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In the previous chapters, I followed the development of Lefort’s conception of premodern societies. In a general sense, these were societies in which the symbolic structure is fixed in another place, that is, outside time, either in a time before time or in an invisible world. Specifically, with regard to the Christian theologico-political of the ancien régime, this “outside ” takes the form of a doubling of the king’s body. Lefort’s unique manner of combining the writings of both Kantorowicz and Michelet shows both that the invisible body of the king is anchored in another place which is the seat of his sovereignty and juridical authority and that his visible body functions on an erotic-political register, as the object of the people’s love which connects not only the divine to the human but also the human to the divine. In the Freudian sense of the term, one could say that his imago is symbolically efficacious, which is to say, it is not a “mere” representation or a mystifying “mask” that hides the real, be it conceived as the operations of power (Foucault) or the extraction of surplus value (Marx). Its symbolic efficacity means that it does something: It gives unity to the regime; it gives the continuity within which social division and conflict are orchestrated; and it gives a sense of belonging to a particular time and place. My reflections on premodernity ended by posing the question of the permanence of the theologico-political. My conclusion was twofold: If one refers to the symbolic structure of society as that which gives access to the real but which is not itself a part of the real, then it is unsurpassable; but if one refers to an imaginary representation of the symbolic which entails a figuration of the symbolic and affirms that it resides in another place, then it is subject to profound mutation. I also said that a later chapter would show how the foreclosure of the symbolic is linked to the totalitarian project. Lefort argues that modernity is this “profound mutation” in the symModernity and Revolution 6 131 bolic order; the harbinger of this mutation is the French Revolution. One of his most extensive writings on the French Revolution takes the form of a reflection on a book of his friend François Furet, entitled Interpreting the French Revolution. I will attempt to disengage these thoughts on the Revolution from the specific context of Lefort’s reading of Furet’s book. Unfortunately , I will not be able to pursue all the details presented in the text. Lefort evokes sympathetically Furet’s practice of interpretation, a practice that he names “conceptual history,” the essence of which is condensed in Tocqueville’s remark in The Ancien Régime and the Revolution: “I am talking about history, not recounting it.” Furet’s position is laid out in “The Revolution Is Over,” one of the essays in his book. His point is that history is given to the historian as preinterpreted. This preinterpretation is done not only, and primarily, by other historians but also by the historical actors themselves; and the historical document issuing from the hand of these actors is already a self-interpretation. Furet claims that, whether from the right or the left, royalist or republican, conservative or Jacobin, the historians of the French Revolution have taken the revolutionary discourse at face value. This is because the historians themselves have remained locked into that discourse. He writes, “They keep putting on the Revolution the different faces assumed by the event itself in an unending commentary on a conflict whose meaning, so they think, the Revolution itself has explained to us once and for all through the pronouncements of its heroes.”1 His point is that as long as the ideological positions which have their origin in the Revolution were “live issues,” historians were “locked into” the discourse of their chosen hero of the Revolution. For example, for the Bolsheviks the Revolution was what the Jacobins interpreted it to have been. Nevertheless, he argues that at the present time (1977) and, we might add, even more so with the fall of the Soviet Union, these positions are no longer credible; only a few cranks identify themselves as either MarxistsLeninists or royalists. In the present moment, we can as it were step back, not in order to finally see the Revolution “objectively” but rather to interpret it in categories other than those of its own self-interpretation. Furet...

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