Breckmann - Democracy Between Disenchantment and Political Theology French Post-Marxism and The Return of Religion

Democracy between Disenchantment and Political Theology: French Post-Marxism and the
Return of Religion
Author(s): Warren Breckman
Source: New German Critique, No. 94, Secularization and Disenchantment (Winter, 2005), pp.
72-105
Published by: New German Critique
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DemocracyBetweenDisenchantmentand
Political Theology.FrenchPost-Marxism
and the ReturnofReligion1
WarrenBreckman
"Where there are no gods, phantoms rule."

- Novalis, Christianity or Europe
"On the Jewish Question" is where Karl Marx declared the liberal state,
the "atheistic state, the democratic state," to be the pure essence of the
Christian state. Considering the American republic, the most advanced
model available, Marx claimed that the state stands over society as
heaven does earth; the sovereignty of the citizen rests on a Christian logic
of incarnation that separates the individual from human species-being; the
abstract universality of rights displaces the concrete universality of man's
participation in collective social life. Marx regarded communism as the
last great act in the history of secularization, returning the transcendent
political state to its immanent place in society and removing the final
obstacle to man's recovery of his alienated humanity.2 The salto mortale
was to be surpassed by the leap into the kingdom of freedom; but in our
1. This articleoriginatedas a lecturegiven at CambridgeUniversityin July 2001. I
am especially gratefulto the participantsof the New YorkAreaSeminarin Intellectualand
CulturalHistoryfor their feedbackon a completedversion in April 2002. Given the long
delay in bringingthis issue to press, I have updatedthe bibliography.A version of the
paperwas firstpublishedin Germanin AllgemeineZeitschriftfiir Philosophie30.3 (2005).
2. I discuss this in some detail in Marx,the YoungHegelians, and the Origins of
RadicalSocial Theory.Dethroningthe Self(New York:CambridgeUP, 1999), ch. 7.
72

WarrenBreckman
73
period, it is liberal democracythat has leapfroggedover communism.

One of the ironiesin the historyof communismis that Marx'ssecularizing impulsehas been almostfully eclipsedby the judgmentthat communism was itself a religion,albeita secularcollectivistreligion.
There is nothing new in the idea that communism is a secularized
messianism, even in post-1945 France, where, despite the widespread
infatuationwith Bolshevism, AlbertCamusdenouncedcommunismas a
myth of this-worldly salvation and Raymond Aron attacked it as the
opium of the intellectuals.This conceit persistsin FrangoisFuret'sfinal
book, ThePassing of an Illusion. TheIdea of Communismin the Twentieth Century,a title that alludesto Freudand situatesthe analysisof communism in the frameworkof the critique of religion. Furet concludes
that the collapse of socialist expectationsundida coverttheologicalcode
with which the twentiethcenturyhad sought historicalcertainty.As he
writes, "At the end of the twentiethcentury,deprivedof God, we have
seen the foundationsof deified history crumbling."What distinguishes
Furetfrom earlieranticommunistslike Camusand Aron is his belief that
with the apparenttriumphof liberal democracy,"historyhas become a
tunnel that we enter in darkness,not knowing where our actions will
lead, uncertainof our destiny."A democracystrippedbare of illusions
proves itself to be an object of anxiety - Furet judges this disenchantedcondition"too austereand contraryto the spiritof modernsocieties to last."Democracyneeds utopia,"a world beyond the bourgeoisie
and Capital,a world in which a genuine human communitycan flourish."3 Furet's book ends with the ambiguous suggestion that neither
democracy'sinventivenessnor its susceptibilityto dreams of historical
redemptionis at an end. If the exit from communistillusion has proven
terminable,thendemocracy'sown exit fromreligionseems interminable.
The mix of triumphalismand apprehensionin Furet's treatmentof
democracyafterthe fall of the Soviet Union, in fact, echoes the ambivalence towarddemocracyalreadyevident in his pathbreakingwork on the
FrenchRevolutionfromthe late 1970s. Indeed,it is an ambivalencecommon to many Frenchintellectualsin the late 1970s and early 1980s, and
moment" when Marxism's
indicative of the so-called "antitotalitarian
grip on Frenchintellectuallife definitivelybroke and many leading leftist intellectualsturnedtowarda democraticpolitics of a decidedly more
3.
Furet,Passing of an Illusion. TheIdea of Communismin the Twentieth
Francois
Century,trans.DeborahFuret(Chicago:U ChicagoP, 1999) 502.

74
FrenchPost-Marxismand the Returnof Religion
pluralistic,quotidian,and non-utopiansort. OlivierMongindescribesthis

crucial turningpoint in recent French intellectualhistory as a "bizarre
period,"when "intellectualsincreasinglydistancethemselves from their
self-image as proprietorsof historyand discoverdemocracyat the same
moment when democracyis the object of increasingdoubt."4Mongin's
comment speaks directlyto the fact that the turn of Frenchintellectuals
towarddemocracycoincidedwith a periodof intensifyingcritiqueof the
that had served as the
very foundationaldiscoursesand meta-narratives
for
democratic
and
socialist
revolutionary
grounds liberal
politicsalike.
The collapse of those foundations whether transcendentalethics,
naturallaw, or rationalityof the historicalprocess - helps to explain
one of the striking aspects of the general democraticreorientationof
Frenchintellectualsin the 1980s, the returnof religion. In 1988, Marcel
Gauchet and PierreNora identifiedthe "rehabilitationof the religious
problematic"as one of the "most spectacular"trends in recent French
intellectuallife.5 In a culturewhere almost all the dominantintellectuals, whether under the sway of Robespierre,Marx, or Nietzsche, had
long dismissed religion as a dead letter, this was indeed a surprising
development.One could multiplythe dimensionsof religion's returnin
the 1980s: the entryof religiousmotifs into the texts of the New Philosophers,the revival of concernfor religiosityamong FrenchJewish intellectuals, the 'return' of Islam sensationally marked by the Iranian
revolution,the Catholic dimensionof Polish Solidarity,and the ethical
turn in Frenchphilosophy,a turn that dovetailedwith the explosion of
interestin EmmanuelLevinas. To these phenomenamust be added one
that bore directly on the democraticreorientationof the French Left,
namely, the resurgenceof the theologico-politicalproblem in French
thought.Indeed, a Frenchhistorianof the Germansecularizationdebate
recentlydescribedthis as the thirdgreatwave of the theologico-political
in the twentieth century,preceded by Carl Schmitt's illiberal political
theology in the Weimarperiod and Germanprogressivepolitical theology and Latin Americanliberationtheology in the 1960s and 1970s.6 In
4. Olivier Mongin, Face au scepticisme (1976-1993). Les mutationsdu paysage
intellectuelou l 'inventionde l 'intellectueldemocratique(Paris:EditionsLa D~couverte,
1994) 17.
Le ddbat50 (May-Aug. 1988):
5. PierreNora and MarcelGauchet,"Aujourd'hui,"
157.
6. Jean-Claude Monod, "Le 'probl~me thdologico-politiqueau XXe siicle,"
Esprit,no. 250 (Feb. 1999): 179-92.

WarrenBreckman
75
contrastto those earliermoments,it must be emphasizedthat the French

resurgencedid not aim to reasserta theological languageas a political
strategy.Rather,Gauchetand Nora signaled the specific natureof this
resurgencewhen they spoke of "thereturnof religion as a centralobject
of social theory and a legitimate object of laic reflection."7For laic
thinkers,the goal was to assess the place of religion in the genealogy of
Yet this was more than an analyticalquestion. For
political modemrnity.
the theologico-politicalquestionspoke directlyto the paradoxicalsituation in which French intellectualsturned to democracy at the same
moment that they perceiveddemocracy'sloss of substanceand foundation. A centuryand a half afterMarxhad detecteda politicaltheology at
the core of liberaldemocracyand called for the final, radicalsecularizato political
tion of politics, French post-Marxistintellectuals tumrned
democracy as the only possible vehicle for emancipatorypolitics; but
they returnedwith less confidence regardingthe question of democracy'srelationshipto the ultimatefigureof otherness.
I want to look at the intersectionof theology and politics in three
post-Marxistphilosophersof the Left who played a central role in the
democratic reorientation of French thought, Cornelius Castoriadis,
Claude Lefort, and Marcel Gauchet.My aim is twofold. My first conin the 1920s, exercern is historical.Castoriadisand Lefort, both bomrn
cised a significant influence upon the course of political thought in
France that intellectualhistoriansare only now beginning to explore.
Gauchet,a generationyounger and currentlyone of the most prominent
philosophers in France, drew inspiration from both Castoriadis and
Lefort. Michael Scott Christofferson,the historianof the 'antitotalitarian moment' in Frenchthoughtof the 1970s and 1980s, presentsCastoriadis, Lefort, and Gauchetas united in the antitotalitariancampaign.8
Certainly,these figures were bound together by personal history and
shared milieux; but behind the common front of anticommunism,
Gauchet, Lefort, and Castoriadisactually representway stations in the
collapse of revolutionarypolitics in France. The theologico-political
problem became a crucial vehicle for the articulationof substantially
differentresponsesto the challengeof rethinkingdemocraticpolitics.
My second concern is more theoretical,because, in the context of
7. Le ddbat50; 147.
8. Michael Scott Christofferson,FrenchIntellectualsAgainst the Left. TheAntitotalitarianMomentof the 1970s (New York:BerghahnBooks, 2004).

76
1980s France, the explorationof the relationshipbetween democracy

and religion representsan importantchapterin the long philosophical
debate about secularization,with the collapse of Marxism giving this
episode its specific valence.
So long as Marxism'ssocial and economic model prevailed,the political domain could always be exposed as epiphenomenal,while political
philosophy could be dismissed as idealist. If, as Jacques Derrida
recently remindedus, Marx believed that "'Christianityhas no history
whatsoever', no history of its own," then we must add that for Marx
politics has no history of its own, and for exactly the same reason.9
However, with the collapse of Marxism'sclaim for the determinantrole
of the economic base, the field was cleared for figures like Castoriadis,
the theorist of the 'social imaginary,'and Claude Lefort, the philosopher of the 'symbolic dimension' of politics, both of whom recognize
the creative and constructiverole of culturalrepresentationsin creating
the social world. Within such a constructionistperspective,both politics and religion could reemergeas irreduciblesystems of meaning that
generate,and not only reflect social-historicallife. Yet that also brought
these two symbolic systems into competition.To state the issue bluntly:
If we consider democracyas the domain of human self-determination
and religion as the domain of human dependence, can democracy
escape from its long entanglementin religion and quasi-religionsand
establish its own autonomy as the self-institutingactivity of human
communities?Or must democracyrely on the othemess of religion to
discover the meaning of democracy?Finally, with a view toward the
historical relationshipbetween the democraticimpulse and the twentieth-century'stotalitarianexperiences, does democracy need religious
othernessas a limitingforce on the exerciseof democraticpower?
A final point must be made before proceeding.Many readers will
immediatelyrecognizeparallelsbetweenthese questionsand the interrogationof the conceptof secularizationopenedby HansBlumenberg'sDie
Legitimitaitder Neuzeit [The Legitimacyof the ModernAge]. Remarkably, the Frenchpost-Marxistdiscussiontracedhere developed without
any apparentknowledge of Blumenberg'scritique of Karl L6with and
Carl Schmitt.Indeed,when Blumenberg'smagnumopus finally appeared
in Frenchtranslationin 1999, Denis Trierweilercharacterizedthe absence
9. JacquesDerrida,Spectersof Marx.TheStateof the Debt, the Workof Mourning
& the New International,trans.Peggy Kamuf(New York:Routledge,1994) 122.

