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LEFORT AND THE PROBLEM

OF DEMOCRATIC
CITIZENSHIP

Mark Blackell

ABSTRACT To interpret the possibilities of a Lefort-inspired theory of citizen-

ship requires first that we depart from traditional liberal and republican theories
of citizenship that conceive of the citizen’s attachment to the political order in
terms of interest or virtue. A Lefort-inspired theory of citizenship must also
reconfigure the object of citizen attachment from an ‘empty place’ of power
to an ‘absent-presence’. The nature of modern democratic citizenship is framed
in terms of ambivalence as a symptom of the symbolic order of democracy,
and the precarious nature of political attachment in modern democracy is read
as paralleling the precariousness of the symbolic order of modern democracy.
In the face of this ambivalence, the possibilities of a Lefort-inspired theory of
citizenship are conceived of explicitly not in terms of identification between
competing political principles but in terms of a partial gesture of love to a
metaphysical limit of democratic political society.
KEYWORDS citizenship theory • democratic theory • Claude Lefort • politi-
cal attachment • political ambivalence

As a theorist of modern democracy, Lefort is noticeably unconcerned

with the question of citizenship. In an era of growing challenges to the
nation-state from both globalizing pressures and from local forms of group
identity, the problem of citizenship demands to be addressed. To this end,
my article will explore Lefort’s mature theory of the symbolic order of
modern democracy and ask what can be said about the nature of modern
democratic citizenship from within such an approach. The problem of
citizenship is essentially a problem of political attachment (see Beiner, 1995):
what is, what can be, and what should be, the nature of citizen attachment

Thesis Eleven, Number 87, November 2006: 51–62

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd
DOI: 10.1177/0725513606068775
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52 Thesis Eleven (Number 87 2006)

to the political order? The problem demands that we examine both the object
of attachment and the subjective nature of the citizen’s attachment to that
object. Lefort’s thought is clearly more helpful in our concern over the object
of democratic citizenship as he points out that this object must ultimately be
an empty place. I am particularly concerned with how we might think the
central tension in his thought: between the self-foundational nature of demo-
cratic regimes and their continued formation in relationship to an outside, a
realm beyond an autonomous democratic society. My claim will be that
exploring the nature of citizenship in Lefort forces us to reconfigure the
object of attachment from an ‘empty place’ to an ‘absent presence’. In explor-
ing what this might mean for our understanding of the subjective nature of
citizens’ attachment to democracy, I argue that the democratic citizen is char-
acterized by an ambivalence of attachment to the political order, raising a
particular subjective dilemma that corresponds to the dilemma of a
precarious symbolic order of power. Exploring the nature of the democratic
bond in Lefort cannot help but bring us to an exploration of the problem
of its precariousness and of what it ought to be. Lefort does not address this
problem of subjective attachment. In conclusion, I will suggest a problem
with seeing the bond the citizen has with the political order in terms of
psychological identification with competing principles of liberty and
equality. In my interpretation, Lefort’s work poses a question for citizenship
theory: is the gesture of love towards a metaphysical horizon fully eradica-
ble in modern democracy?

THE ERASED CITIZEN?

Lefort presents his project as a revival of political philosophy in the
face of the positivism of political science, and of the social sciences more
generally. His call to revive political philosophy is not a revival of the philo-
sophical concern with the essence of man (1988: 217). He rejects the Platonic
aspiration to know the nature of the soul and its relationship to the just and
unjust regime. He wants to revive the political philosophy of antiquity but
sees the ancient concern with knowing the singular Good as impossible in
the political philosophy of modern democracy that has rejected the markers
of metaphysical certainty. Lefort is interested instead in the classical concern
with types of political regimes and their organizing principles. His expressed
goal is to understand ‘the principle of internalization’ (1988: 218) whereby
societies form themselves and understand themselves. This is a concern with
the principles that are formative of social space, that are linked to the
symbolic order of power rather than the traditional social scientific concern
with the given facts that are already present in social space. Unlike a posi-
tivistic social science, that seeks to unearth social facts that are seen as merely
given, political philosophy self-consciously asks about meaning generation
in relationship to fundamental principles.
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Blackell: Lefort and the Problem of Democratic Citizenship 53

