P l t l Th l n th Th ht f L f rt

Bernard Flynn

Social Research: An International Quarterly, Volume 80, Number 1,Spring 2013, pp. 129-142 (Article)

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Bernard Flynn Political Theology in the Thought of Lefort

PERMIT ME TO BEGIN WITH A VERY BROAD STATEMENT. THE DEFAULT

position for the political organization o f human societies is theocracy. By the political organization o f society I m ean only the general articula­tion o f ruler and ruled; by theocracy I mean the sense that in one way or another our institutions have been founded, or in some way sanctified, by God or the gods or some other super sensible agency.

Theocracy offers a solution to the enigm a o f the political. This enigma is given eloquent expression by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan. Human equality is such that there is no discernible reason why one person or a group o f persons should rule over another. Nevertheless, all known societies have, or have had, some sort o f hierarchical structure. The instituting activity o f the gods resolves this enigm a in a manner that is adaptive in the evolutionaiy sense. It was, o f course, Hobbes’s project to undo the theological foundations o f the political and to offer the contract as an alternative. Lefort is too close a reader o f anthropo­logical literature to entertain, even as a heuristic device, the notion o f a stage o f human society that was totally undifferentiated; or to envision the absolute origin o f the political in the juridical event o f the contract, considered either as myth or as prehistorical event. In our own day, the transition from a theologically based politics o f premodernity to a m odern political society is often discussed in term s o f seculariza­tion. An elegant expression o f this position is developed by Karl Lowith (1949) in his book Meaning in History.

For Lowith the theory o f secularization is a mode o f critique. The theories that he deals with would not accept his characterization o f

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them, which claims that their origins are theological in nature. For him secularization is a term o f opprobrium that one casts at one’s enemies. Not so for Carl Schmitt, a believing—not to say a fundamen­talist—Catholic, who in his book Political Theology famously wrote that “all significant concepts o f the modern state are secularized theological concepts” (Schmitt 1985, 36). In Schmitt’s view the religious origins o f political concepts and their referents is not a scandal. The scandal is their secularization, issuing according to Schmitt, in the depoliticized condition o f political romanticism.

It is clear that Lefort’s conception o f the connection o f modern political society to the theological-based polities o f prem odernity diverges from and, at the sam e time, entertains a certain relationship to various conceptions o f secularization. Like some theories o f secu­larization, Lefort’s conception does not m aintain that the theological interpretation o f the political was sim ply a m istake fueled by super­stition, credulity, and the m endacity o f political and religious lead­ers—which, o f course, were not in short supply. Lowith, in contrast, rejects the entire idea o f history as the bearer o f meaning and instead embraces an ancient Greek and Eastern conception o f circular tempo­rality. Such a totalizing position, une pensee du survol, was not open to Lefort for reasons that will be explained below.

The distance between Lefort and Schmitt is clear. Lefort embraces political modernity; Schmitt rejects it. This rejection leads him to a totalitarian position. His insistence that sovereignty be embodied in the person o f the leader makes him a quintessential theorist o f totalitarian­ism, in Lefort’s conception o f it. Nevertheless Lefort, like Schmitt, does see a filiation o f political ideas and theological doctrine.

I propose two directions o f inquiiy concerning Lefort’s continuity with, and discontinuity from, theories o f secularization: the first in terms o f phenomenology, the second in terms o f Hans Blumenberg’s critique o f secularization theoiy. I view Lefort as a political philosopher within the phenomenological tradition. What phenomenon has he spent his life describing and interpreting? I believe it is the becoming anonymous of political power. In Lefort’s study o f Machiavelli, he maintains that the

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Florentine does not place the situation o f the prince within other forms o f human organization as, for example, Aristotle does when he situates the ruler within a form o f familiar authority—although in different ways, for Plato and Aristotle the political order is constructed in analogy with the natural order. In traditional Christian doctrine, the political order is constructed in analogy with the divine order insofar as all authority descends from God. Machiavelli’s silence on these issues is deafening. As Lefort writes, “The things unsaid remain at the horizon o f things said” (1972, 328). This silence is a sign that what the writings o f Machiavelli aim at is a new object, namely, the autonomy and irreducibility o f the political vis-a-vis cosmology and theology.

