Breckmann_Lefort and the Symbolic Dimension

Lefort and the Symbolic Dimension

Warren Breckman

Is a symbol created or found? Does it reveal the freedom of human creation or does itdisclose the form of the world? This was a perennial question for the Romantics of theearly nineteenth century. While some denied the instituted character of symbols in order toassert their correspondence with reality, others defended the autopoietic power of the humancreator. In his theory of the radical imagination and his insistence on society’s institutingcreativity, Cornelius Castoriadis was an emphatic heir of the latter camp. Yet, it is importantto recall a point that Paul Benichou once made in his great work The Consecration of theWriter. In Romanticism, Benichou urges us to recognize “the ambiguity that is characteristicto this intellectual theme, and make of the symbol both a human invention and a characteristicof being itself.”1 Claude Lefort, the theorist of the ‘symbolic dimension’ of the political,remained within this ambiguity. Indeed, many of the issues that came to divide Castoriadisand Lefort in the years after their intensive collaboration as the co-founders of Socialisme ouBarbarie could be encapsulated in the contrast evoked by Benichou. Where Castoriadis heldthat democracy emerged out of the exercise of human autonomy and further insisted thatautonomy has the potential to become more and more lucid about its self-creating activity,Lefort came to believe that even as democracy opened new circuits for the articulation andrealization of autonomy, democratic power, indeed the political domain as such, remainsunmasterable. Democracy, in Lefort’s mature view, is enigmatically poised between humanaction and a disclosure or unveiling of being. Hence, political philosophy, if it is to remaintrue to the indeterminacy and unmasterability of democracy, must preserve metaphoricallythe insight of religion, “that human society can only open on to itself by being held in anopening it did not create.”2 Lefort conceives autonomy as inseparable from its Other (thedehors); the immanence of the social is always shadowed by the transcendent enigma of itsinstitution, and political discourse is always inflected by the language of theology even as itgropes for a secular speech adequate to the mystery of democracy. To be sure, Lefort doesnot believe that there really is a social institution exterior to society, but the impossibility ofsociety ever being fully present to itself creates an effect of exteriority. This exteriority-effectgives us a crucial initial marker for the significance of the ‘symbolic’ in Lefort’s thought.

Hugues Poltier has noted that despite the heavy usage of the term ‘symbolic’ in Lefort’slater work, it is not easy to define its meaning exactly.3 In my presentation, I would like toexplore Lefort’s use of the symbolic. This will by necessity be rather schematic; but I hopethat I can unpack some of the conceptual weight of Lefort’s symbolic and relate it to thearc of his own career as well as to some of his key interlocutors. I will end by returning toPoltier’s complaint that the term remains vague.

Lefort’s thought of the ‘political’ involves at one level a very strong holistic impulse,insofar as the political is the general principle of order or the generative principle thatgives a specific form of social life its manner of being and its permanence in time. Atanother level, Lefort’s holism works to manage or organize division, which he regards asan ineradicable and, indeed, constitutive dimension of the social. As a thinker of division,Lefort brings together two strong influences. As always with Lefort, Maurice Merleau-Pontyis key. If, as Merleau-Ponty insists, reflection arises out of and against a background of

Constellations Volume 19, No 1, 2012.C© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, OxfordOX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Lefort and the Symbolic Dimension: Warren Breckman 31

unreflective being, then consciousness is always in relation to “brute being” (etre brut),with no possibility of a position outside being and no power to master or totalize it. Ina major 1961 contribution to an issue of Les Temps modernes marking Merleau-Ponty’sdeath, Lefort draws out the consequence that human subjectivity rests upon a constitutivedivision between reflection and the unreflective ground. Philosophical interrogation thusmoves constantly in a circle between its own formulations and its encounter with a being thatsurpasses it. The philosophical demarche finds itself in an “ordeal of circularity that is one ofconstant and deliberate indetermination.”4 Brute being, the 1961 essay concludes, remainsincommensurable with the “representations that science composes of it.”5