The first thing that strikes me about Lefort’s formulation of his project
of reviving political philosophy is that he doesn’t seem to pay much explicit
attention to the need to think about different forms of the soul (a central
concern of classical political philosophy) to go along with the concern with
forms of government. I think that Lefort remains ultimately interested in what
we might call forms of political subjectivity relative to different regimes. For
example, in his relatively recent ‘Reflections on the Present’, he notes that:
Democracy does not allow itself to be reduced to a set of institution and rules
of behaviour for which one could provide a positive definition by means of a
comparison with other known regimes. It requires people’s adherence. And
this adherence, or approval, isn’t necessarily formulated in strictly political
terms. (2000: 266)

Yet rarely does Lefort try to formulate what the symbolic order of
modern democracy might require of democratic political subjects. This is
curious given that ancient political philosophy conceived of the inquiry into
the city and the inquiry into the soul as two aspects of one concern. But
can we revive political philosophy without explicitly reviving the concern
with the ‘soul’ (or subject) relative to the city? If not, then where does Lefort’s
inquiry into the nature of the symbolic order of democracy get us in terms
of our understanding of the modern democratic forms of subjectivity? The
problem seems to be that Lefort’s account of the symbolic order of democ-
racy presents us with so abstract a notion of the forming of political space
that it is difficult to relate it to a key aspect of democratic political society:
the forms of subjectivity required as part of the citizen’s very attachment to
the political order.
It is worth asking if Lefort can be said to fit into the traditional ways
of conceiving of the modern democratic bond in citizenship theory, that is,
either in terms of interest or virtue. It is a cornerstone of liberalism from
Hobbes to Locke to utilitarianism that modern liberal democratic societies
are held together through the pursuit of individual interest. The political
bond is primarily a rational one that is there to preserve individual interests,
even if that rational bond is initially motivated by fear (for an account of
the liberalism of fear see Shklar, 1989). The historical accuracy of this account
of the emergence of liberal thought aside, Lefort’s conception of the symbolic
order of power in modern democracy is more of a meta-description of the
processes by which political societies form themselves. The political, as the
reference to a power that grants legitimacy and shape to society, is always
present even if it is understood, as in democracy, to be purely symbolic.
Lefort would presumably refuse the too quick assertion of individual rational
assessment of interest by way of description of the nature of the bond of
democracy; the liberal conception of the political bond in terms of individ-
ual interest is ultimately a liberal vision of how political society ought to be
unified.
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54 Thesis Eleven (Number 87 2006)

What of the Marxist variant that sees the democratic bond in terms of
class interest? Class interest and class conflict are constituent features of
modern democratic society for Lefort but the interest of the working class
is not itself the basis for a larger democratic political unity. The moment that
class identity, and the interest that it is based on, is presented as the unifying
power in political society, the unifying horizon of political society is then
potentially represented within social space. In Lefort’s terms, this moment
amounts to a denial of the purely symbolic nature of democratic power; we
are presented with the possibility of the embodiment of the people in a
representative of the working class that lies at the core of the totalitarian
travesty made possible by modern democracy. Class conflicts and the
conflicts of other forms of group cleavages are indeed constitutive of modern
democratic societies, but they are so only because of the empty, or purely
symbolic, nature of democratic power. Class interest, then, doesn’t explain
how the democratic citizen is fundamentally related to the democratic politi-
cal order. A working citizen’s attachment to her class and the battle for
substantive equality may be vital for democracy, but only in so far as that
battle takes place within a wider attachment to a sort of symbolic emptiness
of power. The nature of this latter attachment is unclear. Perhaps it can only
manifest itself negatively in terms of a refusal of embodiment of power. Is
this a particularly modern democratic form of civic virtue, following the long
tradition of civic republicanism?
Civic virtue remains a central trope in the attempt to account for the
nature and promise of modern democratic society. Whatever the virtue is
that theorists focus on, virtue in general is always some form of excellence
instilled in the individual, that is intrinsically tied to social and political insti-
tutions, practices, beliefs – to an ethos. While the recourse to virtue may
rightly be associated with civic republican critics of liberalism such as Michael
Sandel (1996), it is also central to the moral idealist strain of liberalism that
is in tension with a political proceduralism or constitutionalism (for examples
see Macedo, 1990; Galston, 1991; Berkowitz, 1999; on this tension see Rosen-
blum, 1989). Liberal virtue theorists tend to present a catalogue of virtues
and vices required of a democratic citizen as a result of the various goals of
liberal democracy, the goals of the liberal market economy, or as a result of
role-specific goals (such as for political leaders). On the whole, these virtues
tend to act to balance each other out, allowing for the continued coexistence
of the often competing goals of liberty and equality, pluralism and unity,
political idealism and political practice, etc. In a certain sense, Lefort’s theory
of democracy does open up the possibility of a virtue theory of citizenship.
The symbolic shift in modern democracy to an empty place of power ushers
in the legitimate, even constitutive, tensions in modern society between
claims made on the basis of democratic power or voice, on the basis of social
scientific knowledge, and on the basis of appeals to rights. Given this,
modern democracy seems to require of the citizen that she be open to
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Blackell: Lefort and the Problem of Democratic Citizenship 55

