History of European Ideas

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Claude Lefort: the myth of the One

Nicole Hochner

To cite this article: Nicole Hochner (2023): Claude Lefort: the myth of the One, History of
European Ideas, DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2023.2207183
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2023.2207183

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HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS
https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2023.2207183

Claude Lefort: the myth of the One

Nicole Hochner
Department of Political Science, and the Program in Cultural Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, Israel

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
A growing interest in Claude Lefort is bringing to light his radical insights Claude Lefort; Etienne de La
on modern democracy, totalitarianism, and human rights. While the Boétie; consensus -
notion perhaps most closely associated with Lefort is that of ‘the empty dissensus; totalitarianism;
place of power,’ this article offers a reading of Lefort from a unique political imagination; unity
and division in democracy
angle: his concept of the myth of the One. I demonstrate that to Lefort,
the phantasmagorical appeal of the One – the desire for harmony, unity
and stability – is the force that continually endangers the democratic
project, while the distinctive and unavoidable characteristic of democratic
society is its ‘inability’ to name itself as One – a coherent and established
social self. Thus, the main challenge of society is its symbolic self-
institution. The discussion illuminates Lefort’s singular stance in the study
of totalitarianism (Arendt), his rejection of the imaginary (next to
Castoriadis), his debt to the structuralism scheme (Lévi-Strauss), as well as
his conversation with anarchist voices (La Boétie, Clastres) and with
psychoanalysis (Lacan). Ultimately, what Lefort coins ‘symbolic division’
condenses the pledge of democracy to embrace a neurotic self, a
bodiless body, a nameless identity in an empty space of power. As such,
Lefort’s anti-myth of the One promises to be a vexing objective.

1. Introduction
[Hannah Arendt] denounced the myth of the One without considering the scheme of a new symbolic order.
That is the reason why she has not measured the abyss that separates two forms of society: totalitarianism and
modern democracy. (Claude Lefort)1

To accuse Hannah Arendt of an inability to distinguish between totalitarianism and modern

democracy is a particularly harsh critique within a volume marking fifty years since the publication
of her Origins of Totalitarianism. Claude Lefort (1924–2010), however, who shared with Arendt the
urge to study the perplexing rise of totalitarian regimes, did in fact conclude his contribution with
these vehement lines. In his own terms, it was not enough to denounce the ‘myth of the One’ out-
side ‘the scheme of a new symbolic order.’ For Lefort, the strong attraction to ‘the One’ cannot be
understood outside the analysis of the symbolic matrix encompassing it.2 Does it mean that a myth
is the expression of a symbolic order? How are the two related? The primary objective of this article
is to explore Lefort’s intriguing notion of ‘the myth of the One.’
The concept of ‘the myth of the One’ has to date remained marginal in Lefortian scholarship,
which has preferred to associate Lefort with the idea of an empty place of power, or with his analysis

CONTACT Nicole Hochner nicole.hochner@mail.huji.ac.il

I would like to thank Carmen Dege and Tae-Yeoun Keum for their insightly comments.
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published
allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
2 N. HOCHNER

of human rights, or totalitarianism.3 In a sense, this neglect is justifiable since in Lefort’s vast canon,
the term ‘myth’ remains relatively scarce. I would argue, however, that the notion of ‘the myth of the
One’, despite its infrequent appearance in his writings, is a pivotal axis in the work of the French
philosopher. While to designate a central axis is inevitably reductionist, especially in a body of work
as multifaceted as Lefort’s, I argue here that the notion of ‘the myth of the One’ illuminates the
entire Lefortian galaxy.4
From his early references to totalitarianism and subsequently in his stance on democracy to his
readings of political philosophy, especially La Boétie, Machiavelli, or Tocqueville, or his reflections
on anthropology, in particular in his dialogues with Pierre Clastres, in his analysis of totalitarianism,
and finally in his dialogue with psychoanalysis, Lefort systematically refers to the duality of One/
Other (Un/Autre). Examples can be found in references to the One-Party (in relation to Bolshe-
vism), or the phantasm of People-as-One le fantasme du Peuple Un,5 or the name of the One in
Lefort’s reading of Étienne de La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.6 Significantly, his read-
ing of La Boétie in 1976 was followed by two contributions to the Collège de Psychanalystes: first, his
now famous article on the ‘empty place of democracy’, and the second in the following year, under
the striking title, The Myth of the One in Phantasmagoric and Political Reality.7
But why is the ‘O’ in the ‘myth of the One’ capitalized? ‘The text of ideology is written in capital
letters’ answers Lefort.8 Sarcastically, he asks himself: are there any Big ideas left in our contempor-
ary world? Maybe Humanity? Progress? Nature? Science? Property? Family? Order? Fatherland?
After the demise of monarchy and religion, are capital letters still pertinent? This question is impor-
tant for Lefort in order to stress that the great peril of today is not ‘our unbelief’ (incroyance) that
‘deprives law and right of meaning’ but the corollary of such a crisis; in other words the demise of
belief is turned into a formidable demand for certainty (certitude) and a daunting ‘passion for
unanimism.’9 Nationalism, in its most dangerous form and with its ‘hideous’ plea for ethnic cleans-
ing, reemerges alongside religious fundamentalism. These extreme manifestations of the attraction
of the One are particularly worrying, as a ‘more and more atomized society’ is not able to cope with
the ‘passion for unanimism … which converts all opposition, all dissidence, into treason, and results
in this prodigy of servitude: the common desire not to think anymore.’10 The desire for consolation,
achieved by eliminating the separation, division, and fragmentation of the social body, is what
makes unanimism so appealing. The ‘myth of the One’ is therefore not banal as a formulation,
or a passing expression; it is the key feature of an insatiable need for meaning and the quest for
self-recognition as a singular entity. For Lefort, the democratic experience is crystallized as the
impossibility to establish shared values in an immutable way. That the democratic experience can-
not bear a name, neither one nor another, is precisely the challenge of ‘our times’:11 how to prevent
the filling of the symbolic void generated by the demise of religion and monarchy with new dogmas
and fixed images. Designing a new symbolic realm outside the One/Other prism and leaving it
empty by removing both ‘one and another’ could, however, turn the ‘myth of the One’ upside
down with a no less phantasmagorical aspiration for a world of indetermination and division.
Claude Lefort is not as much the author of major books as of articles and essays, contributions in
journals, magazines and reviews, translations, and prefaces (sometimes collected in books). The
long list of periodicals for which he wrote throughout his life, such as Les Temps modernes, Socia-
lisme ou barbarie, L’Anti-mythes, Textures, Libre, Signes, Esprit, Passé-Présent, Le Temps de la réflex-
ion and offers not only a sketch of his intellectual path, but also the history of the French intellectual
scene after the second World War.12 His quarrels with Cornelius Castoriadis in Socialisme ou bar-
barie, or with Jean-Paul Sartre in the Temps Modernes are illuminating perspectives on contempor-
ary French thought. Lefort was also active in editorial boards and publishing houses, as well as a
translator. Miguel Abensour, who in 1974 created a new collection ‘Critique de la politique’ with
the publisher Payot,13 invited Lefort to contribute to the first titles of the collection. Originally,
the first volume planned for the collection ‘Critique de la politique’ was Max Horkheimer’s Eclipse
of reason. In the end, it was The Discourse on voluntary servitude by Etienne de La Boétie with
Claude Lefort’s interpretative essay that inaugurated the collection. I shall begin with a discussion
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 3

of this volume (1976), as I believe Lefort, through La Boétie, articulates here most straightforwardly
his views on the myth of ‘the One.’ The dialogue with Pierre Clastres imposes itself, as he too via La
Boétie, analyses the refusal of ‘the One’ alongside a State-less alternative. This brings us to the
prevalence of the symbolic, a notion borrowed equally from anthropology and psychoanalysis,
which stands at the heart of Lefort’s political theory, as we shall see in his interventions at the Col-
lège de psychanalystes,14 or in his controversy with Hannah Arendt.