If the ontological position inherited from Merleau-Ponty dictated to Lefort that humansubjectivity rests upon constitutive division, this conviction was underscored in the early1960s by Lefort’s increasing interest in Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s insistence on a radicalheteronomy within man’s psyche dovetailed with Merleau-Ponty’s ontology to convinceLefort that division is constitutive of human identity and immunize him against fantasies ofovercoming this primordial alienation. The influence of Lacan’s model of intra-psychicaldivision transposed onto the collective level of social life is so clear that some twentyyears later, Slavoj Zizek could quite simply call Lefort’s theory of democracy a “Lacanianexposition.”6 Undoubtedly, Lefort’s engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis was positive.There was never even a hint of the kind of critique, let alone polemic that Cornelius Castoriadisdirected at Lacan. Nonetheless, it seems clear that Lacan became serviceable for Lefortprimarily because Lacan’s idea of constitutive division could be integrated into Merleau-Ponty’s ontological critique of totalizing philosophies. In this sense, Lefort had a model inMerleau-Ponty himself, who toward the end of his life perceived points of contact between hisown thought and psychoanalysis.7 As with Merleau-Ponty, Lefort’s engagement with Lacanwas, I think, relatively superficial. Consider his rather imprecise usage of key Lacanianterminology. Of Lacan’s triadic distinction between symbolic, imaginary, and real, it isreally only the ‘imaginary’ that Lefort periodically uses in Lacan’s sense, as, for example, inthe essay “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism.” Other times, he seems to be using‘imaginary’ in a way that seems closer to Castoriadis or even just in the ordinary sense ofthe imagined.

In describing the role of the ‘political’ in giving the social its “original dimensionality,”Lefort routinely speaks of a mise en forme and mise en sens, and links these to a third term,mise en scene. His self-conscious deployment of this theatrical image ties the institution of thesocial to the order of representation. The process whereby society shapes its shared existencethrough self-production and reproduction is indissolubly united with the process wherebythat life is represented or interpreted. Indeed, society supposes the existence of a symbolicorder and vice-versa.8 Yet, of course, it is one of the most important claims of Lefort’smature thought that society and its symbolic representation cannot coincide. One of theearliest formulations of this principle comes in a pivotal text published shortly after his 1961exploration of “brute being.” There, he explicitly extends the lesson of constitutive divisionfrom Merleau-Ponty’s ontology to his new thought of the political. “Society,” he writes,“cannot become an object of representation or a material that we can transform because we arerooted in it and discover in the particular form of our ‘sociality’ the sense of our undertakingsand tasks.”9 True to his renunciation of all philosophies of reconciliation, including Marxism,Lefort views conflict as fundamental to social experience; indeed, conflict’s appearance andoperation belong constitutively to Lefort’s notion of regime. This, of course, is the great themeof Lefort’s opus on Machiavelli, which he began in the early 1950s and finally submitted toRaymond Aron as a these d’etat in the early 1970s.10 Yet what Lefort sees in Machiavelli is

C© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

32 Constellations Volume 19, Number 1, 2012

the insight that if social conflict is to be mastered, then power must rely on a representationthat lifts it above the contest of interests. That is, power involves a symbolic representationof society that is not anchored in the real, but absorbs the inner divisions of the social.11 Thesymbolic thus remains exterior or non-identical to the social, even though the social worldwould be unimaginable without this symbolic institution.

One might say that this symbolic instance is imposed on the ‘real’, as Hent de Vriesdoes in a recent essay on Lefort.12 However, it would be even more accurate to say thatthe symbolic gives society access to the real – firstly, to its own reality insofar as thesymbolic creates a figure of the unity of the social, as well as a sense of the lawful andthe unlawful and of the difference between sense and nonsense, and then, secondly, tothe world more broadly insofar as the symbolic establishes ontological categories of theexistent and the nonexistent.13 We can note that this sets Lefort at some distance from Lacan,who distinguished between “reality,” which is what society designates as real, and the “real,”which is beyond symbolization, indeed even beyond the possibility of symbolization. Lefort’snotion of the real is actually closer to the Lacanian definition of a symbolically instituted“reality” than to the Lacanian “real.” A real beyond all symbolic orders is not a concern forhim, nor does he thematize an unsymbolized and unsymbolizable real as a permanent sourceof disruption and trauma for the symbolic order in the way that is so fundamental to thepolitical thought of Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek.

