Lefort as Phenomenologist of the Political

Lefort as Phenomenologist of the Political

Bernard Flynn

I propose to view Lefort’s work from within the phenomenological tradition, whose watch-word, as you know, is back to the things themselves and whose ‘principle of all principles’is to accept the given to the extent that it is given. I ask myself what is the phenomenonthat Lefort spent his life describing and interpreting. I will claim that it was the becominganonymous of political power, the process by which power comes to be disjoined from theperson, the body, of the prince.

There are three moments within Lefort’s reflection, each associated with a philosophicalinterlocutor: first, there is Marx then there is Machiavelli and finally there is Merleau-Ponty.Later in the paper I will evoke the process by which a society attempts to reconnect power toa determinate element of the real, this, according to Lefort is totalitarianism. I will end thepaper with a few more personal reflections on Lefort.

In his 1955 essay “The Contradiction of Trotsky”1 Merleau-Ponty wrote that Lefort isTrotsky’s Trotsky. Which is to say: Trotsky criticizes the practice of the Bolshevik party butwill not criticize the Leninist theory that subtends it. Whereas Lefort criticizes the Bolshevikpractice and the Leninist theory that subtends it but he will not criticize Marxism itself. Thisis indeed the case. In a 1955 article “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism” Lefortreflects on the itinerary of his own thinking he writes “I firmly believed, at that time, in therole of the proletariat. It was, in my view, the privileged agent of history.”2 Like Merleau-Ponty at the time of his writing Humanism and Terror,3 it was the pretended universalityof the proletariat that attracted Lefort to Marxist thought. In this article he tells us that hewas enchanted by Marx’s text. No doubt he would have concurred with Merleau-Ponty’sreflection on the proletariat where he writes: “In reflection every man can conceive of himselfas simply a man and thereby rejoin the others. But that is through an abstraction: he hasto forget his particular circumstances, and, once he has gotten back from thought to living,he again conducts himself as a Frenchman, a doctor, a bourgeois, etc. Universality is onlyconceived it is not lived. By contrast the condition of the proletarian is such that he can detachhimself from special circumstances not just in thought and by means of an abstraction but inreality and through the very process of his life. He alone is the universality that he reflectsupon; he alone achieves the self-consciousness that the philosophers have anticipated.”4

According to Marx, the dissolution of the proletarian particularity instantiated in thecommunist revolution does not as such empty the place of the political, as will be the casefor Lefort, it rather dissolves the political. By putting the total meaning of history into areal social class Marx envisions the total socialization of society. He proposes the imageof a society delivered from division, at one with itself. It is this pretension to incarnate thesociety beyond all social division that will lead Lefort outside the parameters of Marxism.In an article entitled “Marx: From One Vision of History to Another,” after a detailed andsubtle reading of Marx, that we cannot pursue here except to say that he finds within Marx’stext contrasting trains of thought, one pursuing the progressive stage theory of history whileanother, elaborated in more detail in The Grundrisse, testifies to a radical rupture betweenpre-capitalist and capitalist forms of society. Lefort concludes this article by writing thefollowing. “There arises the image of this strange being, the proletariat: at once purely

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Lefort: Phenomenologist of the Political: Bernard Flynn 17

social, purely historical, and, as it were, outside society and history—a class which ceases tobe one, since the dissolution of all classes takes place within it, and the only class which canact in a way which is free from the poetry of the past; a strange being who fulfills the destinyof humanity, but abolishes all tradition—an heir without a heritage. Should we say that it isthe destroyer of the social imaginary or the last product of Marx’s imagination?”5 Lefort tellsus that it is not only his critical reading of Marxist texts that influenced his thinking but atthe same time his experience as a member of a Trotskyist party. He was struck by the closednature of the party. He sensed a quasi-mystical space where the things of the world, whicheverybody talks about so much, can be grasped only by being carried back to the imaginaryenclosure of history of which the party is the trustee. While Lefort rejects Marxism itself,nonetheless, from it, he retains the notion that social conflict is at the origin of history. It isa conflict which leads to no possible final resolution.