2. The myth of the One: the revelation of La Boétie15

The volume in itself is a matter of curiosity. It is still available today in a pocket edition, entitled La
Boétie and the Question of Politics, comprising seven interpretative essays.16 Only three of them
were produced specifically for the present edition: a lengthy presentation by the two editors, Miguel
Abensour and Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Clastres’ ‘Liberty, Misfortune, Unnamable’ and Claude
Lefort’s ‘The Name of the One’. Preceding La Boétie’s text were placed various extracts from earlier
works such as from Oppression and Liberty by Simone Weil (1937).
This volume marvelously stages what Lefort does best, a multidirectional dialogue with six-
teenth-century authors (La Boétie but also Machiavelli), no less than with anthropology (here
with Pierre Clastres), as well as with immediate contemporaries (here Abensour and Gauchet,
but in a sense Weil too). Like a palimpsest, the various perspectives on La Boétie are not meant
to offer a systematic dossier on the Discourse, but rather to illustrate strata of voices and readings.
This is – I believe – exactly what Lefort meant by ‘the present of the text [le présent du texte]’,17 or
‘the work at work [le travail de l’oeuvre]:’18 the way a text continues to talk to us. As Flynn rightly
suggested, it could be associated with the ‘fusion of horizons’ as defined by Hans Georg Gadamer.19
Though no matter how close the two methods sound, Lefort insisted on the interstices, the in-
betweenness, the ‘entre-connaissance’20 that can never be fused. Even in his methodological
credo, Lefort stands against a stabilization of meanings that could result in something ‘too’ fusional.
If we trust Michel de Montaigne, Étienne de La Boétie composed his treatise when he was only
eighteen, in the tumultuous year of 1548.21 Montaigne tries to minimize the essay as a rhetorical
writing exercise most probably because soon after La Boétie’s premature death, his Discourse
rapidly became a subversive weapon against the monarchy at one of the worst periods of the
War of Religions. It circulated as a manuscript until it was printed as a pirate edition by the Hugue-
not party under the title Against the One ‘Contre Un.’ The seditious tone of the discourse is still
vibrant centuries later. During Lefort’s lifetime, La Boétie’s discourse was explicitly banned by
the Propaganda-Abteilung Frankreich;22 however, it was clandestinely printed in 1943 and 1944
as an act of resistance during the German Occupation. As Simone Weil observes in the same
volume, ‘the submission of the greater number to the smallest, this fundamental fact of almost
all social organizations, has never ceased to astonish all those who think a little.’23 La Boétie’s Dis-
course is therefore not only about the never-ending enigma of disobedience, but also about this
effort ‘to think a little.’
Lefort stages his attentive, painstaking act of reading, by announcing firstly that the Discourse is
not a text, but a voice:
The Discourse breaks through the wall of time. It succeeds, I shall say, in making a voice resonate. Should I
add, that only those who do not remain deaf to oppression, here and now, are able to hear it.24

This voice, for Lefort, has an almost miraculous ability to make itself heard through the ‘wall of
time.’ Whatever were the true intentions of the author, what is at stake is the capacity of his
voice to instigate a critical effort. Such an effort starts always by the work of rereading, by conveying
the echoes of a voice from the past into the present.25 This commentary on La Boétie is therefore a
manifesto on hermeneutics as well as a demonstration of the ‘work’ of the Discourse, prompting us
to go back to the text and listen to the emancipatory voices that are ceaselessly generating new
implications.
4 N. HOCHNER

From the depths of time, the first voice we actually meet in La Boétie’s text is the ancestral poet
Homer, who affirms in the opening paragraph: ‘I see no good in having several masters.’ The logical
conclusion is that one would rather serve one master than many. The idea that the rule of one leader
is the most natural and efficient form of regime is somehow the prevailing opinion. How could it be
otherwise when one God rules his Creation, when one head dominates the whole body and com-
mands its organs and members hierarchically? In his commentary on Dante’s Monarchia, Lefort
explored this thesis, arguing that the rule of one global master is not only possible but is evidently
preferable to a chaotic disarray of civil discord and strife.26 Who could ignore this plea for unity?
The hatred of democracy, to borrow Jacques Rancière’s title,27 is encapsulated in the few lines of
Homer La Boétie quotes in his epigraph.
Unexpectedly, La Boétie makes us realize that the question of one versus many masters prevents
us from raising the question of domination. In political treatises, especially in the genre of Mirrors of
Princes, tyrants are distinguished from good kings in myriad ways, but hierarchical power remains
unquestioned. Seneca’s De Clementia, for instance, distinguishes between despots and monarchs,
but the fact that the source of power is one remains self-evident (in this treatise dedicated to
Nero!). Etienne de La Boétie turns the question of power upside down, after hundreds of political
texts that are in fact lengthy catalogues of good virtues and words of advice for ‘good’ leaders.28 For
La Boétie, the profile of the perfect ruler is simply irrelevant since the foundations of his rule are not
at all grounded in his personal qualities or deeds – he is but a little man, a little homme: a hommeau
– his power rests solely on the acquiescence of the dominated. In his dedication letter, Machiavelli
had already alluded in the Prince that politics should be written from below, from ‘the plains’ – that
is, from the perspective of the 99% – as the Occupy movement designated it recently.29 So when
Homer asked ‘why have many masters when you can have only one?’, La Boétie retorted, ‘why tol-
erate mastery at all?’
For Lefort, this revelation is shocking: ‘Under our eyes, the power of the infinite number is dis-
solved in contact with an almost zero power.’30 Not only are ‘we’, the 99%, stronger because we are
numerous, but the prince is weak and lonesome. In addition, to overthrow his government, the only
act required of us is a refusal to submit. La Boétie suggests that we need only to desire to be free to
break our chains. ‘Be resolved no longer to serve, and you will find yourself free.’
Lefort finds here the disclosure of the perversion of our desires: our natural desire to be free
is corrupted into a denatured drive to serve: ‘the scandal is all the more efficient that it is dis-
missed [il fait silence sur lui].’31 Corruption is no longer assessed by the gap between a despot
and a good ruler, but by our deafness, our incapacity to hear the voice of liberty. Lefort is very
careful to avoid visual metaphors.32 Thus, the emancipatory path is not about opening our eyes,
as there will be nothing to be seen in the-yet-to-come empty place, but rather a polyphony of
voices to listen to.
To Lefort, what is puzzling is the enchantment of the many by the one: ‘The Prince has given his
body to the name [of One] that enchants the number [the many].’33 The many project themselves
onto the body of the tyrant and identify themselves with the name of the One. What is important to
underline here is that such a work of identification turns plurality into a singular identity. As
Michael Walzer once wrote: ‘Politics is an art of unification; from many, it makes one.’34 Alongside
the incarnation of the plurality into the body of the ruler – besides this incorporation – a sup-
plementary step has been put forward, a name has been given to the community. Lefort reveals
that Lacan found here an anticipation of his analysis on the Name of the Father.35 As Samuel
Moyn suggested, ‘Lefort politicized Lacan’s imaginary.’36 What then, is in a name?

