Political Theology

Some notes from Claude Lefort's complex essay, "The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?" from his Democracy and Political Theory.  I make no attempt at an interpretation; instead, I only an attempt to understand.

This is the first part in a series of two or three. 

Crossposted to theoria.  Long!!

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1. Lefort identifies two essential moments in 'our modernity'.  The first moment occurred in the sixteenth century, "the first signs of a modern reflection upon politics and religion" (he likely means Machiavelli, specifically, but the Italian city-states in general), which brings a "new sensitivity to the questions of the foundations of the civil order" born out of the "effects" (as opposed to the event?) of the "collapse of the authority of the Church" and the struggles over the Reformation, there arose, consequently, the assertion of the Prince's absolute right and, obviously, challenges to that claim.  In other language, we might say that the sixteenth century, according to Lefort, discovered Deleuze's "plane of immanence" or, perhaps, the realization (lost since the Greeks?) that we have the autonomy and capacity to institute our own social institutions.  The second moment does not occur until the beginning of the nineteenth century in which "a much wider debate is inaugurated as a result of the French Revolution".

It is while that event is still a living memory that there arises a feeling that a break has occurred, but that it did not occur within time, that it establishes a relationship between human beings and time itself, that it makes history a mystery; that it cannot be circumscribed within the field of what are termed political, social or economic institutions; that it establishes a relationship between human beings and the institution itself; that it makes society a mystery.

It is important -- it seems -- to note that it is not the events themselves, but rather the consequences thereof (i.e., the effects) and the attempt to re-integrate a new 'real' into the symbolic regime of society that is essential.  Lefort does not give an outright answer as to why it is the effects and not the event that is the problem for theory.  We can, perhaps, go outside of Lefort's text and look to a contemporary of his, Jean-Luc Nancy who asserts "The surprise -- the event -- does not belong to the order of representation" (Being Singular Plural, 173). If the event itself is outside representation, if it is the event that disrupts representation or destroys representation, it must follow that the event works as much upon the symbolic as upon the real.  The event cuts into the real -- it destroys the everyday -- but it also slices into the symbolic -- it destroys the framework through which we understand the everyday -- consequently, the event forces a re-ordering of both the real and of the symbolic.  Thus, "it is while the event is a still a living memory ... that it makes society a mystery".  Society becomes a mystery because its representation of itself to itself no longer adheres.  In this sense, we might imagine the event (in this particular case, the French Revolution) as the instituting of a radical, unconstrained freedom.  Action is no longer held back and kept in place by either the power of the real or of the symbolic.  There becomes, in a sense, an identity between "being" and "doing".

The destruction of the real and the symbolic and the temporary institution of radical, unconstrained freedom introduces an immediate reaction: "The religious meaning of this break haunts the minds of the men of the period, no matter what verdicts they may reach".  Regardless of position, "they all speak the same language, and it is simultaneously political, philosophical and religious".

2. This event coincides with an attempt to re-order politics: "to conceive the state as an independent entity, to make politics a reality sui generis, and to relate religion to the domain of private belief".  Concurrently, the real and the symbolic lose their content and, politically, there is an attempt to re-order the social institutions.  It is at this moment when the Ancien Regime literally collapses: the king no longer holds the regime together.  The king is no longer the point of contact between God and man, between the political and the religious.  Religion is made private and politics is made public.  Enforcing this divide is the state. 

Hegel, of course, weighed in on any issue worth weighing in on.  He discusses phrenology and he discusses the Terror.  He also discusses the attempt to separate religion and politics.  In the Philosophy of Mind,  he writes the following:

It has been the monstrous blunder of our times to try to look upon these inseperables as separable from one another, and even as mutually indifferent.  The view taken of the relationship of religion and the state has been that, whereas the state had an independent existence of its own, springing from some source and power, religion was a later addition, something desirable perhaps for strengthening the political bulwarks, but purely subjective in individuals: -- or it may be, religion is treated as something without effect on the moral life of the state, i.e., its reasonable law and constitution which are based on a ground of their own.

Lefort comments, "The 'monstrous blunder' which Hegel denounces would therefore appear to designate the truth of modern times, the truth of our own times".  He, however, wonders if Hegel was, ultimately, wrong.  Did the religious actually recede from the political?  Has there been an actual compartmentalization and separation of the spheres of the political and of the religious?  "Can we not admit that, despite all the changes that have occurred, the religious survives in the guise of new beliefs and new representations, and it can therefore return to the surface, in either traditional or novel forms, when conflicts become so acute as to produce cracks in the edifice of the state?"

3. It becomes necessary to conceptualize both the political and the religious.  If these terms are the foundation of the inquiry, then they must be specified -- at least provisionally. 

