Unity and Division. Lefort and Clastres on the Role of Power in the Constitution of Society

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article looks at the relation between the ideas of philosopher Claude Lefort and ethnologist Pierre Clastres. Both French authors worked in the same paradigm. They were convinced that politics is the “infrastructure” of society: all societies are politically constituted and can only be understood by interpreting the workings of political power. Yet they strongly disagreed on the dividedness of society. Clastres believed that a good solution to the problem of power is possible, while Lefort believes that the presence of power points to the impossibility of any society to coincide with itself. This article also discusses the way they both use the expression “the place of power” and asks to what extent non-Western societies were, both for Clastres and for Lefort, ever more than just a foil to present and illuminate their strongly held theoretical beliefs.KEYWORDS: DemocracypowerexoticismClaude LefortPierre Clastres Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 A much earlier version of this text was published in German as “Claude Lefort Und Pierre Clastres: Einheit Und Teilung.”2 The word “decentre” is particularly apt here as Clastres claims that he is effectuating a Copernican revolution. So far, ethnology was practiced from within the Western world view, as a purportedly neutral vantage point. But this will never do justice to the proper being of primitive societies (Clastres, La Société Contre l’état. Recherches d’anthropologie Politique, 23.).3 As Judith Revel explains, Clastres’s project in this regard resembles that of his contemporaries Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. For them as well, the challenge is to stop reintegrating what is other under our own norms (Revel, Foucault: Une Pensée Du Discontinu, 253–4.). Revel especially explores the analogy with Foucault. Christopher Holman also emphasises this aspect of Clastres’s thought (Holman, “Pierre Clastres as Comparative Political Theorist.”).4 An exception is Samuel Moyn’s 2012 article “Claude Lefort, Political Anthropology, and Symbolic Division,” which dedicates several pages to Lefort’s interpretation of Clastres’s work. Moyn’s most important text on Clastres is entitled “Of savagery and civil society: Pierre Clastres and the transformation of French political thought” (2004). This text does not discuss Lefort but is highly recommended. There are also some informative pages on the relation between Clastres and Lefort in Bernard Flynn’s The Philosophy of Claude Lefort. Interpreting the Political (94–8).5 See my “Democracy, Human Rights, and History: Reading Lefort.”6 Lefort, “Société 'sans Histoire’ et Historicité.”7 The word suffociation (“étouffement”) is used in the original text but has been left out in the re-publication (see page 108 in the 1952 version).8 Lefort, “Société ‘sans Histoire’ et Historicité,” 66.9 Lefort, 69–70.10 Howard, The Marxian Legacy, 250. Note that Dick Howard is commenting on Lefort’s first text on primitive societies (Lefort, “Société ‘sans Histoire’ et Historicité.”), and not on the 1987 Clastres-text (Lefort, “L’œuvre de Clastres.”).11 Namely when he starts working on Machiavelli at the end of the 1950s (whereas his first “ethnological” text dates back to 1951). And it is only very much later, in the 2000s, that he develops a broad intellectual-historical interest in the complete tradition of civic humanism, as he dives into the writings of Hans Baron and others.12 Geertz, “Deep Hanging Out,” 69–72.13 See Holman, “Pierre Clastres as Comparative Political Theorist,” 80–1.14 Published first in an edition of the Encyclopedia Universalis in 1978 and reprinted that same year in an issue of Libre partially dedicated to Clastres, cf. Lefort, “Pierre Clastres.”15 Clastres, La Société Contre l’état. Recherches d’anthropologie Politique, 172. Clastres emphasises the priority of politics very strongly. For instance, he will state that economic exploitation finds its condition of possibility in political inequalities, i.e. in relations of command and obedience: “The political power relation precedes and founds the economic relation of exploitation. Before being economic, exploitation is political; power precedes work; the economic is derivative of the political; the emergence of the state determines the appearance of classes.” (Clastres, 169.)16 Lefort, “Pierre Clastres,” 52.17 Clastres, La Société Contre l’état. Recherches d’anthropologie Politique, 175.18 Clastres, 169.19 Clastres, 176, 178.20 