competing claims of legitimacy that operate on the basis of distinct logics.

Does Lefort’s theory presuppose a citizen who can balance a commitment
to democratic will with an individualistic commitment to human rights, or
balance a commitment to scientific knowledge with a faith in the legitimacy
of democratic will? Or, is this ability to negotiate these potentially opposed
forms of attachment epiphenomenal? Can we say anything more fundamental
about the democratic citizen and her attachment to the political order?
At the centre of Lefort’s mature theory of democracy lies the idea that,
while power is always symbolically forming our political societies and our
understanding of ourselves and our relationship to other types of regimes,
in democracy this process is obscured by the fact that the power that is refer-
enced is ‘tacitly recognized as being purely symbolic’ (1988: 17). It is purely
symbolic in the sense that it no longer has the metaphysical certainty that
it had when embodied in the sacred body of the king. This symbolic dimen-
sion of the political is revealed

in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of the society appears
and is obscured. It appears in the sense that the process whereby society is
ordered and unified across its divisions becomes visible. It is obscured in the
sense that the locus of politics (the locus in which parties compete and in
which a general agency of power takes shape and is reproduced) becomes
defined as particular, while the principle which generates the overall configu-
ration is concealed. (Lefort, 1988: 11)

What this suggests is that the specific claims of scientific truth, and of
individual and group rights, are epiphenomenal in that they are enabled by
a primary, ongoing, and yet obscured forming of political society through a
reference to an absent object in ‘the people’. These claims may be indepen-
dent, but the formation of democratic society is not found in their opposi-
tion so much as it is in a logically prior negative principle: that democratic
power not be fully embodied in society and that no figure or claim can act
as a marker of metaphysical certainty. The idea of a citizen holding a civic
virtue, in contrast, assumes the presence of some social good inscribed, as
it were, on the political subject’s character. To speak of balances in the
virtues of the citizen is to assume a given balance of social goods in the
political community. It presents us with an account of democratic law,
knowledge, and power as if they had a priori balances that express them-
selves as virtues of the citizenry. Lefort, by contrast, emphasizes the radical
contestation that takes place in democratic society between social groups
and authority claims. While democratic societies may require of citizens the
intellectual toughness to live with the ambiguity of divided commitments,
Lefort’s theory of modern democracy treats those divided commitments as
ongoing projects that are expressive of the radically open-ended nature of
political society. Rather than speak in terms of virtues, we might speak in
terms of an existential disposition to the world. It remains to be seen what
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56 Thesis Eleven (Number 87 2006)

this disposition is in relationship to the central object of the political order:

the empty place of democratic power. While one might adhere to a specific
expression of democratic will in the form of an election result or even a
public opinion, this is not an attachment to the purely symbolic order of
democracy. It may reference that attachment, but it also hides the object
from view by replacing the empty object with something concrete.

