‘Savage democracy’ and ‘principle of anarchy’

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 28, Issue 6, 2002, Pages 703-726

  Abensour, Miguel ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

anarchy; democracy; domination; Heidegger; Lefort; Machiavelli; politics; savage democracy; Schurmann; totalitarianism

Indexed keywords

EID: 84998021958     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/019145370202800606     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: from Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987).
2. Claude Lefort, ‘Totalitarianism without Stalin’, in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 52.
3. Claude Lefort, Eléments d'une critique de la bureaucratie (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).
4. See Claude Lefort and M. Gauchet, ‘Sur la démocratie: le politique et l'institution du social’, Textures 2–3 (1971): 8–9.
5. Translator's note: The implicit reference is the work of the French ethnologist Pierre Clastres (1934–1977), whose research was centered on the essential distinction between the political power exercised within tribal societies and the historically specific form of political power based on coercion; namely, the state. See Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State (New York: Zone Books, 1987) and his Archeology of Violence (New York: Semiotext(e), 1994).
6. Claude Lefort, ‘The Question of Democracy’, in Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 19; translation modified.
7. Claude Lefort and P. Thibaud, ‘La Communication démocratique’, Esprit 9–10 (September–October 1979): 34.
8. Claude Lefort, Elements d'une critique de la bureaucratie, p. 23, 28.
9. Lefort, ‘L'idée d'être brut et d'esprit sauvage’, in Sur une colonne absente: Ecrits autour de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 44.
10. See Marc Richir, ‘Le sens de la phénoménologie dans Le Visible et L'Invisible’, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Esprit 6 (June 1982): 132.
11. Because in the following pages I quote extensively from Schürmann's book, the references will be indicated in the essay itself. Translator's note: although the page numbers refer to the English edition, I have modified for reasons of content or clarity some of the citations using the original (Le Principe d'anarchie, Heidegger et la question d'agir (Paris: Seuil, 1982)).
12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Résumés de Cours (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 144.
13. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory; p. 1. translation modified.
14. Claude Lefort, Le Travail de l'oeuvre, Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 426, 725.
15. Claude Lefort, Un Homme en trop. Reflexions sur l'Archipel du Goulag (Paris: Seuil, 1976).
16. No doubt one should understand ‘element’ in relation to the meaning attributed it by Merleau-Ponty, such that ‘it was used to speak of water, of air, of earth, of fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, in midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being’. The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 139).
17. Claude Lefort, ‘Le Désordre nouveau’, in E. Morin, J.-M. Coudray and Claude Lefort, Mai 1968, la Brèche (Paris, Fayard, 1968), p. 49.
18. I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Prometheus Books, 1990), ‘Transcendental Dialectic’, Book I, sec. I, p. 200.
19. Claude Lefort, Le Travail de l'oeuvre, p. 477.
20. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), §303, p. 344.
21. Claude Lefort, p. 194, of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).
22. Lévinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 1991, p. 194, note.