WarrenBreckman
77
of Blumenbergin Franceas an "autismof reception."'0The fact thatthis

French discussion unfolded without referenceto the importantGerman
secularizationdebate lends furtherinterestto the retumrn
of the politicoin
France.
I
will
return
at
the
end
of
the essay to
theological problem
some thoughtsaboutBlumenbergandthe Frenchdebate.
The Return of the Political
Frenchintellectuallife in the late 1970s and 1980s was markedby so
many announcementsof "turns"and "returns"that one sometimes feels
caught in a Parisiantrafficcircle. In 1976, a special issue of the journal
Esprit announced what was surely one of the most significant: the
"returnof the political."Of course, politics had never gone away, least
of all in the form of the philosophe engagd. However,in the mid-1970s,
there were indicationsof a revival of politics as an object of serious historical and philosophicalreflection.Numerousthinkerswho had earlier
viewed politics as an epiphenomenonof the social base now looked to
the 'political' as a field of "powerand law, state and nation, equality
and justice, identity and difference, citizenship and civility."11In this
Castoriadisand ClaudeLefortplayed majorroles. As
revival, Comrnelius
the co-foundersof the militantgroupandjournalSocialisme ou Barbarie in 1948, Lefort and Castoriadishad staked out a unique ground in
French political culture.12They opposed with great vigor the Soviet
Union, the Parti CommunisteFrangaise,the Parti Socialiste, French
Trotskyism, and fellow-traveling intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre.
Although they distanced themselves from all the main tendencies of
Frenchmilitantpolitics, Castoriadisand Lefort remainedstaunchcritics
modes
of westerncapitalism,which they denouncedfor its bureaucratized
of dominationand exploitation.In oppositionto the Fordistcapitalismof
10. Trierweiler,"Un autisme de la reception- A propos de la traductionde La
Lcgitimitedes Tempsmodernesde HansBlumenbergen France,"Esprit,no. 7 (Jul.2000):
51-62. This situationhas been furtherremediedby Jean-ClaudeMonod'smajorstudy,La
Querellede la Secularisation.Theologiepolitiqueetphilosophies de l 'histoirede Hegel a
Blumenberg(Paris:Vrin,2002).
11. PierreRosanvallon,Chaired'histoiremoderneet contemporainedu politique:
LegonInauguralefaitelejeudi 28 mars2002 (Paris:Coll~gede France,Seuil, 2003) 11.
12. On the group's history,see PhilippeGouttraux,'Socialismeou Barbarie'. Un
engagementpolitique et intellectueldans la France de I 'apres-guerre(Lausanne:Editions
PayotLausanne,1997);Dick Howard,TheMarxianLegacy(Minneapolis:U MinnesotaP,
1988); and StephenHastings-King,"Onthe MarxistImaginaryand the Problemof Practice: Socialismeou Barbarie,1952-6,"ThesisEleven49 (1997): 69-84.

78
the West and the organized "state capitalism"of the East, they pioneered a politics based on worker self-management[autogestion] and
direct democracy.Lefort left Socialisme ou Barbaricin 1958 when he
and Castoriadisfell into disagreementover the form of the group, and
Castoriadisdisbandedit in 1966 afterhis decisive rejectionof Marxism
producedintractabledivisionsamongthe members.
Importantas Socialisme ou Barbariemay look in retrospect,its history played out at the marginsof Frenchintellectuallife. That changed
when new circumstancescreated a receptive audience for their ideas.
For one thing, the events of 1968 loosened the hold of the FrenchCommunist Party and produceda fragmentedLeft, includingthe short-lived
Maoist Gauche Prolktarienne and the so-called Deuxikme Gauche,
which subscribedto the politicalgoal of autogestionthathad been articulated by Socialisme ou Barbarie. For another, the "Common Program,"the 1972 electoralalliancebetweenthe FrenchCommunistParty
and the Socialist Party, drove many noncommunistleftist intellectuals
furtheraway from the majorleft-wing parties.Further,the Frenchpublication of AlexanderSolzenitsyn'sGulag Archipelagogenerateda shock
that jolted leftist intellectuals. The "Gulag Effect" produced some
thoughtful meditations,including Claude Lefort's Un homme en trop,
but it also spawnedthe media savvy New Philosophers,who combined
a hair-shirtand ashes rejectionof their formerleftism with bald assertions that all forms of power corruptequally. The New Philosophers
tried to claim affiliation with Castoriadisand Lefort, but both strenuously refused the tribute. Though the New Philosophersshared little
the wave of antitowith the older men beyond the word "totalitarian,"
renew
interest
in three decades
did
talitarianrhetoricundoubtedly help
of seriousphilosophicalandpoliticalwritingby LefortandCastoriadis.
The ideological conjuncturethat thrustpolitical philosophy,and more
specifically, sustainedreflectionupon the experienceof moderndemocracy and its Doppelganger,totalitarianism,into the centerof Frenchdiscussion may be traced in the sociology and institutionalhistory of
Parisianintellectuallife. Between 1971 and 1980, Lefort and Castoriadis participatedin the foundingof two new politicaljournals, Textures
and Libre, along with Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Clastres, and Miguel
Abinsour.Gauchet,who had been Lefort's studentat the University of
Caen in the 1960s, authoredthe article "L'expdriencetotalitaireet la
pens~e de la politique,"[The TotalitarianExperienceand the Thought

WarrenBreckman
79
of the Political]which dominatedthe 1976 special issue of Esprit on the

return of politics. Further,in 1980, Gauchet collaboratedwith Pierre
Nora on foundingthe journalLe DLbat,which quickly establisheditself
as the most influentialParisianperiodicalin the 1980s. FrangoisFuret's
historical writings on the French Revolution broke with the Marxist
school and exploredthe Revolutionas modernity'sfirst experimentwith
democracy;and under Furet'spresidency,the Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) became the epicenterof this revival of
political philosophy.UnderFuret'spatronage,Lefortin 1976 and Castoriadis in 1980 were elected Directeursd'6tudes [directorsof studies].
PierreRosanvallonwrites that their elections gave an "alan ddcisif" to
political studies at the Ecole.13A monthly seminaron politics, history
of political thought, and political philosophy began at the Ecole in
1977. As Rosanvallon remembers,"What made this group special is
that it linked togethertwo differentgenerations.There was the generation of FrangoisFuret, Claude Lefort, CorneliusCastoriadis,Krzysztof
Pomian, but there were also, from the very beginning,Marcel Gauchet,
BernardManin,PierreManent,and myself."l4In 1985, this same group
foundedthe InstitutRaymondAron. This institutionalinitiativewas followed in the 1990s by the creationof numerousjournals committedto
politicalphilosophyandthe historyof politicalthought.'5
Although Furet was the not-so-grayeminence behind most of these
developments,includingLefortand Castoriadis'selectionsto the EHESS,
it would be a mistake simply to identify them with Furet's efforts to
remakethe Ecole in his image. Indeed,both divergedfrom Furet'spolitics. While Furetbelieved that the FrenchRevolution'ssearch for "pure
Castoridemocracy"formednothingless thanthe matrixof totalitarianism,
adis championeddirectdemocracyuntilhis deathin 1997. AlthoughLefort
was closer politicallyto Furet,nonethelesshe criticizedFuret'sneo-Tocand instead
quevilleanassociationof the Revolutionwith totalitarianism,
emphasizedthe Revolution'srole in inauguratingthe indeterminate,open
13. PierreRosanvallon,"Le politique,"Une dcolepour les sciences sociales. De la
Ve section l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, ed. Jacques Revel and
at (Paris:Editionsdu CERF,Editionsde l'Ecole des hautesetudes en sciNathan Wachtel
ences sociales, 1996) 300.
14. Pierre Rosanvallon, cited in Andrew Jainchill and Samuel Moyn, "French
Democracy between Totalitarianismand Solidarity:Pierre Rosanvallonand Revisionist
Journalof ModernHistory76.1 (Mar.2004): 107-54.
Historiography,"
15. JeremyJennings,"TheReturnof the Political?New FrenchJournalsin the History of PoliticalThought,"Historyof Political Thought18.1 (Spring 1997): 148-156.

80
social experienceof democracy.Where Furet'spolitics centeredon the

need for stable representativeinstitutions,Lefortgave his supportto the
pluralisticactivismof the new social movementsthatemergedafter 1968.
Gauchet,by contrast,has commentedrecentlythatbetweenFuretand himself, there existed "thatmysteriousthing that is a deeply spontaneous
accord."16Gauchet,who was a generationyoungerthanFuret,Lefortand
Castoriadis,was indeedperceivedas Furet'sprotege.In fact, Furet'sopponents blockedGauchet'selectionto the icole until 1990, when Furetstrategicallywithdrewhis supportfor his candidacy.Gauchetwill returnin the
final sectionsof the paper,wherewe shall see how his deploymentof the
theologico-politicalquestionin the mid-1980sintersectedwith Furet'spolitics. Forthe moment,let us turnto Castoriadis.
Castoriadisand Religious Heteronomy
Castoriadis'scommitmentto radicaldirect democracyled him into a
sharply antagonisticrelationshipto religion. Equatingautonomy with
the breakthroughof humanself-assertion,Castoriadisviewed religion as
absolute heteronomy."Autonomy"is the key term of the social and
political theory that Castoriadisdeveloped afterhis 1963 announcement
that radicalsnow faced the choice of remainingeitherMarxistsor revolutionaries.From then until his death,he defendedthese redefinedradical politics that he termedthe "projectof autonomy."He conceived of it
as both an individualand a social project.On the individuallevel, it is an
ongoing projectthat develops the capacityfor reflectiveself-understanding and deliberateactivitythat allows "the subjector humansubjectivity
properlyspeaking"to put social boundariesand even itself into question.
As a collective political task, wrote Castoriadisin 1972, the project of
autonomyis a strugglefor a "new relationof society to its institutions,
for the instaurationof a new state of affairs in which man as a social
being is able and willing to regardthe institutionsthatrule his life as his
own collective creations,and hence is able and willing to transformthem
each time he has the need or the desire."17This uncompromisingvision
of directdemocracydrawshistoricalsustenancefrom the example of the
ancientGreekpolis as well as the real advancesthat democraticself-rule
16. Marcel Gauchet,"De Texturesau Dibat ou la revue comme creuset de la vie
intellectuelle,"La ConditionHistorique.Entretiensavec FrancoisAzouviet SylvainPiron
(Paris:Stock,2003) 167.
17. Cornelius Castoriadis,Political and Social Writings,Volume1, trans. David
Ames Curtis(Minneapolis:U MinnesotaP, 1988) 31.

