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In 1999 Lefort published La Complication: Retour sur le Communisme. I will begin with a comment on the book’s title. The reader will recall that twenty years earlier, in 1979, Lefort wrote “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism ,” an article which began with a self-reflection on his path out of Marxism. He described his mentor, Merleau-Ponty, as “a thinker who had a gift for breaking certainties, introducing complications, when one sought simplifications.” This reference to Merleau-Ponty could be read as an introduction to the thought presented in La Complication. At the time of its publication, the contours of his thought on the genesis and the structure of totalitarianism are basically in place. This is by no means to say that it is repetitive; his earlier thoughts on totalitarianism responded to the new phenomenon of the emergence of totalitarianism and to the inability of the left to perceive it. This most recent book responds to the dominant interpretations of totalitarianism that have appeared since the implosion of the Soviet Union: Martin Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991; François Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the 20th Century; and a work which is addressed less critically, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. By demonstrating his divergence from these interpretations, Lefort’s own position is both deepened and clarified. In the Preface he tells us that his aim is “to show what is still repressed in recent interpretations which present the formation of the totalitarian regime as a digression at the core of the 20th century” (CRC, 5). Nevertheless, the two works primarily addressed, those of Malia and Furet, are not texts that operate on the same level. As the subtitle of Malia’s work suggests, it is a history of the USSR. Thus he deals with the totalitarian phenomenon basically as it functions in the formation and operation of the Soviet state; he does this without neglecting altogether the repreThe Fate of the Concept of Totalitarianism after the Fall 12 233 sentation of the USSR in the rest of the world, particularly the United States. Furet’s work, as the subtitle also indicates, is a work on the idea of Communism, mainly in Western Europe and specifically in France. What they have in common is that they both employ a conception of totalitarianism and a notion of its significance in the twentieth century; Malia does so explicitly and Furet does so hesitantly and somewhat grudgingly, as I have already noted above. According to both authors, the totalitarian phenomenon is a thing of the past. Lefort immediately introduces some complications regarding this notion that “totalitarianism is a thing of the past.” The opening sentence of La Complication reads as follows: “Communism pertains to the past; in return, the question of Communism remains at the heart of our time” (CRC, 5). What Lefort wishes to discuss is the placement of totalitarianism in the past, as if it were a closed issue; for him this placement is extremely important. He poses the question: “What general theory of history underlies this periodization?” This raises the not unrelated question of political judgment. The first chapter of Malia’s book is entitled “The Historical Issue: A Time for Judgment.” He writes: “For the first time it is possible to see Soviet Communism as a closed historical epoch, with a clear beginning, a middle and an end.” Further on he evokes the wisdom of Hegel that “the owl of Minerva takes flight only as the shades of night are falling.” He claims that before the collapse of the regime, “we were always somewhere in media res.”1 This would seem to imply that one could judge only after Communism had become a “closed chapter.” While Lefort does not deny that the collapse of the regime does give us a certain privileged perspective on it, he certainly does deny that judgment cannot be effected, or is so only provisionally, in media res. Above I referred to his citation, in the Preface to The Visible and the Invisible, of the line of Kafka: “Things never give themselves to me at their root, but somewhere toward the middle of them.” This is to say, we are “always in media res.” According to Lefort, judgment is effected not in spite of our being in “the middle of things” but precisely because of it. He notes that it is anomalous that Malia would evoke...

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