3. The charm of a name

Lefort scrutinizes the transformative political process prompted by the institution of a single name.
The perplexing ‘power of a name [pouvoir d’un nom], the name of One [le nom d’Un]’ is the power
of the myth to make phantasmagoric entities look deceptively real.37 Three different operations are
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 5

performed: first, the myth of the One enchants us, corrupting our desires; secondly it turns many
into one, and finally it gives a name to something that fundamentally cannot be named because fun-
damentally indefinite. The charm of the One is derived from being named, easily identified and say-
able – ‘dicible.’ Diversity, on the contrary, remains in constant flux and therefore is indeterminate,
never crystallized into a fixed name.
How does enchantment work? The feelings of mutuality and solidarity are distorted and per-
verted into a desire for harmony and consensus. It prompts the narrowing of the manifold and var-
ious desires of the community into the desire for one leadership. This occasions ceaseless abuses
and humiliations inflicted in the name of a homogeneous society united against its enemy: the
Other. The totalitarian regime would not exist without an Other. This malicious intrinsic parasite,
the saboteur, the traitorous – constantly seek to destroy the imaginary unity of society. Evidently,
such an internal Other is more dangerous than any external enemy. As soon as polemical debate, or
the refusal to obey unconditionally is considered high treason, ‘the charm of the One’ prevails.38
Thanks to the valorization of peace, loyalty, and consensus, politics is sketched out in a monopo-
listic guise. Identification with the One impedes the healthy conflict, as defined by Machiavelli,
between those who desire to oppress and those that desire to be free from oppression (The Prince,
chapter 9). It leaves the voracious appetite of the grandi unchecked under the charm of their sup-
posedly aristocratic glory. Myth enchants also thanks to its phantasmagoric temporality, the revival
of a supposedly original Eden and its promises of a restored stability and tranquility endangered by
social division. The denial of time and change – other than decline – is another feature of an
enchanted nostalgia.
Following the delegitimization of dissension, the second function of the myth is to turn many
into One. Under the pretense of fostering cohesion, or social glue, it in fact makes illegitimate any-
thing that could put in jeopardy the monopoly of the One, be it One party, One religion, or People-
as-One. The various appearances of the One in history is manifold. The motto of the French mon-
archy was in modern times ‘One God, One King, One Faith.’ The heresy and the inquisition are
their corollaries. The prohibition of opinions characterized as deviant, the fear of expressing
opinions against the consensus view, or worse, of protesting against the (ostensible) majority are
distinctive of a totalitarian climate. Unity is therefore not a pleasing state of concord and harmony,
a force of unanimity, but the reduction of a polyphonic world into one of a single note melody. As
La Boétie understood well, one does not need to exercise domination to obtain it; self-censorship on
the one hand,39 and the genuine aspiration for peaceful harmony on the other, are the forces that
foster such homogeneity.
The third aspect of the myth is no less crucial: it gives a name, an identity to the many. Such a
name eases the anxiety caused by the incapacity of the many to secure their togetherness. To give a
name to the people, who are by definition a plurality, is for Lefort the original sin (my term). Just, as
in Exodus 3:14 in which God defined himself as ‘I am who I am,’ the people as the alter ego of the
biblical God should refrain from being named. The people are indefinitely indeterminate and
unnamable. To give the people a name is a profanation in the same way that to embody it
would be devastating for its liberty.40 The name is not the institution of a self-conscious subjectivity;
on the contrary, the name of the People-as-One seals the dissolution of their flourishing indetermi-
nacy. As Mazzochi writes, although the name of the One satisfies our narcissism, it nurtures a ‘fan-
tastical body that reduces difference to an identity, consequently subsuming the plurality inherent
to language and communication.’41
These three facets of myth can be associated with three aspects of the work of Claude Lefort. The
question of enchantment touches on the sustaining of our desires by a symbolic matrix; the fruit-
fulness of division is directly related to the tumults of Machiavelli; and finally, the impossibility of
naming a political power is the fundamental indetermination emblematic of modern democracy as
Lefort understood it. The three facets of the myth function as a vicious circle, as division is endan-
gered by the possibility of naming itself as a homogenous One; it prompts a seeming solidarity
under the enchanting guise of harmony, which dangerously erodes the legitimacy of contestation
6 N. HOCHNER

and reduces the variety of opinions. Such a pathology is diagnosed by two phenomena that mirror
each other: disengagement – or what Lefort terms ‘the abdication of thinking’42 – and conformity –
investigated by Tocqueville in America.
Modern democracy as defined by Claude Lefort may well appear utopian, as it is a community
that ought to function without a name, a society without a body, and a power in an empty space
‘deprived of the double reference to the Other and to the One.’43 How could such a political com-
munity possibly act as a unified whole if it is deprived of a common identity? The conjoined essay of
Pierre Clastres on La Boétie could offer a possible path to an answer.

