breckmann_democracy between disenchantment and political theology french post-marxism and the return...

Democracy between Disenchantment and Political Theology: French Post-Marxism and theReturn of ReligionAuthor(s): Warren BreckmanSource: New German Critique, No. 94, Secularization and Disenchantment (Winter, 2005), pp.72-105Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30040951 .Accessed: 04/01/2015 16:02

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Democracy Between Disenchantment and Political Theology. French Post-Marxism and the Return ofReligion1

Warren Breckman

"Where there are no gods, phantoms rule." - Novalis, Christianity or Europe

"On the Jewish Question" is where Karl Marx declared the liberal state, the "atheistic state, the democratic state," to be the pure essence of the Christian state. Considering the American republic, the most advanced model available, Marx claimed that the state stands over society as heaven does earth; the sovereignty of the citizen rests on a Christian logic of incarnation that separates the individual from human species-being; the abstract universality of rights displaces the concrete universality of man's participation in collective social life. Marx regarded communism as the last great act in the history of secularization, returning the transcendent political state to its immanent place in society and removing the final obstacle to man's recovery of his alienated humanity.2 The salto mortale was to be surpassed by the leap into the kingdom of freedom; but in our

1. This article originated as a lecture given at Cambridge University in July 2001. I am especially grateful to the participants of the New York Area Seminar in Intellectual and Cultural History for their feedback on a completed version in April 2002. Given the long delay in bringing this issue to press, I have updated the bibliography. A version of the paper was first published in German in Allgemeine Zeitschrift fiir Philosophie 30.3 (2005).

2. I discuss this in some detail in Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory. Dethroning the Self(New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), ch. 7.

72


Warren Breckman 73

period, it is liberal democracy that has leapfrogged over communism. One of the ironies in the history of communism is that Marx's seculariz- ing impulse has been almost fully eclipsed by the judgment that communism was itself a religion, albeit a secular collectivist religion.

There is nothing new in the idea that communism is a secularized messianism, even in post-1945 France, where, despite the widespread infatuation with Bolshevism, Albert Camus denounced communism as a myth of this-worldly salvation and Raymond Aron attacked it as the opium of the intellectuals. This conceit persists in Frangois Furet's final book, The Passing of an Illusion. The Idea of Communism in the Twenti- eth Century, a title that alludes to Freud and situates the analysis of communism in the framework of the critique of religion. Furet concludes that the collapse of socialist expectations undid a covert theological code with which the twentieth century had sought historical certainty. As he writes, "At the end of the twentieth century, deprived of God, we have seen the foundations of deified history crumbling." What distinguishes Furet from earlier anticommunists like Camus and Aron is his belief that with the apparent triumph of liberal democracy, "history has become a tunnel that we enter in darkness, not knowing where our actions will lead, uncertain of our destiny." A democracy stripped bare of illusions proves itself to be an object of anxiety - Furet judges this disen- chanted condition "too austere and contrary to the spirit of modern societies to last." Democracy needs utopia, "a world beyond the bourgeoisie and Capital, a world in which a genuine human community can flour- ish."3 Furet's book ends with the ambiguous suggestion that neither democracy's inventiveness nor its susceptibility to dreams of historical redemption is at an end. If the exit from communist illusion has proven terminable, then democracy's own exit from religion seems interminable.

The mix of triumphalism and apprehension in Furet's treatment of democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union, in fact, echoes the ambivalence toward democracy already evident in his pathbreaking work on the French Revolution from the late 1970s. Indeed, it is an ambivalence common to many French intellectuals in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and indicative of the so-called "antitotalitarian moment" when Marxism's grip on French intellectual life definitively broke and many leading leftist intellectuals turned toward a democratic politics of a decidedly more

3. Francois Furet, Passing of an Illusion. The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1999) 502.


74 French Post-Marxism and the Return of Religion

pluralistic, quotidian, and non-utopian sort. Olivier Mongin describes this crucial turning point in recent French intellectual history as a "bizarre period," when "intellectuals increasingly distance themselves from their self-image as proprietors of history and discover democracy at the same moment when democracy is the object of increasing doubt."4 Mongin's comment speaks directly to the fact that the turn of French intellectuals toward democracy coincided with a period of intensifying critique of the very foundational discourses and meta-narratives that had served as the grounds for liberal democratic and revolutionary socialist politics alike.

The collapse of those foundations - whether transcendental ethics, natural law, or rationality of the historical process - helps to explain one of the striking aspects of the general democratic reorientation of French intellectuals in the 1980s, the return of religion. In 1988, Marcel Gauchet and Pierre Nora identified the "rehabilitation of the religious problematic" as one of the "most spectacular" trends in recent French intellectual life.5 In a culture where almost all the dominant intellectuals, whether under the sway of Robespierre, Marx, or Nietzsche, had long dismissed religion as a dead letter, this was indeed a surprising development. One could multiply the dimensions of religion's return in the 1980s: the entry of religious motifs into the texts of the New Philos- ophers, the revival of concern for religiosity among French Jewish intellectuals, the 'return' of Islam sensationally marked by the Iranian revolution, the Catholic dimension of Polish Solidarity, and the ethical turn in French philosophy, a turn that dovetailed with the explosion of interest in Emmanuel Levinas. To these phenomena must be added one that bore directly on the democratic reorientation of the French Left, namely, the resurgence of the theologico-political problem in French thought. Indeed, a French historian of the German secularization debate recently described this as the third great wave of the theologico-political in the twentieth century, preceded by Carl Schmitt's illiberal political theology in the Weimar period and German progressive political theology and Latin American liberation theology in the 1960s and 1970s.6 In

4. Olivier Mongin, Face au scepticisme (1976-1993). Les mutations du paysage intellectuel ou l 'invention de l 'intellectuel democratique (Paris: Editions La D~couverte, 1994) 17.

5. Pierre Nora and Marcel Gauchet, "Aujourd'hui," Le ddbat 50 (May-Aug. 1988): 157.

6. Jean-Claude Monod, "Le 'probl~me thdologico-politique au XXe siicle," Esprit, no. 250 (Feb. 1999): 179-92.


Warren Breckman 75

contrast to those earlier moments, it must be emphasized that the French resurgence did not aim to reassert a theological language as a political strategy. Rather, Gauchet and Nora signaled the specific nature of this resurgence when they spoke of "the return of religion as a central object of social theory and a legitimate object of laic reflection."7 For laic thinkers, the goal was to assess the place of religion in the genealogy of political modemrnity. Yet this was more than an analytical question. For the theologico-political question spoke directly to the paradoxical situation in which French intellectuals turned to democracy at the same moment that they perceived democracy's loss of substance and foundation. A century and a half after Marx had detected a political theology at the core of liberal democracy and called for the final, radical secularization of politics, French post-Marxist intellectuals tumrned to political democracy as the only possible vehicle for emancipatory politics; but they returned with less confidence regarding the question of democracy's relationship to the ultimate figure of otherness.

I want to look at the intersection of theology and politics in three post-Marxist philosophers of the Left who played a central role in the democratic reorientation of French thought, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, and Marcel Gauchet. My aim is twofold. My first concern is historical. Castoriadis and Lefort, both bomrn in the 1920s, exercised a significant influence upon the course of political thought in France that intellectual historians are only now beginning to explore. Gauchet, a generation younger and currently one of the most prominent philosophers in France, drew inspiration from both Castoriadis and Lefort. Michael Scott Christofferson, the historian of the 'antitotalitarian moment' in French thought of the 1970s and 1980s, presents Casto- riadis, Lefort, and Gauchet as united in the antitotalitarian campaign.8 Certainly, these figures were bound together by personal history and shared milieux; but behind the common front of anticommunism, Gauchet, Lefort, and Castoriadis actually represent way stations in the collapse of revolutionary politics in France. The theologico-political problem became a crucial vehicle for the articulation of substantially different responses to the challenge of rethinking democratic politics.

My second concern is more theoretical, because, in the context of

7. Le ddbat 50; 147. 8. Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left. The Antito-

talitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004).



1980s France, the exploration of the relationship between democracy and religion represents an important chapter in the long philosophical debate about secularization, with the collapse of Marxism giving this episode its specific valence.

