The Democratico-Political

MARTIN PLOT

Theory and Event

Project Muse

Lugar: Baltimore; Año: 2009 vol. 12 p. 1 - 20

1092-311X

In the essay "The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?" and elsewhere Claude Lefort carefully outlines the main elements of the unprecedented experience of modern democracy. As it is usual in his writings, he does so by playing the game of contrasts. In this text, he puts modern democracy side by side with theologico-political regimes—as he elsewhere puts democracy side by side with totalitarianism—in order to show the main characteristics of the democratic experience. Lefort claims that the nineteenth century´s widespread conviction "that one cannot discern the transformations that occur in political society—that one cannot really take stock of what is appearing, disappearing or reappearing—without examining the religious significance of the Old and the New” was based on the post-revolutionary feeling that a fundamental break with the past had occurred. Nineteenth century thinkers certainly felt the centrality of the relationship between the religious and the political in the changes that were taking place before their eyes, but they were not completely ready to understand their significance. What was common to many nineteenth century thinkers was not the rejection of the separation between the theological and the political but the assumption that the revolution had inaugurated a new religious tradition that now acquired a political face. According to this interpretation, the Revolution had replaced Christianity as the religion of our times. Although those thinkers were inspired in the right insight, what I will discuss in this paper is that what remains in modern democracy of the theologico-political system of representation is not the religious meaning of the political but its "oppositional principle." This oppositional principle is the one that now, after the displacement of the religious to the realm of the private, remains the exclusive attribute of the pole of the political. Until this process of disentanglement took place during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the theologico-political was the internal-external reference that would determine the shape of society. The political was then, as it always is, the general way of being of society, its form. But this form was theologico-political in the sense that it was embodied in a representative of an otherworldly reference. The representation of society before itself was mediated by—and incarnated in—the Monarch as a representative of God. The democratic revolution took place when this mediation with—and embodiment of—the otherworldly collapsed. However, this does not imply that societies no longer have a form, what happened is that this phenomenon turned that form into a permanent enigma and a permanent labor of self-institution. In modern democracies then, societies no longer have a heteronomously shaped body, they are now flesh that manages to achieve only a quasirepresentation, and thus a quasi-shaping, of itself. Since the now disembodied, empty place of power becomes normatively the price to be won over in a permanent political struggle arbitrated by the periodical and exceptional intervention of the voice of the people, this self-shaping activity in which modern democracies engage turns out to be the unending, fundamental, and constitutive dimension of their own existence. Revista indexada en: Academic Search Alumni Edition Academic Search Complete Academic Search Elite Academic Search Premier ArticleFirst Current Abstracts Electronic Collections Online Left Index (Online) MLA International Bibliography Political Science Complete Professional ProQuest Central ProQuest 5000 ProQuest 5000 International ProQuest Central ProQuest Political Science ProQuest Research Library Social Sciences Module TOC Premier (Table of Contents)