3.1. The anti-myth

La Boétie brings Pierre Clastres amongst the Indian Guarani in South America. While Lefort inves-
tigates the attraction exerted by the One, Pierre Clastres in his interpretative study refers to the
‘quest for the not-One’ amongst Indian Guarani. Their motto, he reminds us, is ‘One is Evil itself.’44
It is evil because it is finite and therefore corruptible.45 The ‘prophetic discourse that identifies the
One as the root of Evil’ also ‘asserts the possibility of breaking its hold.’46
This paints for us a dichotomous picture: the West, or ‘the peoples who have a history’ are
attracted to unity; while the Savages or ‘peoples without history’ are supposedly wise enough
to ‘prevent chiefs from being chiefs, the refusal of unification, the endeavor to exorcise the
One.’47 The reversal is complete: the French monarch proclaims, ‘I am the State,’ the Indian
Guarani reply, ‘long live society!’ The West is deceived by the myth of the One, whereas Savages
occlude the nascent State by their commitment to the ‘not-One.’ What are the lessons Clastres
offers? He explains that most Indian rituals act as an antidote to the greed and ambitions of
their chiefs, who are left with the empty power of their words. Speech – according to Clastres
– is the ‘imperative obligation for the chief.’ The main duty of the Indian chief is therefore to
preach, even if his litanies are powerless.48 Nevertheless, they are significant, as in societies with-
out State, the ‘steady flow of empty speech’49 ‘occup[ies] the space of possible power’ and there-
fore ‘impede[s] power from becoming real.’50 As Stathis Gourgouris remarks, ‘[Clastres]
understands that the space of power is always ontologically empty but never performatively
empty. In fact, in order to assure that the space of power remains empty, it must always be per-
formatively filled.’51
Lefort, in contrast to Clastres, refutes the claim pertaining to the emptiness of language and
denies its performative aspects. The Indian ritual of power as the mise en scène of an empty speech
is perhaps a prelude to an empty space, but for Lefort, language is constitutive. The mise en sens
cannot take place outside language, outside a realm of voices. Democracy may be disembodied
for Lefort, but it cannot be mute.52 The place of language brings me to a short digression about
Claude Lévi-Strauss – who was Clastres’ teacher. Lefort and Lévi-Strauss equally disregard rituals
and focus on myth and the institutional power of language. It will allow us to reach the fundamental
place of division and symbolism without which Lefort’s notion of myth cannot be fully grasped.
I argue that Lefort adopted the observations made by Lévi-Strauss at the end of his book, Tote-
mism.53 I will quote two passages at length. For Lévi-Strauss, totemism is a false concept; in his book
he attests that it never existed, the same way he demonstrates in his 1962 book on wild thought that
nothing like it could (or should) have ever been assumed.54 An original self-consciousness brings
man, according to Lévi-Strauss, to identify one with another, to feel compassion. As he admits him-
self, he is heavily indebted here to Jean-Jacques Rousseau:55
It is because man originally felt himself identical to all those like him (among which, as Rousseau explicitly
says, we must include animals) that he came to acquire the capacity to distinguish himself as he distinguished
them, i.e. to use the diversity of species as conceptual support for social differentiation.56

Compassion paradoxically engenders comparisons and divisions. They are the cause of distinctive-
ness and inequality.57 The next point is also borrowed from Rousseau:
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 7

For Rousseau, this is the very development of language, the origin of which lies not in needs but in emotions,
so that the first language must have been figurative […] All enveloping terms, which confounded objects of
perception and the emotions which they aroused in a kind of surreality thus preceded analytical reduction in
the strict sense. Metaphor, the role of which in totemism we have repeatedly underlined, is not a later embel-
lishment of language, but is one of its fundamental modes. Placed by Rousseau on the same plane as opposi-
tion, it constitutes, on the same ground, a primary form of discursive thought.58

These two Rousseauian insights are crucial for Lefort: it anchored humanity in social differentiation
(Lefort would say division), and in the development of a vast symbolic framework. They are impera-
tive in understanding what Lefort calls ‘symbolic division,’ which is in fact the other facet of the
myth of the One.

3.2. The symbolic ‘division’

While in Totemism Lévi-Strauss talked about ‘a kind of surreality’, for Lefort ‘access to the world’,59
is always the product of symbolic activity. Materiality has no significance outside a symbolic
framework.60
In non-democratic societies, such a framework is designed by higher agents such as God, the
spirits, the ancestors, the dogmas of the Party, or the axioms of a universal or natural law. In demo-
cratic societies, on the contrary, what is considered real is articulated collectively. Lefort uses the
term articulated rather than defined, because what distinguished democratic societies is precisely
the indeterminateness of its symbolic institution. The institution of a ‘what is real’ is the design
of a set of ‘organizing schemes’ outside which the intelligibility of a common world is impossible.
It is ‘the form of society within which the division of reality into various sectors appears and is legiti-
mated’.61 Such a ‘space of intelligibility’ is articulated
in accordance with a specific mode of distinguishing between the real and the imaginary, the true and the false,
the just and the unjust, the permissible and the forbidden, the normal and the pathological […] between auth-
enticity and imposture, between the pursuit of power or of private interests and the pursuit of the common
good.62

Such a framework, it seems at first glance, enables us to share a common reality. Exchange by
speech, furthermore, allows us to explore our likeness and articulate the relation of the ‘similar
with the similar.’63 It allows mutual recognition: we can talk to each other, understand one another.
For Lefort, however, what is emphasized is not togetherness or mutual recognition, a common
language or a common good, but division.
Division is constitutive. It means that all aspects of reality (including society) are produced by a
set of distinctions. The vast range of dichotomies typically examined by Lévi-Straussian structural-
ism, however, cannot be stabilized. The possibility of antagonism, the legitimacy of a constant rene-
gotiation of what is licit and illicit means that differentiations belongs to no One.64 Division for
Lefort is therefore constitutive and cannot be resolved.
From a political point of view, the enunciation of a togetherness confronts us with the greatest
peril: the denial of division, the temptation to identify ourselves as tous un (the singular), instead of
tous uns (the plural).65 The ‘threat of enchantment’ is therefore inscribed in symbolic activity. As
soon as the People-as-One or Party-as-One is named as tous un, division ceases to be constitutive
of society, as the imaginary One is necessarily fabricated as a reference to a transcendental outside or
a substantial inside.66 The externality of the imaginary, or its essentialist nature, is indicative of the
profoundly deviant nature of imagination, or I could also say – of mythical thinking. Inexorably, it
produces its opposite: the hideous face of the Other-enemy.67 The People-as-One as well as the Foe-
as-Other are figures of speech; they are imaginary beings. They are nevertheless all too real under an
oppressive, totalitarian regime.
What is denounced by Lefort is not an abuse of language or deceptive lies, but the possibility
through language to identify ourselves outside our in-betweenness. As soon as we seek to be
named ‘all together’ in the singular and reflect ourselves in the mirror as a united people,68 we
8 N. HOCHNER

fill the space in between us with a neurotic and invasive ‘social narcissism.’69 This is the work of
myth. It echoes the Lacanian model of incorporation. The body in the mirror is the (mistaken) rep-
resentation of oneself; it has to be incorporated and unified to overcome the original fracturing.70
For Lefort, however, the division should not be resolved, and contrary to Lacan, for Lefort the sym-
bolic stage is first.71 As soon as we wish to hear our name, the ‘charm of the name of the One …
destroyed the articulation of a political language.’72
The myth is the satisfaction of what we lack most: unity and stability. The myth reflects our
phantasmagorical desire for certainty and reconciliation, the other side of indetermination and div-
ision. Myth therefore always nurtures totalitarian societies, deceptively hiding its cost.
But what about language? Language can save us from tyranny, just as it can enslave us. Human
relationships, in fact, are secured by language, but are also destroyed by it. So it is not language that
is problematic, but the imaginary versus the symbolic. Whereas Lefort talks about the symbolic
institution of society, his previous ally in Socialisme ou Barbarie, Cornelius Castoriadis, opts for
the imaginary institution of society.73 Castoriadis’ democratic project is about autonomy; however
Lefort is reluctant to form any identification with an imaginary Self, or worse with a permanent
unity invigorated by the phantasmagorical nostalgia of an initial freedom, autonomy, or harmony.
The imaginary makes us understand that the vision of the One is supported by a frantic denial of social div-
ision and depends on a phantasm. If language fails us in characterizing the totalitarian phenomenon, is it not
because that phenomenon leads to the limit of the nameable?