Lefort’s emphasis on the symbolic institution of the social sets him at still further distancefrom Marxism. In a major essay in 1974, he criticizes Marx for failing to recognize thesymbolic institution. Collapsing the social institution into the real, Marx treated socialdivision as a primary social datum. What is negated in such cases of epistemological realism,Lefort argues, is “the articulation of the division . . . with the ‘thought’ of the division, athought which cannot be deduced from the division since it is implicated in the definition ofits terms. What is negated is the symbolic order, the idea of a system of oppositions by virtueof which social forms can be identified and articulated with one another; what is negated isthe relation between the division of social agents and representation.”14 True to his roots inphenomenology, which always tried to overcome dualisms between the subjective and theobjective, Lefort insists that he intends neither to “assert the primacy of representation” andthereby fall into the illusion of an “independent logic of ideas” nor to fall into a “naturalistfiction” by adhering to an analysis of social mechanisms. “We must appreciate,” he continues,“that it is the social space which is instituted with the division, and it is instituted only in sofar as it appears to itself. Its differentiation through relations of kinship or class, through therelation between state and civil society, is inseparable from the deployment of a discourse ata distance from the supposed real, a discourse which enunciates the order of the world.”15

Lefort’s appeal to a symbolic order created out of a system of oppositions would seem toalign him with the structuralist position. There is without question a structuralist influenceoperating in Lefort. Even in the early 1950s, he was very interested in Claude Levi-Strauss,and he periodically taught seminars on structural anthropology. Then, too, this would seemto be another indication of Lacan’s influence. Both Bernard Flynn and Hugues Poltier, theauthors of the two major book-length studies of Lefort, note that it is only in the early1970s that Lefort introduces the concept of the symbolic in the “technical sense” that willhenceforth be a key to his political interpretation of societies.16 Yet it is necessary to proceedwith some additional caution. In one of his most pregnant discussions of the symbolic, foundin his 1981 article “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?,” Lefort indicates that hedoes not use the term in the way the social sciences understand it, but in the sense that thesymbolic governs access to the world.17 While it is not entirely clear which social sciences



he means, it seems reasonable to assume that he is speaking of the structuralist model thatwas still powerful in that time. In a published discussion with colleagues at the College depsychanalystes in October 1982, Lefort underscored the complexity of the story: “is it nottime to stop imputing to Lacan the invention of the notion of the symbolic? Some give theimpression that one fine day Lacan came along and that notion of the symbolic was born.The notion of the symbolic is much older!”18

Certainly, Lefort’s engagement with the notion of the symbolic predated his encounterwith Lacan. Indeed, one of the first of his significant articles in the early 1950s was acritique of Claude Levi-Strauss’s attempt to appropriate Marcel Mauss as the forerunner ofhis own symbolic anthropology. Even though Lefort chastises Mauss for ignoring Marx,his assessment of Mauss is mainly very positive. He describes Mauss as “one of the mostrepresentative authors of our epoch,” a figure dedicated to developing a “new rationalism”that does not “explicate a social phenomenon by relating it to another phenomenon judged tobe its cause, but links all economic, juridical, religious, and artistic traits of a given societyand to comprehend how they conspire in the same meaning.”19 Taking aim at Levi-Strauss,Lefort insists that the ideal of mathematizing the symbolic relation was foreign to Mauss.Even more importantly, Lefort claims that Mauss did not seek the strictly internal relations ofsymbols among themselves, but the signification of symbols – precisely what Levi-Strausshad criticized when he attacked Mauss’s discussion of mana. That is, Lefort reads Mauss asa phenomenologist of the social world, who tried to understand the immanent intentionalityof conduct without leaving the plane of the lived. Levi-Strauss, by contrast, drains sociallife of its unmasterable complexity and reduces lived experience to a raw material for theconstruction of a symbolic logic.20 Already in this criticism of Levi-Strauss, we see hints ofthe chiasmatic relation that the later Lefort will describe between the social and its symbolicrepresentation, complete with his rejection of reductionism, whether of a materialist or anidealist kind.

What is really striking in Lefort’s early anthropological essays is that despite his avowedMarxism, he already has a strongly formulated idea of symbolic institution. For example,in a 1952 essay addressing the question of historicity in societies “without history,” hewrites: “an individual life is highly symbolic with regards to cultural becoming, in that[the symbolic] shows [this individual] what sorts of possibilities are given to humans, whatrelations link them to the group and what these relations tend toward, what perceptionof the past and of the future the institutions furnish them.”21 Lefort’s final answer to theapparent absence of temporality in primitive societies is that stagnation is a specific modeof instituting historicity and temporality, a “mise en forme” that establishes a manner ofcoexistence, comportment, and collective practice.22 One sees a similar sensibility at work inLefort’s 1952 attempt to outline a phenomenology of proletarian experience, which depictsthe proletariat’s productive activity extending to the production of social life in its entirety.23

These ideas emerge in close engagement with Merleau-Ponty, who at that time was workingout the ideas on institution that would become the subject of his 1954–1955 lectures.24

