My paper aims to outline the concept of the pathic foundation of political institutions. I depart from the observation of a lack of clarity concerning the resources of institutional stability in the work of Chantal Mouffe and the proponents of agonistic democracy. Drawing from the ideas of Claude Lefort and Carl von Clausewitz, I sketch the idea that the experience of confict itself generates the moral and epistemic groundings that legitimize and stabilize its institutional regulations. It is within the pathic (...) experience of exhaustion in the face of the results of escalating confict that a common ground of legitimacy is reached. The bulk of my paper is dedicated to the phenomenological analysis of the foundational pathic experience, of the pathic disposition of political subjectivity resulting from it, and of its institutional manifestations. (shrink)

El artículo analiza el impacto de la Revolución húngara de 1956 en el pensamiento político de Claude Lefort desde sus comienzos como intelectual y militante de una organización revolucionaria hasta su consagrada teorización acerca de la democracia en contraposición con el totalitarismo. Para ello, el artículo reconstruye los rasgos principales de la Revolución húngara y recoge tres interpretaciones del suceso —la de Jean Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron y Hannah Arendt— a fin de contrastarlas con la de Claude Lefort; también, con (...) idéntico fin, indaga las discrepancias en el seno de Socialisme ou barbarie ocasionadas como consecuencia del acontecimiento húngaro. En el plano teórico-político, el artículo pretende mostrar la relación estrecha entre democracia, revolución y emancipación en la noción de democracia salvaje movilizada por Lefort, revelando la existencia de un hilo conductor entre la ponderación lefortiana de la Revolución húngara y dicha noción crucial. (shrink)

This article looks at the relation between the ideas of philosopher Claude Lefort and ethnologist Pierre Clastres. Both French authors worked in the same paradigm. They were convinced that politics is the “infrastructure” of society: all societies are politically constituted and can only be understood by interpreting the workings of political power. Yet they strongly disagreed on the dividedness of society. Clastres believed that a good solution to the problem of power is possible, while Lefort believes that the presence of (...) power points to the impossibility of any society to coincide with itself. This article also discusses the way they both use the expression “the place of power” and asks to what extent non-Western societies were, both for Clastres and for Lefort, ever more than just a foil to present and illuminate their strongly held theoretical beliefs. (shrink)

French political philosophy has experienced a renewal over the last twenty years. One of its leading projects is Marcel Gauchet’s reflection on democracy and religion. This project situates itself within the context of the French debate on modernity and autonomy launched by the work of Cornelius Castoriadis. Gauchet’s work makes a significant contribution to this debate by building on the pioneering work of Lefort on the political self-instituting capacity of modern societies and the associated shift from religion to ideology. It (...) thus explores the centrality of the notion of sovereignty in the advent of liberal democracy and conducts this reflection within an overall discussion of the role played by Christianity in the genesis of European modernity. It elaborates an anthropology of modernity which explores the relationship between individualism and democracy and redefines modernity as a project of sovereignty which aims at creating a radically new society, the society of individuals. (shrink)

This article addresses Eric L. Santner’s claim that “there is more political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought” by analyzing the “theologico-political problem” in the work of three prominent twentieth-century political thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt share a preoccupation with the crisis of modern political liberalism and confront the theologico-political problem in a similar spirit: although their responses differ dramatically, their individual accounts dwell on the absence of incontestable principles in (...) modern society that can justify life-in-common and the persistence of the political order. Their writings thus engage with the question of the place of “the absolute” in the political realm. In particular, Arendt’s indirect approach to the theologico-political problem is crucial to understanding the radicality of a political world in which traditional certainties can no longer be re-established. The theoretical trajectory I present suggests that the dispersion of political theology in everyday life has a specific corollary: modern politics operates within the tragic and paradoxical nature of its unstable and common origins that cannot be incorporated in exceptionalist versions of the body politic. (shrink)

“In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees.’ We ourselves call one another ‘newcomers’ or ‘immigrants.’” Already here, in the first sentence of Arendt’s essay “We Refugees,” does the hiatus of refugee status become manifest. A divide already opens up between different habits of reference. Refugees refer to themselves in one way, non-refugees refer to them in another, and so does the projected or desired possibility of one world in which both refugees and non-refugees might find accommodation, (...) split into two very different realities. Consciousness of the split is of course solely that of the refugees, at first. Initially, the hiatus is theirs only. Others – non-refugees – remain soundly oblivious to this fundamental split until such time as it brutally breaks into their world too, for instance, when the corpse of a four-year old child washes up on a beach, and washes up on every doorstep in a succession of media waves. And then the hiatus is suddenly everywhere and no one remains exempted. As the last sentence of Arendt’s essay contends forcefully, the split begins with the refugee status of some, but it ends with the bigger split of a world that begins to falter and fall apart: “The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.” The comity of European peoples show all signs of going to pieces again today. When the comity of peoples goes to pieces, it is not only common space that cracks up, but also common time, the common time that warrants common space according to Kant’s Schematismuslehre. It is ultimately this breaking of time – the hiatus of time – that Arendt thematises elsewhere with reference to “the desolate aimless wanderings of Israeli tribes in the wilderness and the dangers which befell Aeneas before he reached the Italian shore.” “[T]his hiatus,” she continues, obviously creeps into all time speculations which deviate from the currently accepted notion of time as a continuous flow.”. This text is also a supplementary discussion of my reviews of two recent monographs on Arendt. See: RECENT ARENDT SCHOLARSHIP: Review of The Wandering Thought of Hannah Arendt by Hans Jörg Sigwart, Palgrave MacMillan, 2016, ISBN: 978-1-137-48214-3, 147 pages, and Rightlessness in an Age of Rights. Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants by Ayten Gündoğdu, New York: Oxford University Press: 2015, 298 pages, forthcoming in Constellations. (shrink)