Dick Howard
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Claude Lefort passed away on October 3, 2010. Lefort was a political activist between 1941 until 1958,when he broke definitively with Socialisme ou Barbarie and abandoned the idea and ideology of political revolution. Then he abandoned political militantism, but he never ceased his passionate interest in politics whether at home or abroad. Dick Howard gives us a talk about his life and his conception of politics.
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Claude Lefort est un philosophe connu dans toute l’Europe. Décédé il y a peu, nous avons demandé à Dick Howard, philosophe politique, de nous prêter son concours pour rendre hommage à Lefort. Il a bien voulu nous confier le texte remanié de la conférence introductive du Colloque Mémorial pour Claude Lefort à la New School for Social Research (New York), le 30 octobre 2010, dans lequel il retrace la biographie intellectuelle de Lefort. Nous donnons deux versions du texte, l’une en anglais, l’autre en français.
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Hier eine Biografie. Claude Lefort ist am 3 October 2010 gestorben. In den Kommenden Jahren wird ihre politische Denken wenig Gelegenheit haben, aufzutrumpfen. Leider ist er wenig gekennt. In seine Leistungen, gibt uns Dick Howard einen Porträt des Claude Lefort. Lefort verfügt über ein unverkennbares Ton, und über eine sehr wandlungsfähige Leben. Was die Leser begeistert kann, ist seine Glaubwürdigkeit als philosopher.
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Claude Lefort è deceduto il 3 ottobre 2010. Fu uno dei grandi filosofi politici del XX secolo. Le sue idee si fecero sentire da per tutto in Europa, ma anche nel mondo intero. Quando Lefort guarda il suo percorso politico, il soffio che ravvivo la sua concezione del politico e chiaramente svelata. Se l’autore di questo testo tornasse oggi su questa parte della nostra storia, è per potere sopralineare quanto l’opera di Lefor – piu precisamente l’ œuvre Lefort – continua a farci riflettere sulle nostre cosidette democrazie, stabilite col tempo, incluso la democrazia al stile Francese.
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Claude Lefort tüm Avrupa’da bilinen bir filozof. Kısa bir zaman önce hayatını yitiren Lefort’u son bir kez onurlandırmak için siyasi filozof Dick Horward’ın görüşlerine başvurduk. Değerli filozof bizler için 30 ekim 2010 tarihinde New School for Social Research’de (New York) Memorial pour Claude Lefort başlıklı sempozyomundan ortaya çıkan bir metini paylaştı. Metin, Lefort’un entelektüel biografisini kaleme alıyor. İşte bu yazıyı fransızca ve ingilizce olarak yayınlıyoruz.
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Let me begin by stressing that Lefort would never have agreed to the title given to this talk, which seems to imply that it is possible to separate the “political” aspects of his life and work from, say, the philosophical, the professorial or the private “parts” of it. Lefort never accepted the ultimately positivist vision of society as composed of distinct and autonomous spheres—the economic, the juridical, the theoretical or the aesthetic…-- that are recomposed in different ways by different political regimes. He surely did not think of his own life in that way.
It is true that Lefort was a political activist between 1941 until 1958,when he broke definitively with Socialisme ou Barbarie and abandoned the idea and ideology of political revolution (1). But during those same years he wrote the essays that were later collected under the title broad-based title, Les formes de l’histoire (subtitled essais d’anthropologie politique), as well as those that he modestly titled Éléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie. Although he abandoned political militantism, he never ceased his passionate interest in politics whether at home (the 1978 Common Program of the communist and socialist parties, Eurocommunist illusions or the refusal of Jacques Delors to run for the presidency in 1995) or abroad (in Eastern Europe, of course, but also in the mid-East and Latin America). Nor are his polemics directed solely at “political themes,” denouncing philosophical modes (from Sartre to Althusser to the so-called New Philosophers), while defending the capacity of art to unveil the lineaments of reality (Blanchot, or Rushdie’s Satanic Verses). It is not surprising that Lefort’s 1976 introductory essay to the journal Libre (2) was titled “Maintenant” or that the collection of 60 years of his previously uncollected writings is called Le temps present, Écrits 1945-2005. In his brief introduction to this 1000 page volume, he explains that it “bears witness to his concern to disclose (déceler) the appearance of the unexpected, of that which is a signature of the present moment” (3).