WarrenBreckman
81
had made in the modem world;and it is built from a uniquesynthesisof

Kantian,Fichtean,Freudianandphenomenologicalelements.
In his effort to rethinkradical politics as a liberatingpraxis and an
activity of imaginativecreation,Castoriadislinked the projectof autonomy to a deepeningcritiqueof the deterministtendenciesembeddedin
western conceptions of being and knowledge. According to him, the
"inheritedlogic-ontology"of this traditionis dominatedby rationalist
categories that reduce all beings to the criterionthat, in Kant's words,
"to be is to be determined."In place of this deeply rooted ontological
orientation toward the determinateand the determined, Castoriadis
introduced a new ontological hypothesis and argued for a "hitherto
unsuspected type of stratification [of being] [. . .] an organization of
layers that in part adheretogether,in terms of an endless succession in

depth of layers of being that are always organized, but never completely, always articulatedtogether,but never fully."18Being, he speculates, is locally organizable or determinable,but overall, being is
"chaos,""abyss,"and "groundlessness."All living beings, including of
course humans,are possible becausethey exist in a parasitizingor ontological symbiosis with a stratumof total being that is locally organizable.19 Westernthought has focused on this level of local lending or
organizationand understoodit as being as such, but it is only at the
expense of covering over the chaos that is also in being. This ontological understandinghas restrictedour cognition of the naturalworld, and
it has obscuredwhat is ontologicallyunique about the social-historical
world. In place of inheritedthought'srationalisticimpulseto subjectthe
social and historicalto deterministiclogic, Castoriadisemphasizes contingency, creation, and "radicalalterity,"the ex nihilo emergence of
novel forms of social life. In one of his most distinctivereformulations
of social thought,he describesthe social-historicalas thatregion of overall being formedby the 'social imaginary',the creativepower by which a
to instisociety drawson a 'magma'of significationsand representations
tute itself as a specific mode and type of human coexistence. Though
Castoriadisemphasizesthatex nihilo creationdoes not occur outside of a
concrete context, no model of causality can exhaustively explain the
18. Cornelius Castoriadis, "Modern Science and Philosophical Interrogation,"Crossroadsin the Labyrinth,trans.KateSoperandMartinH. Ryle (Cambridge,MA:
MIT P, 1984) 172.
19. CorneliusCastoriadis,"TheLogic of Magmasandthe Questionof Autonomy,"
TheCastoriadisReader,ed. David Ames Curtis(Cambridge,MA: Blackwell, 1997) 307.

82
imaginativeacts whereby a collectivity creates meaning and 'materializes' these significationsin institutions.
Every society is institutedby humancreation,Castoriadisargues, but
at only two times in human history have societies acknowledgedhowever incompletely- the role of the creativeimaginationin the formation of social institutions:once in the ancientGreekdemocraciesand
again in Europefromthe late MiddleAges onward.Moretypically,societies occult this self-creationby imputingit to an extra-socialsource.
Hence, the characteristicmodality of humanity'srelation to the chaos
that surroundsand is part of itself is a double movementof annunciation and denunciation,institutionand occultation. Castoriadis'smost
extensive analysisof the tension between institutionand occultationwas
writtenbetween 1978 and 1980 in his essay "The Institutionof Society
and Religion." In it, religion becomes synonymous with heteronomy,
concealing the human act of significationwhereby social life is given
form. Attributingthe origin of the social institutionto a transcendent
extra-socialsource stabilizesthe enigma of humanself-creation,assigning it an origin, foundation,and cause outsideof society itself. Although
religion recognizes contingency and creation, it also veils them, inasmuch as "social imaginarysignificationsalways providefor the Abyss a
Simulacrum,a Figure, an Image - at the limit, a Name or a Wordwhich 're-present' it and which are its instituted presentation:the
Sacred."20The significationof the Sacred brings the Abyss back into
society as an immanentpresence,as a space and a ritualizedpractice,but
it remainsthe Otherthat confersmeaningupon society fromthe outside.
Religion is thus a double misrecognition,of the Abyss and of society's
own creation and creativity.In contrastto the heteronomyof religion,
autonomyrequiresa recoveryof the institutingpower and the lucid recognition of ourselvesas the originof our law. Castoriadisdoes not mean
this to imply the masteryof the outside, but ratherwhat he calls "the
permanentopeningof the abyssalquestion:'Whatcan be the measureof
society if no extra-socialstandardexists, what can and what should be
the law if no externalnorm can serve for it as a term of comparison,
what can be life over the Abyss once it is understoodthat it is absurdto
assign to the Abyss a precise figure, be it that of an Idea, a Value, or a
20. Cornelius Castoriadis,"Institutionof Society and Religion," Worldin Fragments. Writingson Politics, Society,Psychoanalysis,and the Imagination,ed. and trans.
David Ames Curtis(Stanford:StanfordUP, 1997) 324.

WarrenBreckman
83
Meaningdeterminedonce and for all?"'21Translatedinto politicalterms,

this vision of interminablequestioningassumes an unbridgeablegap
between religion as closure and democracyas openness to contingency
and human self-creation.22Indeed,autonomydemandsa kind of heroic
assumptionof responsibility,but also a chasteningsense of our finitude,
once it is recognizedthatno extra-socialstandardexists.
The absence of such standardsmeans that democracyis the "regime
of historicalrisk,"a "tragicregime."A democracymust be a "regimeof
self-limitation,"and this means that democracymust have institutions
of self-limitation. Significantly, in a 1983 discussion of the ancient
Atheniandemocracy,Castoriadisidentifiedtragedyas one such institution of self-limitation. Where many interpretershave read Athenian
tragedyas an outgrowthof the cultic practicesof Greekreligion, Castoriadis emphasizes its "cardinalpolitical dimension,"namely its presentation of the chaos of Being and the "absenceof orderfor man [. . .]
More than that, tragedy shows not only that we are not mastersof the
consequencesof our actions, but that we are not even masters of their
meaning."From this perspective,Castoriadisreads Antigone not as a
play about the supremacyof divine law over human or as the insurmountable conflict between these two principles, as Hegel had. The
play does not warn against Creon's insistence on the human law, but
against the hubris of Creon's"adamantwill to apply the norms"of the
city without any cautionarysense of the uncertaintyof the situation,the
impurityof motives, or the inconclusivecharacterof the reasoningupon
which political decisions rest. When Creon's son, Aimon, acknowledges that he cannot prove his father wrong, but begs him not to
"monosphronein, 'not to be wise alone'," Sophocles "formulatesthe
fundamentalmaxim of democraticpolitics."23On one level, Castoriadis agrees with Hannah Arendt, who sees the political art par excellence in tragedy as far as it develops political judgment through its
capacity to representa process of recognitionand foster the ability of
citizens to see things from the perspectiveof their fellow citizens. Yet
Castoriadisextends that point by arguing that tragedy intensifies the
commitment to autonomy by representingnot the positivity of the
21. Castoriadis,"Institutionof Society and Religion"329.
22. See also CorneliusCastoriadis,"TheRevolutionBefore the Theologians:For a
Critical/PoliticalReflectionon OurHistory,"Worldin Fragments72.
23. CorneliusCastoriadis,"TheGreekPolls andthe Creationof Democracy,"Philosophy,Politics,Autonomy,trans.DavidAmes Curtis(New York:OxfordUP, 1991) 119-20.

84
foundation,as in religion,but,rather,society's lack of foundation.Where

Arendt emphasizesthe power of tragedyto incite citizens to "self-display and agonisticstriving,"Castoriadisarguesfroma participatorydemocratic perspectivethat tragedy'smetaphysicaldisclosuresencourageda
spiritof mutuality,collectivedeliberation,andself-limitation.24
Castoriadis'sdiscussion of tragedy is just one example of his insistence on the impossibilityof ever masteringeither the psyche or society. Nonetheless, numerous critics have taxed him with harboring
dreamsof transparency.
ClaudeLefort,for one, believed that he perpetuated a myth rooted in Marxism of "a society able to master its own
developmentand to communicatewith all its parts, a society able in a
way to see itself"25NotwithstandingCastoriadis'sdisavowals, his theory of autonomydoes expose itself to this criticism,insofaras he sometimes speaks ratherimpreciselyof society as if it were a coherententity
or, even worse, an agent. His tendencyto affirmthe creativityof "society" itself has producedthe ironic consequence that despite his conscious effort to positionhimself at the farthestremove from any positive
relationto religion, he has been attackedfor covertly reinstatinga theological mode of thought.This is the core of JtirgenHabermas'scritique
of Castoriadis.After praisingCastoriadis'sattemptto "thinkthroughthe
liberatingmediationof history,society, externaland internalnatureonce
again as praxis"as one of the most originalcontributionsto postwarradical thought,Habermaschargesthat his social imaginaryis a "languagecreating, world-projecting, world-devouring [. . .] social demiurge."26
Habermas'smisgivings are repeatedby his studentAxel Honneth and

much amplified by one of his followers, Friedhelm L6venich, who
detects an exact parallelbetween the role of God in traditionalphilosophy and the radical imaginaryin Castoriadis:"origin,source, signified
that from which all stems and
and signifier,law-giver,meaning-creator,
to which all returns,the alpha and the omega."27Ldvenichgoes so far
as to label the social imaginarya new theology,a new myth.
The scope of Castoriadis'seffort to rethinkautonomyas a personal
24. On Arendt, see Robert C. Pirro,HannahArendtand the Politics of Tragedy
(DeKalb,IL:NorthernIllinoisUP,2001) esp. 153-86.
25. "An Interviewwith ClaudeLefort,"Telos30 (1976-77): 185.
26. JiirgenHabermas,ThePhilosophicalDiscourse of Modernity TwelveLectures,
trans.FrederickG. Lawrence(Cambridge,MA: MITP, 1991) 327
27. Axel Honneth,"Rescuingthe Revolutionwith an Ontology:On CorneliusCastoriadis'sTheoryof Society,"TheFragmentedWorldof the Social. Essays in Social and
Political Philosophy,ed. C.W. Wright(Albany:SUNY, 1995) 168-83; FriedhelmLivenich, "Heiligsprechungdes Imaginfiren.Das Imaginitrein CorneliusCastoriadis'Gesellschaftstheorie,"The Social Horizon of Knowledge,ed. Piotr Buczkowski (Amsterdam:
RodoDi,1991) 165.

