Introduction

MARTIN PLOT

Claude Lefort. Thinker of the Political

Palgrave Macmillan

Lugar: Basingstoke; Año: 2013; p. 1 - 12

In this Introduction I show how Lefort developed a “comparative” style of investigation. He viewed democracy in its contrast with totalitarianism and vice versa, and he viewed modern societies in their contrast with pre-modern ones and vice versa. In the framework of this interrogative and comparative investigation of political forms, there were two “symbolic mutations” that structured a significant part of his analyses: first, the democratic revolution and, second, the advent of totalitarianism. The first mutation established a discontinuity between the pre-modern notion of the “body politic”—a notion that implied the idea of an organic understanding of the social, with its incorporation of power in one of its “organs” and its attribution of fixed, predetermined social functions, roles, and hierarchies—and the emergence of a new form of society in which what is abandoned is not the element of flesh, of which all bodies, including body politics, are made, but the very idea of a an entirely transcendently given shape of the social. With the advent of this society without a body that modern democracy became, a new conception of power emerged, since the latter is no longer localizable in an organ capable of invoking its consubstantiality. In this mutation, a symbolic displacement thus takes place, one in which power is seen as an empty place. For Lefort, the philosophical practice of interrogating and interpreting the institution of the social thus requires focusing on reflection on the political forms of society. These political forms, being themselves the very institution of the social, perform three intertwined operations that Lefort calls mise-en-forme, mise-en-sens, and mise-en-scène; that is, they give shape, institute meanings, and stage society for itself. In this framework, for Lefort, modern democracy became the form of society in which the periodic renovation and enactment of political and social conflict are revealed as constitutive (one should say institutive) of the way in which society confronts the enigma of its own institution. The Introduction ends with a brief discussion of the chapters included in the book.