When Lefort does reflect on his political parcours, the breadth of his vision of the political is clear. In the Preface to the 1979 re-edition of Éléments…, written after the critique of totalitarianism had finally penetrated even orthodox leftist circles—in part due to Lefort’s essay on Solzhenitsyn, Un homme en trop (1975)—he denounces three false political implications of that critique that, I think, retain their actuality today: a) that the values of the West have to be defended against the totalitarian threat; b) that West and East are both dominated by states and thus differ only in degree; and c) that the resources needed for resistance cannot be found in the miserable spectacle of politics by only in the individual’s heart, or in heaven. He recalls his own self-critical path away from the ideology of revolution and the weight of Marxism (which he refuses to identify with the thought of Marx (4)) to explain how he escaped this binary mode of thought.
Lefort explains more fully his parcours in the Afterword to the 1970 edition of Éléments…under the title “Novelty and the Attraction of Repetition.” Influenced by Castoriadis’ idea of bureaucratic capitalism, Lefort tried to develop a Marxist critique of the Soviet Union. He then elaborated a Hegelian-Marxist vision of the proletariat as a political subject that would step-by-step overcome its own alienation until, finally, it recognized that its own bureaucracy was its true oppressor. His phenomenological account of “L’expérience prolétarienne” and his polemic with Sartre was encouraged by the Hungarian revolution of 1956 when workers not only revolted by invented new forms of self-organization. On the other hand, the political experience of Socialisme ou Barbarie led him to understand that however pure the party, it would inevitably lead to bureaucratic domination over those whose liberation it sought. He recognized that “[i]t is when we taste the bitter delight of overthrowing our first theses that we are the most prisoner of their principles.” That is the attraction of repetition, whose actual appeal is illustrated by the Euro-communist inability to see the new possibilities that had emerged in the Prague Spring. Lefort doesn’t exempt himself from this temptation, criticizing his own lack of “audacity” during his parcours. Why then publish these essays? Why not join Wittgenstein and “throw away the ladder”? “It is clear,” he concludes, “that for me these essays are far from realizing their goal. My hope is that the reader finds in them what I’ve found: an incitation to continue.”
Lefort turned next to Machiavelli, whose concentration on the primacy of political power seemed to offer a replacement for Marx’s stress on the primacy of the forces of production. It is here, in 1972, that Lefort first developed his concept of the oeuvre and its travail as both instituting and instituted. What Lefort learned from his reading of Machiavelli is that the supposed “realist” recognizes the symbolic role of power (5). More important, he recognized that the political is not in society but rather that it is a dimension of society. And, more precisely, the weight of this insight becomes fundamental in a democratic society. This theoretical shift will be discussed by others today; in the present context, its “political” antecedents are important.
Lefort had overcome the attraction of “repetition” when May ’68 burst out. With Castoriadis and Edgar Morin, he published in June La Brèche, the first book to propose an analysis of the “events.” This effort to identify the new reappears in “Maintenant,” the introductory essay to the journal Libre, in which he joined Castoriadis before a final rupture separated them again (6). This context makes clear that, despite the fierce independence of his thought, Lefort is very much in the French tradition of the powerful essayist who is an homme des revues. In addition to Socialisme ou Barbarie, he was been an editor of Textures (1971-75), Libre (1977-80), and Passé-Présent (1982-1984). Most of his books are collections of essays, a literary form that seems particularly fit for democratic societies because, like the parcours traced in Élements, it incites the reader to go beyond what is written on the page by challenging what appears there (7).
What then is the upshot of Lefort’s political biography. I have alluded already to the popular reception in France of Lefort’s critique of totalitarianism, and to his rejection of its simplified and anti-political applications by the so-called New Philosophers and other epigones. But the dialogue of repetition and the new remains although its form—like the forms of ideology analyzed in a path-breaking article of 1974--changes. For example, when an interviewer suggested to him that Solzhenitsyn was a reactionary and for that reason not to be taken seriously, Lefort insisted that “supposing he is a reactionary, that doesn’t prevent him from giving a correct account of Soviet society, at least of his experience.” Similarly, the preachers of radical correctness who reduce the political to politics, and politics to binary thought are unsure what to make of Lefort’s returns to 19th century liberal thought (Tocqueville, Guizot, Quinet and of course Michelet). They forget that Writing. The Political Text and the Essais sur le politique, XIX-XX siècles where these essays are collected also contain repeated interrogations of Marx and of Machiavelli, oeuvres whose sense cannot be exhausted in a single reading because they interrogate the present in the same moment that it turns to them with its own questions. Perhaps Lefort sums up best his own parcours in the title of a book published in 1999, Complication, which is another “return,” this time to the question of communism itself (8). Challenging the ideocratic interpretations of François Furet (Le passé d’une illusion) and Martin Malia (The Soviet Tragedy), Lefort makes clear that the symbolic character of power does not deny its material reality, and that understanding the political does not exclude interpreting politics at its most sordid. But, returning to 60 years of debates about the nature of communism, Lefort makes clear as well that those who concentrate only on the sordid (who were its critics) in their turn avoid the “complication” essential to political thought. In a word, ideas cannot stand on their own feet.
