only as the expression of the “political illusion,” of the illusion of the abstract citizen decoupled from the member of civil society as the place of inequalities; but he misses, thereby, what makes of human rights something other than “rights of the egoistic human being,” as he says, of the private, separated, property-owning individual; he is led to misrecognise the relational and “social” nature of the rights of assembly and expression, which cannot be “rights of the isolated human being,” since they imply an inter-subjectivity, a relation between human beings. Now, the treatment of these rights as “formal” or “bourgeois” will have heavy consequences in the history of the regimes claiming Marx, or, more precisely, Marxism-Leninism.
Lefort’s rereading of Bruno Bauer’s Zur Judenfrage (On the Jewish Question) has a precise context. The article, taken up in the collection L’invention démocratique, is among the interventions linked to current events—a period (let us say, between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s) very dense with major events: in particular the social protests that emerged in the Eastern countries called socialist or “popular democracies,” notably in Poland with the Solidarność union, a union of largely “Christian” allegiance in a country that claimed Marxism-Leninism but in which unions were forbidden. This protest is carried out, in part, in the name of human rights, which incites Lefort to return to Marx’s critique of human rights and to the limits of this critique; and this protest mobilises therefore both a “democratic” referent and a “Christian” referent, as is also the case of certain dissidents in the USSR and Czechoslovakia.
Hence the mention and the question that also appear toward the end of “Permanence of the Theologico-Political”: in the breach of a certain decomposition of the so-called socialist regimes of the East, Lefort observes, “what makes a return is, at the same time as the democratic aspirations, the ancient faith, the Christian faith.” This “return” is also one of the interrogations that are at the origin of this text, visibly. Nevertheless, Lefort adds a very important question. “Would it not be a mistake, however, to believe that the new ties woven between democratic opposition and religious opposition testify to the democratic essence of Christianity or to the Christian essence of democracy? Would one not lose the meaning of the adventure that was being played out in the nineteenth century with their disentanglement?”6 It seems to me that Lefort opposes by this a tendency of the time to posit this equivalence, to construct these ties of essence between democracy and Christianity—even in authors close at one time to him, like Pierre Manent or, in a sense, Marcel Gauchet and his theory of Christianity as “the religion of the exit from religion.” These rereadings tend to minimise conflicts important for the genesis of modern politics, and to make us miss something of this “adventure of disentanglement” between the religious and the political, according to this formula of Lefort already cited, and so striking in my eyes as a designation of a certain experience, open, exalting, and perilous, of democratic modernity.
To be sure, this is only one aspect of the reflection on this situation. Lefort also returns on numerous occasions, in different texts collected notably in L’invention démocratique, to the intrinsic link between Stalinist and post-Stalinist totalitarianism and the will to absorb the “gap” between the real and the symbolic, but also between civil society and the State. In the article “Staline et le stalinisme” (“Stalin and Stalinism”), he notes regarding the Stalinist regime: “there is no gap between (…) State power and society. The notion of a civil society is effaced”7. Nevertheless, this effacement or this abolition of society is never truly possible: Lefort immediately emphasises that he is describing “a political form,” which can never “coincide with reality.”
But the project is structuring, and it functions through what Lefort describes, in terms that will be taken up by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in an entirely different sense, as “the chain of identifications—between People, Proletariat, Directing Organ, Stalin”—identifications that allow a “reduction to the One” through “the operation of a mediator: the Party.” The society/State duality is thus combatted by an operation that brings the totality of domains (law, economy, culture, even science…) under the tutelage of the State.
The paradox of the history of the regimes claiming Marx is obviously that he advocated the withering away of the State and the horizon of a self-organisation of society. What allowed this reversal was assuredly the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat, itself detached from the historical example of the Paris Commune which had been a model for Marx, in favour of a dialectical schema in which one must paradoxically maximise the State in order to make it wither away. Lefort literally recalls the interpretation of the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat launched by Stalin in 1934: “The withering away of the State will be produced through the maximum reinforcement of State power”; which Lefort comments upon in these terms: “the highest degree of State power coincides with an undividedness of society and the State”8.
Two observations: the mention of “the gap” is interesting, because the notion also had a theologico-political history of which I am not certain that Lefort was then aware.
An article by Dominique Colas published in 1991 (thus ten years or so after the texts we are commenting upon here) in the journal Le Genre humain, “Le fanatisme, histoire d’un mot” (“Fanaticism, the History of a Word”), draws attention to the critique, by the theoretician of the Protestant Reformation Melanchthon, of “fanaticism” (Melanchthon, it seems, introduces the word into the French language) precisely insofar as it would seek entirely to absorb the gap or “the interval” (this is the term Melanchthon uses) between the City of Man and the City of God, and to bring the latter about in what Melanchthon precisely calls “civil society.”