WarrenBreckman
85
and political projectdid lead him onto terraintraditionallyoccupied by

theology. Importantcategoriesof his philosophyresonatewith residual
theological meaning,most notablycreatio ex nihilo. It sometimes seems
as if his theory of the creativity of the social imaginaryreinstates a
monotheisticlogic, a peril not unknownto theorists of radical democracy since Rousseaufirst modeled the generalwill on divine potency.28
Conversely, were it the aim of this paper to do so, there are various
ways to challenge the charges of Habermas,L6venich, and Honneth.
The assertionthatthe imaginaryis "world-projecting"
neglects Castoriadis's two-sided descriptionof the world as lending itself to signification
and as an "inexhaustiblesupply of othernessand an [. . .] irreducible
challenge to every establishedsignification.29The claim that the imaginary is a demiurgic force runs contraryto Castoriadis'semphasis on
praxis understoodas the undertakingsof finite subjectsin specific contexts or his insistencethat by "autonomy"he means the effectiveautonomy of effective men and women. His rejection of "Sartreanfreedom,
the lightning stroke without density or attachment,"indicates a general
rejectionof the dreamof absoluteautonomyand revelatoryeruptionsin
history.30More broadly, an adequate response to the Habermasians
would requirean explorationof the place of metaphorin modernphilosophical discourse.Castoriadishimself believed that all theoreticallanguage is necessarily metaphorical,and he sometimes cautionedthat he
was speaking metaphorically,as when he claims that societies pose
"questions"and find "answers"or when he raises the question of origins. Hans Blumenberg'sefforts to develop a "metaphorology"of the
metaphoricaldimensionof essentiallyunanswerablequestionsthat cannot, however, be eliminated,might provide an appropriateavenue for
pursuingthis problem.31Particularlyrelevantare Blumenberg'sinsights
into the "reoccupationof [theological]answerpositionsthat had become
vacantand whose correspondingquestionscould not be eliminated."32It
28. See PatrickRiley, TheGeneralWillbeforeRousseau:TheTransformation
of the
Divine into the Civic (Princeton:PrincetonUP, 1986).
29. Cornelius Castoriadis,The ImaginaryInstitutionof Society, trans. Kathleen
(Cambridge,MA: MIT,1987) 371.
Blamrney
30. CorneliusCastoriadis,"TheEthicists'New Clothes,"Worldin Fragments122.
31. Hans Blumenberg,"Paradigmenzu einer Metaphorologie,"
ArchivfiirBegriffsgeschichte, Bd. 15, (Bonn:BouvierVerlagH. Grundmann,1983) 285-315; and Hans Blumenberg, Asthetische und metaphorologische Schriften, ed. Anselm Haverkamp
(Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp,2001).
32. Hans Blumenberg,Legitimacyof the ModernAge, trans. Robert M. Wallace
(Cambridge,MA: MIT P, 1983) 65.

86
would, of course, remainto be determinedwhetherCastoriadisinstantiates Blumenberg'sclaim that modernthoughthas been overburdenedby

its willingness to take on the debt of prescribedquestionsinheritedfrom
its theologicalpast.
Lefort and DemocraticDisembodiment
Claude Lefort's assertion that his erstwhile Socialisme ou Barbarie
comrade remained tied to a revolutionarydream of social transparency directly contrastswith his own insistence that the social is constituted by a continual exchange between the 'visible' and the
'invisible'. This phrasing suggests a certain openness in Lefort's
thinking to the lessons of religion; but in the first instance, it reveals
the profound influence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty,who was Lefort's
teacher in the 1940s and remained Lefort's closest intellectual interlocutor until his sudden death in 1961. In The Visibleand the Invisible, Merleau-Pontypresents the 'invisible' as the "lining" and the
"inexhaustible depth" of the visible, the necessary and constitutive
relationship between figure and ground, surface and depth, presence
and absence. Accordingto Merleau-Ponty,these are not static ratios, but
chiasmatic exchanges in which the visible and the invisible intertwine
and reverse.Nor is the invisible the non-visible or the "absoluteinvisible, which would have nothing to do with the visible. Rather,it is the
invisible of this world, that which inhabitsthis world, sustains it, and
renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this
being."33Together,visible and invisible form the "flesh of the world,"
Merleau-Ponty'skey phrasedesignatingthe world as a horizon of generalvisibility in which the humanis embeddedas both seer and seen.
Lefort,who edited The Visibleand the Invisibleafter Merleau-Ponty's
death, took over the notion of 'flesh' as a centralcategory in his political philosophy.The "flesh of the social" signifies the political principle
of general social visibility. Whereas modem social science has taken
the political, the social, the private,the public, the economic, the religious, as so many distinct objects, Lefort searches for the "originary
form," the "politicalform," by which the social acquires its "original
Lefort opens his Essais sur le politique by invoking
dimensionality."34
33. MauriceMerleau-Ponty,The Visibleand the Invisible,ed. ClaudeLefort,trans.
AlphonsoLingis (Evanston:NorthwesternUP, 1968) 151.
34. Lefort,cited in BernardFlynn,Political Philosophyat the ClosureofMetaphysics (AtlanticHighlands,NJ: HumanitiesPress, 1992) 178.

WarrenBreckman
87
the concept of politeia or regime. "The word is worth retaining,"he

writes, "only if we give it all the resonance it has when used in the
expression 'the ancien regime'."In that sense, regime combinesthe idea
of a "type of constitution,"understoodin the broad sense of "form of
government"and "structureof power,"and a "styleof existenceor mode
of life."35The investigationof differencesbetweenregimesprohibitsthe
designationof politics as a particularsector of social life. Rather,the
political is a formativeprincipleof the social experienceitself, not a historicaldevelopmentimposedon a pre-existingsocial order.
Where Castoriadisdefines politics as an "explicit collective activity
that aims at being lucid (reflective and deliberate)and whose object is
the institutionof society as such," Lefort defines the political as the
principles that generate a society as a specific form of human life.
Lefort calls the political "a hidden part of social life, namely the processes which make people consent to a given regime - or, to put it
more forcefully, which determinetheir manner of being in society and which guaranteethat this regime or mode of society has a permanence in time, regardlessof the various events that may affect it."36In
brief, the 'political' is Lefort'stranslationof the 'visible' and the 'invisible' into political terms. Marcel Gauchet, who was in turn strongly
influencedby Lefort,formulatesthis even more clearly when he writes,
"the political constitutesthe most encompassinglevel of the organization [of society], not a subterranean
level, butveiled in the visible."37
Given these phenomenological assumptions about the chiasmatic
exchangebetween the near and the remote,between social visibility and
its invisible lining, Lefort perceives a point of contact between politics
and religion. This is the case not only because both are constitutedby
specific forms of exchange between the visible and the invisible, but
because throughouttheir mutualhistory,they have been intertwinedchiasmaticallyas the visible and invisible of each other.The interrogative
title of Lefort's major essay on religion and politics, "The Permanence
of the Theologico-Political?"(1981), suggests this relationship of
mutual inherence. Indeed, one of the main argumentsof the essay is
that religion reveals somethingfundamentalaboutthe political. Or more
35. ClaudeLefort,Democracyand Political Theory,trans.David Macey (Minneapolis: U MinnesotaP, 1988) 2-3.
36. Lefort, "Permanenceof the Theologico-Political?"Democracy and Political
Theory215-16.
37. Gauchet,Le ddbat50 (1988): 168-9.

French Post-Marxism and the Return of Religion
88
precisely, religion reveals an insight that philosophical thought should

try to preserve, namely the
experienceof a differencewhich goes beyonddifferencesof opinion [.
S.]; the experience of a difference which is not at the disposal of
humanbeings, whose advent does not take place within humanhistory,andwhich cannotbe abolishedtherein;the experienceof a difference which relateshumanbeings to theirhumanity,and which means
thattheirhumanitycannotbe self-contained,that it cannotset its limits, and that it cannot absorb its origins and ends into those limits.
Every religionstatesin its own way thathumansociety can only open
on to itself by being held in an openingit did not create.'s
The philosophercannotaccept the languagein which religion expresses

itself, but from religionhe learnsthe "experienceof alterityin language,
and of a division between creationand unveiling, between activity and
passivity,andbetweenthe expressionandimpressionof meaning."39
The appealto othernessas a way of counteractingpolitical hubrisand
fantasiesof social homogeneitywas a commontheme within the antitotalitariandiscourse of Frenchintellectualsin the late 1970s and 1980s.
Among poststructuralistssuch as Jean-LucNancy and PhilippeLacoueLabarthe,or the self-styled Post-MarxistsChantalMouffe and Ernesto
Laclau, the deconstructionof stable identity - of persons, communities, and meaning- appearedto offer a prophylaxisagainsta totalitarianism that seemed to lurk in all forms of politics. When Jacques
Derridabelatedly enteredthis arenain the early 1990s with Specters of
Marx, numerousreviewers accused him of cynicism for claiming that
deconstructionhad always "remainedfaithful to a certain spirit of
Marxism."40He had in fact made hints in that directionfor years; but
as he explainedat a conferencein 1981, he had remainedsilent so as to
avoid contributingto the "anti-Marxistconcert"of the post-1968 years.
His strategy,he reported,was markedin his writingsby a "sortof withdrawalor retreat[retrait],a silence with respectto Marxism- a blank
signifying [...] that Marxismwas not attackedlike such and such other
theoretical comfort [. . .] This blank was not neutral [. . .] It was a per-
ceptible political gesture."41The triumphalismof the post-ColdWarera

38.
of theTheologico-Political?"
222.
Lefort,"Permanence
224.
39. Lefort,"Permanenceof the Theologico-Political?"
40. Derrida,Spectersof Marx75.
41. Derridaquoted in Nancy Fraser,"The FrenchDerrideans:Politicizing Deconstructionor Deconstructingthe Political?"New GermanCritique33 (1984): 133-4.

