Claude Lefort

Thinker of the Political

M. Plot, M. Plot, M. Plot

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780230375581
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is the first English language volume to offer such a wide-ranging scholarly and intellectual perspective on Claude Lefort. It constitutes the most comprehensive attempt to reconstruct Lefort's engagement with his theoretical interlocutors as well as his influence on today's democratic thought and contemporary continental political philosophy.

Part I

Claude Lefort, A Close Reader: Intellectual Influences and Dialogues

1

Claude Lefort: A Political Biography

Dick Howard

Let me begin by noting that Claude Lefort would never have endorsed the title given to this chapter. The idea that the strictly political aspects of his life and work could be separated from the philosophical, professorial, and private richness of his life would have been abhorrent to him. From his earliest work, Lefort fundamentally challenged the positivist conception of a society seen as if from above, composed of distinct and autonomous spheres–of economic, legal, theoretical, and aesthetic authority–which are recombined in different ways by different political regimes. For the same reason, he did not consider his own life on this positivist model of separable fields of existence, as if there were only an external and accidental relation between his social, political, and cultural life. A student of Merleau-Ponty, Lefort remained a phenomenologist, whether he was writing on working-class politics, Soviet totalitarianism, or French or Renaissance history, and above all when he tried to understand the radical nature of democracy and of the democratic project.

Nonetheless Lefort was politically active, as a militant and as a thinker, between 1941 and 1958,¹ at which point–after two previous ruptures and reconciliations–he broke finally with the self-proclaimed revolutionary political group that published the eponymous journal Socialisme ou Barbarie. The ground of the break was his abandonment of the idea and the ideology of a grand political revolution which would put an end to the social contradictions of modern societies. His quest to understand his practical engagement led him to write a series of theoretical essays that were collected in a volume titled, significantly, Les formes de l’histoire (1978). That title does not only refer to the fact that history is not a unilineal progression towards a telos of some kind: Lefort made clear the fluidity of his analysis in adding the subtitle Essais d’anthropologie politique. Dating from the same period are important essays in political philosophy, which Lefort more modestly entitled Éléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie (1971, in paperback 1979). This latter book describes his gradual disappointment with “revolutionary” thought and his discovery of the power, and the ambiguities, of democracy.

Although Lefort abandoned the project of leftist political militantism, he never limited his passion for politics, whether in his own country (in essays, for example, in 1978, on the joint program of the communist and socialist parties, then with regard to Euro-communist illusions, or again with regard to the refusal of Jacques Delors to enter the presidential campaign of 1995) or abroad (in Eastern Europe, of course, but also in Latin America). Each of his, often quite polemical, essays was grounded upon political themes, whether it was a matter of denouncing philosophical modes (from those revolving around Sartre or Althusser to those that were generated by the so-called New Philosophers) or defending the capacity of art to reveal the lineaments of reality (concerning Blanchot, or Rushdie’s Satanic Verses).²

It is not surprising that his introductory essay to the journal Libre,³ on which he collaborated once again with Castoriadis, along with Abensour, Gauchet, and Luciani, was entitled “Maintenant,” or that the collection of his previously uncollected writings, composed during 60 years of political and theoretical activity, is called Le temps present, Écrits 1945–2005. In his brief introduction to this volume of more than 1000 pages, he explains that these works bear witness to his constant concern “to disclose (déceler) the appearance of the unexpected, of that which is a signature of the present moment.”⁴

When Lefort does look back on his political path, the spirit which animates his conception of the political is clearly brought to light. In the preface to the 1979 re-edition of Eléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie, written after the critique of totalitarianism had finally penetrated even the circles of the orthodox French left–in part due to Lefort’s book on Solzhenitsyn, Un homme en trop (1975)–he rejects three erroneous implications that some, and particularly the so-called New Philosophers, who had become popular at the time (although, typically, Lefort does not name them), have derived from that critique of totalitarianism, and which retain a certain contemporary relevance:

a) that the values of the West have always to be defended against the totalitarian threat;

b) that West and East are both subject, differing only by degree, to the domination of the State (which one writes with a capital “S” in order to avoid closer inspection of the social relations that it covers over);

c) that the resources necessary for resistance cannot be found in the deplorable spectacle played out on the stage of politics, but only in the heart of the virtuous or moral individual, or in heaven.

In order to escape this binary mode of thought, which opposes totalitarianism and democracy as if each were absolute and unified, Lefort recalls his own trajectory, which consisted in maintaining a double distance in relation to the ideology of revolution and to the weight of Marxism as a political movement, which he refuses to identify with the thought of Karl Marx.⁵

Lefort explains his path, and his refusal of positivism, even more clearly in the afterword to the re-edition of Éléments (1970), under the title “Novelty and the Attraction of Repetition.” Influenced by Castoriadis’ theory of bureaucratic capitalism, Lefort explained how he had attempted to deploy a Marxist critique of the Soviet Union. To this end, he elaborated a Hegelian–Marxist conception of the proletariat as a political subject that is led, step by step, towards overcoming its own alienation until it finally recognizes its own (Stalinist⁶) bureaucracy as its true oppressor. His phenomenological analysis of what he calls in one article “the proletarian experience,” and his polemics with Sartre around the same theme (at the time when Sartre was defending the role of the party as the conscience of the working class), pre-date the Hungarian revolution of 1956. The experience of those unexpected events seemed to confirm the idea that Hungarian workers did not only revolt against totalitarian domination but also invented new forms of self-organization.