In an article entitled “Esquisse d ’une Genese de l’ldeologie dans les Societes Modernes,” Lefort writes that

the singular nature o f this [symbolic] dispositive is to assure the condition o f occultation without which could arise the question o f an opposition between the im aginaiy and the real. The real, in effect, appears determinable only to the extent that it is already determined, in virtue o f a speech, mythical or religious, which testifies to a knowledge the foundation o f which cannot be put into play by the effec­tive m ovem ent o f understanding, technological innova­tion, the interpretation o f the visible (1978, 293).

It is Lefort’s contention that in premodern society, when reflec­tion exercised itself on power, the organization o f the City, the causes o f its corruption, and so forth, it (reflection) remained rigorously subor­dinated to a theological representation o f the world, which alone fixed the markers o f the real and the imaginary, the true and the false, the good and the evil. There was no place here for thought o f the politi­cal. Within this theological regime it is the person o f the ruler that is linked to the supersensible source o f legitimacy. As we shall see below, in European premodern political society this task is accomplished by the phantasm o f the doubling o f the king’s body.

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In Lefort’s reading, Machiavelli’s The Prince is viewed neither as a manual for governing nor to give advice to a prince. It is rather a study o f the constitution of the place o f political power, which is to say, the m etam orphosis o f force into properly political power. The Florentine tells us that in each polity there are two desires: the grandees’ desire to govern and oppress, and the people’s desire to be free o f oppression. The prince m ust make his alliance with the people rather than with the rich. Why? Because the rich, the upper classes, will always view the prince as simply one o f them, as an ally in the class struggle. According to Machiavelli, the friendship o f the people is easy to keep because they only want not to be oppressed. Lefort em phasizes that it is the people’s desire not to be oppressed by the rich, for assuredly the prince oppresses them in his turn. The violence o f the power o f the prince appears to be o f a different nature than the violence o f the grandee. The people recognize the grandee as their natural adversary, the Other who constitutes them as the immediate object o f its desire.

In language rem iniscent o f Hegel, Lefort calls the adversarial relation o f the people to the grandee a “natural” relation, by which he means a relationship that is not politically instituted or institution­ally mediated. The prince delivers the people from this natural relation because he commands the grandee, and by that very fact “he disabuses them o f their pretension to be the only ones who dom inate” (1972, 383). This is what brings about the very institution o f the political order, since the prince, or as we shall see, the image o f the prince is elevated above the natural conflict generated by the social division, the conflict o f class. For the people, the first effect o f this institution o f the political is to deliver them from the perm anent grip that held them in prison—by what Lefort calls, again using the language o f Hegel, “a ruse o f reason,” the desire o f the people rejoins that o f the prince. In m aking an alliance with the people, the prince is no longer constrained by the grandee, his equal. He finds him self to be alone, which is what he wants.

The relationship between the desire o f the prince and the desire o f the people creates the illusion that there is a position above the natu­

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ral conflict operative in society. Marx characterized this position o f the transcendence o f the class struggle as the political illusion. According to Lefort, it is an illusion only in the sense that it is not sanctioned either by God or by nature; rather it is constituted by a play o f desires. It has what Lévi-Strauss calls “symbolic efficacity.” It does something. It establishes a place from which the prince can rule from the position o f the Third (a position above the conflict o f desires), where he is not identified with either party o f the conflict. Lefort emphasizes and rein­terprets the famous line o f Machiavelli: “that i f the prince cannot be loved it is better that he be feared but m ost o f all he m ust not be hated.” Lefort em phasizes that both love and hatred focus on ’’the person of the prince” and thereby undermine his pretension to transcendence. We see in Lefort’s reading o f Machiavelli a break between the premod­ern and the modern political form; in a sense, for Lefort, strictly speak­ing, there is no political in premodernity. As we have noted above, in premodernity the place o f the political is occupied by the theological. Thus we see his divergence from the conception o f secularization.

