Abstract
The third chapter delves into Lefort’s interpretation of Marx, which is conducted through the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. During the 1950s, Lefort attempted to purge Marx’s texts of all overhanging thought, positivism, or essentialism, and was also increasingly drawn to anthropology. He drew on the studies of Marcel Mauss, Abram Kardiner, Gregory Batson, and Edward Evans-Pritchard to transcend some of the limitations of Marxism. This led him to see society as a symbolic institution, that is, as a continuous self-interpretation of itself. After leaving SouB, Lefort further developed this theory, explicitly stating that every society is the result of an interpretation of itself and of a political choice. As the chapter explains, this concept of institution is also derived from phenomenology and from Merleau-Ponty.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
There are several French intellectuals who, in order to address the crisis of Marxism connected to events in the Soviet Union and especially to the repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, turned to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the structuralist movement. The aim was to overcome certain rigidities inherent in official Marxism, for example in the relationship between structure and superstructure. It is not irrelevant to note how Merleau-Ponty (1964a) himself became interested in the work of Marcel Mauss and Lévi-Strauss. See Dosse (1998, 2014, 2018), Geroulanos (2017), Breckman (2013, pp. 84–89), and Poltier (1998, pp. 21–38).
- 3.
Authors such as Alexandre Kojève, Jean Wahl, Jean Hyppolite, Henri Lefebvre, Pierre Bigo, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty were among the protagonists of this debate. It is through the relationship with Hegel that Marx the philosopher, who had been overlooked by dialectical materialism, was brought into the spotlight. Hyppolite is certainly a central figure for any attempt to understand Hegelian studies in France and the debate on the relationship between Hegel and Marx in this period. See at least Hyppolite (1979). On Marxism and the fortunes of the young Marx in France following World War II see Jay (1986), Pompeo Faracovi (1972), and Lichteim (1966).
- 4.
I am referring to the article “L’aliénation comme concept sociologique”, which was first published in 1955 in the journal Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie 8: 35–54.
- 5.
Landshut and Mayer were also the editors of the first edition of Marx’s early works in 1923. See Marx (1923).
- 6.
Lefort is probably referring to a passage in the preface to the first edition of Capital in which Marx repeatedly advocates the scientific method of his study and the desire to examine, just as a physicist examines natural processes, the economic development of society as a process of natural history. See Marx (1976, pp. 89–93).
- 7.
- 8.
For a sometimes different analysis of Lefort’s reflection on Kardiner see: B. Flynn (2005, pp. 89–94).
- 9.
The French translation did not appear until 1969, when it was published under the title L’individu dans sa société. Lefort himself edited the introduction. See Lefort (1978a, pp. 131–187).
- 10.
I am referring here to two articles: “L’idée de ‘personnalité de base’”, published in 1951, and “Ambiguités de l’anthropologie Culturelle: introduction à l’œuvre d’Abram Kardiner”, published in 1969.
- 11.
Lanza (2021, p. 2) refers to Lefort’s socio-anthropological approach as a particular “way of conceptualizing the interrelationship between the individual and the social”.
- 12.
I state this for the sake of clarity. Mauss’s theories, as well as those of Durkheim, were somehow present in Lefort’s worldview from the very beginning.
- 13.
This is made explicit by Lefort in a 1952 article entitled “Société ‘sans histoire’ et historicité” (Lefort 1978a, pp. 46–77). Here we find one of the first uses of the phrase mise en forme to refer to society in its totality. Once again the debt to anthropology is clear.
- 14.
Merleau-Ponty (2010) uses the term “exigence d’un avenir” to describe the institution of the social and its relationship to time and history.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
Born in 1934 in Paris, Pierre Clastres was a celebrated anthropologist and a close friend of Lefort. Among his works see at least Clastres (1987, 1998). Lefort discusses Clastres in Lefort (2000, pp. 207–235; 2007, pp. 383–387). Clastres had a certain influence in the French culture of the period (Moyn 2004) and, in addition to Lefort, on the thought of authors such as Miguel Abensour or Marcel Gauchet. On the relation between Lefort’s theory and Clastres’ work see Lanza (2021) and Moyn (2013).
- 18.
Clastres uses the term “state” generically, to refer to a form of power that is not internal to the social and is capable of imposing coercive force. This is a deliberately vague definition capable of encompassing various forms of organization of power and different degrees of oppression. In this regard, Lefort expresses his reservations specifically on the legitimacy of such a definition. Not only, he says, is it reductive to limit the definition of the state to the categories of coercion and oppression, but the division of forms of society according to an alleged degree of oppression is also unjustified. See Clastres (2016). On Clastres’s idea of state see Viveiros de Castro (2019).
- 19.
Clastres (1980, pp. 157–170) also contested the Marxist view of history, which he accused of evolutionism. Lefort himself (2000, pp. 207–235) indicates how Clastres’s work was of use in countering both rationalist and evolutionist and structuralist readings of history, which he says are equally flawed.
- 20.