But these analyses and experiences, Lefort continues, did not yet lead him to critical self-understanding. The practical experience of the militant organization Socialisme ou Barbarie made him understand that, however pure, innocent, and transparent the radical party wants to be, it inevitably leads to bureaucratic domination over those it claims to liberate. A division will remain between those who (claim to) know, the leaders, and those (who supposedly) need revolutionary guidance in order to become what History decrees that they must become. This experience led Lefort to realize that “it is at the moment when we taste the bitter delight of overthrowing our biases that we reveal ourselves most fully prisoners of their principles.” That is what Lefort calls “the attraction of repetition,” whose force was illustrated by current events at the time that Lefort was writing, namely the incapacity of Euro-communism to seize the new possibilities which emerged in the Prague Spring of 1968.⁷ Lefort does not exempt himself from this temptation, which he calls “repetition,” criticizing his own lack of audacity during his militant years. Why then, one wonders, did he publish these early essays as a book? Why did he not join Wittgenstein and “throw away the ladder?” “Certainly,” he concludes, “for me these essays are far from realizing their goal. I hope the reader will find in them what he is looking for: an incitation to persevere.” In other words, Lefort does not want to replace one “militant truth” with another, his own. Like Power, Truth is not something that can be appropriated once and for all.

This critical reflection on his own political experience helps to understand why Lefort turned to Machiavelli, whose insistence on the primacy of political power appeared to offer an alternative to Marx’s emphasis on the primacy of productive forces. In Machiavel. Le travail de l’oeuvre, published in 1972, Lefort develops his concept of the work (oeuvre) that works (travail), a relation that is at once instituting and instituted. Lefort draws from his close and detailed reading of the Florentine the lesson that the supposed political “realism” of which Machiavelli is said to be the initiator is based ultimately on his recognition of the symbolic role of power.⁸ This distinction implies that politics is not in society; politics is, rather, a dimension of society. Particularly in a democratic society, what the political scientist calls “politics” is only one dimension of the political, that is, of the way in which society represents not only its own legitimacy but also its future potential. This difference between the political and positive politics has to be seen as one expression of the difference between that which institutes and that which is instituted, a relationship that is historically and socially variable.

It was not simply his remarkable study of Machiavelli (as a “name” that symbolizes a vision of the political, and as a theory that many claim to have penetrated in order to overcome its nefarious implications, and finally as a constantly self-critical author) that prepared Lefort’s next steps. His overcoming of the “attraction of repetition” was clear in his reaction to May 1968. With Castoriadis and Edgar Morin, he published in June La Brèche, the first book to propose an analysis of what the French euphemistically call “the events.” This effort to identify the appearance of the new was developed in “Maintenant,” the already mentioned introductory essay to the first issue of the journal Libre.⁹ It was also the last stage of a long and conflictual collaboration with Castoriadis that ended with a final break between the two, a break that also put an end to the journal after eight issues. This context clarifies the fact that, despite the fierce independence of his thought, Lefort has to be understood within the French tradition of “hommes de revues” as a powerful essayist. In addition to Socialisme ou Barbarie, Lefort was a co-editor of Textures (1971–75), Libre (1977–80), and Passé-Présent (1982–84). Furthermore, most of his books are collections of essays, a literary form that seems most appropriate for democratic societies, because, like the path traced in Élements, it incites his readers to move forward in their reading, challenging them to understand what will follow.¹⁰

At the conclusion of this brief introductory essay, what can be learned from Lefort’s political biography (if, in spite of everything, I can use that term)? I have alluded already to the popular reception of Lefort’s critique of totalitarianism, and to his rejection of its anti-political simplifications that gave rise to the New Philosophers and their epigones. But the challenge posed by the dialogue between repetition and the new remains, although its form changes, just as do the forms of ideology analyzed in the ground-breaking 1974 article “L’ère de l’idéologie” (published in Les formes de l’histoire). For example, when an interviewer suggested to him that Solzhenitsyn was a political reactionary and for that reason his path-breaking Gulag Archipelago could not be taken seriously, Lefort replied that even “supposing he was a reactionary, that does not prevent him from drawing a correct portrait of Soviet society, tied at least to his experience.” Similarly, when the preachers of radical political correctness, who reduce the political to “realistic” politics, and then reduce politics to a simple binary choice, criticize Lefort as a “liberal” because of his repeated studies of 19th-century liberal thought (Tocqueville, Guizot, Quinet, and, of course, Michelet), they forget that both Écrire: à l’épreuve du politique (1992) and the Essais sur le politique, XIX–XX siècles (2001), in which these essays on liberal thinkers are collected, also contain repeated interrogations of Marx and of Machiavelli. They are, in other words, works whose sense cannot be exhausted in a single reading because they interrogate the present just when the present turns towards them with its own questions.

Perhaps Lefort best sums up his path in the little book published in 1999 entitled Complications, another “return,” but this time to the question of communism itself.¹¹ Challenging the interpretations of François Furet (The Passing of an Illusion) and Martin Malia (The Soviet Tragedy), which claim that the USSR was doomed because of the weaknesses and flaws of its ideological basis, Lefort recalls that the symbolic character of power should not obscure its material reality, and that the understanding of the political should not exclude the interpretation of politics in its most sordid activities. This criticism of the two historians as “ideocrats” does not suffice; despite Lefort’s insistence on the symbolic nature of power, ideology alone does not suffice to explain reality’s complications. On the other hand, Lefort recalls and reviews 60 years of debate about the nature of communism to demonstrate that those who based their critiques of communism solely on the sordid nature of its politics, in their turn, avoided the essential “complication” of the political...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Claude Lefort, A Close Reader: Intellectual Influences and Dialogues
• Part II: Interpreting the Political: Events and Political Thought
• Part III: Symbolic Mutations: Lefort’s Influence in Contemporary Democratic Theory
• Index