So long as Marxism's social and economic model prevailed, the political domain could always be exposed as epiphenomenal, while political philosophy could be dismissed as idealist. If, as Jacques Derrida recently reminded us, Marx believed that "'Christianity has no history whatsoever', no history of its own," then we must add that for Marx politics has no history of its own, and for exactly the same reason.9 However, with the collapse of Marxism's claim for the determinant role of the economic base, the field was cleared for figures like Castoriadis, the theorist of the 'social imaginary,' and Claude Lefort, the philosopher of the 'symbolic dimension' of politics, both of whom recognize the creative and constructive role of cultural representations in creating the social world. Within such a constructionist perspective, both politics and religion could reemerge as irreducible systems of meaning that generate, and not only reflect social-historical life. Yet that also brought these two symbolic systems into competition. To state the issue bluntly: If we consider democracy as the domain of human self-determination and religion as the domain of human dependence, can democracy escape from its long entanglement in religion and quasi-religions and establish its own autonomy as the self-instituting activity of human communities? Or must democracy rely on the othemess of religion to discover the meaning of democracy? Finally, with a view toward the historical relationship between the democratic impulse and the twentieth-century's totalitarian experiences, does democracy need religious otherness as a limiting force on the exercise of democratic power?

A final point must be made before proceeding. Many readers will immediately recognize parallels between these questions and the interrogation of the concept of secularization opened by Hans Blumenberg's Die Legitimitait der Neuzeit [The Legitimacy of the Modern Age]. Remark- ably, the French post-Marxist discussion traced here developed without any apparent knowledge of Blumenberg's critique of Karl L6with and Carl Schmitt. Indeed, when Blumenberg's magnum opus finally appeared in French translation in 1999, Denis Trierweiler characterized the absence

9. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf(New York: Routledge, 1994) 122.


Warren Breckman 77

of Blumenberg in France as an "autism of reception."'0 The fact that this French discussion unfolded without reference to the important German secularization debate lends further interest to the retumrn of the politico- theological problem in France. I will return at the end of the essay to some thoughts about Blumenberg and the French debate.

The Return of the Political French intellectual life in the late 1970s and 1980s was marked by so

many announcements of "turns" and "returns" that one sometimes feels caught in a Parisian traffic circle. In 1976, a special issue of the journal Esprit announced what was surely one of the most significant: the "return of the political." Of course, politics had never gone away, least of all in the form of the philosophe engagd. However, in the mid-1970s, there were indications of a revival of politics as an object of serious historical and philosophical reflection. Numerous thinkers who had earlier viewed politics as an epiphenomenon of the social base now looked to the 'political' as a field of "power and law, state and nation, equality and justice, identity and difference, citizenship and civility."11 In this revival, Comrnelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort played major roles. As the co-founders of the militant group and journal Socialisme ou Barba- rie in 1948, Lefort and Castoriadis had staked out a unique ground in French political culture.12 They opposed with great vigor the Soviet Union, the Parti Communiste Frangaise, the Parti Socialiste, French Trotskyism, and fellow-traveling intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre. Although they distanced themselves from all the main tendencies of French militant politics, Castoriadis and Lefort remained staunch critics of western capitalism, which they denounced for its bureaucratized modes of domination and exploitation. In opposition to the Fordist capitalism of

10. Trierweiler, "Un autisme de la reception - A propos de la traduction de La Lcgitimite des Temps modernes de Hans Blumenberg en France," Esprit, no. 7 (Jul. 2000): 51-62. This situation has been further remedied by Jean-Claude Monod's major study, La Querelle de la Secularisation. Theologie politique etphilosophies de l 'histoire de Hegel a Blumenberg (Paris: Vrin, 2002).

11. Pierre Rosanvallon, Chaire d'histoire moderne et contemporaine du politique: Legon Inauguralefaite lejeudi 28 mars 2002 (Paris: Coll~ge de France, Seuil, 2003) 11.

12. On the group's history, see Philippe Gouttraux, 'Socialisme ou Barbarie '. Un engagement politique et intellectuel dans la France de I 'apres-guerre (Lausanne: Editions Payot Lausanne, 1997); Dick Howard, The Marxian Legacy (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1988); and Stephen Hastings-King, "On the Marxist Imaginary and the Problem of Prac- tice: Socialisme ou Barbarie, 1952-6," Thesis Eleven 49 (1997): 69-84.



the West and the organized "state capitalism" of the East, they pio- neered a politics based on worker self-management [autogestion] and direct democracy. Lefort left Socialisme ou Barbaric in 1958 when he and Castoriadis fell into disagreement over the form of the group, and Castoriadis disbanded it in 1966 after his decisive rejection of Marxism produced intractable divisions among the members.

Important as Socialisme ou Barbarie may look in retrospect, its history played out at the margins of French intellectual life. That changed when new circumstances created a receptive audience for their ideas. For one thing, the events of 1968 loosened the hold of the French Com- munist Party and produced a fragmented Left, including the short-lived Maoist Gauche Prolktarienne and the so-called Deuxikme Gauche, which subscribed to the political goal of autogestion that had been articulated by Socialisme ou Barbarie. For another, the "Common Pro- gram," the 1972 electoral alliance between the French Communist Party and the Socialist Party, drove many noncommunist leftist intellectuals further away from the major left-wing parties. Further, the French publi- cation of Alexander Solzenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago generated a shock that jolted leftist intellectuals. The "Gulag Effect" produced some thoughtful meditations, including Claude Lefort's Un homme en trop, but it also spawned the media savvy New Philosophers, who combined a hair-shirt and ashes rejection of their former leftism with bald asser- tions that all forms of power corrupt equally. The New Philosophers tried to claim affiliation with Castoriadis and Lefort, but both strenu- ously refused the tribute. Though the New Philosophers shared little with the older men beyond the word "totalitarian," the wave of antitotalitarian rhetoric undoubtedly did help renew interest in three decades of serious philosophical and political writing by Lefort and Castoriadis.

The ideological conjuncture that thrust political philosophy, and more specifically, sustained reflection upon the experience of modern democracy and its Doppelganger, totalitarianism, into the center of French discussion may be traced in the sociology and institutional history of Parisian intellectual life. Between 1971 and 1980, Lefort and Castoria- dis participated in the founding of two new political journals, Textures and Libre, along with Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Clastres, and Miguel Abinsour. Gauchet, who had been Lefort's student at the University of Caen in the 1960s, authored the article "L'expdrience totalitaire et la pens~e de la politique," [The Totalitarian Experience and the Thought


Warren Breckman 79

of the Political] which dominated the 1976 special issue of Esprit on the return of politics. Further, in 1980, Gauchet collaborated with Pierre Nora on founding the journal Le DLbat, which quickly established itself as the most influential Parisian periodical in the 1980s. Frangois Furet's historical writings on the French Revolution broke with the Marxist school and explored the Revolution as modernity's first experiment with democracy; and under Furet's presidency, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) became the epicenter of this revival of political philosophy. Under Furet's patronage, Lefort in 1976 and Casto- riadis in 1980 were elected Directeurs d'6tudes [directors of studies]. Pierre Rosanvallon writes that their elections gave an "alan ddcisif" to political studies at the Ecole.13 A monthly seminar on politics, history of political thought, and political philosophy began at the Ecole in 1977. As Rosanvallon remembers, "What made this group special is that it linked together two different generations. There was the generation of Frangois Furet, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Krzysztof Pomian, but there were also, from the very beginning, Marcel Gauchet, Bernard Manin, Pierre Manent, and myself."l4 In 1985, this same group founded the Institut Raymond Aron. This institutional initiative was followed in the 1990s by the creation of numerous journals committed to political philosophy and the history of political thought.'5

Although Furet was the not-so-gray eminence behind most of these developments, including Lefort and Castoriadis's elections to the EHESS, it would be a mistake simply to identify them with Furet's efforts to remake the Ecole in his image. Indeed, both diverged from Furet's politics. While Furet believed that the French Revolution's search for "pure democracy" formed nothing less than the matrix of totalitarianism, Castori- adis championed direct democracy until his death in 1997. Although Lefort was closer politically to Furet, nonetheless he criticized Furet's neo-Toc- quevillean association of the Revolution with totalitarianism, and instead emphasized the Revolution's role in inaugurating the indeterminate, open

13. Pierre Rosanvallon, "Le politique," Une dcole pour les sciences sociales. De la Ve section

at l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, ed. Jacques Revel and

Nathan Wachtel (Paris: Editions du CERF, Editions de l'Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, 1996) 300.