WarrenBreckman
89
finally provoked him to defend Marx, or at least a "certainspirit" of

Marx. That is, Derrida rejected Marx's determinist ontology, but
affirmedMarxism'slonging forjustice.
This is, essentially, a variant of the strategy followed by Nancy,
Lacoue-Labarthe,Laclau, and Mouffe in the 1980s. What really distinguishes Derrida'sinterventionis his revival of the messianic impulse in
Marxism.After all, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe
had sought to "retreat"
God - in the sense of both revisit and drive back - in precisely the
same way as politics. Both God and politics are associated with a
monological philosophy of the subject. Jean-FrangoisLyotard had
believed that a paralogical democracy must be godless. Laclau and
Mouffe had criticized religion as hegemonic discourse.Even as late as
1989, Derridahimself was reluctantto link his idea of justice to messianism. By 1993, though he still rejectedany determinatemessianic content, Derridainsistedon the messianicform as an inseparabledimension
of every promise.42This too was not a sudden about-facefor Derrida.
Already in his 1980 essay "Of an ApocalypticTone Recently Adopted
in Philosophy,"Derridahad lamentedhis contemporaries'hasty abandonment of Marxist eschatology.43Moreover,Derrida'speriodic interest in deconstruction'srelationshipto negative theology foreshadowed
his messianic yearning for the totally other.44Derrida'sreferences to
WalterBenjamin'snotion of a "weak messianic force," as well as his
opposition to any attempt to representthe messianic hope, suggest,
finally, the possible influence of a more specifically Jewish tradition,a
complex issue that exceeds the scope of this paper.45Here, it is enough
to note that in Specters of Marx and subsequentwork, Derridarefused
to tie the messianic impulse to a specific religion. Indeed, he vacillated
between, on the one hand, treatingthe messianic as a general ontological form and, on the other, linking its universal form to the specific
42. JohnCaputo,ThePrayersand TearsofJacques Derrida.Religion WithoutReligion (Bloomington,IN: IndianaUP, 1997) 117.
43. Jacques Derrida,"Of an ApocalypticTone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,"
ed. RobertDetweiler,Semeia 23: Derridaand Biblical Studies,(Atlanta:ScholarsPress,
1982) 80.
44. In additionto Caputo,see HaroldCowardand Toby Foshay,eds., Derrida and
Negative Theology(Albany: State Universityof New York P, 1992); and Kevin Hart,
"JacquesDerrida.The God Effect,"Post-SecularPhilosophy:Between Philosophy and
Theology,ed. PhillipBlond (New York:Routledge,1998) 259-80.
45. On Derrida'srelationshipto Benjamin,see the subtle discussion in Hent de
Vries, Religion and Violence.Philosophical Perspectivesfrom Kant to Derrida (Baltimore:Johns HopkinsUP,2002) esp. 266-87.

90
events of revelation in the three religions of the Book.46 Specters of

Marx leans heavily on the former hypothesis, resurrectinga messianism without content, what Derridacalls the "messianicand emancipatory promise [. . .] as promise and not as onto-theological or teleo-
eschatologicalprogramor design."47
Separated from eschatology and teleology, messianism becomes a
hope without hope, an impossible attachmentto a democracythat is
always "h venir,"always 'to come.' This formulationoffers a precise
political counterpartto the play on a Dieu and adieu that animatesDerrida's The Gift of Death and otherworks from the 1990s. Hent De Vries
presentsthe adieu as the core of Derrida'sreturnto religion insofaras it
summonsup all "the ambiguityof a movementtowardGod, towardthe
word or the name of God, and a no less dramaticfarewellto almost all
the canonical, dogmatic,or onto-theologicalinterpretationsof this very
same 'God'."48As with the figure of the adieu, the messianic topos
allows Derridato affirm the yearning for democracy,while avoiding
any hint of "Sameness"or closure that might raise the dangerof totalitarian thinking. That this "messianicity without messianism" spills
directly over into "religionwithoutreligion"becomes manifest in Derrida's recent essay "Faith and Knowledge."There, Derridathe atheist
attemptsto separatereligion from fundamentalism,identifyingthe religious instead with "reticence, distance, dissociation, disjunction"and
naming futuritythe temporalsensibilityof the religious. This is a rather
arbitraryand selective definitionof the religious consideringthe powerful impulse toward closure that has dominatedthe history of religions;
but selectively identifying religion with deferraland infinite otherness
serves Derrida'sneeds because it sharesthe qualitiesof the 'democracy
to come'. Religion and democracythus intertwine.Indeed,the religious
and the political prove inseparable:"The fundamentalconcepts that
often permit us to isolate or to pretend to isolate the political [ . .]
remain religious or in any case theologico-political."Derridapresents
this position as if it were opposed to Carl Schmitt, as if Schmitt had
been forced grudginglyto acknowledgethat his "ostensiblypurelypolitical categories"were in fact the "productof a secularizationor of a
theologico-politicalheritage."Yet it was Schmitt who articulatedand
46. Caputo,Prayersand Tears136.
47. Derrida,Spectersof Marx75.
48. Hent De Vries,Philosophyand the Turnto Religion(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins
UP, 1999) 24.

WarrenBreckman
91
embracedthat theological genealogy and tried to mobilize it as the ultimate source of the power of political concepts. Ultimately, despite Derrida's effort to distance himself from Schmitt's political theology by
linking politics to the deferrals of religion instead of to its potencies, he
and Schmitt both end up at the conviction that the significant concepts
of modern politics are secularized theological concepts.49
Claude Lefort's claim that the philosopher should learn from religion
would seem to unify religion and politics permanently so long as politics resists the illusion of pure self-immanence and clings to a primordial knowledge of otherness. However, Lefort resists this kind of
conclusion and arguesthat it threatensto negate the meaningof the historical separation of democracy from religion. Derrida's position leads
to the view that a new symbolic representation of a power that has no
religious basis merely conceals the displacement and perpetuation of
religious content. Certainly, considering the practices of democracy
since the French Revolution, Lefort finds ample evidence of democracy's entanglement in religion. For example, from the Jacobins
onward, democracy has been haunted by the Christian logic of incarnation, by the impulse to represent the nation as an actual being or, in
Jules Michelet's phrase, to imagine the sovereign "people" as the democratic Christ. This desire to close the gap between the symbolic representation of power and the complexity of the real through the logic of
embodiment lived on in twentieth-century fantasies of the party, the
nation, the class, the race, and the leader and it has been accompanied
by efforts to unite the existence of democracy in historical time with
permanent duration. Hence, not only the attempt to immortalize the
institutions of democracy, but in the most extreme instance, the "persistence of the theologico-political vision of the immortal body" expressed
literally in the mummification of the leader.50
Rather than taking those entanglements as signs of democracy's intrac-
table relianceon religion, it is significantthat Lefortreadsthem as phenomena of a transitional epoch. In fact, he insists on the radical novelty
of democracy, which lies in the open, indeterminate, and unmasterable
49. Derrida,"Faithand Knowledge:The Two Sourcesof 'Religion' at the Limitsof
ReasonAlone,"Religion,ed. JacquesDerridaand GianniVattimo(Stanford:StanfordUP,
1998) 25-26. See CarlSchmitt,Political Theology.Four Chapterson the Conceptof Sovereignty,trans. George Schwab (Cambridge,MA: MIT P, 1988) 36. For a subtle, albeit
thoroughlyDerrideandiscussion of the differencesbetween Derridaand Schmitt,see De
Vries, Religionand Violenceesp. 353-70.
50. Lefort,"TheDeathof Immortality?"
Democracyand Political Theory274.

92
social experience that it generates. Lefort traces this experience to a

"symbolicmutation"in the orderof power,whereinpower underwenta
in the period of transitionfrom monarchyto
radical "disincorporation"
democracy.Inspiredby ErnstKantorowicz'sseminalwork on the medieval image of the king's body as a double body, mortaland immortal,
individualand collective, Lefort arguesthat even in the ancien rigime,
the monarchstill incarnatedpower, knowledge and law in the unity of
his body. The novel radicalismof moderndemocracylies in its disincorporationor disembodimentof power in the name of an egalitarianperception of social relations.Democraticpower is a "lieu vide,"an "empty
place." Democraticpower may be contested - indeed it depends on
contest - but no one can appropriate,occupy or incarnateit, nor can
such power be 'represented'.With the disembodimentof power goes a
dispersal of power, knowledge, and law. They enter into contentious
relations,cannotbe masteredby a single logic of representation,and are
always in 'excess' of each other.Moderndemocracyis thus markedby
the simultaneousloss of foundationand the interminablesearch for
foundation,the loss of a notion of legitimatepower and the opening of
an interminabledebate as to what is legitimate.Democracy institutesa
society in which division is not disruptive,but constitutiveof the social
domain. As Bernard Flynn writes, "the non-identity of society with
itself makes possible (enables) a discourseon the political."Such a discourse was not repressed in pre-modernsociety, because it was not
"symbolicallyenabled."51Of pre-modernsocieties, Lefort asserts that,
"Whenreflectionexerciseditself on power,the organizationof the City,
the causes of its corruption,it remainedrigorously subordinatedto a
theological representationof the world, which alone fixed the markers
of the real and the imaginary,the true and the false, the good and the
evil. Therewas not for thoughta place of the political[. . .]"52
The political event of modern democracyis thus also a "metaphysical event," a tear in the tissue of human belief and symbolic order.
Ratherthan proceedingas Carl Schmitt (and Derrida) do by identifying this symbolic change as concealing an underlyingcontinuity with
religion, Lefort emphasizes the efficacy of the symbolic: the appearance of a power that disavows the religious does have the capacity to
51. Flynn,Political Philosophyat the Closureof Metaphysics188-89.
52. Claude Lefort, "La Naissance de l'Iddologieet Humanisme,"Les Formes de
l 'Histoire(Paris:Gallimard,1978) 236.

WarrenBreckman
93
constitutea new practice.Hence, he endorsesTocqueville'sinsight that

democracy is importantnot for what it "does,"but for what it "causes
to be done," namely its power to arouse constantagitationin people.53
This means that democracycontinuallymoves forwardinto the open,
indeterminate,ungroundedspace of democraticcontestation.But, writes
Lefort,the paradoxof "anynew adventurethat begins with the formulation of a new idea of the state,the people, the nationor humanityis that
it has its roots in the past."54Hence, in the unsettlingearly experience
of democracy,people graspedat religious forms in an attemptto avert
any furtherdissolutionof the social. Moreover,the collapse of theological representationsof the world symbolicallyenabledthe emergenceof
a representationof society as a sui generis creation of human will.
Thus, the theological image of a unified divine will replicateditself in
the image of society as a unified subject, a phantasmaticidentification
that underwritesthe democraticslogan "voxpopuli vox dei" as much as
it does the dream of fusion, the 'People-as-One',in twentieth-century
Lefortdetects a furtherimpulsetowardthe theologicototalitarianism.55
political in the psychical traumathat accompaniedthe disembodiment
of power. With veiled referencesto JacquesLacan,Lefort's essay "The
Image of the Body and Totalitarianism"
suggests that subjects constitute themselves througha specularrelationto the figure of power. The
experience of democracyis akin to the individual'stransitionfrom the
imaginaryto the symbolic;and as with the "ordealof the division of the
subject,"the traumaticloss of the substanceof the body politic is never
fully overcome.56Beyond the Lacanianinflection of this idea, Lefort's
detection of a traumaticcore in democracytaps into the quite specific
meaning of regicide within the French political imagination,wherein
political modernity is tied to the destructionof the king's body and
political libertylinkedprimordiallyto crime.57
Although Lefort arguesthat in times of crisis, the theologico-political
formationmay reassert itself within democraticculture, he asks, "Far
from leading us to concludethatthe fabricof historyis continuous,does
not a reconstructionof the genealogy of democratic representations
53. Lefort, "Reversibility.Political Freedomand the Freedomof the Individual,"
Democracyand Political Theory169.
54. Lefort,"Permanenceof the Theologico-Political?"255.
55. Lefort, "The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,"
The Political Forms of
Society 304.
Modemrn
56. Lefort,"TheImageof the Body and Totalitarianism"306.
57. See Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI. Regicide and the French Political
Imagination(Princeton:PrincetonUP, 1994). Dunnends her studywith AlbertCamus,but
the polyvalentmeaningof regicideseems to continuein Lefort,not to mentionfigureslike
Nancy and Foucault.