There is a second respect in which Lefort’s thought differs from some theorists o f secularization. We will explore this by a brief reflec­tion on Hans Blumenberg’s critique o f secularization theories. My goal here is not to evaluate Blumenberg’s critique either critically or affirma­tively, but simply to use it in order to explicate Lefort’s position vis-a-vis secularization theories. In The Legitimacy of the Modem Age, Blumenberg proposes three criteria for the appropriate application o f the concept o f secularization. The first is the identity o f what has been secularized, the second is the legitimacy o f the initial ownership, and the third is the unilateral nature o f its removal (Blumenberg 1983, 23-24). The para­digm for the legitimate use o f the concept is, according to Blumenberg, the secularization o f church property. He has been criticized for this but this is not our concern here. It is clear that the land, when owned by the church and when owned by the crown, is the same land. It is identical. There is no reason to doubt the ownership o f church property before its appropriation by the crown; the church certainly did not voluntarily give up this property. Thus we see what Blumenberg considers to be

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the appropriate use o f the concept. When we apply these three crite­ria to Lefort’s conception o f the relationship between premodern and modern political power, we see that, by Blumenberg’s criteria, Lefort’s position cannot be characterized as one o f secularization.

We have seen in Lefort’s reflections on the prince that modern political power is invested not in the person o f the ruler but in the place o f power. It has become anonymous. In addition it no longer has a claim to divine guarantee. As a consequence o f this disjunction from the supersensible, there can be no place in which there can be a condensa­tion o f power, law, and knowledge. Using a phrase recurrent in Lefort’s writing, there is a dissolution of the markers o f certainty. Legitimacy can be established only discursively and tem porarily through proce­dural rules. He views totalitarianism as the attem pt to re-establish an absolute center o f power. Thus we see that political power is profoundly transformed in the transition from premodernity to modernity.

In seeking to apply Blumenberg’s second criteria we come upon an extremely im portant and obscure aspect o f Lefort’s thought. Was theology the “unambiguous owner” o f its doctrines and concepts? This leads us to Lefort’s consideration o f religion and its relationship to the political. In terms o f the political theology o f premodemity, Lefort relies on Ernest Kantorowicz’s book, The Kings’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology.

Kantorowicz cites an anonym ous Norman writing in the year1100:

We thus have to recognize [in the king] a twin person, one descending from nature, the other from grace. . . . One through which, by the condition o f nature, he conformed with other men: another through which, eminence o f [his] deification and by the power o f the sacram ent [of conse­cration], he excelled all others. Concerning one personal­ity, he was, by nature, an individual man: concerning his other his personality, he was, by grace, a Christus, that is, a God-man (Kantorowicz 1957, 46).

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Christ was human and divine by nature, whereas his deputy, the king, was human and divine only by grace. Consecration provided the king a body o f grace by which he becam e another m an excelling all others. The king’s body is doubled by grace, which is to say, the king’s power is a consequence of, and not the cause of, the doubling o f his body. The doubling o f his body is an effect o f the grace o f consecration by which the king is inserted into a chain that leads back to Christ but does not originate with him; according to the anonymous Norman, the kings o f Israel also participated in this doubling, though they have done so not as representatives o f Christ but rather in anticipation o f him.