14. Pierre Rosanvallon, cited in Andrew Jainchill and Samuel Moyn, "French Democracy between Totalitarianism and Solidarity: Pierre Rosanvallon and Revisionist Historiography," Journal of Modern History 76.1 (Mar. 2004): 107-54.

15. Jeremy Jennings, "The Return of the Political? New French Journals in the His- tory of Political Thought," History of Political Thought 18.1 (Spring 1997): 148-156.



social experience of democracy. Where Furet's politics centered on the need for stable representative institutions, Lefort gave his support to the pluralistic activism of the new social movements that emerged after 1968. Gauchet, by contrast, has commented recently that between Furet and himself, there existed "that mysterious thing that is a deeply spontaneous accord."16 Gauchet, who was a generation younger than Furet, Lefort and Castoriadis, was indeed perceived as Furet's protege. In fact, Furet's oppo- nents blocked Gauchet's election to the icole until 1990, when Furet stra- tegically withdrew his support for his candidacy. Gauchet will return in the final sections of the paper, where we shall see how his deployment of the theologico-political question in the mid-1980s intersected with Furet's politics. For the moment, let us turn to Castoriadis.

Castoriadis and Religious Heteronomy Castoriadis's commitment to radical direct democracy led him into a

sharply antagonistic relationship to religion. Equating autonomy with the breakthrough of human self-assertion, Castoriadis viewed religion as absolute heteronomy. "Autonomy" is the key term of the social and political theory that Castoriadis developed after his 1963 announcement that radicals now faced the choice of remaining either Marxists or revo- lutionaries. From then until his death, he defended these redefined radical politics that he termed the "project of autonomy." He conceived of it as both an individual and a social project. On the individual level, it is an ongoing project that develops the capacity for reflective self-understanding and deliberate activity that allows "the subject or human subjectivity properly speaking" to put social boundaries and even itself into question. As a collective political task, wrote Castoriadis in 1972, the project of autonomy is a struggle for a "new relation of society to its institutions, for the instauration of a new state of affairs in which man as a social being is able and willing to regard the institutions that rule his life as his own collective creations, and hence is able and willing to transform them each time he has the need or the desire."17 This uncompromising vision of direct democracy draws historical sustenance from the example of the ancient Greek polis as well as the real advances that democratic self-rule

16. Marcel Gauchet, "De Textures au Dibat ou la revue comme creuset de la vie intellectuelle," La Condition Historique. Entretiens avec Francois Azouvi et Sylvain Piron (Paris: Stock, 2003) 167.

17. Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, Volume 1, trans. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1988) 31.


Warren Breckman 81

had made in the modem world; and it is built from a unique synthesis of Kantian, Fichtean, Freudian and phenomenological elements.

In his effort to rethink radical politics as a liberating praxis and an activity of imaginative creation, Castoriadis linked the project of autonomy to a deepening critique of the determinist tendencies embedded in western conceptions of being and knowledge. According to him, the "inherited logic-ontology" of this tradition is dominated by rationalist categories that reduce all beings to the criterion that, in Kant's words, "to be is to be determined." In place of this deeply rooted ontological orientation toward the determinate and the determined, Castoriadis introduced a new ontological hypothesis and argued for a "hitherto unsuspected type of stratification [of being] [. . .] an organization of layers that in part adhere together, in terms of an endless succession in depth of layers of being that are always organized, but never completely, always articulated together, but never fully."18 Being, he specu- lates, is locally organizable or determinable, but overall, being is "chaos," "abyss," and "groundlessness." All living beings, including of course humans, are possible because they exist in a parasitizing or ontological symbiosis with a stratum of total being that is locally organizable.19 Western thought has focused on this level of local lending or organization and understood it as being as such, but it is only at the expense of covering over the chaos that is also in being. This ontological understanding has restricted our cognition of the natural world, and it has obscured what is ontologically unique about the social-historical world. In place of inherited thought's rationalistic impulse to subject the social and historical to deterministic logic, Castoriadis emphasizes contingency, creation, and "radical alterity," the ex nihilo emergence of novel forms of social life. In one of his most distinctive reformulations of social thought, he describes the social-historical as that region of overall being formed by the 'social imaginary', the creative power by which a society draws on a 'magma' of significations and representations to insti- tute itself as a specific mode and type of human coexistence. Though Castoriadis emphasizes that ex nihilo creation does not occur outside of a concrete context, no model of causality can exhaustively explain the

18. Cornelius Castoriadis, "Modern Science and Philosophical Interroga- tion,"Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1984) 172.

19. Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy," The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997) 307.



imaginative acts whereby a collectivity creates meaning and 'material- izes' these significations in institutions.

Every society is instituted by human creation, Castoriadis argues, but at only two times in human history have societies acknowledged - however incompletely - the role of the creative imagination in the formation of social institutions: once in the ancient Greek democracies and again in Europe from the late Middle Ages onward. More typically, societies occult this self-creation by imputing it to an extra-social source. Hence, the characteristic modality of humanity's relation to the chaos that surrounds and is part of itself is a double movement of annuncia- tion and denunciation, institution and occultation. Castoriadis's most extensive analysis of the tension between institution and occultation was written between 1978 and 1980 in his essay "The Institution of Society and Religion." In it, religion becomes synonymous with heteronomy, concealing the human act of signification whereby social life is given form. Attributing the origin of the social institution to a transcendent extra-social source stabilizes the enigma of human self-creation, assign- ing it an origin, foundation, and cause outside of society itself. Although religion recognizes contingency and creation, it also veils them, inas- much as "social imaginary significations always provide for the Abyss a Simulacrum, a Figure, an Image - at the limit, a Name or a Word - which 're-present' it and which are its instituted presentation: the Sacred."20 The signification of the Sacred brings the Abyss back into society as an immanent presence, as a space and a ritualized practice, but it remains the Other that confers meaning upon society from the outside. Religion is thus a double misrecognition, of the Abyss and of society's own creation and creativity. In contrast to the heteronomy of religion, autonomy requires a recovery of the instituting power and the lucid recognition of ourselves as the origin of our law. Castoriadis does not mean this to imply the mastery of the outside, but rather what he calls "the permanent opening of the abyssal question: 'What can be the measure of society if no extra-social standard exists, what can and what should be the law if no external norm can serve for it as a term of comparison, what can be life over the Abyss once it is understood that it is absurd to assign to the Abyss a precise figure, be it that of an Idea, a Value, or a

20. Cornelius Castoriadis, "Institution of Society and Religion," World in Frag- ments. Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997) 324.


Warren Breckman 83

Meaning determined once and for all?"'21 Translated into political terms, this vision of interminable questioning assumes an unbridgeable gap between religion as closure and democracy as openness to contingency and human self-creation.22 Indeed, autonomy demands a kind of heroic assumption of responsibility, but also a chastening sense of our finitude, once it is recognized that no extra-social standard exists.