The imaginary denies social realities. It is synonymous with a phantasmagoric exteriority, with a
mythical concord. In contrast:
The symbolic makes us recognize the instauration of a system in which settled relations among groups and
individuals are articulated, and in which shared notions of the real, true, and normal are established.74

The myth belongs to the imaginary of an original state: a phantasmagorical state of primary unity
filling the space of power with an imposturous identity, with an unreal social body outside the rea-
lity of diversity and division. The myth of the One projects the people into a distorted image of itself
and, as in the Lacanian mirror-stage, it inaugurates a self-identification with an imago.75 The sym-
bolic, on the other hand, allows society to temporarily institutes itself through a series of ‘distinc-
tions that are basic to the exercise of the intellect.’ Such a provisional state does not mean that Lefort
is nihilistic or anarchistic: a society can certainly not function in an empty void, as ‘if we refuse to
risk making judgements, we lose all sense of the difference between forms of society.’ It is therefore
essential to give society a form, at least tentatively:
Giving them [forms of society] a form implies both giving them meaning (mise en sens) and staging them
(mise en scène). They are given meaning in that the social space unfolds as a space of intelligibility … 76

The ‘space of intelligibility’ is the necessary discrimination between opposed elements. It does not
mean that what is permissible or forbidden should stay so forever as a sacrosanct structure; on the
contrary, a society is instituted by its capacity to transgress its boundaries of certainty and run con-
troversies over its most fundamental distinctions. A free society is a form of collectivity that vindi-
cates divergence, following the lesson of Machiavelli, who acknowledges conflict as essential in
maintaining a free city.

4. Rupture with the (Machiavellian) body

Machiavelli transforms the organistic body and its hierarchy between highs and lows into a social
body made of humours in constant flux and endless interactions.77 Machiavellian fluidity makes the
opposition between contrary humours a healthy state. This is not enough for Lefort, who adopts the
conflict but wholly rejects the image of the body and its symbolic corollaries of incorporation,
boundaries, and exteriority. For Lefort, the body of the King or the body of the People, the will
of the God or the will of the Party are interchangeable. Lefort opts for a bodiless society.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 9

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who tried to save us from the Leviathan monstrosity, imagined some-
thing equally phantasmagorical: the denial of any obstacle between ourselves,78 an absence of a
‘hors de soi’ in the guise of a general will. Lefort, who is at the antipodes of Rousseau’s general
will, adopts nevertheless Rousseau’s definition of alienation as an externality of oneself, along
with his project to examine the means by which a people institute itself as a people (Social Contract,
Part I, ch. 5).79 Lefort, I believe, gives an answer to that question of self-institution that Rousseau
leaves open.80
As mentioned above, society is for Lefort instituted by symbolic means. From his mentor, Maur-
ice Merleau-Ponty, Lefort learned that what has been made real – such as society – hides its own
symbolic origins. The symbolic matrix that makes society real is what renders it invisible.81 The
symbolic articulations of a democratic society define what is enviable or undesirable, valuable or
worthless, but tell nothing about its origins. In Dick Howards’ words:
in an apparent paradox that is quite familiar to the phenomenologist, it makes itself invisible as the act of insti-
tution. The symbolic function of the political is to institute what a society takes as real. But, as with ideology, to
be effective the political has to hide its own creativity from itself.82

This void explains the attraction of the myth of the One in a democratic context. It functions as a
veil to the origins of society: its primordial division and its symbolic institution. We would love to
believe that society is founded on some necessity or epic teleology, on a primitive state of nature and
unity; we would love to have highest goals and answers to all our questions, but Lefort makes clear
that democracy is ‘instituted and sustained by the dissolution of markers of certainty.’83
This lack of certainty calls forward a desire for fulfilment. This brings us back to Lacan. The
attractiveness of Oneness is for Lefort a sort of neurotic self-injury. As Lefort explains himself in
the colloquium of psychoanalysts in 1982, totalitarianism can pretend to overcome division and
bring comfort, but it is a pathology characterized by three features: It is the negation of my own
self (literally Lefort says I am engulfed in a ‘we’), the negation of indetermination (I am engulfed
in certainty) and the privation of my own voice (I become a vessel through which a pseudo-truth’s
discourse is delivered).84 Only the radical alteration of the desire to be free can convince us to
renounce the endless possibilities of polyphony. This is ultimately the ‘work’ of the myth: the dis-
possession of possibilities, the denaturation of our desires, the erasure of the constitutive division of
society.
According to La Boétie, alienation is not the result of mighty powers; on the contrary, it is a self-
inflicted disorder. The petty desire to bear the name of the One above all others tempts dozens of
little tyrants amongst us – La Boétie calls them tyranneaux as they mirror the little man, the hom-
meau. As soon as one of them disengages himself from the tous uns in the plural, he weakens the
whole. By breaking the ties of a horizontal heterogeneity, diversity is jeopardized, inequalities and
social gaps grow, and eventually the whole society collapses into domination.85 Although Stalin is
the imagined ‘incarnation of the party,’ he is not alone to be blamed. Similarly to La Boétie, Lefort
notices that:
Party militants … consented, for the party, to be condemned by the party. They gave and denounced them-
selves to the point of passing themselves off as its enemies out of fear of losing their wound with it. La Boétie
had already suggested that men were caught in the phantasm of a body of which they were members … [the
party] had the extraordinary new property of giving consistency to the One in the guise of a collective indi-
vidual … The tyrant awakened or precipitated the people’s desire to appear to themselves as united [tout un].86

The true democratic revolution is the tremendous courage of men who together reject unity, stab-
ility, and harmony in order to free themselves from the mythical One. While power for Hannah
Arendt is the ability ‘to act in concert’ with peers.87 for Lefort, power is our duty to nurture our
divergences and expel the fantasy of ‘concert’ from our imagination.
Why Hannah Arendt is so severely criticized? Her fault is to allow the lure of a fusional consen-
sus to remain. In order to break with the myth of the One, division has to be recognized and cher-
ished. It is true that in many aspects, Arendt and Lefort are very close in their analysis of
10 N. HOCHNER

totalitarianism as a space where debate is prohibited, in their wish for a plural society, and in their
apology for democracy and political participation. And yet, Arendt cannot consent to the dissol-
ution of certainty professed by Lefort. For her, ‘at a certain point, democratic politics must risk
the inherent tragedy of acting,’ and put forward ‘a positively formulated political project.’88 Does
it mean that Arendt ignores the ‘symbolic mutation’ at the origins of totalitarianism?89 She
might well have denounced the myth of the One without considering its symbolic roots, but it is
no coincidence that for her politics needs a real public sphere, and access to the political world relies
on real bodies.90 Next to the imaginary of Castoriadis, and the symbolic of Lefort, Arendt could
perhaps be associated with the real, the realm of peer action.

