The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political

Introduction

What is it that recommends the work of a philosopher for our consideration ? There was a time when the only consideration would have been whether the work were true, whether it represented reality as it is in itself. Evoking Aquinas’s definition of truth, we could question whether the work contains a correspondence between intellect and thing. However, in our epoch few authors would claim such status for their work, and even fewer readers would demand it. This is not because all of us have suddenly adopted some sort of wholesale relativism which would efface the very opposition between truth and falsity; rather, it is because many of us have come to view truth, particularly the truth of the human world, as being deeply implicated in history and temporality. We have come to regard the work of the philosopher as a labor of interpretation and to consider this act itself as deeply implicated in the reality of what it hopes to decipher. Goethe said that, for him, reading a work of Kant was like walking into an illuminated room. Likewise for us, what we seek in a philosophical work is illumination. We do not look for eternal truths but wish to discover something we had not known before, or perhaps had known in a confused manner whereby it remained latent, to use Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor, “as a storm is latent in the dark clouds overhead, or the figure of a ship in the inarticulate perception of ‘something’ on the beach.” We have become suspicious of a philosophy that promises to explain everything. Although we ceaselessly draw sustenance from the work of Hegel, few of us are inclined to accept the entire “system.” We have become more modest in our expectations, less inclined to believe that “only the whole is true.” We are generally content, not to say happy, if we come away from a work of philosophy with the conviction that we have seen something not before visible, thought something not heretofore given to thought, and especially so if that something is of particular importance. What aspect of the world, and our experience of it, does the work of Claude Lefort endeavor to illuminate, and why are we in need of this illumination now? From its very beginning his work has set for itself the task of interpreting the political life of modern society; as we shall see, this task does not exclude either ontological or epistemological issues. The preIntroduction xiii ceding sentence contains words and phrases—for example, “political” and “modern society”—the meanings of which are by no means uncontested . For the moment we shall leave to one side the particular inflection that Lefort gives to these terms. That we are in need of such illumination would appear to be obvious. Indeed, Aristotle tells us that in one respect the discourse on the political is the most important because it determines what other forms of thought will be able to flourish within the polis. Beginning in ancient Greece, the form and dynamic of our political life has been an object of extreme fascination for philosophers. Few of the great philosophers (Descartes is an exception) have not written at least one tract on the political. And yet in June 1999 Pierre Manent can begin his Report to the Library of Congress on “The Fate and Meaning of Political Philosophy in Our Century” as follows: Commissioned to speak of political philosophy, I am confronted with an unexpected difficulty: not an overflowing wealth of materials, but on the contrary a singular dearth of them. It could even be said without paradox that our century has witnessed the disappearance, or withering away, of political philosophy. An old-fashioned empirical proof of this statement is easy to produce: certainly no Hegel, no Marx, even no Comte, has lived in our century, able to convey to the few and the many alike the powerful vision of our social and political statics and dynamics. However highly we might think of the philosophical capacities and results of Heidegger , Bergson, Whitehead or Wittgenstein, none of us would consider any one of them for his contribution to political philosophy.1 Manent is not alone in recognizing the contemporary dearth of political philosophy. Hannah Arendt, a thinker with whom Lefort entertains a relationship both appreciative and critical, notes that modernity has given us social philosophies and philosophies of history but has not produced any political philosophies. Leo Strauss has pointed out that we seem incapable of understanding, or...