WHAT IS THE OBJECT OF DEMOCRATIC ATTACHMENT?

This brings us to an impasse in our attempt to formulate the nature of
democratic citizenship in terms of Lefort’s theory of the symbolic order of
democracy. We can’t fully assess the citizen’s subjective attachment to the
political order without knowing what it is that she is attached to. To say that
it is an attachment to an empty place of power presents us with a precarious
account of the object of attachment and leaves us with little sense of the
nature of the citizen’s bond with such an object. While Lefort emphasizes
the empty place of power in democracy, this account is complicated by his
recognition of the two fundamental dangers that confront modern demo-
cratic societies. On the one side lies the danger of totalitarianism through
the re-embodiment of power in the body of the leader or the party. This is
not, of course, a return to a pre-modern form of symbolic power because
totalitarianism, like democracy, refuses all certain external metaphysical
markers, or transcendent sources, of authority. Totalitarianism is a continu-
ation of the ideal of radical autonomy in the democratic revolution. Totali-
tarianism differs from democracy in that it abandons the separation between
the symbolic and the real. In other words, it seeks to symbolically institute
itself through reference to a concrete social body in the totalitarian leader
or the party. This filling of the empty place of power was Lefort’s greatest
concern, coming out of the left and trying to address the problem of Stal-
inism as he did.
On the other side lies the more insidious and less spectacular danger
of the dissolution of the social in democracy, when ‘conflict between classes
and groups can no longer be symbolically resolved within the political
sphere’ (Lefort, 1988: 19). There are concrete dangers that we can see in
both developed and emerging democracies. These include: the danger of
proliferating and paralysing social divisions (even of civil war); the danger
of a kind of disillusionment with democratic politics and the capacity of
representative government to have any reference to a source of democratic
legitimacy; and the danger of mass apathy. These dangers are ultimately
manifestations of a failure of the democratic symbolic order to give presence
to power even as it holds it as a kind of absence. So, on the one side lies
the threat of totalitarian re-embodiment of power, while on the other side
lie the various manifestations of a failure to give presence to the power of
the people, leading to the dissolution of the social. Of course, these dangers
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Blackell: Lefort and the Problem of Democratic Citizenship 57

are related, as disillusionment and exacerbated social conflict tend to result

in a move to a totalitarian solution to the problem of democracy. The power
of the people must be empty, in the sense of never being embodied, or
made fully present, in social space, but nonetheless still be a symbolic point
of reference. As Lefort notes, under the sign of democracy, ‘It would be
more accurate to say that power makes a gesture towards something outside,
and that it defines itself in terms of that outside’ (1988: 225). But what is the
nature of that outside and of the gesture towards it? Clearly the outside can’t
be assigned to ‘to the gods, the city, or to holy ground’ (p. 226). But nor
can it be eliminated such that society with its divisions can refer solely to
‘an inside that can be assigned to the substance of the community’ (p. 226).
The empty place of power must not be a mere absence; it must be a kind
of absent presence. To understand the symbolic order of power in modern
democracy we must emphasize the particular tension between absence and
presence. Democratic society, in so far as it is able to negotiate the twin
dangers expressed above, must be symbolically formed through recourse to
an absent presence, an organizing principle (the power of the people) that
is both empty in the sense of not embodied and yet somehow present as a
symbolic reference point and object of attachment by democratic citizens.
Lefort also begins to complicate his general formulation of the empty
place of power, that cuts off all metaphysical markers of certainty, when he
concerns himself with the question of the theologico-religious element in
democracy. Lefort sees modern democracy as inaugurating a form of self-
referential political society that breaks with the divine, with absolute markers
of metaphysical certainty that anchor society. If the markers of metaphysical
certainty are gone, does this mean that the search for metaphysical truth is
absent from the democratic adventure? The closest answer comes in his essay
on ‘The Permanence of the Theologico-Political’. His goal in this difficult
essay is to assess the implicit or explicit claim made by numerous 19th-
century thinkers, from Michelet to Hegel to Tocqueville, that the religious
persists within the modern democratic enterprise. As Lefort notes, many ideo-
logically diverse thinkers in the 19th century ‘looked at the religious for the
means to reconstitute a pole of unity which could ward off the threat of the
break up of the social that arose out of the Ancien Regime’ (1988: 249). Ulti-
mately, Lefort argues that these 19th-century thinkers miss the novelty of the
modern democratic, symbolic ordering of power as refusing markers of meta-
physical certainty. Yet Lefort also admires such thinkers as Michelet for their
implicit openness to the symbolic ordering of society, precisely the thing
that is needed in a revival of political philosophy. As Lefort notes, religion
and philosophy share a concern with the experience of ‘a difference that is
not at the disposal of human beings’ as well as concern over how ‘human
society can only open on to itself by being held in an opening it did not
create’ (1988: 222). Modern philosophy may refuse the terms of religion, but
it is still animated by a concern with self-limitation, with the limits of the
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58 Thesis Eleven (Number 87 2006)