First, the religious.  "it would ... seem that we can readily agree that certain beliefs, attitudes and representations reveal religious sensibility".  This 'religious sensibility' appears to hold whether not agents relate them to "dogma", "fidelity on their part to a church" and that they "may, in certain cases, go hand in hand with militant atheism".  Even atheists partake in the 'religious sensibility'.  The content of the 'religious sensibility' is most apparent when it is tied to a particular religion, rather than to religion in general.  Apparently, Lefort is willing to stop here in specifying the religious.  The 'religious sensibility', simply, is associated with "certain beliefs, attitudes and representations".  That is, the religious has some relation or provides some means of access to the symbolic.

Second, the political.  While it seems that the specificity of the religious is not immediately clear, Lefort assures us that it is much easier to identify the religious than it is to identify the political. Afterall, the religious can be understood in analogy with a specific religion; the political, however, can be found everywhere.  To make matters worse, the French language identifies to senses of 'political': le politique and la politique.  Or, translated into English, 'the political' and 'politics' respectively.  Even worse, a substantive and positive definition of the political seems impossible: "The criterion of what is political is supplied by the criterion of what is non-political, by the criterion of what is economic, social, juridical, aesthetic, or religious".  The problem, apparently, is epistemological.  Science, according to Lefort, deals with 'particulars'.  Thus, we readily apprehend the political when it is limited to a particular domain: "power relations", "a superstructural level", etc.  The political, however, appears to partake in generality, thus making it foreign to the particular.

4. While Lefort spends much time berating 'political science' and 'political sociology' while defending 'political philosophy', the 'political sociologist', such as myself, might be inclined to refer to some external texts at this point.  Lefort -- in the French style -- does not see it necessary to make explicit reference outside of his own discourse.  To those unfamiliar with these conventions (largely Anglo-Americans in the positivist and analytical tradition), French writing is largely seen as insular, egotistical, self-righteous, and constantly re-inventing the wheel.  It is as though Lefort has never read anything in his life!  It is as though he has never heard of Max Weber and Carl Schmitt!  It is as though Lefort himself wrote the works of Weber and Schmitt.  Of course, this is not the case.  But, for some, such a belief fulfills an important ideological function.

Before moving on with Lefort, let's move back.  Let's return to a debate -- incidentally, largely unnoticed in Anglo-American scholarship -- between the eminent political sociologist, Max Weber, and his disciple, Carl Schmitt.  People like to pass around gossip: "Did you know that Carl Schmitt was in attendance when Weber delivered 'Politics as a Vocation'?"  As though it would never occur to Schmitt to pick up a book on his accord.  As though that Nazi has no relation to that Liberal except to have once heard him speak.  Schmitt's political sociology, of course, is largely an attack and a response to Weber. You would have to be blind -- or an Anglo-American analytico-positivist philosopher -- to not see this.  Incidentally, the debate between Weber and Schmitt is the very one Lefort is alluding to in his discussion. The terms are -- and this is not a coincidence, like a Nazi showing up for a Liberal's lecture -- exactly the same.

Weber, that modern day Hegel, who wrote on every topic imaginable, has much to say about the political.  Indeed, the political is ostensibly the subject of his three volume Economy and Society. It isn't just in "Politics as a Vocation" that Weber discusses these topics... it's just easier to pick up a lecture than it is to pick up two-thousand pages.

In Economy and Society, Weber determined it was impossible to specify the content of the political.  The political exists at the limits of legitimacy.  It is legitimacy that separates the political from sheer naked force and violence.  Hence the importance Weber ascribes to the claim of "legitimate monopoly of coercive force" as the defining feature of the state.  Weber understands force and he understands legitimacy, but he does not understand the political, which connects the two.  The problem is one of ends -- the political has no end specific to it.  The economic has the ends of the profitable, the aesthetic has the ends of the beautiful, and so on. The political, meanwhile, has no such specific end.  Indeed, the political make take any specific domain as its own end:

It is not possible to define a political organization, including the state, in terms of the end to which action is devoted. All the way from provision for subsistence to the patronage of art, there is no conceivable end which some political association has not at some time pursued.  And from the protection of personal security to the administration of justice, there is none which all have recognized.  Thus it is possible to define the 'political' character of an organization only in terms of the means peculiar to it, the use of force.  This means is, however, in the above sense specific, and is indispensable to its character.  It is even, under certain circumstances, elevated into an end in itself (Economy and Society, vol I., "Basic Sociological Terms", 55).

Again,

Owing to the drastic nature of its means of control, the political association is particularly capable of arrogating to itself all the possible values toward which associational conduct might be oriented; there is probably nothing in the world which at one time or another has not been an object of social action on the part of some political association (Economy and Society, vol II., "Political Communities", 902).

And,

The political community, furthermore, is one of those communities whose action includes, at least under normal circumstances, coercion through jeopardy and destruction of life and freedom of movement applying to outsiders as well as to the members themselves. The individual is expected ultimately to face death in the group interest (Economy and Society, vol II., "Political Communities", 903).