94
reveal the extent of the breakwithin it?" Ratherthan seeing democracy

as a new episode in the transferof the religiousinto the political, Lefort
urges us to reflect on the "adventureof theirdisintrication."Like Castoriadis, Lefort insists on a division between religion and the new social
experienceof democracy.However,Lefortremainsmuch more guarded
in his gesturetowardthe projectof autonomy.To a much greaterdegree
than Castoriadis,Lefort circumscribesautonomy by placing the selfdeterminingpower of democraticsociety into an agonistic relationship
with the enigma of the social world's opening onto itself. Clearly,
Lefort means to tie this enigma to democraticpractice and discourse;
for the othernessof the social institutionno longer comes from a figure
of the Other,but inheres in the latency of all identitiesclaimed within
and for democraticsociety. Nonetheless, in the history of democracy,
the enigma of the social institutionhas producedits share of civil religions; and as Derrida'sexample shows, the theologico-politicalremains
capable of reactivation.Modem democracymay not conceal a religious
core; but with Lefort'sterms, the persistenceof the theologico-political
signifies the "unavoidable- and no doubt ontological - difficulty
democracyhas in readingits own story."58The adventureof disintrication seems tortuousandpossibly interminable.
Marcel Gauchetand the Birth of Democracy
from the Spirit of Religion
The question of disintricationis centralto Marcel Gauchet'sThe Disenchantmentof the World.The book was publishedin Francein 1985 to
considerableacclaim and controversy,and it helped establish Gauchet
as one of the leading French intellectualsof his generation.Gauchet's
book bears many signs of the influenceof Castoriadisand Lefort,which
is not surprisinggiven the close relations he maintainedwith the two
older men, as Lefort's studentat Caen in the late 1960s and collaborating with both in the journals Texturesand Libre.59As a studentin the
early 1960s, Gauchet had aligned himself with the Left, but early
58. Lefort, "Permanenceof the Theologico-Political?"255. Lefort has recently
returnedto these ideas in La complication:Retoursur Communisme(Paris:Fayard,1999).
59. Natalie Doyle's "Democracyas Socio-CulturalProjectof IndividualandCollective Sovereignty. Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet and the French Debate on Modern
Autonomy,"ThesisEleven75 (Nov. 2003): 69-95, appearedtoo late for me to respondto it
in this article. However,my interpretationcontrastswith her portrayalof a harmonious
commonprojectunfoldingin stages fromCastoriadis,to Lefort,to Gauchet.

WarrenBreckman
95
encounterswith communistschoolteachersimmunizedhim against the

pull of the CommunistParty.His sympathieslay with anti-Stalinistlibertarianand anarchisttendencies, like those he had encounteredin the
pages of Socialisme ou Barbarie, which he had been reading since he
was 15.60 His meeting with Lefort in 1966 decisively turned him
towardthe problemof the foundationsof democracy,a concernthat has
been at the core of his writing ever since, althoughhis commitmentto
democracyhas evolved from ultra-leftanarchismto liberal democracy.
Further, Lefort seems to have played a major role in convincing
Gauchet that the intersectionof the political and the religious is the
nodal point of the interrogationof democracy.61Despite Lefort's
impact, however, the decisive influence on The Disenchantmentof the
Worldis arguablyCastoriadis.Indeed, Gauchet follows Castoriadisin
viewing religion as a "way of institutionalizinghumans against themselves," that is, as a form of humanself-creationthat acts againstautonomy.62 The basic task of The Disenchantmentof the Worldis thus
Castoriadian:to trace the gradualbreakdownof religious othernessand
the transferof the institutingpower from the extra-socialsource to society itself. However, in tracing the shift from heteronomoussociety to
autonomoussociety, Gauchetarrivesat political conclusionsaboutmodern democracythatdifferstrikinglyfromCastoriadis.
Castoriadisdrew a rigid line between democraticautonomyand religious heteronomy;even Lefort emphasizedthe rupturebetween religion and democracy, despite his insistence upon a more vexed
relationship between the two phenomena. By contrast, Gauchet
attemptedto explain the emergenceof democracyout of religion. This
approach aligns him in some ways with Max Weber's theoretical
accountof the gradualformationof a self-sufficientsecularsphereas the
actualizationof potentialitiesexisting within the religious domain itself.
However, where Weberhad stressedthe specific role of the Protestant
Reformationin creatingconditionsthat would eventuallylegitimatethisworldly pursuitsand instrumentalrationality,Gauchet situates Weber's
thesis within a much broaderargumentabout the transformativeeffects
60. Gauchet,La ConditionHistorique22-27.
61. The interviewsin La ConditionHistoriquedescribea growingdistancebetween
Gauchetand Lefort,beginningwith tensionsover a co-authored1971 articlethatGauchet
claims was mostly his own creation.
62. Gauchet, The Disenchantmentof the World.A Political History of Religion,
trans.OscarBurge(Princeton:PrincetonUP, 1997) 22.

96
of monotheism.He differs from Weberin anotherand still more revealing way. Weber never claimed that a religious dynamic alone could
explain the emergenceof modernity;accordingly,he supplementedhis
study of the Protestantethic with works on issues such as commercial
behavior and urbanismin the middle ages. Gauchet,by contrast,places
almostexclusive weight on transformation
in the symbolic
extraordinary,
dimension.Indeed,it is amusingto read, in a publishedtable ronde on
his work, Catholictheologianschiding him for neglecting materialfactors.63It is as if, in the rushto shed all trappingsof the Marxianmodel,
Gauchetends up with an unapologeticidealismand his insistenceon historicalcontingencyis over-riddenby the unfoldinglogic of an idea.
Gauchet's book offers a conceptualhistory of religion in which the
true breakis not the adventof Christianity,but the emergenceof monotheism during the Axial Age.64 He rejects an evolutionarymodel of
religion and arguesthat religion received its fullest expressionin primitive societies, when the institutingpower was most fully removed from
humansociety. For such a society, the foundingpower lies at an unfathomable distance in the past; the present is in a position of absolute
dependence on this mythic past, and human activities adhere to their
inauguraltruth.Such radicaldispossessionenforces an "ultimatepolitical equality, which, although it does not prevent differences in social
status or prestige, does prohibitthe secession of unified power."65This
is an importantpoint for Gauchet,as it sets the stage for the "Political
Historyof Religion"thatis promisedby the book's subtitle.
Gauchet's depiction of primitive religion bears the traces of Emile
Durkheim,for whom religion functionsas a system of communication
and a means of specifying and regulatingsocial relationships.Gauchet
had praisedDurkheim'scontributionin an earlieressay, but he had ultimately criticizedDurkheimfor lapsing into a deterministaccountof the
necessity of religion instead of viewing religion as a "free instituting
63. PierreColin andOlivierMongin,eds., Un mondedesenchantd.Dibat avec Marcel Gauchetsur le Disenchantementdu monde(Paris:Cerf, 1988).
64. Gauchethere used the term introducedby KarlJaspersto describethe transformations of the first millenium B.C. See Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der
Geschichte (Zirich: Artemis-Verlag,1949). See also S. N. (Shmuel Noah) Eisenstadt,
"The Axial Age: The Emergenceof TranscendentalVisions and the Rise of the Clerics,"
Archiveseuropdennesde sociologie 23.2(1982):294-314; and S. N. (ShmuelNoah) Eisenstadt,ed., The Originsand Diversityof Axial Age Civilizations(Albany:State University
ofNew YorkP, 1986).
65. Gauchet,Disenchantment25.

WarrenBreckman
97
operationarising from an act of creationexpressinga decision of society."66 Gauchet situates himself more closely to two contemporary
anthropologistswho exercised considerableinfluence on the antitotalitarian currents of French thought in the late 1970s. They are Louis
Dumont, whose studies of the emergenceof modern individualismout
of Christianityand distinctionbetween "holistic"and "individualistic"
societies Gauchet embraces, and even more importantly,Pierre Clastres, who was an importantmemberin the milieux of the journals Textures and Libreuntil his death in a car accidentin 1977.67Clastres'sLa
Socidtdcontre 'etat (1974) articulated,as Lefortstated,"the questionof
the political"at the heartof primitivesociety. The book's radicalclaim
is that at the heart of such a social order was the refusal of a power
capable of detaching itself from the community,the rejection of an
internaldivision that would eventuallyrenderpossible the advent of the
State.68Gauchet took up Clastres'sideas but rejected his depiction of
an anarchisticstruggle of primitivesociety against the state. "How can
one be againstsomethingthat does not yet exist?"Gauchetasks bluntly.
Accordingly,he revises Clastres'sthesis from society against the state
to "society againstpolitical division."69Thus, the originaryrole of religion, he reasons, was to preventpolitical division throughthe religious
division betweenthe externalfoundationand society.
Two greatupheavalsshook this originaryform of religion,the birthof
the state and the emergenceof monotheism.Of the two, Gauchetconsiders the emergence of the state around five thousand years ago to
have been the more epochal. Where total dispossessionhad essentially
neutralizedthe dynamicsof grouprelations,the adventof political domination brought new instabilitiesand potencies into the "heart of the
collective process."70Political dominationalso inaugurateda different
66. MarcelGauchet,"Ladettedu sens et les racinesde I'6tat.Politiquede la religion
primitive,"Libre,no. 2 (1978): 10-11.
67. GauchetdiscussesDumontat lengthin "De l'av~nementde l'individui la d6couverte de la soci~td,"Revueeurop6enedes sciences sociales XXII, no. 68 (1984): 109-126.
On Clastres,see the tributeissue of Libre,no. 4 (1978). Sam Moyn is currentlyworkingout
the detailedhistoryof these relations.See "Of Savageryand Civil Society:PierreClastres
andthe Transformation
of FrenchPoliticalThought,"ModernIntellectualHistory1.1 (April
2004): 55-80, and "Savageand Modem Liberty:MarcelGauchetand the Originsof New
FrenchThought,"EuropeanJournalof Political Theory4. 2 (Spring2005): 164-187.
68. See ClaudeLefort,"Dialoguewith PierreClastres,"Writing.ThePolitical Test,
trans.and ed. David Ames Curtis(Durham:Duke UP,2000) 214.
69. Gauchetin Un mondedcisenchantd
72.