Kantorowicz shows how this is linked to the double nature o f Christ in the theology o f the Eucharist. Briefly, in the first phase the m ystical body o f Christ refers to the presence o f the body o f Christ in the Eucharist, as opposed to his real body, which was in heaven. In consequence o f a heresy that denied the “real presence” o f Christ in the Eucharist, the church generated another set o f oppositions between the true body o f Christ in the Eucharist and the mystical body of Christ in the church. Pope Boniface VII summarized this doctrine as follows: “Urged by faith we are bound to believe in one holy church, which represents one mystical body, the head o f which is Christ, and the head o f Christ is God.” The notion o f the church as a mystical body is progressively secularized. In the development o f this secularization, Thomas Aquinas holds a key position. The Angelic Doctor was inclined to replace the liturgical image o f the mystical body with the juridical image o f a mystical person. After the twelfth century, the notion o f mystical body, originally referring to the sacrament o f the altar, is used to describe the body politic o f the church with Christ as its head. As the church was a mystical body with Christ as its head, so the realm is a mystical body with the king at its head.

Power resides neither in the visible body o f the king nor in the office; rather it is present in the invisible body o f the king that touches the supersensible, the invisible. The body politic with the king at its head is not a convenient m etaphor or a m anner o f speak­ing. It is the phantasm ic m eans by which the nation effects its own

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unity. Through the image o f the king’s body, the societies o f prem od­ern Europe represented them selves to themselves. It was their way of recognizing them selves, and as Hegel has shown in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1806), the being o f self-consciousness is a being recognized. The synthesis o f them selves that they (nations) effected through the im age o f the king’s body constitutes their reality as political entities. It (the king’s body) was both the source and the lim itation o f political power.

Within absolutism the power o f the king is absolute in the sense that there is no formal mechanism o f appeal against it. It is absolute— but not arbitrary in the sense o f depending on the whim o f the natural person who happens to be the prince at the moment. Lefort elaborates this conception o f power in an article entitled “The Permanence o f the Theologico-Political?” The main point o f this article, which article begins with a citation from Hegel’s Encyclopedia, is a consideration of the articulation between religion and the political:

It has been the m onstrous blunder o f our tim es to try to look upon these inseparable [religion and the political] as separable from one another, and even m utually indif­ferent. The view taken o f the relationship o f religion and the state has been that, whereas the state has an indepen­dent existence o f its own, springing from some source and power, religion was a later addition, som ething desirable perhaps for strengthening the political bulk works, but purely subjective in individuals . . . or it may be, religion is treated as something without effect on the moral life o f the state e.g. its reasonable law and constitution which are based on grounds o f their own (Lefort 2000, 214).

Lefort opposes political science inasm uch as it affects this dismantling o f the connection between religion and the political. The problem that he finds with political science is its conception o f society as a causal conjunction o f various autonom ously intelligible spheres.

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It does not show how, or even whether, these spheres are divisions o f the sam e society. The scientific point o f view and political science involves the same sort o f conjuring trick that Merleau-Ponty unmasked in the psychology o f perception. The trick is that the initial unity o f the perceived object is decomposed into sense data, associations, judg­ments, and so forth, and then out o f these units one reconstructs the initial experience. The entire procedure, however, has been guided by the initially experienced unity. There is a sort o f question-begging whereby the reconstituted whole is supposed to be the conclusion o f the scientific procedure, but in fact the procedure would itse lf have been impossible if one did not have the whole before one’s eye. From the very beginning there is a unity that exists and guides it at each step along the way.

For Lefort there are spheres o f society, or i f one prefers, divisions, but they are internal divisions o f one society. There is a flesh o f the social whereby the spheres o f the same society are related because o f their inscription within one social space. Lefort sees different regimes or form s o f society in order to identify a principle o f internalization that can account for a specific mode o f differentiation and articulation between classes, groups, and social ranks. “At the sam e time, he [the philosopher] seeks a specific mode o f discrimination between markers, be they economic, juridical, aesthetic, religious, which order the expe­rience o f coexistence” (2000, 218). The putting into form (mise-en-forme) by which a society institutes itse lf involves an engendering o f sense (mise-en-sens): although a society is certainly never transparent to itself, it is nevertheless a system o f intertwining meanings. Social practices are recognized as such only because they m ean something within the general context o f meeting, otherwise they would be simply physical motions.