Finally,

The decisive means for politics is violence ("Politics as a Vocation", From Max Weber, 121).

Summarizing: For Weber, it is impossible to define the political because the political refuses to remain tied down to a specific sphere.  Politics is dynamic, fluid and invasive: there is no end that it won't claim as its own.  Thus, while other domains -- the economic and the aesthetic -- have ends proper to themselves -- the profitable and the beautiful -- politics, in contrast, has no such specific end. Consequently, politics can only be defined on the basis of its "decisive means"; viz., violence.  Politics is always in relation to its “decisive means”.  The question, thus, becomes where legitimacy ends and force begins.  Or, from another perspective, from when the threat of force becomes the exercise of force.

This is an ideal place to turn to Weber’s disciple, Carl Schmitt.  In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt immediately identifies Weber (and Lefort’s) problem: the political is defined relationally in that it has no end specific to itself, but that we can intuitively grasp in reference to the ends of other spheres of social life:

religious as antithesis of political
cultural as antithesis of political
economic as antithesis of political
legal as antithesis of political
scientific as antithesis of political (The Concept of the Political, 23)

Schmitt, however, believes that the specific content of the political can be elucidated:

A definition of the political can be obtained only discovering and defining the specifically political categories.  In contrast to the various relatively independent endeavors of human thought and action, particularly the moral, aesthetic, and economic, the political has its own criteria which express themselves in a characteristic way.  The political must therefore rest on its own ultimate distinctions, to which all action with a specifically political meaning can be traced.  Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable.  The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and of what it consists.  The nature of such a political distinction is surely different from that of those others.  It is independent of them and as such can speak clearly for itself (The Concept of the Political, 25-6).

Schmitt immediately, and famously, provides the relevant distinction:

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. This provides a definition in the sense of a criterion and not as an exhaustive definition or one indicative of substantial content. Insofar as it is not derived from other criteria, the antithesis of friend and enemy corresponds to the relatively independent criteria of other antitheses: good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere,  and so on.  In any event it is independent, not in the sense of a distinct new domain, but in that it can neither be based on any one antithesis or any combination of other antitheses, nor can it be traced to these.  If the antithesis of good and evil is not simply identical with that of beautiful and ugly, profitable and unprofitable, and cannot be directly reduced to the others, then the antithesis of friend and enemy must even less be confused with or mistaken for the others.  The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation.  It can exist theoretically and practically, without having simultaneously to draw upon all those moral, aesthetic, economic, or other distinctions.  The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions.  But he is, neveretheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specifically intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.  These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party (The Concept of the Political, 26-7).

If the friend/enemy antagonism cannot be resolved through recourse to either previously existing rules (international law?) or to a third party (the League of Nations?), the answer must lie elsewhere: combat, force, and violence.  This logical conclusion is happily pursued by Schmitt:

For to the enemy concept belongs the ever present possibility of combat.  All peripherals must be left aside from this term, including military details and the development of weapons technology.  War is armed combat between organized political entities; civil war is armed combat within an organized unit.  A self-laceration endangers the survival of the latter.  The essence of a weapon is that it is a means of physically killing human beings.  Just as the term enemy, the word combat, too, is to be understood in its original existential sense.  It does not mean competition, nor does it mean pure intellectual controversy nor symbolic wrestlings in which, after all, every human being is somehow involved, for it is a fact that the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being symbolically a combatant.  The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing.  War follows from enmity.  War is the existential negation of the enemy.  It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid (The Concept of the Political, 33).

Schmitt, then, solves the problem confronting Weber.  While violence may be the decisive means of politics, violence is not what gives politics its definition or its meaning.  The political, then, is put in proper relation to the other spheres of social life:

moral as the distinction between good and evil
aesthetic as the distinction between beautiful and ugly
economic as the distinction between profitable and unprofitable
political as the distinction between friend and enemy

Legitimacy, in Schmitt's view, does not fit into the definition of the political.  This is telegraphed in the second sentence of the book where Schmitt paraphrases Weber, leaving out one essential element: "According to modern linguistic usage, the state is the political status of an organized people in an enclosed territorial unit" (The Concept of the Political, 19).  The claim to the legitimate monopology of coercive force by the modern state is just that: a claim. It is not an essential feature of the modern state.  Rather, the essential feature is the relation between the collectivity and territory, which necessarily implies an external relation to other collectivity/territory units.  Violence, then, does not fit into the definition of the state, but into the definition of the political. Weber's inability to separate the state from the political in modernity lead him to an inability to specify the political.  The political ceases to be the transition from threat of violence to the exercise of violence.  Instead, the political becomes the ever-present possibility of violence.

