Abstract
Although Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology of perception and his essays on art, politics, and language already showed an affinity between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and style, and the political and cultural dynamics of society at large, it was his late notion of flesh 1 that became crucial for grounding what I assume to be his aesthetico-political understanding of politics and ultimately democracy. The emergence of flesh as a concept was contemporary with Merleau-Ponty’s break with Marxism as a philosophical model and with revolutionary dialectics as a political project. The move represented the earliest and more fundamental rejection of both the revolutionary “solution” to the indeterminate and conflictive character of social life and also to the technocratic and ideological attempt to eliminate democratic politics in the name of market efficiency and neoliberal radicalism — and Claude Lefort was the author who made the most out of this break. In theorizing the historical breakdown of the horizon of radical transcendence implied in the theologico-political regime and in denouncing the re-embracement of the One in the horizon of radical immanence in the totalitarian party’s claim to having access to a complete knowledge of the social, Lefort developed a comprehensive understanding of the social in terms of flesh and of the political as its mise-en-forme, mise-en-sens, and mise-en-scène.
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Notes
“The flesh is not matter … it is not a fact or a sum of facts ‘material’ or ‘spiritual.’ [ … ] To designate it, we should need the old term ‘element,’ in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an ‘element’ of Being.” M. Merleau-Ponty (1997) The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), p. 139.
For a longer version of this view, see M. Plot (2012) “Our Element. Flesh and Democracy in Merleau-Ponty,” Continental Philosophy Review 45: 2, pp. 235–59.
M. Merleau-Ponty (2002) Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge).
C. Lefort (2000) Writing. The Political Test (Durham: Duke University Press), pp. 48–9. The emphasis is Lefort’s.
E. Kantorowicz (1957) The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
C. Lefort (1988) Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 245.
The reference to the “gaze of God” as “objectivizing” should be seen along the lines of Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Sartre’s philosophy of negativity in The Visible and the Invisible. In Sartre, “Being” was presented as the flattened, disincarnated opposite of the radical subject. The two-dimensionality of Being was thus split in the radical distinction between a Being that is sheer positivity on the one hand and a nothingness that is sheer negativity on the other. What I want to imply right away is that, for Lefort, modern democracy embraces the carnal, two-dimensional being of the social. Dealing with a somewhat similar question, Stefanos Geroulanos describes the theologico-political regime in the following way: “To be forever seen without seeing back is to succumb to a mercy and grace in religious force, to walk in fear and faith of a tremendous power one cannot face. It is to live a paranoid existence of nakedness before a God who is all-seeing, hence omniscient and omnipotent …I will name this condition theoscopy.… theoscopy involves the establishment of a site of perfect vision in the political, a site endowed with transcendental, theological power, which then turns into the sovereign structuring principle of the theologico-political.” Stefanos Geroulanos (2006) “Theoscopy. Transparency, Omnipotence, and Modernity” in Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (eds) Political Theologies (New York: Fordham University Press), p. 633.
Lefort (1988) Democracy and Political Theory, p. 245.
Jean-Luc Nancy claims that this split between the theological and the political, or, to put it in his words, between church and state, is not a product of modernity but the very Western origin of politics tout court: “The separation of church and state is not one political possibility among others, but a constitutive element of politics as such … Though the polis, the city, has its own religion, celebrates its own rites, and also makes room for other less public or less ‘civic [citoyens]’ forms of worship [cultes], it nonetheless presupposes, in its principle, its very being as polis, a fundamental rupture with any kind of theocracy, whether direct or indirect … politics encompasses any kind of ‘cracy’ except theocracy. Reciprocally, theocracy encompasses any kind of societal organization that rests on a religious principle, except for politics — even where the latter seems to call for a religious dimension. [ … ] The separation of church and state should be considered as the one true birth of politics.” J.-L. Nancy (2006) “Church, State, Resistance” in Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (eds) Political Theologies, pp. 102–3.
C. Lefort (1988) “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” Democracy and Political Theory, p. 255.
Actually, this is a quality Lefort attributes to Tocqueville, but it is obviously in both style and content that Tocqueville could be counted as one of Lefort’s great teachers — together, of course, with Machiavelli, Marx, and Merleau-Ponty. See C. Lefort (2000) Writing, p. 37.
