Claude Lefort and the democratic enigma: strengths and limits of a modern political invention

Abstract

The core of this research is to investigate the place of the reflection on democracy at the thought of Claude Lefort and his contribution to the political and philosophical debate in the twentieth century. Therefore, this research aims to reconstruct the paths of lefortian intellectual trajectory in order to show the genesis of his reflection on the democratic regime, the different characterizations that he provides about this regime and the historical and theoretical contrasts that the philosopher displays in order to catch the singularity of modern democracy compared to the social formations of the Ancien Régime on the one hand, and the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, on the other. In this sense, it is necessary to build a dialogue with some political classical authors such as Machiavelli, Tocqueville and Marx, to show the developments of lefortian conception about democracy as a regime established by an unprecedented revolution against the pillars of a political order based on the image of the body and in the grounds of power from transcendent principles. Regime that is instituted by the disembodiment of power and society, the democracy is singular because it is radically open to the history, indeterminate and without a telos, accepting the division and the conflict in a ceaseless movement of interrogation, establishment and creation of new rights. Acting as a conducting wire of our research, the fundamental question that culminates in the present investigation can be enunciated: is the place occupied by democratic conception of Lefort an alternative to the polarization of the debate on democracy, opposing, in the theoretical scene of the twentieth century, Marxists and liberals? Taking away Marxism to reopen a thought about democracy, could Lefort also keep a distance from the principles and consequences of a liberal democratic conception, which reduces the democracy to a fixed body of rule of law institutions or to a set of regular procedures? (AU)