98
relation between the visible and the invisible, for the distance between
society and its origin became a distance operatingwithin human society between the dominantand the dominated,those who have the gods
on their side and those who do not. The emergenceof monotheismduring the Axial Age (800 to 200 BC) addedanotherdimensionof instability. Monotheism brought an infinite increase in the potency and
othernessof the divine, imaginednow as a god-subjectwhose will not
only created the cosmos but also sustains it in every present moment.
Gauchet bases the central thesis of his book on what he calls the
"dynamicof transcendence"inauguratedby the formationof the subjectivized God. Far from dispossessinghumans,transcendencemakes God
more accessible: foundationno longer belongs in the remotestpast, but
in the present. This vision of the world as the object of a single will
opens up possibilities for human understandingof the creation and at
least partial deciphermentof that divine will. The representationof
absolute otherness yields a de facto reduction of otherness. Hence
Gauchet's paradoxicalformulation:"the greaterthe gods, the freer the
humans are."71Christianityradicalizedthe effects of the monotheistic
revolution.With the incarnation,the divine enters the world and introduces new and transformativetensions into the dynamic of transcendence: the enigma of the wholly other and the humanform of the GodMan, inscrutabilityof the Father'smessage and the need to interpretthe
humanvoice of the Son, hope in the beyondversus adherenceto a herebelow that had been graced by Christ'shumanity,world rejection and
the imperative to act upon the world. So explosive were these new
instabilitiesin Gauchet'sestimationthat he names Christianitythe "religion for departingfromreligion."
GauchetsharesLefort'sinterestin the relationshipbetweenthe incarnation and politics, but he gives a more detailedaccountof the instabilities
that Christianityintroducedinto the institutionof monarchy.WherepreChristianmonarchscould functionas both priestsand kings and occupy
the meeting place betweenthe visible and the invisible,Christhad taken
that place once and for all. The Christianmonarchcould no longeraspire
to be the perfectmediator.However,if the Christianking could no longer
be what Christwas, he could at least be like Christ"to the extentthat he
This preserved
made Christ'sabsencepresentand symbolizedhis truth."72
71.
72.
Gauchet,Disenchantment51.
Gauchet,Disenchantment140.

WarrenBreckman
99
the sacral dimension of kingship and reinstatedits mediating function

between the beyond and the here-below.At the same time, however,the
unbridgeablegap between Christand the monarchmeantthat the legitimacy of the Christian ruler contained a destabilizing and transformative
element. For the monarch did not represent the point of meeting but the
depth of separation between the two orders of reality marked as forever
separated by being uniquely consubstantial in Christ. Hence, the sacral
dimension of kingship derived from the management of the lowly world;
but behind the apparent continuity of the sacral function, Gauchet
detected a great transformation. The monarch's mediating activity shifted
toward a domain removed from the church's control, the domain of justice. A great metamorphosis in the sacral function of kingship meant that
the king emerged as the "archetypal mediating figure in the collective
sphere, as opposed to the individual mediation between souls and God,
guaranteed by the sacraments' absolving power."73
Gauchet follows Ernst Kantorowicz in dating this change to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when new symbols emerged of political incorporation, the state as a secular corpus mysticum and the notion
of the body politic.74 However, Gauchet's conclusion is much bolder
than any found in Kantorowicz,for he identifies this as nothing less

than the birth of political modernity. As he writes, this was a "radical
turnaround of the relation between power and society. The monarch
gradually evolved from incarnating sacral dissimilarity into realizing the
collective body's internal self-congruence."75 Political modernity
deployed this symbolic reversal in two directions: the growth of a State
oriented toward monopolizing collective organization and a form of
political legitimacy based on a logic of representation. Political modernity replayed the paradox of monotheism in the form of a tendency
toward the democratic inversion of sovereignty.
Once the split betweenthis world andthe beyondhas causedpolitical
authorityto take responsibilityfor representingand organizingcollective-being, then individualswill soon exercise sovereignty,whatever
royal trappings of authority remain. The State colossus is first
strengthened,only to open itself up laterto its subjects.By deepening
74. See ErnstKantorowicz,The Kings TwoBodies. A Studyin Medieval Political
Theology(Princeton:PrincetonUP, 1957) esp. 192f. on the secularcorpus mysticumand
210f. on the "bodypolitic."

100
FrenchPost-Marxismand the ReturnofReligion

fromitssubjects,theStateendsupbeingidentifiedwith
theseparation
them,in thatthosewho submitto powerwill eventuallyclaimthe
it.
rightto constitute
The dynamic of transcendenceacted as the great agent returningthe

institutingpower to humansociety, transforminga transcendentlogic of
one. The history of the transilegitimacy into an immanent-democratic
tion from heteronomyto autonomy is "religious to the core," writes
Gauchet.If we have moved from being within religion to being outside
it, our world neverthelessremainsshapedby it. Hence, "If we have surpassed the religious, it has not left us, and perhaps never will, even
thoughits historicaleffectivenessis finished."76
It is not my purposeto evaluatethe meritsof this argument.Rather,I
want to emphasize one importantpoint, that is, the significance of the
book within the intellectualand politicalcontext of Francein the 1980s.
The history of the disenchantmentof the world served as a vehicle for
Gauchetto express a generation'sdisenchantmentwith its formerpolitical commitments. A 1986 conversationbetween Gauchet and Pierre
Manent in the pages of Esprit is revealing. Manent, best-known to
American readers as the major purveyor of Leo Strauss's ideas in
France,was at that time completinga book that depictedthe history of
liberalism as the protractedstruggle of the secular city against the
theologico-political problem, that is, the intertwiningauthorityof the
"religious sacred" and the "civic sacred."77Manent complained that
Gauchet's account of religion's decline erased the role played by the
great polemical struggle waged from Machiavelli onward against the
political power of sacred monarchy.Gauchet's reply had less to do
with the relative historical merits of their respective positions than
with contemporarypolitics: "a sober view of democraticdevelopment,
conducted on the base of a religious genealogy, permits the simultaneous rebuttalof ultra-democraticoptimism,blind to the obstacles that
lie in its route, and of conservativepessimism, obsessed exclusively by
the factors of dissolution and the inviability of an individualist
76. Gauchet,Disenchantment58-9. In a recentexchange with R6gis Debray,who
explicitly argues for the permanenceof the religious, Gauchetinsists upon modernity's
breakfrom religion, but this is not the positionhe advocatedin the mid-1980s. See "Du
religieux,de sa permanenceet de la possibilit6d'en sortir.R6gis Debray,MarcelGauchet:
un 6change,"Le Dibat 127 (Nov.-Dec.2003): 3-19.
77. PierreManent,An IntellectualHistory of Liberalism,trans. Rebecca Balinski
(Princeton:PrincetonUP, 1994).

WarrenBreckman
101
order."78Farfrombeing the 'other'of democraticpolitics,the theologicopolitical forms the invisible containerfor the experienceof democracy.
Here,a religiousgenealogyserves the normalizationand stabilizationof a
liberal democraticorderand cautionsequally against both direct democraticaspirationsandthe religiouscriticsof secularsociety.
It is a sign of Gauchet'sintentionsthat in spite of Castoriadis'sinfluence, he completely neglected the ancient Greek origins of democracy.
This neglect fully inverts the democratic vision of Castoriadis, for
whom the ancient Greek model of direct democracyremainedthe vital
germ, if not the model for the modem project of autonomy.Against
Castoriadischampiwhat he called the "metaphysicsof representation,"
oned an uncompromisingAristoteliandefinitionof the citizen as "capable of governing and being governed,"and he devoted considerable
energy to analyzingthe institutionalinnovationsof the first democratic
regime, including, as we have seen, tragedy. Gauchet, by contrast,
totally neutralizedthe value of the Greek experience. He directed his
general argumentthat humansare freerundermonotheismagainstmodernist or postmodernistcelebrationsof paganismand cited specifically
MarcAug6's celebrationof polytheism,althoughone might also include
the even betterknown case of Jean-FrangoisLyotard'sidentificationof
paganism with heterogeneity.79Furthermore,rather than considering
Atheniandemocracyas a relativebreakthroughto a new political form,
Gauchetstressed how the polis was embeddedin a vision of a rational
cosmos that acted as a constraintupon political innovation.Hence, the
political novelty of fifth-centuryAthens gets lost within its general participationin the religious transformationsof the Axial Age.80 The point
is not so much whetherCastoriadisunderstatedthe limitationsof Greek
political innovation;rather,it is strikingthat for Gauchet, the ancient
78. MarcelGauchet,"Le christianismeet la cit6 moderne.Discussion entre Marcel
Gauchetet PierreManent,"Esprit(Apr.-May,1986):99.
79. MarcAug6, Geniedupaganisme(Paris:Gallimard,1982);Lyotard,Instructions
paiennes (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1977). More generally,see MartinJay, "Modernand
PostmodernPaganism;Peter Gay and Jean-FrangoisLyotard,"Enlightenment,Passion,
ModernityHistoricalEssays in EuropeanThoughtand Culture,eds. MarkS. Micale and
RobertL. Diele (Stanford:StanfordUP,2000) 249-62.
80. JohannArnasonweighs the meritsof Castoriadis'sautonomymodel and Eisenstadt's Axiality (without mention of Gauchet)against the state of historicalresearchin
"Autonomyand Axiality: ComparativePerspectiveson the Greek Breakthrough,"
Agon,
Logos, Polis. The GreekAchievementand its Aftermath(Stuttgart:FranzSteiner,2001)
155-206.

102
experienceapparentlyhas no meaningfor the adventof moderndemocracy or the futurepossibilitiesof democraticaction.

