Abstract
This essay begins with the contention that phenomenology has taken a “hermeneutic turn,” “the things themselves” are always already interpreted. Philosophers often elaborate their own positions through a “reading” of the works of other philosophers. This is the case for Claude Lefort. Through his interpretive reading of the works of Machiavelli one sees the origin of Lefort’s idea of the autonomy and the anonymity of the political and thus his notion of political modernity. In tracing the evolution of Lefort’s relationship to Marx, we witness the process by which he disengages himself from his early “enchantment” with the works of Marx and the idea of the proletariat as a class bearing universal interest. Ultimately he criticizes Marx for his attempt to derive the political from the dimension of the social. This issues in his theory of totalitarianism as the attempt of a regime to close in on itself, thus denying any gesture to the dimension of the other.
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Notes
Ian Hacking, Why does Language matter to Philosopy? (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978) p. 187.
Claude Lefort, Introduction to Merleau-Ponty’s Institution and Passivity, trans. Leonard Lawlor, (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2010) p. XX.
Machiavelli in the Making, the Engish translation of La travail de oeuvre de machiavel, trans.
Michel Smith (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2012). (All of the Machiavelli notes are from this text).
Claude Lefort, “The Contradiction of Trotsky,” The Political Forms of Modern Society, ed. John Thompson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986) PP. 292–307.
Claude Lefort, "Marx: From One Vision of History To Another," The Political Forms of
Modern Society, pp. 139–181.
Ibid, p. 139.
Claude Lefort, Les Formes de l'histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) p. 32.
Ibid. 47.
Ibid. 42.
Ibid.49.
Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, p. 142.
Ibid. p. 143.
Ibid, p. 148.
Ibid, p. 150.
Ibid, p. 151.
Ibid, p. 155.
Ibid, p. 161.
Ibid, p. 160.
Ibid. p. 163.
Ibid. p. 169.
Ibid. p. 171.
Ibid. p. 175.
Ibid. p. 180.
Ibid.
"Novelty and the Appeal of Repetition," The Political Forms of Modern Society, p. 125.
"Rereading the Communist Manifesto”, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (London: Polity Press 1988) p. 152.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 153.
Ibid. p. 154.
Ibid. p. 156.
Ibid. p. 161.
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Flynn, B. Lefort as a reader of Machiavelli and Marx. Cont Philos Rev 51, 401–420 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-017-9431-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-017-9431-7