Lefort then turned his interest to the great political theorist, Machiavelli, for whom conflictis forever without possible resolution, it’s being always subject to consistent re-negotiation.His major work, Le Travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel,6 was written as his Doctorial thesisunder the direction of Raymond Aron. It is a work the richness of which we can onlyallude to without pretending to enter into any significant commentary on it. Let us limitourselves to the guiding thread of our reflection, that is, the process by which political powerbecomes anonymous. Lefort begins his reflections on Machiavelli by noting that what is notspoken about, what is unsaid, in the Prince separates it from traditional Christian manualsof governance and also from the works of antiquity. Lefort writes, “the author does notsituate the relation of the prince with his subjects within a more general framework of arelation of man with his fellow man, nor with nature, nor with God.”7 Machiavelli does notplace the situation of the prince within other forms of human organization, as for exampleAristotle does when he situates the ruler within a form of familial authority. For both Platoand Aristotle, although in different ways the political order is constructed in analogy withthe natural order, as for example, the tri-parte division of the soul and of the polity in Plato’sRepublic. In traditional Christian doctrine, elaborated philosophically by the scholastics,the political order is construed in analogy with the divine order, insofar as all authoritydescends from God. “Machiavelli’s silence on these issues is indeed deafening, the thingsunsaid remain at the horizon of things said.”8 This silence is a sign that what the writingsof Machiavelli aim at is a new object, namely, the autonomy and the irreducibility of thepolitical vis a vis cosmology and theology. Lefort observes how Machiavelli distinguishesbetween the problems of the hereditary prince, a natural prince, and a prince of a newlyacquired territory. The privilege of the hereditary prince is simply that his subjects havebecome accustomed, by long experience, to his oppression and thus he has no motive forintroducing destabilizing changes. The ‘natural prince’ is called natural by nothing moreprofound than the habituation of his subjects, and not because it is founded upon a design ofProvidence or natural finality.

Lefort gives a certain privilege to Chapter Six of the Prince that is entitled ‘ConcerningNew Princedoms Acquired by One’s Own Arms and Virtu.’ In this chapter he contends wedeal with the very foundations of the political. According to Lefort’s reading of this textthe act of institution is not simply a product of the sovereign will of the prince; rather asMachiavelli claims, a prince who would found a new polity must “go along paths beatenby great men and imitate the most pre-eminent so that if his own virtu does not measure upto theirs, at least it may smell like it.”9 The prince must imitate the virtue of symbolic andmythical founders, e.g., Moses, Romulus and Remus etc.; this repetition or quasi-repetitionintroduces the notion of ruse or illusion; his virtue must smell like theirs. The elevation

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from which the prince, a most excellent man, must perform the most difficult and dangeroustask of introducing new institutions must be constituted by encouraging the illusion throughwhich his virtu must smell like that of the symbolic founders. The most novel dimension ofLefort’s interpretation of Machiavelli is his conception of the process by which the man ofpower is transformed into the prince.

In the ninth chapter of the Prince, Machiavelli presents a theory of class conflict that hebelieves to be both universal and also the very foundation of the political. He writes, “twoopposing classes exist in every city.”10 The conflict is between the rich (the grandee) andthe people. This conflict is a conflict of two desires. “The common people want neither tobe governed nor oppressed by the rich and the rich want to govern and oppress the commonpeople.”11 Lefort insists that Machiavelli views this opposition not as simply an oppositionof fact, whereby some people are in fact richer than others, rather it is that one desires tocommand and oppress while the other desires not to be commanded or oppressed. Since it isnot a conflict over something, for example, the division of the surplus, it cannot be resolved.Of the two classes, Lefort contends that their existence is only determined by their essentialrelationship in the clash of two appetites in principle equally insatiable. And furthermore aclass exists only by the lack that constitutes it in the face of the other.