To be sure, we are dealing here with another duality than the society/State duality, but one can recognise the setting in place of a certain critical schema that defends the “gap” and duality against the attempt to realise the theologico-political One in a City from which those whom Melanchthon calls the “fanatics” wish to exclude every trace of division—and first of all, of course, of spiritual division, of heresy.
Lefort rejects, to be sure metaphorically, the will to make “the last judgement” fall upon the city. But if one thus sets aside the theologico-political figures of fanaticism and totalitarianism, does not the defence of the “gap” between the symbolic and the real, and of the difference between State and civil society, amount to renouncing a profound, “radical” social transformation?
When Ernesto Laclau took up from Lefort this theme of the gap between the Real and the Symbolic in the sense of a warning against the fantasy of an “overcoming” of every figure of political leader, or of the political as such, Slavoj Žižek reproached him with a renunciation of the revolutionary project as such.9
Lefort assumed the abandonment of a form of “revolutionarism” if the latter implies reinvesting the fantasy of the One people, restored in pure undividedness (generally after the inevitable designation of the “parasites” of the new unified body politic: the “enemies of the people”).
This in no way means, it seems to me, that one must renounce a priori and in all circumstances the idea of revolution for Lefort: he moreover supported the democratic revolutions of the East, and he would doubtless have been ready to defend revolutions rendered necessary by situations of oligarchic confiscation of power—the very idea of “democratic invention” forbids excluding a priori the idea that this invention sometimes implies a revolution.
Moreover, Lefort seems sometimes embarrassed at the idea of embracing, by default, reformism, and he defends rather a horizon of autonomy that would be favoured by social movements; his evocation may seem to announce certain developments of contemporary “autonomous” movements, such as the Zones to Defend (ZAD): thus he speaks of “spaces governable by those who inhabit them,” of “new models of representativity,” of “the transformation of society by movements attached to their autonomy” rather than by “parties whose vocation is power”10.
But this autonomy remains “relative,” Lefort not subscribing to a horizon of pure “self-organisation of society” rid of all power—for one returns then to a fantasy of the One.
Some reminders and some concluding remarks. The first remark consists in observing that the theme of the “empty place,” of democracy as a political form characterised by a “void of foundation,” is doubtless the point that has most marked this reflection of Lefort’s, in part theologico-political. Thus Paul Ricœur greets this idea while estimating that one can oppose to the idea of a “void of foundation,” which would characterise democracy according to Lefort, that of a “multi-foundation”11: modern democracy would not have, to be sure, one unique foundation, but several foundations issuing notably from the Enlightenment—including in their dimension of critique of religious authorities—but another foundation would persist alongside, that of a certain juridico-moral heritage come from the Abrahamic religions and valorising, no doubt, the “person.”
This opposition is interesting, but in reducing Lefort’s problematic to the sole concepts of the “void of foundation” and of the “empty place,” it leaves in the shadow other dimensions of Lefort’s reflection. Although he insists on the “disentanglement” of the religious and the political as constitutive of modern democracy, Lefort does indeed make room, in a sense, for certain theologico-political heritages—such as the moment of the constitution of the State of law, which Lefort situates, as we saw, at the crossroads between a certain subordination of royal power to commandments and precepts of good juridical government coming, partly, from a Christian provenance, partly from a Roman one. Ricœur’s presentation also exposes one to a misinterpretation of the idea of this “empty place,” for of course it is not a question of saying that State power is not de facto “occupied” by individuals and groups who sometimes use it solely for their own profit, nor that it should be empty in the sense in which an ultra-liberal vision might wish that the State should no longer be “governed” by anyone, but should be, in a sense, placed on autopilot, by a sort of cybernetic “governance.” It was indeed for Lefort a matter of bringing out a democratic “logic” distinct from monarchical as well as from totalitarian logic. Nevertheless, Lefort’s calling into question of the denial of social division in totalitarianism aimed also at this tendency when it is exercised within the framework of a libertarian or ultra-liberal vision—with effects that are, to be sure, less dramatic but potentially destructive on the social and economic plane. Postulating a pure self-organisation of society, such conceptions seek to make of power not a symbolically empty place but a really empty place, Lefort suggests: in the sense that the individuals who occupy it will appear to act only as “private” individuals or groups, in the service of private interests12. “The privatisation of groupings, of individuals, of each sector of activity is increasing,” Lefort noted in 1980.
This perception would certainly find application, today, to political forms let us say neoliberal—with governments that are often perceived by a good part of the population as—following a formula of this text by Lefort—“a faction in the service of private interests”13. The risk always exists, and today more than ever, of an “appropriation” of public authority by purely private groups.