5. Conclusion
The Ciceronian tradition says ‘there can be no fellowship between us and tyrants.’91 Lefort adds:
‘the tyrant installed in the position of the One had no friends.’92 As Gourgouris concludes: ‘Friend-
ship is not merely antagonistic to tyranny, it is precisely what tyranny cannot achieve.’93 Whereas
friends talk openly with each other, in a climate of ideological orthodoxy or fear, language is taken
hostage. This is why ideology is written in capital letters and freedom only in lower case. This is also
why Lefort distanced himself from the study of the production of social discourse by sociology.94
The denunciation of the myth of the One is instrumental for Lefort, both in the reading of La
Boétie, Machiavelli, or Clastres, as in his analysis of totalitarianism and modern democracy. It clar-
ifies the Lefortian symbolic matrix based on fluidity rather than rigidity, division rather than con-
ciliation, a polyphonic cacophony rather than a concert, the many rather than the One, and finally
lack rather than fulfilment. Lefort’s emptiness and the ‘dissolution of markers of certainty’ may
appear phantasmagorical if not dogmatic. Instead of the myth of the One, are we not left with a
no less mythical vacuity? Lefort in a way even fails to denounce loudly and clearly the Other
arch-enemy of democracy: certainty, stability and homogeneity.
How could Lefort enchant us without a name, the name of Liberty, or as in The Prince chapter 5,
the memory of such a name, ‘non dimenticano quello nome’? Can Lefort hear Machiavelli’s voice
reminding us that division can turn destructive and that liberty has always had trouble finding good
friends?:
… another difficulty is joined, which is that the state that becomes free makes partisan enemies and not par-
tisan friends … the common utility that is drawn from a free way of life is not recognized by anyone while it is
possessed.95

The visible fruits of liberty hide their sources. Are we tragically left to value democracy only when it
vanishes? Could we not be thrilled by the desire to be free, outside the anxiety of its loss? Lefort has
perhaps deconstructed the attractiveness of the myth of the One, but has yet to demonstrate how to
cherish the dissolution of the markers of certainty the way the vivere libero96 was cherished in the
tumultuous Republic of Machiavelli. Is democracy not a place where we could make, again, friends?

Notes
1. Claude Lefort, ‘Thinking with and Against Hannah Arendt’, Social Research: An International Quarterly 69,
no. 2 (2002): 447–59.
2. The term symbolic matrix [matrice symbolique] figures, for example, in Lefort’s contribution on Kardiner,
‘Ambiguïtés de l’anthropologie culturelle’, in Les formes de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 97 [page 162
in the pocket edition].
3. Amongst the growing literature on Lefort, see Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort, Interpreting the
Political (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006); Samuel Moyn, ‘Claude Lefort, Political Anthropol-
ogy, and Symbolic Division’, Constellations 19, no. 1 (2012): 37–50 and in French Hugues Poltier, Claude
Lefort la découverte du politique (Paris: Editions Michalon, 1997); Le travail de L’œuvre – Claude Lefort, ed.
Justine Lacroix and Jean-Yves Pranchère (Paris: Editions Raison Publique, 2019); Nicolas Poirier, Introduction
à Claude Lefort (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2020).
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 11

4. I use the term galaxy purposely, to avoid the notion of system which is problematic for Lefort.
5. The term appears several times throughout Lefort’s works; for instance in ‘The Question of Democracy’, in
Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Polity Press, 1988), 13, in French in Essais
sur le politique XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986), 31.
6. Claude Lefort, ‘Le nom d’Un’, in Etienne de La Boétie, Le discours de la servitude volontaire et La Boétie et la
question du politique, ed. Miguel Abensour. Texte établi par Pierre Léonard (Paris: Payot, 1976, I quote the
pocket edition 2002 witch is has a different pagination), 269–335. This text is also reproduced in the posthu-
mous volume of Claude Lefort, Lectures politiques de Dante à Soljenitsyne (Paris: PUF, 2021), 21–74.
7. Claude Lefort intervenes several times at the Collège de Psychanalystes in Paris. The transcriptions of the meet-
ing of July 1981 and October 1982 are published as Claude Lefort, ‘Démocratie et avènement d’un “lieu vide”’,
Psychanalystes, Revue du Collège de psychanalystes, n. 2 (1982) and Claude Lefort and François Roustang, ‘Le
mythe de l’Un dans le fantasme et dans la réalité politique’, Psychanalystes, Revue du Collège de psychanalystes
n. 9 (1983).
8. Claude Lefort, ‘Esquisse d’une genèse de l’idéologie dans les sociétés modernes’, in Claude Lefort, Les formes
de l’histoire. Essais d’anthropologie politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 300. In ‘Maintenant’ published in Libre 1
(1976) he says ‘la Propriété, le Travail, la Liberté, le Progrès et la Société ou l’Individu … les mots qui désignent
les institutions autrefois sacro-saintes, on voudrait les écrire sans majuscules’, in Le temps présent. Ecrits 1945–
2005 (Paris: Belin, 2007), 290.
9. Claude Lefort, ‘Le XXe siècle: la croyance et l’incroyance’, Esprit 209, no. 2 (1995): 23–4 https://www.jstor.org/
stable/24275733.
10. ‘Nous en voyons déjà le signe dans l’essor du nationalisme, dans ses manifestations extrêmes, dans son déchaî-
nement sous la forme hideuse de la purification ethnique, et nous en voyons encore le signe dans la poussée de
l’intégrisme religieux … la passion de l’unanimisme et l’affirmation arrogante d’une légitimité absolue, qui
convertit toute opposition, toute dissidence, en trahison, puis aboutit à ce prodige de servitude: le commun
désir de ne plus penser’, in Lefort, ‘Le XXe siècle: la croyance et l’incroyance’, 24.
11. Time and temporality are central concepts for Lefort. Since human reality is always in flux it is important for
Lefort to design our duty to decipher our own times: see the title of his last collection of article: Le Temps
présent.
12. See Franck Berthot, ‘Textures et Libre (1971–1980), une tentative de renouvellement de la philosophie poli-
tique en France’, and Goulven Boudic, ‘Brèves réflexions sur la gestion du conflit intellectuel à travers trois
revues Les Temps modernes, Esprit, Socialisme et barbarie’, in Les revues et la dynamique des ruptures, ed. Fran-
çois Hourmant and Jean Baudouin (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2007), respectively 105–29 and
67–83; as well as Alexandre Feron, ‘Sartre contre Lefort. De quoi l’expérience prolétarienne est-elle le nom ?’,
Rue Descartes 96, no. 2 (2019): 65–79.
13. See the ‘Manifeste de la collection “critique de la politique”’, in Miguel Abensour, Pour une philosophie poli-
tique critique (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2009) see also Jérôme Melançon, ‘Note critique – Partir des textes avec
Miguel Abensour’, Cahiers Société 2 (2020): 269–84. https://doi.org/10.7202/1075550.
14. See note 7.
15. Many readers identify this contribution as a major text by Lefort. As far as I know, it is still not translated into
English. See, for instance, Paul Mazzochi, ‘Desire, Friendship and the Politics of Refusal, Afterlives of La
Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude’, Utopian Studies 29, no. 2 (2018): 248–66, Michaël Boulet, ‘Claude
Lefort, lecteur de La Boétie’, in Cahiers de La Boétie. Lectures politiques de La Boétie (Paris: Garnier, 2013),
115–35; Paul Zawadzki, ‘Des renversements de la liberté en servitude: Claude Lefort lecteur de La Boétie, Exi-
lium 2 (2021): 167–89, by the same, ‘Le Discours de la servitude volontaire d’un siècle à l’autre. Verticalité,
horizontalité, intersubjectivité’, Revue du MAUSS 48, no. 2 (2016): 29–44 and Claude Habib, ‘De la servitude
volontaire une lecture politique’, in La démocratie à l’œuvre (Paris: Éditions Esprit, 1993), 191–211.
16. See note 6.
17. Lefort, ‘Le nom d’Un’, 309. It is difficult to translate without missing the double meaning of present as pres-
ence and as now.
18. See Le travail de l’œuvre: Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972) partly translated by Michael B. Smith as the
Machiavelli in the Making (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012). Lefort, alike Leo Strauss, is
not interested by the intentions of an author or by the historical context of a work, rather he is looking for
a hidden voice. However, contrary to Leo Strauss, the voice he tries to capture is not the voice of a fixed
and eternal truth but a voice that can instigate an emancipatory awakening, a voice that each time can resonate
differently in new ways.
19. Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort, chapter 3.
20. Lefort, ‘Le nom d’Un’, 308. Translations are mine.
21. Simone Goyard-Fabre, ‘Introduction’, in Etienne de La Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire (Paris: GF
Flammarion, 1983), 32 and 36–49. See also Efraim Podoksik, ‘Estienne de La Boétie and the Politics of Obe-
dience’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 65, no. 1 (2003): 83–95 http://www.jstor.org/stable/
20680554.
12 N. HOCHNER