According to Machiavelli, the situation of class conflict is universal and ineluctable; aprince can found a civic princedom only by drawing support from one or the other of theconflicting classes. He argues that a prince can take and maintain power only by means ofhis friendship with the people and not by a friendship with the rich. Why not the rich? Atfirst glance it would appear that Machiavelli proposes only a prosaic and sociological reason.The people are more numerous than the grandee and a prince can neutralize the grandee buthe must live with the people. When we look more closely however we see that Machiavelli’spurpose is far more profound and Lefort emphasizes this. Machiavelli writes, “The man whobecomes prince with the aid of the rich maintains his position with greater difficulty thanthe one who does so with the aid of the common people; because in the former situation,while he is prince he finds himself surrounded by many who consider themselves his equal,and hence he can neither govern them nor manage them the way he wants. The man whobecomes prince with the aid of the common people finds himself alone, surrounded by none,or very few, who are not prepared to obey.”12 The grandee see the prince as their equal. Heis one of them, one that they can use to further their class interest. In their eyes, his imagewill never be elevated above the class struggle, the prince will simply be their instrument.The relationship between the prince and the grandee will be a personal relationship. Thefriendship of the people is easy to keep because they only want not to be oppressed. Lefortadds and emphasizes, that it is their [the people’s] desire not to be oppressed by the rich,“for assuredly the prince oppresses them in his turn. . . But the violence of his [the prince]power appears to be of a different nature than that of the grandee, for in them [the grandee]the people recognize their natural adversary, the other which constitutes it as its immediateobject of desire.”13

In language reminiscent of Hegel, Lefort calls the adversarial relation of the people to thegrandee a natural relationship. The people are the immediate object of the desire of the rich.By natural Lefort means not politically instituted or institutionally mediated. The princedelivers the people from this natural relation because he commands the grandee and by thatvery fact he “disabuses them of their pretension to be the only ones who dominate.” 14 Inthe prince, the people seek protection against the grandee’s insatiable desire to oppress. Thisconstitutes the institution of the political order, since the prince, or as we shall see, the imageof the prince is elevated above the natural conflict generated by the social divisions. For the



people the first effect of the institution of the political is a diminution of the “permanent gripwhich held them in prison” by what Lefort calls, using a language reminiscent of Hegel, “aruse of reason”, the desire of the people rejoins that of the prince; in making an alliance withthe people, the prince is no longer constrained by the grandees, his equals. He finds himselfalone, which is what he desires. “There is an obscure accordance between the non-power ofthe people’s desire and the absolute power of the prince’s desire.”15 According to Lefort, thisopposition is an essential opposition and there is no possibility of its coming to an ultimateresolution. The institution of the political will mask the social division but not abolish it,since it is born on this conflict

Perhaps the most scandalous aspect of the Prince is Machiavelli’s listing of the virtuesthat the prince must appear to have but must not possess in reality. Lefort attributes toMachiavelli the idea that the being of the prince is a matter of being recognized by the other.The Prince is not a substance who would have or not have certain qualities, rather his beingis his being recognized. “The conduct of the prince is not dissociable from the representationof him that is formed by the Other.” 16 The being of the prince is outside of himself: it existsin the order of appearances. In what does the image of the Prince consists? The others aredisposed to see the prince as an object of love or hatred. He must avoid both love and hatredsince both emotions attached themselves to his person, and the emotions of the people arenotoriously fickle and easily transformed from love into hatred. Love and hatred have astheir object the individual person, but respect and awe attach themselves to the position ofthe prince, a position above society and the conflicts that arise from its incompatible desires.The prince must deflect these emotions from his person on to the place of the political, theimpresario. For Machiavelli, as well as for Lefort, there is no ontological, cosmological ortheological foundation for a place of the political that is above society. This place is generatedby the symbolic exchange between the prince’s desire for power and the people’s desire tobe delivered from the non-institutionalized power of the grandee. According to Lefort, whatMachiavelli is describing is the metamorphosis of force into political power.

In the Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty elaborates a critique of transcendentalphilosophy, which he characterizes as the attempt of reflective consciousness to begin withthe constituted object and follow backwards the path of its constitution in order to arrive atthe zero point of subjectivity. As though one can walk in either direction from Notre Dameto the Eiffel Tower or from the Eiffel Tower to Notre Dame. Merleau-Ponty criticizes thispretension to undo our insertion into Being, into the there is, in order to reconstitute it inreflection. In the preface to The Visible and the Invisible, Lefort cites a line of Kafka that verywell characterizes Merleau-Ponty’s position “things give themselves to me not by their rootsbut by a place somewhere in the middle.” It is our insertion into the flesh of the political, theflesh of history, that motivates Lefort to reflect on the theological foundations of the Christianmonarchy, a theological foundation that Lefort does not underwrite but observes. He thus goesback to a time before Machiavelli in order to provide an analysis of the Christian monarchy,and then to consider modern democracy as the determinate negation of this monarchy. Forhim the Christian theological political is a contingently given historical fact. He explores thephilosophical significance of the Christian monarchy in an article entitled “The Permanenceof the Theologico-Political?”17 Lefort is certainly not calling for a religious revival, rather hemeans that the intertwining of religion and the political is not completely dismantled by theirinstitutional separation, or by the conscious refusal to base one on the other, or the consciousrejection of religious belief. It is precisely to the doctrine of Christianity, the doctrine thatwas most scandalous to the thinkers of the Enlightenment, that Lefort turns his attention, tothe belief that the man Jesus was the son of God. While Lefort is not proposing a regeneration