Let us note in passing that in this page, as in other texts, alongside the idea of the “empty place” that “those who exercise public authority cannot claim to appropriate,” Lefort here mentions “the image of popular sovereignty”; he recalls the fact, evident in principle but much less so in practice, that democracy is intrinsically linked to the idea that “the legitimacy of power resides in the people.”
It seems to me important, today, not to occult this other face of his vision of democratic legitimacy, for even if it has not been the object of a specific elaboration by Lefort himself, the author of L’invention démocratique did make room for popular sovereignty—let us cite the 1980 article, “La logique totalitaire” (“The Totalitarian Logic”): “Democracy allies two apparently contradictory principles: one, that power emanates from the people; two, that it is the power of no one. Now it lives off this contradiction.”14
To be sure, the analysis of totalitarian logic and in particular of Stalinism is surely one of the most striking aspects of Lefort’s reflection, which gives rise to his original concepts of the “empty place,” of “disincorporation of power,” etc. But the risk of a reading exclusively focused on the study of totalitarianism and of Stalinism is to make one forget this other side of democracy—popular legitimacy, the sovereignty of the people… Lefort has not illuminated these dimensions in a profoundly new way, but it must be emphasised that they do find their place in his thought of democracy.
It is important to recall this in the face of a certain neoliberal tendency to “undo the demos,” to place an entire dimension of politics—the economic in particular—out of reach, as it were, of the popular will, and, through the submission of governments to non-elected bodies such as rating agencies, to empty popular legitimacy of content.
The last observation would be a question: after all, one can tell oneself that even if the Stalinist project of indistinction between State power and society was indeed totalitarian, there exists a version completely opposed to this project, a quasi-inverse project: not entirely submitting society to the State, but entirely freeing society from the State. The “duality” would thus indeed be overcome, but, let us say, in an anarchist (or at least “anti-statist”) or, eventually, “libertarian” sense. Now, may one not think that the notion of “wild democracy,” when it is employed positively by Lefort, points in an anarchising direction? Is not an “anarchist” reading of Lefort’s “wild democracy” legitimate and perhaps, today, fertile?
The theme of “wild democracy” is notoriously unstable in Lefort, taking on at times—most often—a positive sense, sometimes—in late texts, such as La Complication (The Complication)—a negative sense. I will not pronounce on the fertility of the anarchising interpretation, for after all one can judge interpretations also by their effects, by what they make possible intellectually and practically, and these effects are still open. By contrast, one can interrogate the philological consistency of an integrally positive interpretation of this motif. Lefort notes in L’invention démocratique: “He who dreams of a total abolition of power…”
By contrast, something of “wild democracy” comes positively to prevent democracy from freezing into a figure of order; and it is then less a matter of opposing an anarchising pole to an institutional pole of democracy than of recalling that democratic institutions have owed their existence to insurrections and revolutions, or, as Lefort writes, that “democracy was instituted by wild paths”15.
p. 24.↩︎
p. 59.↩︎
The subtle differences in the reading of Kantorowicz become more biting in the discussion on human rights, with Gauchet’s article, “Les droits de l’homme ne sont pas une politique” (“Human Rights Are Not a Politics”) (Le Débat, 1980, no. 3, pp. 3-23), mirroring the decisive article in which Lefort had answered the same question during encounters organised by the journal Esprit, “Les droits de l’homme sont-ils une politique ?” (“Are Human Rights a Politics?”).↩︎
Michelet, Le Peuple (The People), 1846, Flammarion, 1974, pp. 228-229, cited by Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié (Politics of Friendship), Galilée, p. 253.↩︎
Which Kantorowicz too had pointed out, notably in texts collected in French in the work Mourir pour la patrie et autres textes (Dying for the Fatherland and Other Texts) (French trans., PUF, 1984), where he evokes the recovery and the “disfiguration” of political theologies in their contemporary takeover, in particular: nationalist and fascist (the fatherland never dies”).↩︎
Claude Lefort, “Permanence du théologico-politique?” in Le Temps de la réflexion, …, p. ; taken up in Essais sur le politique, Seuil, ……↩︎
Ibid., p. 129.↩︎
Ibid., p. 125.↩︎
See notably the respective contributions of Ernesto Laclau and S. Žižek in J. Butler, E. Laclau, S. Žižek, Après l’émancipation (After Emancipation), French trans. Philippe Sabot, Seuil, “l’ordre philosophique,” 2017 (translation of Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 2000).↩︎
Claude Lefort, “Droits de l’homme et politique” (“Human Rights and Politics”), in L’invention démocratique (The Democratic Invention), p. 80.↩︎
Paul Ricœur, La Critique et la conviction (Critique and Conviction), Calmann-Lévy, 1995, p. 162 and following.↩︎
C. Lefort, “La logique totalitaire” (“The Totalitarian Logic”) (1980), taken up in L’invention démocratique, here p. 95.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Ibid., p. 28.↩︎