Claude Lefort, some major claims
• political philosophy as focus on the political
- vs. politics: a delimited area of life and activity
- the political: the (specific) formation (mise en forme) or regime that is the foundation
and the form that conditions the whole of societal life
staging (mise en scène)
- the mode of being or
institutionally anchored form that
conditions and steers the life of a
society
- regime
- a certain structure and mode of
power
sense giving (mise en sens)
- the modes of thinking that define, condition
and orient this form
- space of intelligibility
- instituted divisions of just-unjust, true-false,
normal-pathological etc.
- ideology?
- or the modes of thinking inherent in certain
practices
political?
- conditions, orients and thereby steers (power) the whole
- structurally and on the level of thinking (understanding)
- implications for action
- not in a deterministic sense
Lefort, some major claims
• the uniqueness of democratic society to other forms
“… democracy … inaugurates a history which abolishes the place of the referent from
which the law once derived its transcendence” (Democracy and Political Theory, p. 39)
- in other words: lack of a secure foundation
• compare: the social contract-tradition
- lack of religious or hereditary foundation -> search for the establishment of a
foundation outside of society
 natural law, basic rights (≈ moral foundation): Hobbes, Locke
 reason: Rousseau, Kant
 will to co-operation, conception of the person, basic conception of justice, reasonable
pluralism: Rawls
• Lefort:
- the constitutive/institutive process (the political) neither outside nor inside of society
- co-foundational: the foundation and the institutionalisation of a certain regime is one
and the same thing (≈ the foundation is created in the act itself)
- post-metaphysical thinking, post-foundationalism
Lefort, some major claims
• Lefort on (modern) democracy:
- a form for whom the lack of a secure foundation is self-consciously taken to be its very
foundation
- “the disappearance of markers of certainty”
“.. the division between legitimate and illegitimate … is simply removed from the realm
of certainty” (p. 39)
- compare Mouffe ≈ pluralism
-”the locus of power becomes an empty place”
 no one can embody power in any full or final sense
- compare Mouffe: power as hegemony (a temporary dominance that contains
exclusions (of views, of groups), thereby never being able to embody the people as a
whole)
- diagnostic thesis: the importance of concealing this lack of foundation
- democracy is inherently haunted by insecurity (already on the level of principles)
 threat: the risk of the appearance of ’fulfillers’ of the foundation: appeal to a return to
a transcendent origin or foundation (historic people, morality, religion, charismatic
authority etc.)
Lefort, some major claims
• two central dimensions of the democratic form (staging & sense-content):
human rights
public space
- similar foundation as that of democracy
- neither inside nor outside of society
- co-foundational of democracy
- lack foundation outside of the act of instituting
them
- the creation of a public space is co-foundational
with democracy/an inherent consequence of it:
• Arendt: human rights ≈ “a right to have rights”
- rights are rights of the citizen (things that ought
to be protected by the state)
- human rights are rights to have those rights,
irrespective if you have the protection of any state
or not
“the singular thing about the freedoms proclaimed
at the end of the eighteenth century is that they
are in effect indissociable from the birth of the
democratic debate. Indeed, they generate it.” (p.
39)
“a regime founded upon the legitimacy of a debate
as to what is legitimate and what is illegitimate – a
debate which is necessarily without any guarantor
and without any end” (p. 39)
“The negative is effective: it does away with the
judge, but it also relates justice to the existence of
a public space – a space which is so constituted
that everyone is encouraged to speak and to listen
without being subject to the authority of an
another” (p. 41)
Chantal Mouffe, some major claims
• democracy as agonistic pluralism
• diagnostic background:
- the reduction of politics and democracy to some form of ‘co-operative consensus
formation’ is a threat to democracy
- too rationalistic: removes, marginalises or hides the real and necessary moments of
real antagonism present in any pluralistic society, the presence of exclusions (of views
and groups), and the presence of hegemonic power
- in other words: it removes, marginalises or hides the moment of the political
“A well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions. If this is missing
there is the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a confrontation among other
forms of collective identification, as is the case with identity politics
… the result can be the crystallization of collective passions around issues which cannot be managed
by the democratic process and an explosion of antagonisms that can tear up the very basis of civility”
(The Democratic Paradox, p. 104)
- risks: collective counter-movements (identity politics), the tearing up of democratic
society into open antagonisms, the normalisation of specific exclusions
Mouffe, some major claims
• politics vs. the political
• “the ensemble of practices, discourses and
institutions which seek to establish a certain
order and organize human coexistence”
“in conditions that are always potentially
conflictual because they are affected by the
dimension of the ‘political’”
(The Democratic Paradox, p. 101)
• “the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in
human relations”
(The Democratic Paradox, p. 101)
Mouffe, some major claims
• the theory of hegemony (Laclau and Mouffe)
- inspired by Antonio Gramsci
• the power inherent in any socio-political order constitutes a hegemony
≈ the temporary power of a certain socio-political regime or group
- compare Lefort: staging
- based on inclusions and exclusions
- may aim to contain the whole only be means of exclusions
- the excluded form the constitutive outside
 the presence of constitutive antagonisms is unavoidable
• defines a social objectivity: the unity of organisation and practices that defines a
‘hierarchy of relevance’
- what counts as objectively important issues, defines objectives (goals), ideological backup: values etc.
compare Lefort: space of intelligibility, sense-content
the political?