22. Bernadette Gadomski, La Boétie, penseur masqué (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), 40–1.
23. Simone Weil, ‘Méditation sur l’obéissance et la liberté’, in La Boétie, Le Discours, 113.
24. ‘Le Discours force le mur du temps. Il y parvient disions-nous, de faire résonner une voix. Faut-il ajouter que
ceux-là seuls l’entendent qui ne restent pas sourds ici et maintenant à l’oppression’, Lefort, ‘Le nom d’Un’, 273.
25. The necessary return to the text and rereading is noticed also by Pierre Pachet in his article ‘la Reformulation
dans l’oeuvre de Claude Lefort’, in La démocratie à l’œuvre, 297–310.
26. Claude Lefort, Dante’s Modernity An Introduction to the Monarchia with an Essay by Judith Revel, in Cultural
Inquiry 16, ed. Christiane Frey et al. (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-16.
27. See Jacques Rancière, La haine de la démocratie (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005), The Hatred of Democracy, trans.
Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006).
28. Brunetto Latini’s Book of the Treasure, li livres dou tresor, is a good illustration of the genre, see the translation
by Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin (New York: Garland, 1993). For a wider perspective see for instance
Enrico Boccaccini, Reflecting Mirrors, East and West: Transcultural Comparisons of Advice Literature for
Rulers (8th–13th century) (Leiden: Brill, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004498921.
29. See Sarah Van Gelder and the Yes! Magazine, ed., This Changes Everything : Occupy Wall Street and the 99%
Movement (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011), as well as David Graeber, The Democracy Pro-
ject, A History, A Crisis, A Movement (New York: Random House, 2013).
30. ‘Sous nos yeux, la puissance du nombre infini se dissout au contact d’une puissance quasi nulle’, Lefort, ‘Le
nom d’Un’, 276.
31. Lefort, ‘Le nom d’Un’, 278.
32. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1993).
33. Lefort, ‘Le nom d’Un’, 279–80.
34. Michael Walzer, ‘On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought’, Political Science Quarterly 82, no. 2 (1967):
191–204. www.jstor.org/stable/2147214.
35. Pauline Colonna d’Istria, ‘La division originaire du social. Lefort lecteur de Lacan?’, Politiques et Sociétés 31,
no. 1 (2015): 135 and Warren Breckman, ‘Lefort and the Symbolic Dimension’, in Claude Lefort: Thinker of the
Political, ed. Martín Plot (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 176–85.
36. Samuel Moyn, ‘Claude Lefort, Political Anthropology, and Symbolic Division’, in Claude Lefort: Thinker of the
Political, 60.
37. Lefort, ‘Le nom d’Un’, 285.
38. The expression Lefort uses is ‘le charme de l’Un’; for instance in ‘Le refus de penser le totalitarisme, conférence
Hannah Arendt à l’occasion de l’installation à Berlin des Archives Hannah Arendt (2000)’, in Le temps présent.
Ecrits 1945–2005 (Paris: Belin, 2007), 973.
39. It is, I believe, more than anecdotal that Lefort experienced himself self-censorship, he confesses that when he
left the review Socialisme ou Barbarie founded with Cornelius Castoriadis, he felt freed from self-censorship:
‘j’étais délivré d’une censure; je ne parle pas de celle des autres, mais de la mienne propre, car, au sein de Socia-
lisme ou Barbarie, je m’interdisais de donner former à des pensées qui auraient fait apparaître, à mes propres
yeux, ma rupture avec le marxisme et le projet «révolutionnaire» du groupe’, in Lefort, ‘Entretien avec l’Anti-
Mythes’, originally published in L’Anti-Mythes, no. 14 (19 avril 1975), reproduced in Le Temps présent. Ecrits
1945–2005 (Paris: Belin, 2007), 236.
40. ‘La société démocratique s’institue comme société sans corps’, in Lefort, ‘La question de la démocratie’, in
Essais sur le politique, 29.
41. Mazzochi, ‘Desire, Friendship’, 255.
42. ‘C’est le renoncement à penser qui fut l’une des conditions de l’établissement du totalitarisme, l’une des car-
actéristiques majeures, tant du communisme, que du nazisme et du fascisme’, in Claude Lefort, ‘Le refus de
penser le totalitarisme, conférence Hannah Arendt à l’occasion de l’installation à Berlin des Archives Hannah
Arendt (2000)’, in Le temps présent, 970.
43. Lefort, ‘Permanence of the Theologico-Political’, Democracy and Political Theory, 226. Translation slightly
amended.
44. Pierre Clastres, ‘Chapter 9: Of the One Without the Many’, in Society Against the State, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Zone Books, 1989), 171, also 173, 217, the original French is ‘l’Un, c’est le Mal’, La Société contre
l’Etat (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974), 148–50, 184–5.
45. Clastres, Society Against the State, 172–3, in French, 148–9.
46. Ibid., 216, in French, 184.
47. Ibid., 218, in French, 186.
48. ‘The Duty to Speak’ is chapter 7 in Society Against the State, 151–5, French, 133–6.
49. Clastres, ‘The Duty to Speak’, 153–5, in French, 134–6.
50. ‘Entretien avec Pierre Clastres’, Anti-Mythes 9 (1975): 40.
51. Stathis Gourgouris, The Perils of the One (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 47.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 13