realm of appearances, with the invisible in the visible. So the 19th-century

thinkers Lefort is referring to are right to demand that the philosophical
account of society acknowledge its debt to religion. The political shares
certain aspects with the religious in the sense that both ‘bring philosophic
thought face to face with the symbolic’; both ‘govern access to the world’
(1988: 222). The political, as the concern with the symbolic formation of
society, is never identical to the theological but the question of the meta-
physical is built into its inquiry. There is a paradox in the philosophical
concern with the symbolic order of modern democracy: it is simultaneously
a concern with radical autonomy and immanence of power while also involv-
ing a gesture to an external realm beyond the social and to an invisible
structuring of meaning. The metaphysical question as an incomplete and
ongoing concern is implicit in the examination of ‘a division which institutes
common space, of a break which establishes relations, of a movement of
the externalization of the social which goes hand in hand with its internal-
ization’ (1988: 225).

AMBIVALENCE, IDENTIFICATION, AND LOVE

This interpretation of Lefort suggests that the object of democratic
attachment is not entirely an empty place of power. Rather, it is an absent
presence that operates across the division between the visible social realm
and the invisible, metaphysical realm. A revival of political philosophy and
of a political sociology that seeks to examine the symbolic order of society
cannot but be concerned with an ambiguous object and its varied manifes-
tations. What can we say of the citizen’s orientation to such an absent
presence? If there is a divided object of democratic attachment, we can
legitimately expect a division in the bond between citizen and political order.
The central point to emerge out of a Lefort-inspired examination of the
nature of the citizen’s attachment to democracy is that it is fundamentally
ambivalent. The citizen must both remain committed to democracy as struc-
turing of social space and conflicts while at the same time sceptical and
dismissive of attempts to fix the will of the people within social space. This
is an ambivalent attachment: it demands both a deep attachment to the
notion of the people and a deep suspicion of it at the same time.
Lefort does not, to my knowledge, explore this possibility. It is one,
however, that is explored in some of the very post-revolutionary thinkers
that Lefort is concerned with in his essay on the theologico-political. I will
briefly focus on Benjamin Constant, whose response to the French Revol-
ution brings him to theorize the absent presence of power in modern democ-
racy as well as the ambivalent nature of the citizen’s attachment to
democracy. We see this ambivalence most clearly in his essay, ‘The Liberty
of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’, where he contrasts the
moderns and the ancients in terms of their expectations about the exercise
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Blackell: Lefort and the Problem of Democratic Citizenship 59