The absence of such standards means that democracy is the "regime of historical risk," a "tragic regime." A democracy must be a "regime of self-limitation," and this means that democracy must have institutions of self-limitation. Significantly, in a 1983 discussion of the ancient Athenian democracy, Castoriadis identified tragedy as one such institution of self-limitation. Where many interpreters have read Athenian tragedy as an outgrowth of the cultic practices of Greek religion, Casto- riadis emphasizes its "cardinal political dimension," namely its presentation of the chaos of Being and the "absence of order for man [. . .] More than that, tragedy shows not only that we are not masters of the consequences of our actions, but that we are not even masters of their meaning." From this perspective, Castoriadis reads Antigone not as a play about the supremacy of divine law over human or as the insur- mountable conflict between these two principles, as Hegel had. The play does not warn against Creon's insistence on the human law, but against the hubris of Creon's "adamant will to apply the norms" of the city without any cautionary sense of the uncertainty of the situation, the impurity of motives, or the inconclusive character of the reasoning upon which political decisions rest. When Creon's son, Aimon, acknowl- edges that he cannot prove his father wrong, but begs him not to "monos phronein, 'not to be wise alone'," Sophocles "formulates the fundamental maxim of democratic politics."23 On one level, Castoria- dis agrees with Hannah Arendt, who sees the political art par excel- lence in tragedy as far as it develops political judgment through its capacity to represent a process of recognition and foster the ability of citizens to see things from the perspective of their fellow citizens. Yet Castoriadis extends that point by arguing that tragedy intensifies the commitment to autonomy by representing not the positivity of the

21. Castoriadis, "Institution of Society and Religion" 329. 22. See also Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Revolution Before the Theologians: For a

Critical/Political Reflection on Our History," World in Fragments 72. 23. Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Greek Polls and the Creation of Democracy," Philos-

ophy, Politics, Autonomy, trans. David Ames Curtis (New York: Oxford UP, 1991) 119-20.



foundation, as in religion, but, rather, society's lack of foundation. Where Arendt emphasizes the power of tragedy to incite citizens to "self-dis- play and agonistic striving," Castoriadis argues from a participatory democratic perspective that tragedy's metaphysical disclosures encouraged a spirit of mutuality, collective deliberation, and self-limitation.24

Castoriadis's discussion of tragedy is just one example of his insistence on the impossibility of ever mastering either the psyche or society. Nonetheless, numerous critics have taxed him with harboring dreams of transparency. Claude Lefort, for one, believed that he perpetu- ated a myth rooted in Marxism of "a society able to master its own development and to communicate with all its parts, a society able in a way to see itself"25 Notwithstanding Castoriadis's disavowals, his theory of autonomy does expose itself to this criticism, insofar as he sometimes speaks rather imprecisely of society as if it were a coherent entity or, even worse, an agent. His tendency to affirm the creativity of "society" itself has produced the ironic consequence that despite his con- scious effort to position himself at the farthest remove from any positive relation to religion, he has been attacked for covertly reinstating a theological mode of thought. This is the core of Jtirgen Habermas's critique of Castoriadis. After praising Castoriadis's attempt to "think through the liberating mediation of history, society, external and internal nature once again as praxis" as one of the most original contributions to postwar radical thought, Habermas charges that his social imaginary is a "language- creating, world-projecting, world-devouring [. . .] social demiurge."26 Habermas's misgivings are repeated by his student Axel Honneth and much amplified by one of his followers, Friedhelm L6venich, who detects an exact parallel between the role of God in traditional philosophy and the radical imaginary in Castoriadis: "origin, source, signified and signifier, law-giver, meaning-creator, that from which all stems and to which all returns, the alpha and the omega."27 Ldvenich goes so far as to label the social imaginary a new theology, a new myth.

The scope of Castoriadis's effort to rethink autonomy as a personal

24. On Arendt, see Robert C. Pirro, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois UP, 2001) esp. 153-86.

25. "An Interview with Claude Lefort," Telos 30 (1976-77): 185. 26. Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Twelve Lectures,

trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991) 327 27. Axel Honneth, "Rescuing the Revolution with an Ontology: On Cornelius Cas-

toriadis's Theory of Society," The Fragmented World of the Social. Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. C.W. Wright (Albany: SUNY, 1995) 168-83; Friedhelm Liven- ich, "Heiligsprechung des Imaginfiren. Das Imaginitre in Cornelius Castoriadis' Gesell- schaftstheorie," The Social Horizon of Knowledge, ed. Piotr Buczkowski (Amsterdam: RodoDi, 1991) 165.


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and political project did lead him onto terrain traditionally occupied by theology. Important categories of his philosophy resonate with residual theological meaning, most notably creatio ex nihilo. It sometimes seems as if his theory of the creativity of the social imaginary reinstates a monotheistic logic, a peril not unknown to theorists of radical democracy since Rousseau first modeled the general will on divine potency.28 Conversely, were it the aim of this paper to do so, there are various ways to challenge the charges of Habermas, L6venich, and Honneth. The assertion that the imaginary is "world-projecting" neglects Castoria- dis's two-sided description of the world as lending itself to signification and as an "inexhaustible supply of otherness and an [. . .] irreducible challenge to every established signification.29 The claim that the imaginary is a demiurgic force runs contrary to Castoriadis's emphasis on praxis understood as the undertakings of finite subjects in specific con- texts or his insistence that by "autonomy" he means the effective autonomy of effective men and women. His rejection of "Sartrean freedom, the lightning stroke without density or attachment," indicates a general rejection of the dream of absolute autonomy and revelatory eruptions in history.30 More broadly, an adequate response to the Habermasians would require an exploration of the place of metaphor in modern philosophical discourse. Castoriadis himself believed that all theoretical language is necessarily metaphorical, and he sometimes cautioned that he was speaking metaphorically, as when he claims that societies pose "questions" and find "answers" or when he raises the question of origins. Hans Blumenberg's efforts to develop a "metaphorology" of the metaphorical dimension of essentially unanswerable questions that cannot, however, be eliminated, might provide an appropriate avenue for pursuing this problem.31 Particularly relevant are Blumenberg's insights into the "reoccupation of [theological] answer positions that had become vacant and whose corresponding questions could not be eliminated."32 It

28. See Patrick Riley, The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986).

29. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamrney (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1987) 371.

30. Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Ethicists' New Clothes," World in Fragments 122. 31. Hans Blumenberg, "Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie," Archivfiir Begriffs-

geschichte, Bd. 15, (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag H. Grundmann, 1983) 285-315; and Hans Blu- menberg, Asthetische und metaphorologische Schriften, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2001).

32. Hans Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1983) 65.



would, of course, remain to be determined whether Castoriadis instanti- ates Blumenberg's claim that modern thought has been overburdened by its willingness to take on the debt of prescribed questions inherited from its theological past.

Lefort and Democratic Disembodiment Claude Lefort's assertion that his erstwhile Socialisme ou Barbarie

comrade remained tied to a revolutionary dream of social transparency directly contrasts with his own insistence that the social is constituted by a continual exchange between the 'visible' and the 'invisible'. This phrasing suggests a certain openness in Lefort's thinking to the lessons of religion; but in the first instance, it reveals the profound influence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was Lefort's teacher in the 1940s and remained Lefort's closest intellectual inter- locutor until his sudden death in 1961. In The Visible and the Invisi- ble, Merleau-Ponty presents the 'invisible' as the "lining" and the "inexhaustible depth" of the visible, the necessary and constitutive relationship between figure and ground, surface and depth, presence and absence. According to Merleau-Ponty, these are not static ratios, but chiasmatic exchanges in which the visible and the invisible intertwine and reverse. Nor is the invisible the non-visible or the "absolute invisible, which would have nothing to do with the visible. Rather, it is the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being."33 Together, visible and invisible form the "flesh of the world," Merleau-Ponty's key phrase designating the world as a horizon of general visibility in which the human is embedded as both seer and seen.

Lefort, who edited The Visible and the Invisible after Merleau-Ponty's death, took over the notion of 'flesh' as a central category in his political philosophy. The "flesh of the social" signifies the political principle of general social visibility. Whereas modem social science has taken the political, the social, the private, the public, the economic, the religious, as so many distinct objects, Lefort searches for the "originary form," the "political form," by which the social acquires its "original dimensionality."34 Lefort opens his Essais sur le politique by invoking

33. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968) 151.

34. Lefort, cited in Bernard Flynn, Political Philosophy at the Closure ofMetaphys- ics (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992) 178.


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the concept of politeia or regime. "The word is worth retaining," he writes, "only if we give it all the resonance it has when used in the expression 'the ancien regime'." In that sense, regime combines the idea of a "type of constitution," understood in the broad sense of "form of government" and "structure of power," and a "style of existence or mode of life."35 The investigation of differences between regimes prohibits the designation of politics as a particular sector of social life. Rather, the political is a formative principle of the social experience itself, not a historical development imposed on a pre-existing social order.