52. In addition, Lefort accepts the idea of a conscious refusal of historicity but cannot espouse the presumably
desire to avoid the threat of novelty, see Lefort, ‘Entretiens avec l’Anti-Mythes’, 248 and his article ‘Sociétés
sans histoire et historicité’, in Les formes de l’histoire.
53. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (London: Merlin Press 1964).
54. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Wild Thought, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt (Chicago: The University of Chi-
cago Press, 2021 [1962]).
55. Incidentally, it raises a fascinating quest about the relative absence of Rousseau in Lefort’s oeuvre.
56. Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 101.
57. At least for Rousseau of the Second Discourse, it will tragically lead to pride, hierarchy, and the dissolution of
the original liberty and equality of man.
58. Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 102.
59. Lefort, ‘Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’, in Democracy and Political Theory, 222.
60. ‘Marx méconnaît la dimension symbolique du champ social’, in Lefort, ‘Esquisse d’une genèse de l’idéologie
dans les sociétés modernes’, Les formes de l’histoire, 486.
61. Lefort, ‘The Question of Democracy’, in Democracy and Political Theory, 11. In French, in Essais, 20.
62. Lefort, ‘The Question of Democracy’, in Democracy and Political Theory, 11–12. In French, in Essais, 20–1.
63. ‘la relation du semblable avec le semblable’, Lefort, ‘Le nom d’Un,’ 297.
64. See Poirier, Introduction, 88 and Etienne Tassin, ‘De la division’, in Le travail de l’oeuvre, 55–74. See also
Antoine Chollet, ‘“Peuple-Un” ou dèmos: les figures du peuple chez Lefort et Castoriadis’, in Cornelius Cas-
toriadis et Claude Lefort: l’expérience démocratique, ed. Nicolas Poirier (Lormont: Le bord de l’eau, 2015),
31–42.
65. Lefort, ‘Le nom d’Un’, 297.
66. ‘Power … defines itself in terms of that outside’, see the outside/inside, within/without, empty/full and further
dichotomies in Lefort, ‘the Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’, in Democracy and Political Theory.
67. Lefort, ‘The French Communist Party after World War II’, in Complications, Communism and the Dilemmas
of Democracy, trans. Julian Bourg with a Preface by Dick Howard (New York: Columbia University Press,
2007), 107–8.
68. Lefort, ‘Le nom d’Un’, 297.
69. Ibid., 299.
70. Lefort refers to Lacan’s mirror stage in ‘Flesh and Otherness’, in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, ed.
G. A. Johnson and M. B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990).
71. It is beyond the scope of this article to treat the question of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic, but a
systematic comparison has to be made between Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Clastres, Castoriadis and Lefort. Gode-
lier’s book, The Imagined, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, trans. Nora Scott (London: Verso, 2020) does
not refer to Lefort.
72. Lefort, ‘Le nom d’Un’, 299.
73. See Cornelius Castoriadis, L’institution imaginaire de la société (Paris: Seuil, 1975), see Olivier Fressard, ‘Cas-
toriadis, le symbolique et l’imaginaire’, in L’Imaginaire selon Castoriadis, thèmes et enjeux, ed. Sophie Klimis
and Laurent Van Eynde (Bruxelles: Publications des facultés universitaires Saint Louis, 2006), 119–50. Lefort is
absent from this study but it still illuminates the choice of Castoriadis to opt for the imaginary rather than the
symbolic.
74. Lefort, ‘Disincorporation and Reincorporation of Power’, in Complications, 140.
75. Lacan refers to an ‘imaginary servitude’ in his 1949 article on the mirror stage. In English translated by Jean
Roussel in New Left Review 51 (September/October 1968): 63–77. Reprinted in Mapping Ideology (New York:
Verso, 1994).
76. Lefort, ‘The Question of Democracy’, in Democracy and Political Theory, 11–12, in French, 20: ‘Celle-ci [mise
en forme] est en même temps une mise en sens et une mise en scène. Mise en sens car l’espace social se déploie
comme espace d’intelligibilité, s’articulant suivant un mode singulier de discrimination du réel et de l’imagi-
naire … ’.
77. On the metaphor of the body politic, see Nicole Hochner ‘A Sixteenth Century Manifesto for Social Mobility,
or, the Body Politic Metaphor in Mutation’, History of Political Thought 33, no. 4 (2012): 607–26. I believe,
with Cary J. Nederman, that the humoral body was not ‘invented’ by Machiavelli, see ‘The Living Body Politic:
The Diversification of Organic Metaphors in Nicole Oresme and Christine de Pizan’, in The Living Body: The
Political Thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Karen Green and Constant J. Mews (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005),
19–34.
78. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press
1988).
79. ‘Le sauvage vit en lui-même; l’homme sociable toujours hors de lui ne sait vivre que dans l’opinion des autres’,
Second Discourse; my emphasis. See Andrew Arato, ‘Political Theology and Populism’, Social Research 80, no.
1 (2013): 143–72.
14 N. HOCHNER

80. Samuel Moyn argues that this was the cause of Clastres’s charges agains Lévi-Strauss, that left aside society
itself, see his essay Claude Lefort, ‘Political Anthropology’, 56–7.
81. After Merleau-Ponty’s death, it was Lefort who edited his posthumous book: Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1964).
82. Dick Howard, The Specter of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 78.
83. Lefort, ‘The Question of Democracy’, in Democracy and Political Theory, 19. In French in Essais, 30.
84. Claude Lefort and François Roustang, ‘Le mythe de l’Un dans le fantasme et dans la réalité politique’, Psycha-
nalystes, Revue du Collège de psychanalystes n. 9 (1983): 59.
85. Lefort, ‘Le nom d’Un’, 329.
86. Lefort, ‘Voluntary Servitude’, in Complications, 168–9.
87. Hannah Arendt, ‘On Violence’, in Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence;
Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).
88. I borrow here a sentence from Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen, Visions of Council Democracy. Castoriadis, Lefort,
Arendt (Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 167.
89. ‘Modern totalitarianism arises from a political mutation, from a mutation of a symbolic order, and the change
in the status of power is its clearest expression’, in Lefort, ‘The Question of Democracy’, in Democracy and
Political Theory, 13 in French, 22.
90. Charles des Portes, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Phenomenology of the Body’, Human Studies 45 (2022):
139–56.
91. ‘Nulla est enim societas nobis cum tyrannis’, De Officis, book III, 32, trans. Margaret Atkins, On Duties,
ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 111.
92. Lefort, ‘Voluntary Servitude’, in Complications, 169.
93. Gourgouris, The Perils of the One, 55. See also François Gantheret, Les multiples visages de l’Un. Le charme
totalitaire (Paris: PUF, 2013).
94. Alain Caillé, ‘Claude Lefort, les sciences sociales et la philosophie politique’, La démocratie à l’œuvre, as well as
Andrea Lanza, ‘Looking for a Sociology Worthy of Its Name: Claude Lefort and His Conception of Social Div-
ision’, Thesis Eleven 166, no. 1: (2021): 70–87.
95. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1996), book I, chapter 16, 45.
96. Discourses on Livy, II, 2.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID
Nicole Hochner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5463-1313

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