As Andreas Kalyvas will address the issue of ‘institution’, let me just note that whereasCastoriadis was reluctant to acknowledge that Merleau-Ponty influenced his own thinkingabout the institution of society, with Lefort, Merleau-Ponty’s impact is explicit. Or, perhapsmore accurately, it is hard to tell how to assign priority, to the teacher or to the student, asif their relationship itself were enacting an intricate example of chiasma. At any rate, thecontinuity from Lefort’s early thought to his mature ideas is patent. In the 1979 preface tothe second edition of Elements of a Critique of Bureaucracy, he described the constitution



of society as a “symbolic matrix of social relations,” thus echoing formulations scatteredliberally throughout Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on the institution.25

Let me return in conclusion to Hugues Poltier’s complaint that Lefort does not use theterm ‘symbolic’ with very great precision. This seems true, but I would suggest that it is notbecause of any lack of rigor on Lefort’s part, but rather because his concept does not remainrestricted to the abstract and reduced notion of the symbolic advanced by structuralism, butrather carries with it expressive and affective dimensions as well, not to mention a spatialdimension, at least in a negative sense insofar as symbolic exteriority creates the interiorsocial space. Moreover, to expand upon an earlier point, Lefort’s concept of the symbolicstands at some distance from Lacan’s. For Lefort, the symbolic is a dimension of the social,but that suggests the symbolic is not all there is to the social whole. Nor, as a dimensionof the social, is the ‘symbolic’ simply the system of signs tout court. Moreover, to citeLefort’s most famous claim about modern democracy, if modern democratic society’s quasi-representation of itself remains an empty place, it is empty not because it is structured by lackor incompletion, which is the transcendental condition of the symbolic in Lacan’s system,but because modern democracy institutes the symbolic dimension of power as empty.26 Thisis a point made forcefully by the young Slavoj Zizek, when he insists that, “it is misleadingto say that the ‘democratic invention’ finds the locus of Power empty – the point is rather thatit constitutes, constructs it as empty; that it reinterprets the ‘empirical’ fact of interregnuminto a ‘transcendental’ condition of the legitimate exercise of Power.”27

If we take Zizek’s interpretation of the ‘democratic invention’ seriously, then we cansee the way Lefort’s idea of the ‘symbolic dimension’ circles back to the ambiguity thatPaul Benichou detected in Romantic thinking about the symbolic. Is a symbol created orfound? The Romantics tended to associate the symbolic with the numinous, the exterior, theimpossible presentation of the unpresentable. If the symbol thus discloses, or perhaps better,intimates the form of the world, it is precisely as a presentation of the unpresentable that thesymbolic reveals its origin in human creation. To be sure, Lefort believes that the symbolicitself is caught up in a history of demystification.28 Hence, as he writes in “The Permanence ofthe Theologico-Political?”, “both the political and the religious bring philosophical thoughtface to face with the symbolic.”29 Both offer responses to the basic ontological experience ofconstitutive division, of humanity’s non-coincidence with itself. Religion, however, interpretsthis as a division between the visible world and an invisible world of God or gods. In asuggestive formula from Bernard Flynn, premodern religion is the symbolic dimension asinterpreted by the imagination; “the fundamental indeterminacy through which societiesrelate to themselves and the world is dramatized in terms of determinate figures existingin the visible world.”30 Unlike Lacan’s contrast between the symbolic and the imaginary,Lefort’s question is rather one of disentangling the imaginary from the symbolic throughthe course of history. If Lefort has an anthropological constant, it is that societies aresymbolically instituted, which means that the domain of the political necessarily comesforth with the social institution. However, the political may be lived in a mode of non-recognition. Lefort’s mature thought rests upon identifying the emergence of the place ofthe political, the possibility of disentangling the symbolic, imaginary, and real, and livingin the condition of indeterminacy that opens up once this disentanglement is underway. Yettrue to the ambiguity of the symbolic itself, the autonomy that is won through recognitionof the symbolic as such will always be accompanied and limited by the exteriority of theinstitution, even if we can gain a freeing recognition that exteriority is an effect of the socialitself.



NOTES

1. Paul Benichou, Le sacre de l’ecrivain 1750–1830, Essai sur l’avenement d’un pouvoir spirituellaıque dans la France moderne, (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 243f.

2. Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political,” in Democracy and Political Theory,trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 262.

