From body to flesh: Lefort, Merleau-Ponty, and democratic indeterminacy
| Published date | 01 October 2020 |
| Date | 01 October 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885117722075 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
E J P T
European Journal of Political Theory
2020, Vol. 19(4) 571–592
From body to flesh:
! The Author(s) 2017
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Lefort, Merleau-Ponty, and
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885117722075
democratic indeterminacy
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Salih Emre Gerc¸ek
Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, USA
Abstract
Claude Lefort’s theory of democratic indeterminacy has been an influential source
among democratic theorists to demonstrate that democratic times lack absolute and
determinate grounds on which to base and justify collectivities in the name of society or
the people. However, few readers have paid sustained attention to Lefort’s advice that
we should read Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological move from the idea of
‘‘body’’ to ‘‘flesh’’ to grasp the experience of indeterminacy. This article attends
to this advice, and excavates how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological discussion of
indeterminacy guides Lefort’s idea of democratic indeterminacy. More importantly,
however, the article reveals that Lefort’s appropriation of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of
flesh signals an ambiguity in Lefort’s democratic theory—an ambiguity that presents
democratic indeterminacy either as the radical possibility of creating democratic
collectivities, or as the impossibility of decisively achieving democratic collectivities.
Challenging Lefort’s subject-centered interpretation of flesh, the article contends that
Merleau-Ponty’s move from body to flesh is to emphasize indeterminacy as an intersub-
jective, worldly experience. This world-centered reading of flesh suggests that the prom-
ise of democratic indeterminacy lies not only in questioning the closure of collectivities
but also in proliferating collective experiences in many areas of common life.
Keywords
Lefort, Merleau-Ponty, body, flesh, indeterminacy, democracy
‘‘It seems strange to me,’’ declares Claude Lefort (1988: 20), ‘‘that most of our
contemporaries have no sense of how much philosophy owes to the democratic
experience, that they do not explore its matrix or take it as a theme for their
reflections, that they fail to recognize it as the matrix of their investigations.’’
Judging from Lefort’s influence on contemporary democratic theory, many of
Corresponding author:
Salih Emre Gerc¸ek, Northwestern University, 601 University Place, Scott Hall, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA.
Email: gercekemre@gmail.com
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European Journal of Political Theory 19(4)
his readers have taken this statement seriously. Indeed, I am referring to Lefort’s
influential description of the ‘‘democratic revolution’’ (Lefort, 1988: 14, emphasis in
original) as the ‘‘dissolution of the markers of certainty’’ (Lefort, 1988: 18). In this
account, the historical transformation from the Ancien Re´gime to democracy has
destroyed the natural and theological bases of power that were once ‘‘linked to the
person of a prince or to the existence of a nobility’’ (Lefort, 1988: 18). The import
of this destruction, as Lefort claims in his oft-cited sentence, is a condition wherein
‘‘people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and
knowledge and as to the basis of relations between self and other, at every level of
social life’’ (Lefort, 1988: 19, emphasis in original). Inasmuch as readers of Lefort
have taken this condition of indeterminacy as the underlying condition of demo-
cratic politics, Lefort’s theory of democratic indeterminacy has become an import-
ant source for positing and exploring a central problematic in democratic theory:
how can we ground and justify collectivities in the name of the people or commu-
nity or society?1
Despite the prominence of Lefort’s idea of democratic indeterminacy, very few
of Lefort’s readers have paid sustained attention to the theoretical influences pre-
sent in its formulation, namely, Lefort’s apprenticeship with phenomenologist
Maurice Merleau-Ponty.2 This is all the more surprising when we consider
Lefort’s explicit suggestion that we should follow the ‘‘evolution of the thought
of Merleau-Ponty,’’ more particularly the latter’s move from ‘‘the idea of the body
to the idea of the flesh’’ to ‘‘rediscover the indeterminacy of history and of the being
of the social’’ (Lefort, 1988: 20). In fact, Lefort’s concept, the ‘‘flesh of the social’’ is
nothing more than an attempt to translate Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological
transition into a historical-political account of democracy. Lefort appropriates
Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘‘flesh’’ in order to explain the transformation of the
perceptual and experiential condition from the Ancien Re´gime to democratic
times—a transformation which brought about the democratic experience of inde-
terminacy. Hence, my first aim in this article is to return to Merleau-Ponty’s
thought to fill a gap in the literature, and demonstrate how Merleau-Ponty can
help us to understand Lefort’s theory of democratic indeterminacy. I will attend to
Lefort’s call and excavate how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological formulation of
flesh, and the experience of indeterminacy it conveys, guided Lefort’s idea of demo-
cratic indeterminacy.