of belief in the divinity of Christ, he does tell us that it is one of the profound failures ofmodern political philosophy to relegate this belief to the level of an erroneous opinion. Thefigure of the God-man Christ is for Lefort a central figure of the mise-en-scene by whichpre-modern European societies constituted their political identity. He finds in the work ofErnest Kantorowicz’s: The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology aninterrogation of the figure of the God-man which is not been taken up by modern politicalphilosophy.

Briefly let me summarize the use to which Lefort puts Kantorowicz’s analysis. The doublenature of Christ, both human and divine, serves as an imago through which the Europeanmonarchy was constituted. As Christ was both human and divine, likewise the churchconstituted a mystical body, both visible and invisible, with the Pope as a figure of mediationbetween the temporal and eternal, between the faithful and Christ. The secularization of thisnotion issues in the figure of the kingdom, the realm, unified as a quasi-mystical body withthe king as its head, and in like manner, as a mediation between God and man. In virtue ofthis role of mediator, the King has two bodies, namely, the ‘body of nature’ and the ‘bodyof grace.’ His body is the point of intersection between the visible and the invisible, thehuman and the divine. At the same time the King represents the unity of the realm and theintersection with the divine through which operations of power have legitimacy. The unitythus constituted transcends the level of events, particular occurrences, and engenders a ‘unityand identity in depth’ by which the living are put into relationship with the dead and withthe future. This unity is projected onto the body of the King. According to Lefort, the figureof the king’s body, as overcoming both spiritual and temporal dispersion and as the focalpoint of the divine origins of legitimacy, is not simply a mystification occulting the processof the extraction of surplus value (Marx) or masking the operations of power (Foucault).Rather this figure constitutes a social space within which class conflict can operate andwithin which one can distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate use of power. The Kingas mediator between the body politic and the divine is not a theory, it is neither true nor falserather it opens a space in which one can distinguish the true and the false in both social andpolitical discourse. Lefort writes, “When it remains true to its inspiration . . . . what philosophydiscovers in religion is a mode of portraying or dramatizing the relations that human beingsestablish with something which goes beyond empirical time and space within which theyestablish relations with one another. The work of the imagination stages a different time,a different space . . . . Of course it bears the marks of human operations . . . . Human beingspopulate the invisible with the things that they see . . . ”18

For Lefort religion is an imaginary interpretation of an ontological experience. It drama-tizes the experience of the other. Religious faith both testifies to an experience and at thesame time falsifies it by interpreting it in an imaginary dimension, as involving the gods,God, etc. Nonetheless it testifies to societies non-identity with itself, to the fact that societiesidentity is deferred, as the body according to Merleau-Ponty is identical with itself onlyacross an ontological gap, an ecart.

The Democratic Revolution affects a disincarnation of society where no figure can claimto incarnate the people. For Lefort, while the figure of the other is effaced, nevertheless theplace of the other remains, which testifies to societies non-identity with itself, its failureto close in on itself in a pure immanence. Democracy takes place in the empty place leftby the effacement of the figure but not the dimension [the place] of the other. Since noone can claim legitimacy in virtue of a special relationship to the divine, the King’s otherbody, legitimacy can be established only discursively and always tentatively. Its source oflegitimacy is the people but the people remains radically indeterminate and the question of



who in fact represents the people will be the subject of politics, which transpires within thespace of the political. Democracy is fragile. It is a test of societies’ capacity to relate toitself across the ontological void that precludes ultimate foundations. According to Lefort,totalitarianism is the product of a failure of this test. It is an attempt reincarnate society inthe figure of a leader or a party which would annul the social division and would realize thefantasy of the people as one, in which there is no legitimate opposition, where all factualopposition is conceived of as coming from the outside, the enemy. The totalitarian regimewould deliver society from the nightmare image of its total dissolution on the level of thereal, of what Lacan calls ‘the body in bits and pieces.’

