In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

When writing a book on the work of another philosopher one wishes, above all, to be accurate. Taken to its most nightmarish extreme, the writer could find himself in the position laid out by Borges in his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In this story Pierre Menard begins by attempting to write something on Cervantes’ Don Quixote, however , in his passion for accuracy he ends by repeating Cervantes’ text word for word. If we recall our chapter on the theory of interpretation operative in Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli, we must admit that Pierre Menard was not, in fact, faithful to Cervantes’ thought. As we have seen in Lefort’s notion of interpretation, those who take the text as their sole object forget that the text itself has an object. The object, the “meaning,” of Lefort’s work is the illumination that it sheds on our political world. In the body of my study, I have often compared Lefort’s position with that of other philosophers within the tradition of European philosophy . In this brief conclusion, I will suggest some respects in which his thought could intervene in certain discussions that are taking place in the American context. Remaining on a high level of abstraction, I will discuss the ideal types of liberalism and communitarianism, theories of rights vs. theories of the good, as they relate to the debates concerning the nature of democracy. Liberalism, based on a theory of rights, is strongly universalistic . As stated in the American Bill of Rights, “We hold it to be selfevident that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Such a formulation obviously has onto-theological presuppositions. In modernity, we have witnessed a secularization of this position; however, none have been completely successful in establishing an ontological foundation that would replace the Creator after his disappearance with the “death of God.” To my mind, communitarians have been more successful at showing that the formal structure of rights theories does, in fact, contain historically specific substantive value commitments and thus is not as formal as its proponents claim. In Stephen Mulhall’s and Adam Swift’s book, Liberals and Communitarians , they cite Michael Sandel who argues that “Rawls’ substantive political theory presupposes a certain conception of the essential nature of Conclusion 271 personhood, a conception that rules out the possibility of a person’s being constitutively attached to her end.” I take this to mean that indeed there are certain types of people willing to enter into Rawls’s thought experiment of going behind a “curtain of ignorance”; however, that there could be an historical genealogy of the emergence of such types, and if this were the case, then the results of this thought experiment are far less universalizable than its proponents imagine. Communitarians are very apt at showing the historical embeddedment of our values, even when these values are represented as purely formal. Nevertheless, they have been less successful in avoiding a type of relativism which, if taken seriously, would have pernicious political consequences . For example, in a country which lacks a tradition of the respect for individual rights and does not have a constitution which would legally protect these rights, if a dissident is thrown into a prison or a psychiatric institution, do we have any justification other than our personal revulsion for objecting to his or her treatment? Indeed, totalitarian regimes have been vociferous in their insistence that all so-called values are strictly delimited in both space and time and that any objection to their treatment of their own people constitutes an unwarranted “intrusion into their internal affairs.” From the perspective of such regimes, the very idea of a “rights of man” is nothing other than an ideology of Western imperialism. Even if there have been incidents in which they have been so used, we cannot quite bring ourselves to conclude that an imprisoned trade unionist in China has no more rights than an inanimate object, and that as such his or her rights could not possibly be being violated. In Lefort’s thought, we do not see any effort to find a substitute for the lapsed onto-theological foundations of a doctrine of rights. As I have argued elsewhere in my book Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics , this is not so in the thought of Habermas, where the conception of language naturally finalized toward rational consensus functions as such a substitute. Because Lefort...

Share