Understanding the Concept of the Political in Claude Lefort's Political Philosophy

1. Claude Lefort, some major claims • political philosophy as focus on the political - vs. politics: a delimited area of life and activity - the political: the (specific) formation (mise en forme) or regime that is the foundation and the form that conditions the whole of societal life staging (mise en scène) - the mode of being or institutionally anchored form that conditions and steers the life of a society - regime - a certain structure and mode of power sense giving (mise en sens) - the modes of thinking that define, condition and orient this form - space of intelligibility - instituted divisions of just-unjust, true-false, normal-pathological etc. - ideology? - or the modes of thinking inherent in certain practices political? - conditions, orients and thereby steers (power) the whole - structurally and on the level of thinking (understanding) - implications for action - not in a deterministic sense

2. Lefort, some major claims • the uniqueness of democratic society to other forms “… democracy … inaugurates a history which abolishes the place of the referent from which the law once derived its transcendence” (Democracy and Political Theory, p. 39) - in other words: lack of a secure foundation • compare: the social contract-tradition - lack of religious or hereditary foundation -> search for the establishment of a foundation outside of society  natural law, basic rights (≈ moral foundation): Hobbes, Locke  reason: Rousseau, Kant  will to co-operation, conception of the person, basic conception of justice, reasonable pluralism: Rawls • Lefort: - the constitutive/institutive process (the political) neither outside nor inside of society - co-foundational: the foundation and the institutionalisation of a certain regime is one and the same thing (≈ the foundation is created in the act itself) - post-metaphysical thinking, post-foundationalism

3. Lefort, some major claims • Lefort on (modern) democracy: - a form for whom the lack of a secure foundation is self-consciously taken to be its very foundation - “the disappearance of markers of certainty” “.. the division between legitimate and illegitimate … is simply removed from the realm of certainty” (p. 39) - compare Mouffe ≈ pluralism -”the locus of power becomes an empty place”  no one can embody power in any full or final sense - compare Mouffe: power as hegemony (a temporary dominance that contains exclusions (of views, of groups), thereby never being able to embody the people as a whole) - diagnostic thesis: the importance of concealing this lack of foundation - democracy is inherently haunted by insecurity (already on the level of principles)  threat: the risk of the appearance of ’fulfillers’ of the foundation: appeal to a return to a transcendent origin or foundation (historic people, morality, religion, charismatic authority etc.)

4. Lefort, some major claims • two central dimensions of the democratic form (staging & sense-content): human rights - similar foundation as that of democracy - neither inside nor outside of society - co-foundational of democracy - lack foundation outside of the act of instituting them • Arendt: human rights ≈ “a right to have rights” - rights are rights of the citizen (things that ought to be protected by the state) - human rights are rights to have those rights, irrespective if you have the protection of any state or not “the singular thing about the freedoms proclaimed at the end of the eighteenth century is that they are in effect indissociable from the birth of the democratic debate. Indeed, they generate it.” (p. 39) public space - the creation of a public space is co-foundational with democracy/an inherent consequence of it: “a regime founded upon the legitimacy of a debate as to what is legitimate and what is illegitimate – a debate which is necessarily without any guarantor and without any end” (p. 39) “The negative is effective: it does away with the judge, but it also relates justice to the existence of a public space – a space which is so constituted that everyone is encouraged to speak and to listen without being subject to the authority of an another” (p. 41)

5. Chantal Mouffe, some major claims • democracy as agonistic pluralism • diagnostic background: - the reduction of politics and democracy to some form of ‘co-operative consensus formation’ is a threat to democracy - too rationalistic: removes, marginalises or hides the real and necessary moments of real antagonism present in any pluralistic society, the presence of exclusions (of views and groups), and the presence of hegemonic power - in other words: it removes, marginalises or hides the moment of the political “A well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions. If this is missing there is the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a confrontation among other forms of collective identification, as is the case with identity politics … the result can be the crystallization of collective passions around issues which cannot be managed by the democratic process and an explosion of antagonisms that can tear up the very basis of civility” (The Democratic Paradox, p. 104) - risks: collective counter-movements (identity politics), the tearing up of democratic society into open antagonisms, the normalisation of specific exclusions

6. Mouffe, some major claims • politics vs. the political • “the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order and organize human coexistence” “in conditions that are always potentially conflictual because they are affected by the dimension of the ‘political’” (The Democratic Paradox, p. 101) • “the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations” (The Democratic Paradox, p. 101)