There is also a mise en scene o f social relations, by which Lefort m eans that a society gives itse lf a “quasi-representation o f itself.” By quasi-representation he does not m ean an actual picture—the flag, eagle, and so forth—but rather som ething closer to Merleau-Ponty’s corporal schema, as described in The Phenomenology of Perception. This

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is a schem a o f one’s body that is not an im age or picture o f oneself. While not being purely and sim ply visual, it tends nonetheless toward visibility. It is a notion m ore aligned to spatial and tem poral unifica­tion than to a literal image. The synthesis that the body affects o f itself by m eans o f a quasi-representation is a synthesis o f the visible and the invisible. Likewise, the mise-en-scene by which a society constitutes its identity is a quasi-representation consisting o f a synthesis, or an inter­twining, o f the visible and the invisible. According to Lefort, it is this mise-en-sens and mise-en-scene, the form o f the social, or “the m anner o f being,” that is denegated by political science to the profit o f a system of independent spheres and a reconstructed knowledge o f the whole.

Inasmuch as Lefort clearly rejects the “m odern” conception of the exteriority o f the religious and the political, I will turn again to his conception o f their relationship. Their separation is clearly a histori­cal phenom enon coincident with the Enlightenm ent. Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenm ent?” is a demand to free ourselves from the self­incurred tutelage o f the priest. It is a dem and that we m ake public use o f our reason. Clearly the constitutional guarantees o f the democratic revolutions m ake provisions for the separation o f church and state. The generalized secularization o f the West is an indisputable fact. However, the evocation o f this fact does not resolve the philosophical issue. Lefort contends that the intertwining o f the religious and the political is not dism antled by their institutional separation, nor by the conscious refusal to base one on the other, nor by the conscious rejection o f religious belief. The king represented at the sam e time the unity o f the realm and its intersection with the divine through which the operations o f power have their legitimacy. The unity thus constituted transcends the level o f events, particular occurrences, and engenders a unity and identity in depth by which the living are put in relationship to the dead and to the future. This unity is projected onto the body o f the king. Granting the deepening o f secular trends, Lefort nonetheless contends that these changes did not entirely elim inate the notion o f the kingdom as a unity that was both organic and mysti­

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cal, a unity in which the m onarch was at the sam e time the body and the head.

Concerning the relationship o f philosophy to religion, Lefort writes, in the “Permanence o f the Theologico-Political?”

When it remains true to its inspiration . . . what philosophy discovers in religion is a mode o f portraying or dramatizing the relationships that hum an beings establish with some­thing that goes beyond em pirical time and space within which they establish relations with one another. This work of the imagination stages a different time, a different space—Once we recognize that hum anity opens onto itse lf by being held in an opening it does not create, we have to accept that change in religion is not to be read simply as a sign that the divine is a human invention, but as a sign o f the deciphering o f the divine or, beneath the appear­ance o f the divine, o f in excess o f Being over appearance (2000, 223).

According to Lefort, religion in our secular age does not consist o f the compendium o f curious beliefs that unenlightened people were once credulous enough to entertain; for him this view attests to the vanity o f perceiving “the social and political fields as purely and simply a product o f hum an invention.” We see that his position functions as a critique o f hum anism . The root o f m an is not, as Marx wrote, man himself; rather, interpreted under the divine it is “an excess o f Being over appearance,” a power o f revelation that philosophy cannot surpass. Religion poses in its own way the nonidentity o f society with itself the ecort that defers society’s identity with itself. As the immanence o f the body with itse lf is, in the thought o f Merleau-Ponty, perpetu­ally deferred, likewise the immanence o f the body politic is, according to Lefort, also deferred and submitted to a nonidentity with itself, the difference from itself, an irreducible alterity. Religion “dram atizes” the Other. Religious discourse orchestrates a problematic o f difference.