In Gauchet's genealogy, or - to use an even more appropriate
Nietzschean phrase- his account of the birth of democracyfrom the
spirit of religion, liberal individualismand representativedemocracy
emerge as the naturalheirs to the logic of Christiantranscendence.As
for direct democracy,Gauchetviewed it as Furetdid. Indeed,Gauchet's
contributionto Mona Ozouf and Furet's Critical Dictionary of the
French Revolution(1988) arguedthat a totalitarianlogic emergedwhen
the "Declarationof the Rights of Man and Citizen"fused the legal protection of individualrights with the exercise of popularsovereignty.81
The ideological reorientationof French intellectual life, which began
with the rejection of Marxismand the affirmationof democraticcommitments,melts into the claim for a left-liberalconsensusof the sort triumphantlypresentedin the 1989 bicentenaryof the French Revolution
that was so dominated by Francois Furet that he was anointed "roi
Furet." On the broadest historical scale imaginable, Gauchet's ambitious book confirmedthatthe "revolutionis over."82
TheAmbiguityofLegitimacy
The reorientationin Frenchthoughtreceives its English canonization
in "New FrenchThought,"a PrincetonUniversityPress book series that
81. Marcel Gauchet,"Droitsde l'homme,"Dictionnairecritiquede la Revolution
franCaise: (1780-1880) eds. FrangoisFuretand Mona Ozouf (Paris:Flammarion,D.L.,
1988) 685-95.
82. I take the title of the lead essay in Furet'sInterpretingthe French Revolution.
Gauchethas more recentlyarguedthatthe exit fromreligionhas become so completethat
democracyis imperiled.In his recentexchangewith Debrayin Le Ddbat,Gauchetworries
about the loss of the phantomform of religion,the loss of "collectivetranscendenceof
which the nationand the state are the main incarnations"
(15). Elsewherehe presentsthis
threat in terms of the loss of the ultimateother against which Frenchdemocracyhad
defined itself. See La religiondans la ddmocratie.Parcoursde la laicite (Paris:Gallimard,
1998) and the collection of his essays La democratiecontreelle-mdme(Paris:Gallimard,
2002). Gauchet'sconcernaboutthe survivalof democracyoutsideof a relationshipto religion seems to be one reason why Daniel Lindenberglinks him to the likes of Georges
Sorel and Charles Maurrasin Le rappel a l'ordre. Enqudtesur les nouveauxreactionnaires (Paris:Seuil, 2002) 78-80. This is an ultimatelyunconvincinglinkage,but it is typical of the generaltenorof Lindenberg'spolemic,which provokeda debateout of all scale
with the book's quality. In light of the configurationof intellectualsdiscussed in the
present essay, it is interestingto note the suggestion that the scandal over Lindenberg
marksthe end of the "antitotalitarian
family."See Jean BirnbaumandNicolas Weill, "Ce
livre qui brouilleles families intellectuelles,"Le Monde(22 Nov. 2002).

WarrenBreckman
103
publishedan English translationof Gauchet'sbook in 1997. The comrnerstone of the series is an anthologyof recentFrenchpolitical philosophy
compiled by the series editor, Mark Lilla.83 Gauchet's genealogy of
modem democracy figures prominentlyin Lilla's introductoryessay.
Bearingthe title "TheLegitimacyof the LiberalAge," Lilla's text obviously evokes Hans Blumenberg'sgreat book The Legitimacy of the
ModernAge. Ironically,however,Blumenbergis strikinglyabsent from
the French debate that I have partiallysketchedhere. In fact, Blumenberg's book appearedin Frenchonly in 1999, thirty-threeyears after its
Germanpublicationand sixteen years after the English translation.By
comparison,almost all the works of Carl Schmitt,a majorpurveyorof
the idea of political theology and a target of Blumenberg'scritique,
were translatedinto French in the 1980s. That disparityreveals something about the crucial importanceof nationalcontexts and traditionsin
giving particularform to a debatethat, on anotherregister,has a kind of
deracinated cosmopolitan reference to the historical destiny of the
"West."Blumenberg'sinterventionin the debate over secularizationis
almost exclusively concerned with the condition of knowledge, of
human self-assertionunderstoodas curiosity. As Martin Jay has written, "the self that is doing the assertingis essentially a transcendental
one developing itself over time, engagingin what might be called a species Bildung."84Even in the chapterdevoted to Carl Schmitt, Blumenberg's main concern remains the epistemological value of Schmitt's
claim aboutthe secularizationof theologicalconcepts. Thoughone may
easily extrapolateliberal democraticpolitics from Blumenberg'simpassioned defense of Enlightenmentvalues, he does not directly address
the implicationsof Schmitt's views for modem democracy or liberalism. By contrast,the Frenchinterestin the question of the relationship
between modernityand religionhas seldom strayedfar from the domain
of politics. It is perhapsnot surprisinggiven a national context where
the invention of democraticpolitics was inseparablefrom a struggle to
drive religion out of the public domain;after all, throughoutits entire
history, French republicanismhas been virtually synonymouswith the
secular campaign against religion. Nor is it surprisingthat within an
83. MarkLilla, ed., New French Thought:Political Philosophy(Princeton:Princeton UP, 1994). For a generalassessmentof this series, see MartinJay,"Lafayette'sChildren:The AmericanReceptionof FrenchLiberalism,"SubStance31.1 (2002): 9-26.
84. Jay,"Blumenbergand Modernism:A Reflectionon TheLegitimacyofthe Modern Age,"Fin de SikcleSocialismand OtherEssays (New York:Routledge,1988).

104
intellectual traditionwhere the leading thinkers had long been resolutely laic, the religious should returnas, essentially,a functionalistcategory. For Castoriadis,Lefort,and Gauchet,religion is basicallynothing
more than a symbolic system that ordersthe social-politicalworld. As
to "religiousexperience,"they remaintone deaf.
There is a deeper irony in Mark Lilla's attemptto borrow gravitas
from Blumenberg. For in fact, measured by Blumenberg's criteria,
Gauchet's account actually fails to establishthe legitimacy of political
modernity.Indeed,even makingfull allowancefor Gauchet'soriginality
and brilliance, his account resembles the kind of secularizationnarrative that Blumenbergcriticized in figures like Carl Schmitt and Karl
L6with.85Thatis, Blumenbergstrenuouslyresistedviews that regardthe
age as formedthrougha kind of transferof religious substance
modemrn
into secular forms. Such views, Blumenberg argued, delegitimize
modernityby dressingit in borrowedclothes, overlookingits autonomy
and novelty and seeing it insteadas a derivativeof a religiousworld.
Karl Marx's confident campaign against political theology in the
name of a radicalvision of humanself-determinationmust surely stand
as one of the strongestassertionsof the autonomyof the modern.The
collapse of the Marxist project of emancipationin the late twentieth
century broughtwith it the collapse of confidence in the secularizing
project that had accompaniedit. Awarenessof the ambiguity of that
struggle against political theology, not to mentionthe possible perils of
attemptingto liberatethe humanspherefrom its dependenceon an Oththat has traditionallybeen enshrinedin religion, has markedthe
emrness
sensibilities of post-Marxistdemocraticintellectualsat least as much as
celebratoryassertions of "legitimacy."Indeed, there is a moment of
arbitrarinessor undecidabilityin this post-Marxistreassertionof contingency, social openness, and human creativity.It can lead to Castoriadis's militantrejectionof religion or to Derrida'sappeal to messianism
in the name of a "democracy"that is always a venir, a political Otherness thattherebysharesa sublimeplace with religion.
If the returnof religion in Frenchpoliticalthoughtis inseparablefrom
the collapse of Marxism, it is, nonetheless, tempting to see parallels
between the aftermathof Marxismand the periodof fermentjust before
its birth.For in the 1820s and 1830s, anothergrandsynthesizingsystem
85. Liwith's Meaningin History,anotherimportantwork in the Germansecularization debate,was publishedin Frenchtranslationin October2002 by Gallimard.

WarrenBreckman
105
was in collapse, Hegel's attemptto incorporateall thought and being

within a total philosophy.As Germanintellectualsfaced the decay of
Hegel's philosophy of absolute reason, they found themselves confronted by a moment of contingency and indecision. Would the collapse of Hegelianism lead to the reconstructionof rationalitywithin a
demystified human domain? Or, would reason finally renounce its
desire for identity with God and Nature and once again experience its
foundationwithin Being as an enigmaticrelationshipto Otherness?The
first path, of course, was followed by the Young Hegelians and Marx,
the second by such thinkers as Soren Kierkegaard and the later
FriedrichWilhelm Joseph Schelling. The contrastbetween Castoriadis
and Derridathus createsa momentof dejh vu, until one recalls the double challenge that indelibly marks ours as a differentepoch. If socialhistoricalcreationis to reside fully in the humandomain,then thought
must conjurewith the limits of the 'human'within the human,find and
preserveothernessin itself, and learnin the same momentto affirmand
deny itself. Conversely,if thinkerslike Derridachoose to summon the
religious as a figure of Otherness,then they must try to hold what may
well prove an impossiblepositionbetweenempty verbiagethat obscures
their actualdistancefrom belief and a real returnto religion throughthe
alchemyof rhetoricalevocation.


Breckmann - Democracy Between Disenchantment and Political Theology French Post-Marxism and The Return of Religion

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Democracy between Disenchantment and Political Theology: French Post-Marxism and the

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"Where there are no gods, phantoms rule."

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period, it is liberal democracythat has leapfroggedover communism.

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FrenchPost-Marxismand the Returnof Religion

pluralistic,quotidian,and non-utopiansort. OlivierMongindescribesthis

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contrastto those earliermoments,it must be emphasizedthat the French

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FrenchPost-Marxismand the Returnof Religion

1980s France, the explorationof the relationshipbetween democracy

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of Blumenbergin Franceas an "autismof reception."'0The fact thatthis

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FrenchPost-Marxismand the Returnof Religion

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of the Political]which dominatedthe 1976 special issue of Esprit on the

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FrenchPost-Marxismand the Returnof Religion

social experienceof democracy.Where Furet'spolitics centeredon the

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had made in the modem world;and it is built from a uniquesynthesisof

layers that in part adheretogether,in terms of an endless succession in

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FrenchPost-Marxismand the Returnof Religion

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.157 on Sun, 4 Jan 2015 16:02:22 PM

Meaningdeterminedonce and for all?"'21Translatedinto politicalterms,

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FrenchPost-Marxismand the Returnof Religion

foundation,as in religion,but,rather,society's lack of foundation.Where

Habermas'smisgivings are repeatedby his studentAxel Honneth and

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and political projectdid lead him onto terraintraditionallyoccupied by

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FrenchPost-Marxismand the Returnof Religion

would, of course, remainto be determinedwhetherCastoriadisinstantiates Blumenberg'sclaim that modernthoughthas been overburdenedby

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the concept of politeia or regime. "The word is worth retaining,"he

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French Post-Marxism and the Return of Religion

precisely, religion reveals an insight that philosophical thought should

The philosophercannotaccept the languagein which religion expresses

ceptible political gesture."41The triumphalismof the post-ColdWarera

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finally provoked him to defend Marx, or at least a "certainspirit" of

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FrenchPost-Marxismand the Returnof Religion

events of revelation in the three religions of the Book.46 Specters of

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FrenchPost-Marxismand the Returnof Religion

social experience that it generates. Lefort traces this experience to a

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constitutea new practice.Hence, he endorsesTocqueville'sinsight that

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FrenchPost-Marxismand the Returnof Religion

reveal the extent of the breakwithin it?" Ratherthan seeing democracy

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encounterswith communistschoolteachersimmunizedhim against the

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FrenchPost-Marxismand the Returnof Religion