7. Mouffe, some major claims • the theory of hegemony (Laclau and Mouffe) - inspired by Antonio Gramsci • the power inherent in any socio-political order constitutes a hegemony ≈ the temporary power of a certain socio-political regime or group - compare Lefort: staging - based on inclusions and exclusions - may aim to contain the whole only be means of exclusions - the excluded form the constitutive outside  the presence of constitutive antagonisms is unavoidable • defines a social objectivity: theunity of organisation and practices that defines a ‘hierarchy of relevance’ - what counts as objectively important issues, defines objectives (goals), ideological back-up: values etc. compare Lefort: space of intelligibility, sense-content the political? - a principal and necessary feature of this mode of being is the presence of antagonisms - these comes to define the political according to Mouffe

8. Mouffe, some major claims rationalist solutions: • to strive for a reasonable background consensus, securing individual rights and peaceful co-operation (liberal, Rawls) • to strive for rational processes of democratic legitimacy, securing both unity and democracy (deliberative democracy, Habermas) agonistic pluralism “… envisaged from the perspective of ‘agonstic pluralism’ the aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into agonism” (p. 103) • turning antagonism into agonism: - preserving the moments of real conflict, while keeping them peaceful (destruction of the enemy vs. respect for your adversary) - accepting the presence of power (that rule is always temporary hegemony), - keeping exclusions visible (in order to make possible their removal) • democratic citizenship “what is really at stake in the allegiance to democratic institutions is the constitution of an ensemble of practices that make possible the creation of democratic citizens. This is not a matter of rational justification but of availability of democratic forms of individuality and subjectivity”

9. Mouffe, some major claims • politics of the left: striving for the hegemony of democracy - logic of equality and self-determination (popular sovereignty) - to foster a democratic culture, the ethical state - giving space to agonistic conflicts - keeping exclusions visible - politics as a mode of action aiming at hegemony (vs. the establishment of a unified mode of government on the basis of moral or rationalist principles

10. Hannah Arendt(1906–75) was a German American political theorist. She described herself as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world”. Inn 1950, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Arendt served as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University and Northwestern University, a professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, as well as at The New School in New York. Publications The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). The Human Condition (1958). Between Past and Future: Six exercises in political thought (1961) On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Men in Dark Times (1968). Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (1972). Jacques Rancière(born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) Publications, English translations: The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (1989) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991) On the Shores of Politics (1995) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1998) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2004) The Future of the Image (2007) Hatred of Democracy (2007) The Aesthetic Unconscious (2009) The Emancipated Spectator (2010) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010) Chronicles of Consensual Times (2010) The Politics of Literature (2011) Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double (2011)

11. Hannah Arendt on plurality, equality and politics • diagnostic starting point (The Human Condition) ”The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition” “What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears ... What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing ... It deals only with the most elementary articulations of the human condition, with those activities that traditionally, as well as according to current opinion, are within the range of every human being” (p. 5) ”The human condition comprehends more than the conditions under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come into contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence” (p. 9)

12. Arendt diagnosis of the social and the political • the contemporary pre-dominance of the issues of the social - the social: management of the whole (the dimensions of labor and work, the conditions of life and worldliness) including the economy, the construction of the welfare state over that of the political - the political: the creative, communicative making of the new, acting in concert (the dimension of action, plurality and natality)

13. Jacques Rancière and contemporary philosophy conception of politics as disagreement (mésentente) • mésentente: - dissension, dissensus - disagreement • compare: Lefort on the formation of the political as both concerned with sense and staging • (genuine?) politics as rooted in the logic of equality • politics ≈ democratic politics aesthetics • the concept of partition (Fr. partage) of the sensible - those divisions on the level of perception through which we construct a conception of the situation, the world etc. - conceptual, discursive, but having a direct effect on perception - perception is always already both ‘seeing things’ and a ‘how they are seen’ • aisthesis≈ sensual perception, perception containing both sensual awareness and intellectual meaning, organised perceptions containing sense or meanings • politics and aesthetics - the presence and relevance of partitions of the sensible in politics - the presence of political meanings in the arts (art, literature, theatre, cinema)

14. Rancière on politics/the political • takes place on the level of action at the meeting point of two heterogeneous logics - action?  does not take place without ’human initiative’  does not necessarily take place at all (politics is rare) logic of politics • the interruption of police logics in the name of the equality of everyone and anyone - the act of raising claim of equality in a manner that interrupts with the police logic of governmentality logic of the police • roughly: governmental rule and administrative practices, including the established practices of social life (culture) • compare: Foucault’s studies of the 18th and 19th century European discipline of the ‘science of the police’ - management of the whole, the welfare of the whole: health, education, security etc. - governmentality • legitimate inequality - the combination in actual societal life of equality of basic rights, opportunity etc. with the actual inequalities in social position, wealth etc. - compare: Rawls difference principle