5. Lefort does not go down this Germanic road.  He, instead, borrows from a different source: the ancient idea of comparing regimes, or forms of society, developed by Plato and Aristotle.  “We arrive at a very different idea of the political if we remain true to philosophy’s oldest and most constant inspiration, if we use the term to refer to the principles that generate society or, more accurately, different forms of society”.  The political is thereby related to the form of the regime. 

The idea that what distinguishes one society from another is its regime – or, to be more accurate and to avoid an over-worked term – its shaping [mise en forme] of human coexistence has, in one form or another, always been present, and it lies, so to speak behind the theoretical constructs and behind advances in philosophical thought which are tested against the transformation of the world.  In other words, it is simply because the very notion of society already contains within it a reference to its political definition that it proves impossible, in the eyes of the philosopher, to localize the political in society.

If the political is not located in society, then we cannot say that it is a sphere or system or domain existing in society.  That is, Weber and Schmitt have it backwards: for them, the political is a consequence of the social.  The social has priority over the political because, for them, in order to have politics, it is necessary to already have a collectivity engaging in collective action.  On the surface, this does not appear to be a controversial claim: politics is something we do within or between societies.  It makes intuitive sense.  However, it leaves open a glaring hole: if the political is a consequence of the social, that is, if the social makes the political possible and thus acts as its foundation, it is impossible to say that the creation of the social was a political act.  In other words, the creation of the social is neutral. Lefort, however, reverses this tendency.  The political is the question of the form of the social; the political is what gives shape to the social.  Thus, the founding of the social in the first instance was a political act.  Similarly, any change to the form of the social is an instance of the political.  The political question, then, is “the mode of the institution of the social”.  The political is the interplay of the instituting/instituted.  If the social is created and changed through the political, then – contrary to Schmitt’s, Strauss’ and Kojeve’s and, indeed, Nietzsche’s fears – the political can never disappear unless the social itself disappears.  (Of course, people have made this very claim.  But the meaning of the social is not the same.  For many of the ‘death of the social’ crowd, the death in question is the collapse of the state/society or public/private distinction.)  But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Earlier, in “The Question of Democracy”, Lefort had defined a regime as containing a “form of government” (constitution) and a “mode of life”. In this essay, he adds to the analysis with the concepts of ‘mise en forme’, ‘mise en sens’, and ‘mise en scene’.

We can further specify the notion of shaping [mise en forme] which we have introduced by pointing out that it implies both the notion of giving meaning [mise en sens] to social relations […] and that of staging them [mise en scene]. Alternatively, we can say that the advent of a society capable of organizing social relations can come about only if it can institute the conditions of their intelligibility, and only if it can use a multiplicity of signs to arrive at a quasi-representation of itself.

We can graft the new terms on to the previous terms.  The regime becomes equivalent to the ‘mise en forme’, the constitution to the ‘mise en scene’, and the mode of life to the ‘mise on sens’. We are tempted to make a ‘structural’ versus ‘content’ comparison at this point.  On the one hand, we have the structural definition of the regime as the combination of the form of government (constitution) and an associated mode of life.  On the other hand, we have the meaningful definition of the mise en forme as the combination of the mise en scene and the mise en sens.

With respect to the former, the form of government refers to “the structure of power which […] is considered legitimate and which, in its turn, provides the basis for a legitimate distinction between social ranks” and the mode of life to “those mores and beliefs that testify to the existence of a set of implicit norms determining notions of just and unjust, good and evil, desirable and undesirable, noble and ignoble” (“The Question of Democracy”, 2-3).  We might call these the objective conditions of the regime in that all regimes possess these two characteristics: on the one hand, the regime must select a particular form (for instance, democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, or mixed) and it must also divide between the just and unjust, the good and evil, the desirable and undesirable, and the noble and ignoble. Regardless of the specifics, each regime must take account of these features.

With respect to the latter, the regime must provide the structure with content and meaning.  What Lefort is getting at here is clearly in a Durkheimian vein: “Far from being built into human nature, no idea exists, up to and including the distinction between right and left, that is not, in all probability, the product of religious, hence collective, representations” (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 11-2).  If there is an argument with Durkheim on this point, it is over the question of whether or not these representations are religious or political. Lefort, clearly, sides with the political.  (It is worth keeping in mind, however, that Lefort is concerned with “political societies” while Durkheim is concerned with “the simplest and most primitive” societies.)  Thus, the empty ‘nothing’ of the structure must be filled with ‘something’.  This is where the ‘quasi-representation’ of the regime to itself comes in to play.  The structural elements of the regime must be rendered meaningful; that is, they must be apprehended as having meaning to the agents making up the regime.  In other words, it is necessary that the social space unfold in an intelligible manner in accordance with the mode of life.  The second aspect, the mise en scene, is the construction of the relation between the regime and its symbolic order.  That is, the mise en scene renders the form of government intelligible to agents through an ordering of the symbolic order of Law, Knowledge, and Power.