3. Hugues Poltiers, Passion du politique: La pensee de Claude Lefort (Geneve: Labor et Fides, 1998),184.

4. Lefort, “L’idee d’etre brut et d’esprit sauvage,” Les Temps modernes, 17, 184–185 (Oct. 1961):275.

5. Lefort, “L’idee d’etre brut et d’esprit sauvage,” 286.6. Slavoj Zizek, “The Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Yugoslavia: An Interview with

Eric Laurent [1985],” in Zizek, Interrogating the Real, eds. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (New York:Continuum, 2008), 21.

7. Numerous commentators have remarked upon Merleau-Ponty’s interest in psychoanalysis, includ-ing Gauchet in “Freud et apres,” La condition historique. Entretiens avec Francois Azouvi et Sylvain Piron(Paris: Editions Stock, 2003), 175. As Gauchet notes, it was within Merleau-Ponty’s circle that Lacan andLefort came to know each other personally. Samuel Moyn explores these relations in greater detail in hisforthcoming A New Theory of Politics. I am grateful to him for sharing a draft of Chapter One.

8. Poltiers, Passion du politique, 187.9. Lefort, “La politique et la pensee de la politique,” Les Lettres nouvelles, no. 32 (1963): 19–70.10. Lefort, Le Travail de l’oeuvre. Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).11. Oliver Marchart formulates this view well in Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political

Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 93: “Therole of power is precisely to institute society by signifying social identity – and only by relating to thisrepresentation/signification of identity can people relate to the space in which they live as a coherentensemble . . . .”

12. Hent de Vries, “‘Miracle of Love’ and the Turn to Democracy,” The New Centennial Review vol.8, no. 3 (2009): 244.

13. See Lefort quoted in Dick Howard, The Marxian Legacy (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1988), 221.

14. Lefort, “Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies,” Political Forms of Modernity:Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 194.

15. Lefort, “Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies,” 194.16. The quote comes from Poltier, Passion du politique, 184; see also, Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy

of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 84–86.17. Lefort, “Permanence,” 222.18. Lefort, “Le Mythe de l’Un dans le Fantasme et dans la Realite Politique,” Psychanalystes: Revue

du College de Psychanalystes, 9 (Oct., 1983): 41.19. Claude Lefort, “L’Echange et la lutte des hommes,” Les Temps Modernes 6, no. 64, (February

1951): 1400.20. Lefort, “L’Echange et la lutte des hommes,” 1402. Francois Dosse claims that “Both the procla-

mation of a program [in Levi-Strauss’s Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss] and Claude Lefort’scritiques provided the rational kernel for all the debates and polemics that developed in the fifties and sixtiesaround the structuralist banquet.” Dosse, History of Structuralism. Vol. 1: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966,trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 31.

21. Lefort, “Societe ‘sans historie’ et Historicite,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 12 (July1952), 97.

22. Lefort, “Societe ‘sans histoire’ et Historicite,” 110–111. The phrase “mise en forme” appears onpages 95 and 108.

23. Lefort, “L’experience proletarienne,” Socialisme ou Barbarie, 11 (nov.-dec., 1952), 1–19.24. Merleau-Ponty, L’Institution dans l’histoire personnelle et publique: Le probleme de la passivite.

Le sommeil, l’inconscient, la memoire. Notes de cours au College de France (1954–1955) (Paris: EditionsBelin, 2003).

25. Lefort, “Preface,” Elements d’une critique de la bureaucratie (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 25. Thesense of continuity is reinforced if one considers Lefort, “L’idee d’etre brut et d’esprit sauvage,” 285.

26. For an account that too readily equates Lefort’s and Lacan’s concept of the symbolic, see SaulNewman, “The Place of Power in Political Discourse,” International Political Science Review, 25, 2 (2004):esp. 150.



27. Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do. Enjoyment as a political factor (London, 2002),276n.52.

28. I have explored this in Breckman, “Democracy Between Disenchantment and Political Theology:French Post-Marxism and the Return of Religion,” New German Critique, 94 (Winter, 2005), 72–105.

29. Lefort, “Permanence,” 222.30. Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort, 125.

Warren Breckman is Associate Professor of Modern European Intellectual and CulturalHistory at the University of Pennsylvania and executive editor of Journal of the Historyof Ideas. His books include Marx, the Young Hegelians and the Origins of Radical SocialTheory: Dethroning the Self (1999), European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents(2007), and Adventures of the Symbolic: Postmarxism and Radical Democracy (forthcoming2012).


Breckmann_Lefort and the Symbolic Dimension

Documents

Transcript of Breckmann_Lefort and the Symbolic Dimension