See Lefort (2000, pp. 207–235). Lefort criticizes Clastres’ idea of a radical opposition between primitive, egalitarian, free and anti-state societies and all other societies that presuppose one. He also thinks that Clastres does not capture the image of the body and otherness of law in the rituals of primitive societies. Finally, he criticizes his definition of the state. Referring to Clastres’s reading of rituals and the unity of “societies against the state” Lefort writes: “Not only would such an interpretation fail to recognize the singularity of primitive practices and beliefs (which can’t be reduced to the separation of the invisible from the visible), and not only would it identify the essence of religious belief with that of the primitives and make of the great historical religions transitory by-products of the building up of the State, but—and this is the point that to us seems decisive—it would take away all signification from the very notion of the other” (p. 227).
- 21.
On this topic see also Lefort and Gauchet (1971, pp. 20–33), in which the authors discuss “Decision”. However, the term is problematic and was not taken up again by Lefort.
- 22.
It may be interesting to point out how Castoriadis (2019, pp. 133–140) criticizes Lefort’s text, accusing him of cultural relativism.
- 23.
The most accurate interpretation of Lefort’s use of the example of Nuer society seems to me to lie precisely in the desire to capture the indissoluble interweaving of the real and the imaginary. I therefore disagree with the reading proposed by Bernard Flynn, for whom Nuer society was an example of a pre-modern society that does not embrace history and does not recognize the difference between the symbolic and the real. See Flynn (2005, pp. 87–89 and 125). It is certainly true that, as we shall see later, a characteristic of modern society is the possibility of the distinction between the symbolic and the imaginary, which would not occur to the Nuer. However, what Lefort is asserting in these pages is quite different: he does not state that only a modern society (such as the capitalist society described by Marx) can discern the difference between reality and representation, but rather that this difference is impossible. And this is precisely the case for a modern observer like Lefort.
- 24.
It is not possible here to analyze therelationship between Lefort's and Castoriadis's works. It is sufficient to highlight how Lefort's critique of Marxism has remarkable similarities with that proposed by Castoriadis in SouB years and later in his major work (Castoriadis 1987).
- 25.
See also pp. 185–186 and Lefort (1978a, pp. 235–236).
- 26.
Lefort (1986, p. 186) states: “It is impossible, in my view, to deduce the order of law, of power or of knowledge from the relations of production; it is also impossible to reduce the language in which social practice is articulated to the effects of the labour-capital division. These relations are organized, and these effects develop, only as a function of conditions that we cannot situate at the level of the real; on the contrary, such conditions become accessible to us, are organized and become intelligible, only when the reference points of a new experience of law, power and knowledge are established, only when a mode of discourse is developed in which certain oppositions and certain practices actually take hold – that is, relate to one another and potentially contain a universal sense, in allowing for a regulated exchange between action and thought”. In the original French, however, it is clear that the subjects of Lefort’s sentence are not the conditions but what we call real.
- 27.
- 28.
It is not possible here to outline a history, however brief, of the symbolic in anthropological studies. One thinks of structuralism, Lévi-Strauss, but also Clifford Geerz and Victor Turner. For a further discussion see Tarot (1999). Breckman (2013) proposes the idea of a “symbolic” turn that would characterize French theory in the second half of the twentieth century.
- 29.
These terms, choice and origin, are clearly problematic. Indeed, in Lefort’s thought, in this instance choice or origin is nothing more than interpretations or representations of real choice or origin.
- 30.
The use of the formulas mise en forme, mise en sens, and mise en scène, which make up the triad of the “construction” of the social, owes a debt to Piera Aulagnier, a Lacanian psychoanalyst and Castoriadis’ wife from 1968 to 1984.
- 31.
- 32.
Lefort (1988, p. 11) states: “The political is thus revealed, not in what we call political activity, but in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured. It appears in the sense that the process whereby society is ordered and unified across its divisions becomes visible. It is obscured in the sense that the locus of politics (the locus in which parties compete and in which a general agency of power takes shape and is reproduced) becomes defined as particular, while the principle which generates the overall configuration is concealed”.
- 33.
On the relationship between Lefort and structuralism see Chapter 6.
- 34.
- 35.
Merleau-Ponty’s polemical target, beyond the rationalism of philosophical theories, is in this case the excessive relativism of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism. The latter’s thought, precisely through its radical relativism and a scientific conception that equates truth with a physical law, stood in the illusory position of the absolute observer who thinks himself outside of society itself. See Merleau-Ponty (2010, pp. 61–75) and Lefort’s foreword (pp. IX–XXXI) now also in Lefort (2021, pp. 343–368).
- 36.
Here there is the meaning of the opposition between institution and constitution. Merleau-Ponty (2010, p. 8) states: “constitute in this sense is nearly the opposite of to institute: the instituted makes sense without me, the constituted makes sense only for me and for the ‘me’ of this instant. Constitution [means] continuous institution, i.e., never done. The instituted straddles its future, has its future, its temporality, the constituted depends entirely on the ‘me’ who constitutes (the body, the clock)”.
- 37.
- 38.
On the relationship between Lefort and Merleau-Ponty see Poirier (2020), Di Pierro (2019, 2020), Dodeman (2019), Gerçek (2017), Mazzocchi (2013), Flynn (2008), and Labelle (2003). Lefort writes about Merleau-Ponty on several occasions, including in a number of forewords to the latter’s works. See Lefort (1978b, 1990) and the works by Merleau-Ponty that he edited, Merleau-Ponty (1964b, 1968, 1969, 1973, 1980, 2010, 2022b).
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Di Pierro, M. (2023). The Symbolic Dimension of the Social. In: Claude Lefort's Political Philosophy. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36378-8_3
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