of sovereignty. If moderns have high expectations of respect for rights, their

expectations of exercising democratic sovereignty are inherently limited.
While sovereignty is seen as absolute in ancient republics, the individual in
the modern republic is sovereign ‘only in appearance. His sovereignty is
restricted and almost always suspended. If, at fixed and rare intervals, in
which precautions and obstacles again surround him, he exercises this
sovereignty, it is always only to renounce it’ (Constant, 1988: 312). This
restriction and suspension of sovereignty is directly related to the institution
of political representation. The institution of modern democratic political
representation alters the nature of democratic sovereignty such that it
becomes a ‘fiction’, ‘mere appearance’, and an ‘abstract supposition’ . . . and
the spirit of the moderns is such that this apparent loss in sovereignty is
expected. Exercising political will was ‘a vivid and repeated pleasure to
ancient citizens, one that they were willing to make great sacrifices to
preserve and that compensated for the loss of individual liberty’ (1988: 316).
What we moderns have lost, then, in this shift in the nature of democratic
sovereignty, is a distinct type of pleasure derived from the actual and ongoing
exercise of sovereignty. We find in Constant a melancholic tone in his
identifying this inevitable loss of the full presence of sovereignty as central
to political modernity. But, most importantly, democratic citizens tend to be
plagued by both weakness of conviction and fluctuating conviction, that is,
by ambivalence of political attachment.
Constant sees political modernity in terms that suggest a kind of incom-
plete form of attachment and we might wonder if such a perspective is
implied by Lefort. Ambivalence is not exactly a political virtue nor is it
precisely something that can be relied upon to sustain a political regime. It
is more of a symptom of modernity or a characteristic disposition that struc-
tures modern democratic citizenship. Indeed, for Constant, in the absence
of the passion of the ancients, modern political institutions must instil desire
in citizens (see Constant, 1988: 328; see also Fontana, 1991: 112). What, if
anything, marks the positive formulation of the democratic bond from the
perspective of a Lefort-inspired political theory?
Is it enough to follow the Lefort-inspired path of Chantal Mouffe, who
argues that, given the radical incompleteness of democratic society and the
impossibility of any references beyond the social, what sustains a radical-
ized liberal democracy is the citizens’ ongoing identification with the
principles of equality and liberty? Mouffe notes that liberal democratic unity
is an articulated project that ‘can exist only through multiple and competing
forms of identifications’ (Mouffe, 2000: 56). The liberal democratic citizen
is both preserved as an open-ended project (and thus radical) as well as
unified through sustaining a tension-filled identification with the liberal
discourse of modernity and its democratic one, that is, between the
‘equivalential’ logic of democratic equality and the ‘differential’ logic of
liberty. She seeks to understand the project of ‘radical liberal democracy’
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60 Thesis Eleven (Number 87 2006)

(Mouffe, 1996: 20) through a strengthening of identification with its prin-

ciples of liberty and equality, which exist in a tension but which can be
articulated together. It is worth mentioning Mouffe’s attempt to address the
challenge posed by Carl Schmitt’s account of the political as ultimately
securing its unity through the decisionistic assertion of the friend/enemy
distinction. In seeking a different form of unity for radical liberal democracy,
Mouffe looks to citizens’ ability to shift their orientation to others from
enemies (whose exclusion from the political space is needed to affirm the
unity in identity of that space) to adversaries. ‘An adversary is an enemy,
but a legitimate enemy, one with whom we have some common ground
because we have a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of
liberal democracy: liberty and equality’ (Mouffe, 2000: 102). Here we have
one way of appropriating Lefort to develop a theory of democratic citizen-
ship. It is to assert and rely upon the identificatory attachment to divergent
principles of liberty (based on the logic of difference) and equality (based
on the logic of identity). Mouffe’s way of trying to escape Schmitt’s ‘demo-
cratic’ logic of identity is to assert the need for strong identification with
divergent principles at one and the same time.
The problem with Mouffe’s solution to the problem of citizenship is that
identification is inadequate to the task of sustaining, and thus unifying in an
ongoing fashion, a tension between two different discourses or principles.
Mouffe’s assertion is that the bond of radical democratic society is not found
in any overarching structure or meaning but in the process of citizens’ identity
formation through divided identification. But what is identification? As a
psychological mechanism, identification acts to tie one’s sense of self to some
psychical object through sameness; the psychical action is one which asserts
similitude – it is mimetic. Identification is, at least at some level, rooted in a
process of making two presences the same, of bringing them into one
common presence. The question then becomes how an identification with
two principles, or discourses that must work in different directions, is possible.
It seems to be possible, without radical division of the political subject, only
in so far as there is actually identification with a tension itself, with a gap,
an absence. But it is unclear how an identificatory attachment to a gap or
absence does anything more than set up a division within the political subject
that can find expression only in oscillating between attachments. In other
words, it does not seem to resolve the problem of the fundamental ambiv-
alence of the democratic citizen; it simply displaces that ambivalence.
We need to return to an under-explored aspect of Lefort’s theory of
democracy to begin to rethink the problem of citizenship beyond identifi-
cation. The tension to be sustained – and thus unified in an ongoing fashion
– is not one between equal and opposed logics within democratic society
(that find a kind of isometric equilibrium) but between the very distinct
realms of autonomous democratic society on the one hand and its meta-
physical beyond on the other. One way that Lefort refers to this articulation
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Blackell: Lefort and the Problem of Democratic Citizenship 61