Claude Lefort passed away on October 3, 2010. While the French press marked the occasion with pages of praise of one of the great thinkers of the century, the American and German media were silent (with the exception of a small obituary in the TAZ). A brief anecdote may help to understand this neglect. When Lefort received the Hannah Arendt Prize given by the city of Bremen in 1998, I was asked to deliver the Laudatio. At the outset of my presentation, I asked why they needed to bring an American to Germany to praise a French thinker. Franco-German relations were current in most fields. Reflecting on the question, I suggested three reasons for the neglect (9). First, Lefort was a critic of totalitarianism who did not treat its relevance as belonging only to the past, even after the Fall of the Wall in 1989. Second, given German history, political theory has to give a uniquely positive—not a “complicated”—picture of democracy. Third, German political theory tends to be overwhelmingly sociological in its orientation. For these three reasons, I suggested, the political parcours of a self-critical thinker like Lefort fits ill within the framework of German self-understanding. I wonder today how well Lefort’s political thought fits its American cousin?
[1] His commitment was not just academic or polemical. He explains that already in 1941 he had organized resistance to the Occupation in 1941, giving him hope that in spite of his disagreements with the prevailing views of the Trotskyites, he could mobilize support for his political views. Later, when he left Socialisme ou Barbarie definitively, in 1958, he joined other comrades to create a journal for workers’ self-expression called ILO (Informations et liasons ouvrières). When this project came to naught, he joined a discussion group called the Cercle Saint-Juste, where he rejoined Castoriadis, Vidal-Naquet, Vernant, Chatelet and others in discussions of Greek history and the French Revolution.
2 The editorial committee of Libre was composed of Miguel Abensour, CorneliusCastoriadis, Pierre Clastres, Marcel Gauchet, Claude Lefort and Maurice Luciani. The journal, which appeared twice yearly, was subtitled “Politique-anthropologie-philosophie.”
3 “souci de déceler ce qui advient, ce qui se fait signe du temps present.”
4 Comparing his own attitude toward Marx to that of Castoriadis, in the interview with the Anti-Mythes, Lefort asserts that “Castoriadis’ critique not only of Marxism but of Marx is fully justified.” But, he continues, Castoriadis doesn’t admit what his critique itself owes to Marx: “His desire to desacralize Marx… which is wholly legitimate, leads him to accentuate his break with Marx.” Lefort, who has returned again and again to Marx—perhaps most impressively in “D’une forme d’histoire à une autre” and in the rereading of the Manifesto—sees in this attitude “the illusion of knowing what Marx is doing” which is a displaced version of the illusion that there can be an ultimate knowledge of society…” which can be used to control it and overcome its divisions.
5 C.f. Miguel Abensour’s reconstruction of the two distinct moments of Lefort’s critique of totalitarianism based on this distinction, in La démocratie à l’oeuvre. Autour de Claude Lefort, edited by Claude Habib and Claude Mouchard (Paris: Editions Esprit, 1993), pp. 79-136.
6 During the time of Libre, Lefort joined with Clastres, Gauchet and Abensour in a collective study-group that produced a re-edition of Étienne de la Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, touching another theme that remained central to his political thought, reapparing for example in his 1999 book, Complication to explain the acceptance by party members of their subordination to the leadership.
7 C.f., the essay “Democratie et l’art d’écrire” in Écrire. A l’épreuve du politique, whose title suggests that writing itself is the test of the political. Unlike nearly all of the leading thinkers of his generation, Lefort never accepted offers by friends or editors to produce the kind of biographical dialogue that popularize the conceptual apparatus that he has developed. Worth noting, however, is his essay “Philosopher?” whose interrogative title is significant. Lefort suggests that his true ambition was to be a writer (in op. cit.).
8 The English translation is Complications. Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy, translated by Julian Bourg with a Foreword by Dick Howard (Columbia University Press, 2007).
9 Text printed in Festschrift zur Verleihung des Hannah-Arend-Preises für politisches Denken 1998 (Bremen: Boll Stiftung