Where Castoriadis defines politics as an "explicit collective activity that aims at being lucid (reflective and deliberate) and whose object is the institution of society as such," Lefort defines the political as the principles that generate a society as a specific form of human life. Lefort calls the political "a hidden part of social life, namely the pro- cesses which make people consent to a given regime - or, to put it more forcefully, which determine their manner of being in society - and which guarantee that this regime or mode of society has a permanence in time, regardless of the various events that may affect it."36 In brief, the 'political' is Lefort's translation of the 'visible' and the 'invisible' into political terms. Marcel Gauchet, who was in turn strongly influenced by Lefort, formulates this even more clearly when he writes, "the political constitutes the most encompassing level of the organization [of society], not a subterranean level, but veiled in the visible."37

Given these phenomenological assumptions about the chiasmatic exchange between the near and the remote, between social visibility and its invisible lining, Lefort perceives a point of contact between politics and religion. This is the case not only because both are constituted by specific forms of exchange between the visible and the invisible, but because throughout their mutual history, they have been intertwined chi- asmatically as the visible and invisible of each other. The interrogative title of Lefort's major essay on religion and politics, "The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?" (1981), suggests this relationship of mutual inherence. Indeed, one of the main arguments of the essay is that religion reveals something fundamental about the political. Or more

35. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneap- olis: U Minnesota P, 1988) 2-3.

36. Lefort, "Permanence of the Theologico-Political?" Democracy and Political Theory 215-16.

37. Gauchet, Le ddbat 50 (1988): 168-9.



precisely, religion reveals an insight that philosophical thought should try to preserve, namely the

experience of a difference which goes beyond differences of opinion [. S.]; the experience of a difference which is not at the disposal of

human beings, whose advent does not take place within human history, and which cannot be abolished therein; the experience of a difference which relates human beings to their humanity, and which means that their humanity cannot be self-contained, that it cannot set its limits, and that it cannot absorb its origins and ends into those limits. Every religion states in its own way that human society can only open on to itself by being held in an opening it did not create.'s

The philosopher cannot accept the language in which religion expresses itself, but from religion he learns the "experience of alterity in language, and of a division between creation and unveiling, between activity and passivity, and between the expression and impression of meaning."39

The appeal to otherness as a way of counteracting political hubris and fantasies of social homogeneity was a common theme within the antitotalitarian discourse of French intellectuals in the late 1970s and 1980s. Among poststructuralists such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe, or the self-styled Post-Marxists Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, the deconstruction of stable identity - of persons, communities, and meaning - appeared to offer a prophylaxis against a totalitarianism that seemed to lurk in all forms of politics. When Jacques Derrida belatedly entered this arena in the early 1990s with Specters of Marx, numerous reviewers accused him of cynicism for claiming that deconstruction had always "remained faithful to a certain spirit of Marxism."40 He had in fact made hints in that direction for years; but as he explained at a conference in 1981, he had remained silent so as to avoid contributing to the "anti-Marxist concert" of the post-1968 years. His strategy, he reported, was marked in his writings by a "sort of with- drawal or retreat [retrait], a silence with respect to Marxism - a blank signifying [...] that Marxism was not attacked like such and such other theoretical comfort [. . .] This blank was not neutral [. . .] It was a per- ceptible political gesture."41 The triumphalism of the post-Cold War era

38. Lefort, "Permanence of the Theologico-Political?" 222. 39. Lefort, "Permanence of the Theologico-Political?" 224. 40. Derrida, Specters of Marx 75. 41. Derrida quoted in Nancy Fraser, "The French Derrideans: Politicizing Decon-

struction or Deconstructing the Political?" New German Critique 33 (1984): 133-4.


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finally provoked him to defend Marx, or at least a "certain spirit" of Marx. That is, Derrida rejected Marx's determinist ontology, but affirmed Marxism's longing for justice.

This is, essentially, a variant of the strategy followed by Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Laclau, and Mouffe in the 1980s. What really distinguishes Derrida's intervention is his revival of the messianic impulse in Marxism. After all, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe had sought to "retreat" God - in the sense of both revisit and drive back - in precisely the same way as politics. Both God and politics are associated with a monological philosophy of the subject. Jean-Frangois Lyotard had believed that a paralogical democracy must be godless. Laclau and Mouffe had criticized religion as hegemonic discourse. Even as late as 1989, Derrida himself was reluctant to link his idea of justice to messianism. By 1993, though he still rejected any determinate messianic content, Derrida insisted on the messianic form as an inseparable dimension of every promise.42 This too was not a sudden about-face for Derrida. Already in his 1980 essay "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," Derrida had lamented his contemporaries' hasty aban- donment of Marxist eschatology.43 Moreover, Derrida's periodic interest in deconstruction's relationship to negative theology foreshadowed his messianic yearning for the totally other.44 Derrida's references to Walter Benjamin's notion of a "weak messianic force," as well as his opposition to any attempt to represent the messianic hope, suggest, finally, the possible influence of a more specifically Jewish tradition, a complex issue that exceeds the scope of this paper.45 Here, it is enough to note that in Specters of Marx and subsequent work, Derrida refused to tie the messianic impulse to a specific religion. Indeed, he vacillated between, on the one hand, treating the messianic as a general ontological form and, on the other, linking its universal form to the specific

42. John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears ofJacques Derrida. Religion Without Reli- gion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1997) 117.

43. Jacques Derrida, "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," ed. Robert Detweiler, Semeia 23: Derrida and Biblical Studies, (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1982) 80.

44. In addition to Caputo, see Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, eds., Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany: State University of New York P, 1992); and Kevin Hart, "Jacques Derrida. The God Effect," Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, ed. Phillip Blond (New York: Routledge, 1998) 259-80.

45. On Derrida's relationship to Benjamin, see the subtle discussion in Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence. Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Balti- more: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002) esp. 266-87.



events of revelation in the three religions of the Book.46 Specters of Marx leans heavily on the former hypothesis, resurrecting a messianism without content, what Derrida calls the "messianic and emancipatory promise [. . .] as promise and not as onto-theological or teleo- eschatological program or design."47

Separated from eschatology and teleology, messianism becomes a hope without hope, an impossible attachment to a democracy that is always "h venir," always 'to come.' This formulation offers a precise political counterpart to the play on a Dieu and adieu that animates Derr- ida's The Gift of Death and other works from the 1990s. Hent De Vries presents the adieu as the core of Derrida's return to religion insofar as it summons up all "the ambiguity of a movement toward God, toward the word or the name of God, and a no less dramatic farewell to almost all the canonical, dogmatic, or onto-theological interpretations of this very same 'God'."48 As with the figure of the adieu, the messianic topos allows Derrida to affirm the yearning for democracy, while avoiding any hint of "Sameness" or closure that might raise the danger of totalitarian thinking. That this "messianicity without messianism" spills directly over into "religion without religion" becomes manifest in Derr- ida's recent essay "Faith and Knowledge." There, Derrida the atheist attempts to separate religion from fundamentalism, identifying the religious instead with "reticence, distance, dissociation, disjunction" and naming futurity the temporal sensibility of the religious. This is a rather arbitrary and selective definition of the religious considering the power- ful impulse toward closure that has dominated the history of religions; but selectively identifying religion with deferral and infinite otherness serves Derrida's needs because it shares the qualities of the 'democracy to come'. Religion and democracy thus intertwine. Indeed, the religious and the political prove inseparable: "The fundamental concepts that often permit us to isolate or to pretend to isolate the political [ . .] remain religious or in any case theologico-political." Derrida presents this position as if it were opposed to Carl Schmitt, as if Schmitt had been forced grudgingly to acknowledge that his "ostensibly purely political categories" were in fact the "product of a secularization or of a theologico-political heritage." Yet it was Schmitt who articulated and

46. Caputo, Prayers and Tears 136. 47. Derrida, Specters of Marx 75. 48. Hent De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

UP, 1999) 24.