between democratic society and its outside is in terms of the figure and the
dimension of the other. Medieval monarchy conceived of itself in terms of
its deep sacred relationship with a divine source, a transcendent other.
Democracy in contrast negates the ‘figure of the other’ in that it refuses any
kind of discrete marker of metaphysical certainty. But democracy doesn’t
reject what Lefort calls the ‘dimension of the other’ (1988: 229) and in this
it stands in opposition to totalitarianism that, as Lefort notes, ‘tries to suppress
the dimension of the other through a representation of the People-as-One’
(1988: 235). This is to say that the difference between democracy and totali-
tarianism is not exhausted by the idea that totalitarian regimes embody
power in social space, while democratic regimes make power an empty seat.
We must include a difference in the regimes’ articulation of their relation-
ship with an external world. By external world, I don’t mean simply their
relationships with other states or types of government. I mean their relation-
ship with necessity, with death, with an invisible realm beyond the visible,
with the metaphysical realm – with all that marks a limit to their purely
immanent account of their political sovereignty.
What I find illuminating about this point of contrast between demo-
cratic and totalitarian regimes in Lefort is that their symbolic orders are sepa-
rable by the fact that democracy preserves a questioning orientation to what
are commonly thought to be non-political (or even pre-modern political)
concerns. The question that we should be asking in reading Lefort on the
nature of democratic citizenship is: how can the democratic citizen love
the realm of the eternal, the invisible in the visible, and the dimension of the
other even as she does so with full recognition of the partial nature of this
gesture? Love is necessary precisely because it is not the psychological
mechanism of mimesis or representation: it is the mechanism of bridging
difference. This capacity of love to bridge the realms of the sacred and the
profane was well recognized by Dante, whose conception of love (as picked
up by 19th-century thinkers such as Michelet) Lefort ultimately criticizes in
his essay on ‘The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’ But the point of
Lefort’s criticism is essentially that their recourse to love in the political realm
is such that it seeks to overcome the immanence of the project of modern
democracy. This does not, however, mean that that very same project does
not demand that we continue to ask about the nature of love – or more
exactly the partial gesture of love – in response to the never-ending problem
of the relationship to the internal-external relationship in the ongoing
formation of modern democratic societies. Ultimately I think that Lefort does
not erase the citizen. His thought implicitly demands of citizenship theory
that it inquire into the particular nature of democratic love (rather than
religious love transported into the political realm) to even begin to
adequately address the decisionistic solution to the external-internal problem
of the political in Schmitt. If we are to examine the double nature by which
the political hides and reveals itself in modern democracy, we must ask:
05 068775 Blackell (bc-t) 25/9/06 2:36 pm Page 62

62 Thesis Eleven (Number 87 2006)

how is it that democratic citizenship makes a gesture of love towards a

metaphysical beyond even as it obscures and refuses the object of that
gesture?

Mark Blackell has a recent PhD in Social and Political Thought from York
University in Toronto, Canada. His research concerns the foundations of liberal
democracy, its symbolic resources and limits, as well as the nature of liberal-
democratic citizenship. He is currently a University-College Professor in Liberal
Studies and Political Science at Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo, British
Columbia, Canada. [email: blackellm@mala.bc.ca]

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