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  • The Democratico-PoliticalSocial Flesh and Political Forms in Lefort and Merleau-Ponty
  • Martín Plot (bio)

Rather than seeing democracy as a new episode in the transfer of the religious into the political, should we not conclude that the old transfers from one register to the other were intended to ensure the preservation of a form which has since been abolished, that the theological and the political became divorced, that a new experience of the institution of the social began to take shape…and that, ultimately, it is an expression of the unavoidable—and no doubt ontological—difficulty democracy has in reading its own history…?

Claude Lefort

Lefort and the Enigma of Democracy

Modern democracy is an enigma. It is an enigma because, being born out of the split of the theological and the political, it places society face to face with its own institution. In theologico-political orders, societies take themselves for granted, they see themselves as a unity guaranteed by the objectifying gaze of God. Modern democracies, in contrast, confront the ambiguity proper of a being that becomes an entity before its own gaze—a two-dimensional, reversible being, a seer that is also a visible. No longer being a heteronomously constituted object, now the body politic becomes both a subject and an object, a flesh in the gaze of itself. In order to understand this mutation and the advent of the form of society that I will call democratico-political,i one of my articulating strategies will be the uncovering of the implicit dimensions—and the exploration of the political potentialities—of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh.ii Since I will use this concept from now on, it is important to make explicit at this early stage the way in which I will use it. In praising Tocqueville's intellectual style, Claude Lefort, a student, friend, and posthumous editor of Merleau-Ponty, says:

Tocqueville's art of writing seems to me, in effect, to be placed in the service of an exploration of democracy that is simultaneously an exploration of the 'flesh of the social.' We advance this latter term—which we borrow from Maurice Merleau-Ponty—to designate a differentiated setting [milieu] that develops as it is put to the test of its internal division and is sensitive to itself in all its parts. […] Tocqueville lets himself be guided by the exigency of his investigation. He explores the social fabric [tissu] in its detail, fearing not that he might discover therein contrary properties. I would dare say that he performs 'cuts' in its tissue and seeks in each of its parts the potentialities that lie hidden within—this, while knowing that, in reality, 'everything holds together.' […] In this sense, Tocqueville's design is not alien to the inspiration behind phenomenology… Tocqueville tries to discover some generative principle of social life, but he does not allow one to believe that one might be able to dissipate the opacity of social life itself. What he sets down is the exigency of an interminable deciphering of the genesis of meaning.iii

Following the famous notion of Ernest Kantorowicziv—and inscribing the latter's intellectual perspective in the Tocquevillean tradition—Lefort tells us that the two bodies of the king in theological monarchies were the pre-modern guarantee of social and political unity. The kingdom was considered to be an organic and mystical unity by reference to a king's body that was both real and symbolic. In its symbolic character, it represented an externally instituted unity of the people: "A carnal union [was] established between the great individual and his mass of servants, from the lowliest to the most important, and it [was] indissociable from the mystical union between king and kingdom."v Moreover, what lines ago I called the unifying gaze of Godvi was shown to have other side, because since the king had "the gift of attracting the gaze of all, of concentrating upon himself the absolute visibility of man-as-being…he [abolished] differences between points of view and [ensured] that all merge in the One."vii In short, the king was both the body and the head of the body...

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