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These texts o f Lefort seem to evoke the late writings o f Heidegger, for whom the name o f ontological difference (“an excess o f Being over appearance”), when it is thought within the onto-theological tradi­tion, is interpreted as God. Beneath the names o f the onto-theological tradition, Heidegger seeks a more profound notion o f the difference as such, namely, the Event. In the latter part o f the “Permanence o f the Theologico-Political?” Lefort writes, “Do we not have to ask whether the religious m ight not be grafted onto a more profound experience as a result o f some determinate representation o f origins, community, and identity?” (2000, 230) What is this “more profound experience”? Surely it is the experience o f “the nonidentity o f Being and appearance,” the experience o f difference.

Thus, returning to Blumenberg’s second criterion, religion is, for Lefort, in a certain sense a second-order elaboration o f an experience that is ontological in nature. Religion gives an im aginary interpreta­tion o f the symbolic. In a certain sense, one might say that the political and the religious are internal articulations o f the symbolic that simul­taneously m ark our finitude and open us onto the world. In Lefort’s thought, religion testifies to a relationship between humanity and its Other. Within the totalitarian regimes o f the Soviet bloc, religion was a protest against the attempt to close humanity and human histoiy in on itself. “Religion states in its own way that human society can only open onto itself by being held in an opening it did not create. Philosophy says the same thing, but religion said it first, albeit in terms which philoso­phy cannot accept” (2000, 222-223).

For Lefort there is an unambiguous priority o f the ontological dimen­sion on which the doctrinal content o f religion is founded. In premodem societies, the symbolic dimension within which people establish rela­tionships with one another and the world is dramatized or depicted in religious terms as a relationship to an invisible world. The work o f the imagination stages (mise en scène) a different time and a different space. It populates the invisible world with things it sees, the visible. It invents a time that existed before time, and organizes a space that existed before space. It creates scenarios based on the most general conditions o f life.

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We see that, in a limited sense, Lefort’s thought does rejoin that o f Feuerbach and Freud inasmuch as the spirits, God, the gods, and so forth are our projections from everyday life. However, for him what is not explicable as a human projection is the experience o f being deliv­ered over to oneself on the basis o f a fundam ental alterity. Lefort’s thought opens onto a fundam ental aspect in the work o f Merleau- Ponty, where the body’s identity is constituted across fundam ental divergence, an ecart, with itself. It is likewise for him that the body poli­tic is constituted across a fundamental divergence with itself.

Permit me to conclude with a few remarks on the question mark in the title o f the “Permanence o f the Theologico-Political?” This title has been interpreted to m ean that Lefort thinks the horizon o f religion, or specifically Christianity, is unsurpassable and that democracy would be possible only in a country whose traditional theological political theology has been formed by Christianity. This is to profoundly misun­derstand Lefort’s intention. He is not trying to elaborate a general theory o f how and when democracy is possible. Rather, he is reflecting on our own political experience and how our own regime came into being. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that Christianity is, by universal agreement, the religion o f incarnation and modernity, but for Lefort it is the place o f disincam ation—this is to say, post-Christian but not a-Christian, having nothing to do with Christianity. Recall Lefort’s quotation from Kafka in the preface to the Visible and the Invisible: “The things presented them selves to him ‘not by their roots but by some point or other situated toward the middle o f them.’” We are always in m edia res. Are there other possibilities? Why not?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSI would like to thank the Harry Van Arsdale Center for Labor Studies for its support o f my research.

REFERENCES

Blumenberg, Hans. 1983. The Legitimacy of the Modem Age. Translated byRobert Wallace. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1957. The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Lefort, Claude. 1972. Le Travail de VOeuvre Machiavel. Paris: Editions Gallimard.

--------. 1978. “Esquisse d ’une Genese de l ’ldeologie dans les SocietesModemes.” Les Formes de 1’Histoire. Paris: Edition Gallimard.

--------. 2000. “The Permanence o f the Theologico-Political?” Democracyand Political Theory. Translated by D. Marcy. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lowith, Karl. 1949. Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago: University o f Chicago Press.

Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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