Warren Breckman 91

embraced that theological genealogy and tried to mobilize it as the ultimate source of the power of political concepts. Ultimately, despite Derr- ida's effort to distance himself from Schmitt's political theology by linking politics to the deferrals of religion instead of to its potencies, he and Schmitt both end up at the conviction that the significant concepts of modern politics are secularized theological concepts.49

Claude Lefort's claim that the philosopher should learn from religion would seem to unify religion and politics permanently so long as politics resists the illusion of pure self-immanence and clings to a primor- dial knowledge of otherness. However, Lefort resists this kind of conclusion and argues that it threatens to negate the meaning of the historical separation of democracy from religion. Derrida's position leads to the view that a new symbolic representation of a power that has no religious basis merely conceals the displacement and perpetuation of religious content. Certainly, considering the practices of democracy since the French Revolution, Lefort finds ample evidence of democracy's entanglement in religion. For example, from the Jacobins onward, democracy has been haunted by the Christian logic of incarnation, by the impulse to represent the nation as an actual being or, in Jules Michelet's phrase, to imagine the sovereign "people" as the democratic Christ. This desire to close the gap between the symbolic representation of power and the complexity of the real through the logic of embodiment lived on in twentieth-century fantasies of the party, the nation, the class, the race, and the leader and it has been accompanied by efforts to unite the existence of democracy in historical time with permanent duration. Hence, not only the attempt to immortalize the institutions of democracy, but in the most extreme instance, the "persistence of the theologico-political vision of the immortal body" expressed literally in the mummification of the leader.50

Rather than taking those entanglements as signs of democracy's intractable reliance on religion, it is significant that Lefort reads them as phenomena of a transitional epoch. In fact, he insists on the radical novelty of democracy, which lies in the open, indeterminate, and unmasterable

49. Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of 'Religion' at the Limits of Reason Alone," Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998) 25-26. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology. Four Chapters on the Concept of Sov- ereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1988) 36. For a subtle, albeit thoroughly Derridean discussion of the differences between Derrida and Schmitt, see De Vries, Religion and Violence esp. 353-70.

50. Lefort, "The Death of Immortality?" Democracy and Political Theory 274.



social experience that it generates. Lefort traces this experience to a "symbolic mutation" in the order of power, wherein power underwent a radical "disincorporation" in the period of transition from monarchy to democracy. Inspired by Ernst Kantorowicz's seminal work on the medieval image of the king's body as a double body, mortal and immortal, individual and collective, Lefort argues that even in the ancien rigime, the monarch still incarnated power, knowledge and law in the unity of his body. The novel radicalism of modern democracy lies in its disincorporation or disembodiment of power in the name of an egalitarian per- ception of social relations. Democratic power is a "lieu vide," an "empty place." Democratic power may be contested - indeed it depends on contest - but no one can appropriate, occupy or incarnate it, nor can such power be 'represented'. With the disembodiment of power goes a dispersal of power, knowledge, and law. They enter into contentious relations, cannot be mastered by a single logic of representation, and are always in 'excess' of each other. Modern democracy is thus marked by the simultaneous loss of foundation and the interminable search for foundation, the loss of a notion of legitimate power and the opening of an interminable debate as to what is legitimate. Democracy institutes a society in which division is not disruptive, but constitutive of the social domain. As Bernard Flynn writes, "the non-identity of society with itself makes possible (enables) a discourse on the political." Such a discourse was not repressed in pre-modern society, because it was not "symbolically enabled."51 Of pre-modern societies, Lefort asserts that, "When reflection exercised itself on power, the organization of the City, the causes of its corruption, it remained rigorously subordinated to a theological representation of the world, which alone fixed the markers of the real and the imaginary, the true and the false, the good and the evil. There was not for thought a place of the political [. . .]"52

The political event of modern democracy is thus also a "metaphysical event," a tear in the tissue of human belief and symbolic order. Rather than proceeding as Carl Schmitt (and Derrida) do by identifying this symbolic change as concealing an underlying continuity with religion, Lefort emphasizes the efficacy of the symbolic: the appear- ance of a power that disavows the religious does have the capacity to

51. Flynn, Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics 188-89. 52. Claude Lefort, "La Naissance de l'Iddologie et Humanisme," Les Formes de

l 'Histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) 236.


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constitute a new practice. Hence, he endorses Tocqueville's insight that democracy is important not for what it "does," but for what it "causes to be done," namely its power to arouse constant agitation in people.53 This means that democracy continually moves forward into the open, indeterminate, ungrounded space of democratic contestation. But, writes Lefort, the paradox of "any new adventure that begins with the formulation of a new idea of the state, the people, the nation or humanity is that it has its roots in the past."54 Hence, in the unsettling early experience of democracy, people grasped at religious forms in an attempt to avert any further dissolution of the social. Moreover, the collapse of theological representations of the world symbolically enabled the emergence of a representation of society as a sui generis creation of human will. Thus, the theological image of a unified divine will replicated itself in the image of society as a unified subject, a phantasmatic identification that underwrites the democratic slogan "vox populi vox dei" as much as it does the dream of fusion, the 'People-as-One', in twentieth-century totalitarianism.55 Lefort detects a further impulse toward the theologico- political in the psychical trauma that accompanied the disembodiment of power. With veiled references to Jacques Lacan, Lefort's essay "The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism" suggests that subjects constitute themselves through a specular relation to the figure of power. The experience of democracy is akin to the individual's transition from the imaginary to the symbolic; and as with the "ordeal of the division of the subject," the traumatic loss of the substance of the body politic is never fully overcome.56 Beyond the Lacanian inflection of this idea, Lefort's detection of a traumatic core in democracy taps into the quite specific meaning of regicide within the French political imagination, wherein political modernity is tied to the destruction of the king's body and political liberty linked primordially to crime.57

Although Lefort argues that in times of crisis, the theologico-political formation may reassert itself within democratic culture, he asks, "Far from leading us to conclude that the fabric of history is continuous, does not a reconstruction of the genealogy of democratic representations

53. Lefort, "Reversibility. Political Freedom and the Freedom of the Individual," Democracy and Political Theory 169.

54. Lefort, "Permanence of the Theologico-Political?" 255. 55. Lefort, "The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism," The Political Forms of

Modemrn Society 304. 56. Lefort, "The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism" 306. 57. See Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI. Regicide and the French Political

Imagination (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994). Dunn ends her study with Albert Camus, but the polyvalent meaning of regicide seems to continue in Lefort, not to mention figures like Nancy and Foucault.



reveal the extent of the break within it?" Rather than seeing democracy as a new episode in the transfer of the religious into the political, Lefort urges us to reflect on the "adventure of their disintrication." Like Casto- riadis, Lefort insists on a division between religion and the new social experience of democracy. However, Lefort remains much more guarded in his gesture toward the project of autonomy. To a much greater degree than Castoriadis, Lefort circumscribes autonomy by placing the self- determining power of democratic society into an agonistic relationship with the enigma of the social world's opening onto itself. Clearly, Lefort means to tie this enigma to democratic practice and discourse; for the otherness of the social institution no longer comes from a figure of the Other, but inheres in the latency of all identities claimed within and for democratic society. Nonetheless, in the history of democracy, the enigma of the social institution has produced its share of civil religions; and as Derrida's example shows, the theologico-political remains capable of reactivation. Modem democracy may not conceal a religious core; but with Lefort's terms, the persistence of the theologico-political signifies the "unavoidable - and no doubt ontological - difficulty democracy has in reading its own story."58 The adventure of disintrication seems tortuous and possibly interminable.

Marcel Gauchet and the Birth of Democracy from the Spirit of Religion

The question of disintrication is central to Marcel Gauchet's The Dis- enchantment of the World. The book was published in France in 1985 to considerable acclaim and controversy, and it helped establish Gauchet as one of the leading French intellectuals of his generation. Gauchet's book bears many signs of the influence of Castoriadis and Lefort, which is not surprising given the close relations he maintained with the two older men, as Lefort's student at Caen in the late 1960s and collaborating with both in the journals Textures and Libre.59 As a student in the early 1960s, Gauchet had aligned himself with the Left, but early

58. Lefort, "Permanence of the Theologico-Political?" 255. Lefort has recently returned to these ideas in La complication: Retour sur Communisme (Paris: Fayard, 1999).