- a principal and necessary feature of this mode of being is the presence of
antagonisms
- these comes to define the political according to Mouffe
Mouffe, some major claims
rationalist solutions:
agonistic pluralism
• to strive for a reasonable
background consensus,
securing individual rights and
peaceful co-operation (liberal,
Rawls)
“… envisaged from the perspective of ‘agonstic pluralism’ the
aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into
agonism” (p. 103)
• to strive for rational processes
of democratic legitimacy,
securing both unity and
democracy (deliberative
democracy, Habermas)
• turning antagonism into agonism:
- preserving the moments of real conflict, while keeping
them peaceful (destruction of the enemy vs. respect for
your adversary)
- accepting the presence of power (that rule is always
temporary hegemony),
- keeping exclusions visible (in order to make possible
their removal)
• democratic citizenship
“what is really at stake in the allegiance to democratic
institutions is the constitution of an ensemble of practices that
make possible the creation of democratic citizens. This is not a
matter of rational justification but of availability of democratic
forms of individuality and subjectivity”
Mouffe, some major claims
• politics of the left: striving for the hegemony of democracy
- logic of equality and self-determination (popular sovereignty)
- to foster a democratic culture, the ethical state
- giving space to agonistic conflicts
- keeping exclusions visible
- politics as a mode of action aiming at hegemony (vs. the establishment of a unified mode of
government on the basis of moral or rationalist principles
Hannah Arendt
(1906–75) was a German American political theorist. She described herself as a political theorist
because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world”. Inn 1950, she became a
naturalized citizen of the United States. Arendt served as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley,
Princeton University and Northwestern University, a professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of
Chicago, as well as at The New School in New York.
Publications
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).
The Human Condition (1958).
Between Past and Future: Six exercises in political thought (1961)
On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963).
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).
Men in Dark Times (1968).
Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (1972).
Jacques Rancière (born Algiers, 1940) is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate
School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis)
Publications, English translations:
The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (1989)
The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991)
On the Shores of Politics (1995)
Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1998)
The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2004)
The Future of the Image (2007)
Hatred of Democracy (2007)
The Aesthetic Unconscious (2009)
The Emancipated Spectator (2010)
Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010)
Chronicles of Consensual Times (2010)
The Politics of Literature (2011)
Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double (2011)
Hannah Arendt on plurality, equality and politics
• diagnostic starting point (The Human Condition)
”The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition”
“What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point
of our newest experiences and our most recent fears ... What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it
is nothing more than to think what we are doing ... It deals only with the most elementary
articulations of the human condition, with those activities that traditionally, as well as according to
current opinion, are within the range of every human being” (p. 5)
”The human condition comprehends more than the conditions under which life has been given to
man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come into contact with turns immediately
into a condition of their existence” (p. 9)
Arendt diagnosis of the social and the political
• the contemporary pre-dominance of the issues of the social
- the social: management of the whole
(the dimensions of labor and work, the conditions of life and worldliness)
including the economy, the construction of the welfare state
over that of the political
- the political: the creative, communicative making of the new, acting in concert
(the dimension of action, plurality and natality)
Jacques Rancière and contemporary philosophy
conception of politics as
disagreement (mésentente)
aesthetics
• the concept of partition (Fr. partage) of the sensible
• mésentente:
- dissension, dissensus
- disagreement
• compare: Lefort on the formation of
the political as both concerned with
sense and staging
• (genuine?) politics as rooted in the
logic of equality
- those divisions on the level of perception through which we
construct a conception of the situation, the world etc.
- conceptual, discursive, but having a direct effect on
perception
- perception is always already both ‘seeing things’ and a ‘how
they are seen’
• aisthesis ≈ sensual perception, perception containing both
sensual awareness and intellectual meaning, organised
perceptions containing sense or meanings
• politics ≈ democratic politics
• politics and aesthetics
- the presence and relevance of partitions of the sensible in
politics
- the presence of political meanings in the arts (art, literature,
theatre, cinema)
Rancière on politics/the political
• takes place on the level of action at the meeting point of two heterogeneous
logics
- action?  does not take place without ’human initiative’
 does not necessarily take place at all (politics is rare)
logic of politics
logic of the police
• the interruption of police logics in the
name of the equality of everyone and
anyone
- the act of raising claim of equality in
a manner that interrupts with the police
logic of governmentality
• roughly: governmental rule and administrative practices,
including the established practices of social life (culture)
• compare: Foucault’s studies of the 18th and 19th century
European discipline of the ‘science of the police’
- management of the whole, the welfare of the whole:
health, education, security etc.
- governmentality
• legitimate inequality
- the combination in actual societal life of equality of basic
rights, opportunity etc. with the actual inequalities in social
position, wealth etc.
- compare: Rawls difference principle