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As we have already seen in the previous chapter, Lefort’s conception of premodern societies, “societies without history,” is that generally these societies can be included in, but do not exhaust, the type of societies which characteristically have their symbolic structure fixed to nature or to a supersensible world, another place. A rejection of history, whereby its temporalization is such that the future is as fixed and determinate as the past, is not an essential characteristic of these societies. Societies whose symbolic structure is anchored in another place do not necessarily reject history, or linear temporality; we need only to think of Judaism, or particularly Christian societies. If one objects to this topography, claiming that it is exclusive because some societies have not been considered—Buddhist and Islamic societies, for example—then I would respond that Lefort is not trying to construct a topography of all possible societies. Rather, he is attempting , as Foucault would say, to write a “history of the present.” More pertinently, Lefort is practicing what Merleau-Ponty calls hyper-reflection. Merleau-Ponty argues that in the classical philosophy of reflection—the tradition emerging from Kant but not limited to him—the philosophical project is to regress from objectivity to its conditions of possibility which are conceived of as having their place in the unity of the transcendental subject. The project continues following backward the path from the unity of the subject to its articulation in a system of categories that render possible the appearance of objectivity. As I said above, self-reflective philosophy claims to be able to do this in a manner similar to the way in which one can walk in either direction between Notre Dame and l’Etoile. According to both Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, this regression to the zero point of subjectivity is impossible since it would ignore, or foreclose, the sense in which the subject is always already inserted into the flesh of the world, the there is. The project of a total reflection would pretend to undo European Premodernity 5 100 our natal bond with the world in order explicitly and consciously to remake it, either by means of a transcendental regression in the manner of Kant or by way of the fully achieved phenomenological reduction, the epoche, in the manner of Husserl. This project involves, according to Merleau-Ponty, a sort of sophisticated naïveté inasmuch as the “constituted objectivity,” which is conceived of as the achievement of subjectivity, serves as the “guiding thread” of the whole analysis. The illusion of total reflection is consequent on an occultation of its own origin. The whole reflective analysis is not false, but still naive, as long as it dissimulates from itself its own mainspring, and as long as, in order to constitute the world, it is necessary to have a notion of the world as preconstituted —as long as the procedure is, in principle, delayed behind itself.1 Our initial inherence in the world is repressed and comes to have the type of efficacity that Freud called Nachtraglichkeit, that is, a delayed action or action at a distance. In the classical notion of reflection, the conditions of possibility, though discovered after experience, are ontologically prior to experience. For the notion of a reflection that would coincide with itself, the stain of being “second” is considered to be a scandal. In opposition to this form of reflection, Merleau-Ponty proposes what he calls “hyperreflection ,” which is a reflection that is mindful of its own secondary character . It is cognizant of the fact that it is a response to a situation that is “always already given” and cannot be returned to its origin. This notion of hyper-reflection is captured in Kafka’s phrase, quoted by Lefort in the Preface to The Visible and the Invisible, “The things present themselves to us not by their roots, but by some point or other situated toward the middle of them.” These ruminations on the ontological and epistemological status of reflection may appear far afield from the present topic, but they are not. Lefort’s thinking constantly practices the type of hyper-reflection adumbrated in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. In response to the question asked above, we can say that in Lefort’s thought there is no question of his elaborating a categorical system that would fit every possible society. In the course of this book, I will occasionally make comparisons between Lefort’s thought and that of Habermas; for now, I will merely sketch...

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