59. Natalie Doyle's "Democracy as Socio-Cultural Project of Individual and Collec- tive Sovereignty. Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet and the French Debate on Modern Autonomy," Thesis Eleven 75 (Nov. 2003): 69-95, appeared too late for me to respond to it in this article. However, my interpretation contrasts with her portrayal of a harmonious common project unfolding in stages from Castoriadis, to Lefort, to Gauchet.


Warren Breckman 95

encounters with communist schoolteachers immunized him against the pull of the Communist Party. His sympathies lay with anti-Stalinist lib- ertarian and anarchist tendencies, like those he had encountered in the pages of Socialisme ou Barbarie, which he had been reading since he was 15.60 His meeting with Lefort in 1966 decisively turned him toward the problem of the foundations of democracy, a concern that has been at the core of his writing ever since, although his commitment to democracy has evolved from ultra-left anarchism to liberal democracy. Further, Lefort seems to have played a major role in convincing Gauchet that the intersection of the political and the religious is the nodal point of the interrogation of democracy.61 Despite Lefort's impact, however, the decisive influence on The Disenchantment of the World is arguably Castoriadis. Indeed, Gauchet follows Castoriadis in viewing religion as a "way of institutionalizing humans against themselves," that is, as a form of human self-creation that acts against autonomy.62 The basic task of The Disenchantment of the World is thus Castoriadian: to trace the gradual breakdown of religious otherness and the transfer of the instituting power from the extra-social source to society itself. However, in tracing the shift from heteronomous society to autonomous society, Gauchet arrives at political conclusions about modern democracy that differ strikingly from Castoriadis.

Castoriadis drew a rigid line between democratic autonomy and religious heteronomy; even Lefort emphasized the rupture between religion and democracy, despite his insistence upon a more vexed relationship between the two phenomena. By contrast, Gauchet attempted to explain the emergence of democracy out of religion. This approach aligns him in some ways with Max Weber's theoretical account of the gradual formation of a self-sufficient secular sphere as the actualization of potentialities existing within the religious domain itself. However, where Weber had stressed the specific role of the Protestant Reformation in creating conditions that would eventually legitimate this- worldly pursuits and instrumental rationality, Gauchet situates Weber's thesis within a much broader argument about the transformative effects

60. Gauchet, La Condition Historique 22-27. 61. The interviews in La Condition Historique describe a growing distance between

Gauchet and Lefort, beginning with tensions over a co-authored 1971 article that Gauchet claims was mostly his own creation.

62. Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World. A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997) 22.



of monotheism. He differs from Weber in another and still more revealing way. Weber never claimed that a religious dynamic alone could explain the emergence of modernity; accordingly, he supplemented his study of the Protestant ethic with works on issues such as commercial behavior and urbanism in the middle ages. Gauchet, by contrast, places extraordinary, almost exclusive weight on transformation in the symbolic dimension. Indeed, it is amusing to read, in a published table ronde on his work, Catholic theologians chiding him for neglecting material factors.63 It is as if, in the rush to shed all trappings of the Marxian model, Gauchet ends up with an unapologetic idealism and his insistence on historical contingency is over-ridden by the unfolding logic of an idea.

Gauchet's book offers a conceptual history of religion in which the true break is not the advent of Christianity, but the emergence of monotheism during the Axial Age.64 He rejects an evolutionary model of religion and argues that religion received its fullest expression in primitive societies, when the instituting power was most fully removed from human society. For such a society, the founding power lies at an unfath- omable distance in the past; the present is in a position of absolute dependence on this mythic past, and human activities adhere to their inaugural truth. Such radical dispossession enforces an "ultimate political equality, which, although it does not prevent differences in social status or prestige, does prohibit the secession of unified power."65 This is an important point for Gauchet, as it sets the stage for the "Political History of Religion" that is promised by the book's subtitle.

Gauchet's depiction of primitive religion bears the traces of Emile Durkheim, for whom religion functions as a system of communication and a means of specifying and regulating social relationships. Gauchet had praised Durkheim's contribution in an earlier essay, but he had ultimately criticized Durkheim for lapsing into a determinist account of the necessity of religion instead of viewing religion as a "free instituting

63. Pierre Colin and Olivier Mongin, eds., Un monde desenchantd. Dibat avec Mar- cel Gauchet sur le Disenchantement du monde (Paris: Cerf, 1988).

64. Gauchet here used the term introduced by Karl Jaspers to describe the transformations of the first millenium B.C. See Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Zirich: Artemis-Verlag, 1949). See also S. N. (Shmuel Noah) Eisenstadt, "The Axial Age: The Emergence of Transcendental Visions and the Rise of the Clerics," Archives europdennes de sociologie 23.2(1982): 294-314; and S. N. (Shmuel Noah) Eisen- stadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University ofNew York P, 1986).

65. Gauchet, Disenchantment 25.


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operation arising from an act of creation expressing a decision of society."66 Gauchet situates himself more closely to two contemporary anthropologists who exercised considerable influence on the antitotalitarian currents of French thought in the late 1970s. They are Louis Dumont, whose studies of the emergence of modern individualism out of Christianity and distinction between "holistic" and "individualistic" societies Gauchet embraces, and even more importantly, Pierre Clas- tres, who was an important member in the milieux of the journals Tex- tures and Libre until his death in a car accident in 1977.67 Clastres's La Socidtd contre 'etat (1974) articulated, as Lefort stated, "the question of the political" at the heart of primitive society. The book's radical claim is that at the heart of such a social order was the refusal of a power capable of detaching itself from the community, the rejection of an internal division that would eventually render possible the advent of the State.68 Gauchet took up Clastres's ideas but rejected his depiction of an anarchistic struggle of primitive society against the state. "How can one be against something that does not yet exist?" Gauchet asks bluntly. Accordingly, he revises Clastres's thesis from society against the state to "society against political division."69 Thus, the originary role of religion, he reasons, was to prevent political division through the religious division between the external foundation and society.

Two great upheavals shook this originary form of religion, the birth of the state and the emergence of monotheism. Of the two, Gauchet con- siders the emergence of the state around five thousand years ago to have been the more epochal. Where total dispossession had essentially neutralized the dynamics of group relations, the advent of political domination brought new instabilities and potencies into the "heart of the collective process."70 Political domination also inaugurated a different

66. Marcel Gauchet, "La dette du sens et les racines de I'6tat. Politique de la religion primitive," Libre, no. 2 (1978): 10-11.

67. Gauchet discusses Dumont at length in "De l'av~nement de l'individu i la d6cou- verte de la soci~td," Revue europ6ene des sciences sociales XXII, no. 68 (1984): 109-126. On Clastres, see the tribute issue of Libre, no. 4 (1978). Sam Moyn is currently working out the detailed history of these relations. See "Of Savagery and Civil Society: Pierre Clastres and the Transformation of French Political Thought," Modern Intellectual History 1.1 (April 2004): 55-80, and "Savage and Modem Liberty: Marcel Gauchet and the Origins of New French Thought," European Journal of Political Theory 4. 2 (Spring 2005): 164-187.

68. See Claude Lefort, "Dialogue with Pierre Clastres," Writing. The Political Test, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis (Durham: Duke UP, 2000) 214.

69. Gauchet in Un monde dcisenchantd 72. 70. Gauchet, Disenchantment 35.



relation between the visible and the invisible, for the distance between society and its origin became a distance operating within human society between the dominant and the dominated, those who have the gods on their side and those who do not. The emergence of monotheism during the Axial Age (800 to 200 BC) added another dimension of instabil- ity. Monotheism brought an infinite increase in the potency and otherness of the divine, imagined now as a god-subject whose will not only created the cosmos but also sustains it in every present moment. Gauchet bases the central thesis of his book on what he calls the "dynamic of transcendence" inaugurated by the formation of the subjec- tivized God. Far from dispossessing humans, transcendence makes God more accessible: foundation no longer belongs in the remotest past, but in the present. This vision of the world as the object of a single will opens up possibilities for human understanding of the creation and at least partial decipherment of that divine will. The representation of absolute otherness yields a de facto reduction of otherness. Hence Gauchet's paradoxical formulation: "the greater the gods, the freer the humans are."71 Christianity radicalized the effects of the monotheistic revolution. With the incarnation, the divine enters the world and intro- duces new and transformative tensions into the dynamic of transcendence: the enigma of the wholly other and the human form of the God- Man, inscrutability of the Father's message and the need to interpret the human voice of the Son, hope in the beyond versus adherence to a here- below that had been graced by Christ's humanity, world rejection and the imperative to act upon the world. So explosive were these new instabilities in Gauchet's estimation that he names Christianity the "religion for departing from religion."