More importantly, however, I will argue that exploring Lefort’s reading of
Merleau-Ponty’s concept of body and flesh gives us critical leverage against
Lefort’s own theory of democracy. Specifically, an attention to Lefort’s use of
flesh reveals an ambiguity in Lefort’s idea of democratic indeterminacy. That is,
Lefort’s ‘‘democracy indeterminacy’’ oscillates between two senses of democratic
politics: It either signals the radical possibility of creating democratic collectivities
or the impossibility of decisively achieving democratic collectivities. As I will
demonstrate, this ambiguity stems from Lefort’s subject-centered reading of
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, which fails to capture Merleau-Ponty’s formu-
lation of the experience of indeterminacy as an intersubjective, worldly experience.
Contra Lefort’s interpretation, I will argue that Merleau-Ponty’s progress from
Gerc¸ek
573
body to flesh is not meant to suggest that the ‘‘body’’ signifies a phenomenological
closure of the subject and the ‘‘flesh’’ signifies an openness of the subject, but calls
for a decisive move from a subject-centered phenomenology to a world-centered
phenomenology. A world-centered reading of flesh, I will propose, enables demo-
cratic theory to take Lefort’s idea of indeterminacy to a politically creative terrain
because it enables democratic theorists to thematize how the affirmation of the
impossibility of achieving definitive collectivities can translate into possibilities of
articulating democratic collectivities. My reading of flesh will stress that democratic
indeterminacy signifies the importance not only of challenging the closure of
collective identities but also of creating collectivities.
Democratic indeterminacy
The most original aspect of Lefort’s democratic theory is its reconstruction of
historical transformations with phenomenological concepts of body and flesh.
While neither of these concepts are Lefort’s own, the way Lefort appropriates
them allows him to introduce democracy as a novel perceptional and experiential
condition, which he calls democratic ‘‘indeterminacy’’ (Lefort, 1988: 16–19).
According to Lefort (2000a: 96), the ‘‘metaphor of body’’ played a ‘‘key role’’ in
sustaining the political and social absolutism of the Ancien Re´gime. The king’s
body provided society with the perception of unity, and a ‘‘latent but effective
knowledge of what one meant to the other throughout the social’’ (Lefort, 1988:
17, emphasis in original). Symbolically uniting the society within his personhood
and under his rule, the king’s body projected a unity onto society, and gave society
an orderly ‘‘body politic’’ (Lefort, 1988: 253, emphasis in original) in such a way
that political power, hierarchies, and distinctions were perceived to have a natural
and theological basis (Lefort, 1988: 17). Lefort claims that the most emblematic
aspect of the ‘‘democratic revolution’’ (Lefort, 1988: 14, emphasis in original) was
the dissolution of this ‘‘theologico-political’’ basis of social unity (Lefort, 1988:
242–251). The ‘‘originality’’ of democracy, Lefort (1988: 34) asserts, ‘‘is signaled
by a double phenomenon:’’ ‘‘a power which is henceforth involved in a constant
search for basis because law and knowledge are no longer embodied in the person
or persons who exercise it,’’ and an ungraspable society because ‘‘the markers
which once allowed people to situate themselves in relation to another in a deter-
minate manner have disappeared.’’ In other words, the destruction of the mon-
archy creates a perception of a political and social ‘‘vacuum’’ where the king once
stood as an omnipresent and omnipotent figure (Lefort, 1988: 27). To describe this
political vacuum, Lefort proposes his famous notion of the ‘‘empty place’’ of power
(Lefort, 1988: 226). The place of power in democracies is empty not only because it
lacks a determinate figure but also because the democratic societies are ‘‘without
any positive determination’’ (Lefort, 1988: 226). Hence the social vacuum: the
democratic destruction of the figure of the prince leads to a novel perception of
the society in which ranks, classes, and distinctions ‘‘no longer go unchallenged’’
(Lefort, 1988: 19). According to Lefort, only totalitarian regimes can fill this pol-
itical and social vacuum with the image of a unitary body—with the image of a
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