I will now turn to the last part of the paper. In Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot hasargued that in the context of ancient philosophy taking a philosophical position is not simplya matter of intellectual judgment but that it involves, or has a certain elective affinity with, away of life. For example, he associates epistemological skepticism with moral and politicalconformism. I propose to take this idea outside of the confines of ancient philosophy and seeif it’s possible to detect a way of life, a manner of ‘being in the world,’ that in some sense isconnected with Lefort’s philosophical position. Generally what I mean by his philosophicalposition is that sense in which he recognizes that we inhere in being, in the flesh of the worldand the flesh of history and at the same time participate in an empty place. Claude Lefortwas a person with very strong political convictions and fierce independent judgment. At areception held by his publisher on the occasion of the publication of the Le Temps Present:Ecrits 1945–200519 Lefort gave a brief presentation in which he focused on the position thathe had taken at the time of the Kravchenko Affair. Victor Kravchenko was a defector fromthe Soviet Union who had written a book with the title I Chose Freedom, a book that revealedthe brutality and repression that the Soviet state was directing against its people. He wasvilified by the Communists who went so far as to say that he did not really write the bookbut that it was a product of the American CIA. Kravchenko sued the communist publicationLes Lettres Francaise for libel. Lefort was very proud that he was one of the very few peopleon the left who unequivocally and unambiguously supported Kravchenko. Nevertheless, theforcefulness of Lefort’s convictions, both philosophical and political, was tempered by anextravagant sense of self-irony which precluded them being transformed into any form ofdogmatism. Once walking by the Hudson River in the evening, speaking French [me badly],Lefort said to me C’est difficile a trouver l’essence de la vie philosophique. My reply wasto say that I was surprised to hear him speak in the language of essence. He laughed andsaid that he did not mean ‘essence’ in the Platonic sense but that he meant essence in thesense of gasoline, fuel, that one puts in a car. He said the problem was that in philosophyyou are never sure of having made progress. I am not exactly sure what he meant, yet Ithink I know. In any case it is not the statement of a dogmatic philosopher. Once he andJudith had a conversation about the reception of his work and how and whether it would betaken up after his death. Judith told me that he was somewhat optimistic. Levi-Strauss whenasked what he thought would become of his work after his death said “I don’t know and Idon’t care.” Lefort would certainly have agreed with the first part of that sentence but notwith the latter part. He did indeed care and hope that his work would provoke the thought ofothers. To strike a biblical note, his attitude towards the reception of his work was not thathe was throwing pearls before swine but that he was casting his bread upon the water. Hefaced his impending death with courage and without any longing for consolation. The lasttime I saw him in late August 2010, we said goodbye in the foyer of his apartment knowingfull well that we would never see one another again. We embraced and he looked at me andsort of shrugged. I interpret that shrug as an extravagant statement of stoicism. Not unlike



the remark of a character in Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut who says “Life goeson . . . until it doesn’t.”

NOTES

1. Claude Lefort, “The Contradiction of Trotsky,” The Political Forms of Modern Society, ed. JohnThompson (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), 31–52.

2. Claude Lefort, “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” The Political Forms of ModernSociety, 293.

3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, tr. John O‘Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).4. Ibid., 115–6.5. Claude Lefort, “Marx: From One Vision of History to Another,” The Political Forms of Modern

Society,180.6. Claude Lefort, Le Travail de l’Oeuvre Machiavel (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1972).7. Ibid., 326.8. Ibid., 328.9. Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. & tr. James Atkinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company,

1976), 143.10. Ibid., 91.11. Ibid., 191.12. Ibid.13. Le Travail de l‘Oeuvre Machiavel, 383.14. Ibid.15. Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston: North-

western University Press, 2005), 17.16. Le Travail de l‘Oeuvre Machiavel, 404.17. Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?,” Democracy and Political Theory,

tr. D.Macey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).18. Ibid., 223.19. Claude Lefort, Le Temps Present: Ecrits 1945–2005 (Paris: Belin, 2007).

Bernard Flynn is Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Empire State and also teaches Phi-losophy at the New School for Social Research. His books include Merleau-Ponty and thePossibilities of Philosophy (2009) and The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting thePolitical (1996).


Lefort as Phenomenologist of the Political

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