Gauchet shares Lefort's interest in the relationship between the incarnation and politics, but he gives a more detailed account of the instabilities that Christianity introduced into the institution of monarchy. Where pre- Christian monarchs could function as both priests and kings and occupy the meeting place between the visible and the invisible, Christ had taken that place once and for all. The Christian monarch could no longer aspire to be the perfect mediator. However, if the Christian king could no longer be what Christ was, he could at least be like Christ "to the extent that he made Christ's absence present and symbolized his truth."72 This preserved

71. Gauchet, Disenchantment 51. 72. Gauchet, Disenchantment 140.


Warren Breckman 99

the sacral dimension of kingship and reinstated its mediating function between the beyond and the here-below. At the same time, however, the unbridgeable gap between Christ and the monarch meant that the legitimacy of the Christian ruler contained a destabilizing and transformative element. For the monarch did not represent the point of meeting but the depth of separation between the two orders of reality marked as forever separated by being uniquely consubstantial in Christ. Hence, the sacral dimension of kingship derived from the management of the lowly world; but behind the apparent continuity of the sacral function, Gauchet detected a great transformation. The monarch's mediating activity shifted toward a domain removed from the church's control, the domain of justice. A great metamorphosis in the sacral function of kingship meant that the king emerged as the "archetypal mediating figure in the collective sphere, as opposed to the individual mediation between souls and God, guaranteed by the sacraments' absolving power."73

Gauchet follows Ernst Kantorowicz in dating this change to the thir- teenth and fourteenth centuries, when new symbols emerged of political incorporation, the state as a secular corpus mysticum and the notion of the body politic.74 However, Gauchet's conclusion is much bolder than any found in Kantorowicz, for he identifies this as nothing less than the birth of political modernity. As he writes, this was a "radical turnaround of the relation between power and society. The monarch gradually evolved from incarnating sacral dissimilarity into realizing the collective body's internal self-congruence."75 Political modernity deployed this symbolic reversal in two directions: the growth of a State oriented toward monopolizing collective organization and a form of political legitimacy based on a logic of representation. Political modernity replayed the paradox of monotheism in the form of a tendency toward the democratic inversion of sovereignty.

Once the split between this world and the beyond has caused political authority to take responsibility for representing and organizing collective-being, then individuals will soon exercise sovereignty, whatever royal trappings of authority remain. The State colossus is first strengthened, only to open itself up later to its subjects. By deepening

73. Gauchet, Disenchantment 142. 74. See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political

Theology (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957) esp. 192f. on the secular corpus mysticum and 210f. on the "body politic."

75. Gauchet, Disenchantment 143.


100 French Post-Marxism and the Return ofReligion

the separation from its subjects, the State ends up being identified with them, in that those who submit to power will eventually claim the right to constitute it.

The dynamic of transcendence acted as the great agent returning the instituting power to human society, transforming a transcendent logic of legitimacy into an immanent-democratic one. The history of the transition from heteronomy to autonomy is "religious to the core," writes Gauchet. If we have moved from being within religion to being outside it, our world nevertheless remains shaped by it. Hence, "If we have surpassed the religious, it has not left us, and perhaps never will, even though its historical effectiveness is finished."76

It is not my purpose to evaluate the merits of this argument. Rather, I want to emphasize one important point, that is, the significance of the book within the intellectual and political context of France in the 1980s. The history of the disenchantment of the world served as a vehicle for Gauchet to express a generation's disenchantment with its former political commitments. A 1986 conversation between Gauchet and Pierre Manent in the pages of Esprit is revealing. Manent, best-known to American readers as the major purveyor of Leo Strauss's ideas in France, was at that time completing a book that depicted the history of liberalism as the protracted struggle of the secular city against the theologico-political problem, that is, the intertwining authority of the "religious sacred" and the "civic sacred."77 Manent complained that Gauchet's account of religion's decline erased the role played by the great polemical struggle waged from Machiavelli onward against the political power of sacred monarchy. Gauchet's reply had less to do with the relative historical merits of their respective positions than with contemporary politics: "a sober view of democratic development, conducted on the base of a religious genealogy, permits the simultaneous rebuttal of ultra-democratic optimism, blind to the obstacles that lie in its route, and of conservative pessimism, obsessed exclusively by the factors of dissolution and the inviability of an individualist

76. Gauchet, Disenchantment 58-9. In a recent exchange with R6gis Debray, who explicitly argues for the permanence of the religious, Gauchet insists upon modernity's break from religion, but this is not the position he advocated in the mid-1980s. See "Du religieux, de sa permanence et de la possibilit6 d'en sortir. R6gis Debray, Marcel Gauchet: un 6change," Le Dibat 127 (Nov.-Dec. 2003): 3-19.

77. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994).


Warren Breckman 101

order."78 Far from being the 'other' of democratic politics, the theologico- political forms the invisible container for the experience of democracy. Here, a religious genealogy serves the normalization and stabilization of a liberal democratic order and cautions equally against both direct democratic aspirations and the religious critics of secular society.

It is a sign of Gauchet's intentions that in spite of Castoriadis's influence, he completely neglected the ancient Greek origins of democracy. This neglect fully inverts the democratic vision of Castoriadis, for whom the ancient Greek model of direct democracy remained the vital germ, if not the model for the modem project of autonomy. Against what he called the "metaphysics of representation," Castoriadis championed an uncompromising Aristotelian definition of the citizen as "capable of governing and being governed," and he devoted considerable energy to analyzing the institutional innovations of the first democratic regime, including, as we have seen, tragedy. Gauchet, by contrast, totally neutralized the value of the Greek experience. He directed his general argument that humans are freer under monotheism against mod- ernist or postmodernist celebrations of paganism and cited specifically Marc Aug6's celebration of polytheism, although one might also include the even better known case of Jean-Frangois Lyotard's identification of paganism with heterogeneity.79 Furthermore, rather than considering Athenian democracy as a relative breakthrough to a new political form, Gauchet stressed how the polis was embedded in a vision of a rational cosmos that acted as a constraint upon political innovation. Hence, the political novelty of fifth-century Athens gets lost within its general participation in the religious transformations of the Axial Age.80 The point is not so much whether Castoriadis understated the limitations of Greek political innovation; rather, it is striking that for Gauchet, the ancient

78. Marcel Gauchet, "Le christianisme et la cit6 moderne. Discussion entre Marcel Gauchet et Pierre Manent," Esprit (Apr.-May, 1986): 99.

79. Marc Aug6, Genie du paganisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1982); Lyotard, Instructions paiennes (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1977). More generally, see Martin Jay, "Modern and Postmodern Paganism; Peter Gay and Jean-Frangois Lyotard," Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture, eds. Mark S. Micale and Robert L. Diele (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000) 249-62.

80. Johann Arnason weighs the merits of Castoriadis's autonomy model and Eisen- stadt's Axiality (without mention of Gauchet) against the state of historical research in "Autonomy and Axiality: Comparative Perspectives on the Greek Breakthrough," Agon, Logos, Polis. The Greek Achievement and its Aftermath (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2001) 155-206.



experience apparently has no meaning for the advent of modern democracy or the future possibilities of democratic action.

In Gauchet's genealogy, or - to use an even more appropriate Nietzschean phrase - his account of the birth of democracy from the spirit of religion, liberal individualism and representative democracy emerge as the natural heirs to the logic of Christian transcendence. As for direct democracy, Gauchet viewed it as Furet did. Indeed, Gauchet's contribution to Mona Ozouf and Furet's Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1988) argued that a totalitarian logic emerged when the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen" fused the legal pro- tection of individual rights with the exercise of popular sovereignty.81 The ideological reorientation of French intellectual life, which began with the rejection of Marxism and the affirmation of democratic commitments, melts into the claim for a left-liberal consensus of the sort tri- u

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