C. Lefort (1988) Democracy and Political Theory, p. 213.
C. Lefort (1988) Democracy and Political Theory, p. 236 and following. “Michelet elevates Buffon, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau to the status of the founding fathers of the new humanity (he even calls them ‘the great doctors of the new Church’) … We see here the workings of the transference [of the religious to the political]. ‘Until then, unity had been based upon the idea of a religious or political incarnation. A human God, a God made flesh was required to unite Church and State. Humanity was still weak, and placed its union under the sign, the visible sign, of a man, an individual. From now on, unity will be purer, and will be freed from this material condition.’ ” C. Lefort (1988) Democracy and Political Theory p. 241.
For the idea of totalitarianism as a society without a body, see C. Lefort “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism” in C. Lefort (1986) The Political Forms of Modern Society (Cambridge: The MIT Press), pp. 292–306.
C. Lefort (1986) The Political Forms of Modern Society p. 284.
The word is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s. A. Solzhenitsyn (1974) The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper).
J. Rancière (2006) The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Continuum).
C. Lefort (1988) “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” in Democracy and Political Theory.
Carl Schmitt also established a certain correlation between the metaphysical discourse of an epoch and its political organization. His position, however, is very different from the historical relativism of Foucaultian epis-temes. For Schmitt, in the end, there is only one acceptable metaphysical discourse — Catholicism — and therefore only one acceptable form of political organization — a theologico-political one. See C. Schmitt (2008) Political Theology II. The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology (Malden: Polity Press).
Merleau-Ponty’s words — borrowed from Malraux — for understanding a successful expression. See M. Merleau-Ponty (1998) “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” in Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press).
J. Rancière (2009) Aesthetics and Its Discontents (New York: Polity) and (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics.
C. Schmitt (2008) Political Theology II p. 91.
H. Arendt (1978) The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace) pp. 23–30.
A. Arato (2013) “Conceptual History of Dictatorship (And Its Rivals)” in E. Peruzzotti and M. Plot (eds) Critical Theory and Democracy (New York: Routledge).
J. Rancière (1999) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press) p. 34.
R. Koselleck (1988) Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge: The MIT Press)
and C. Schmitt (1988) Crisis in Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge: The MIT Press).
C. Schmitt (2006) Political Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press).
In Roman Catholicism and Political Form, Schmitt presents the modern state as having distanced itself — aesthetico-politically, I would say — from his model of theologico-political authority. This view brings him closer to the position I am outlining in this chapter, only in a pessimist, melancholy way. See C. Schmitt (1996) Roman Catholicism and Political Form (Praeger).
See A. Arato (2000) Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield); luyen A. Arato (2009) Constitution Making Under Occupation (New York: Columbia University Press); and A. Arato (2013) “Conceptual History of Dictatorship (and its Rivals)” in E. Peruzzotti and M. Plot (eds) Critical Theory and Democracy.
See M. Merleau-Ponty (2010) Institution and Passivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press).
A. Arato (2002) “Dictatorship Before and After Totalitarianism,” Social Research 69:2, pp. 473–503.
H. Arendt (1963) “Ideology and Terror” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: Meridian).
C. Lefort (1986) The Political Forms of Modern Society.
M. Merleau-Ponty (1974) Adventures of the Dialectic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), p. 95–201.
C. Lefort (2000) Writing. The Political Test p. 48.
Flynn explains Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the chiasm in this way: “The seeing body is not simply a piece of the perceived world, as in materialism; nor does it dominate the visible as the subject for-whom it exists, as in idealism. There is rather an intertwining — a chiasm — of the vision and the visible …Vision and visibility, coupled as such, are reciprocally implicated.” B. Flynn (1992) Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics (Amherst: Humanity Books) p. 149.
M. Merleau-Ponty (1997) The Visible and the Invisible, p. 249.
M. Merleau-Ponty (2007) The Visible and the Invisible, p. 9.
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© 2013 Martín Plot
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Plot, M. (2013). The Advent of the Aesthetico-Political. In: Plot, M. (eds) Claude Lefort. Critical Explorations in Contemporary Political Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375581_16
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