Clastres, La Société Contre l’état. Recherches d’anthropologie Politique, 169.21 Source: personal interview with Miguel Abensour (Paris, 12 June 2009).22 Lefort, “L’œuvre de Clastres,” 310.23 Lefort, 320. Lefort quotes Clastres here.24 Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort. Interpreting the Political, 96.25 Cf. Lefort, “L’œuvre de Clastres,” 319–21. In the text’s English translation, the term “pouvoir communautaire” is rendered as “communitarian power.” But it seems to me that the French word “communautaire” has a more general meaning here than the technical term “communitarian”.26 Clastres, “Entretien Avec Pierre Clastres,” 6. (emphasis added).27 Clastres, “La Question Du Pouvoir Dans Les Sociétés Primitives,” 20–1.28 Clastres, 20.29 Revel, Foucault: Une Pensée Du Discontinu, 251–8. Revel goes on to show that there is also a family resemblance between Foucault’s and Clastres’s views on the the relation between war and politics (Revel, 259.).30 Martin Deleixhe has recently associated Clastres’s view with Karl Marx’s comments about democracy in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “The stateless primitive societies described by Clastres are thus eerily reminiscent of the total demos hastily sketched into Marx’s critique of Hegel” (Deleixhe, “Post-Marxists and 'Young Marxists',” 166.). This similarity is plausible. But maybe one should go further and look for their common root in the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.31 Clastres, “Liberté, Malencontre, Innommable,” 157.32 Clastres, “Entretien Avec Pierre Clastres,” 22.33 Clastres, “La Question Du Pouvoir Dans Les Sociétés Primitives,” 6–8.34 Clastres, “Liberté, Malencontre, Innommable,” 157.35 Lefort, “L’œuvre de Clastres,” 313.36 Lefort, 324.37 Ibid.38 Lefort, 325.39 Lefort, 323.40 Ibid.41 Ibid.42 In “Dialogue with Pierre Clastres”, Lefort claims that in writing “L'ère de l'idéologie” (1973) he was thinking of Clastres, even if he did not mention him (Lefort, 325.). This shows that the reflections on ethnological material were for Lefort instrumental in developing his ideas on ideology. Note that the 1973 text on ideology is a first version of the more well known text “Esquisse d'une genèse de l'idéologie dans les sociétés modernes,” published in 1974 (Lefort, “Esquisse d’une Genèse de l’idéologie Dans Les Sociétés Modernes.”).43 Lefort, “L’ère de l’idéologie,” 80.44 Lefort, “L’œuvre de Clastres,” 324–5.45 Lefort’s very first text on an anthropological theme is a 1951 study of Marcel Mauss (Lefort, “L’échange et La Lutte Des Hommes.”), where he reads and defends Mauss as a “phenomenologist of the social world” (cf. Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic, 156.) against Lévi-Strauss’s “mathematical” interpretation of Mauss. But he is not yet hooked on the notion of “symbol” or “the symbolic” (cf. Lefort, “L’échange et La Lutte Des Hommes,” 1402.).46 I am basing myself on the outstanding presentation by Camille Tarot (Tarot, De Durkheim à Mauss. L’invention Du Symbolique, 271–3.)47 Tarot, 643.48 Lefort’s thinking about the symbolic might also have been influenced by his erstwhile pupil, Marcel Gauchet. In a string of essays about Clastres, written between 1974 and 1978, Gauchet had come to adopt a position similar to Lefort’s. Not surprisingly, Lefort fails to quote Gauchet in his 1987 text on Clastres. For a presentation of Gauchet’s take on Clastres, see Samuel Moyn (“Savage and Modern Liberty;” “The Politics of Individual Rights: Marcel Gauchet and Claude Lefort.”). Moyn’s pieces are excellent, but at one point he suggests, somewhat confusingly, that Gauchet in a 1975 text agrees with Lefort’s analysis of Clastres. This is surprising given that Gauchet’s text predates Lefort’s published texts on Clastres. Of course, it is likely that these issues were discussed among Gauchet, Lefort, and indeed Clastres himself, and hence that this divide between Clastres on the one hand and Gauchet and Lefort on the other, had organically emerged in their conversations.49 Abélès, “Pouvoir, Société, Symbolique. Essai d’anthropologie Politique,” 41.50 “The place of the political” is the title of Abélès’s study of the political system of the Ochollo-people in Ethiopia (Abélès, Le Lieu Du Politique.). His approach runs parallel to that of Clastres in that he is interested in the political mechanisms that allow societies without a state to apprehend themselves as political unities. Abélès discovers in the Ochollo society a clearly delineated political realm (“le lieu du politique”, Abélès, 234.), a realm that moreover corresponds to a clearly delineated real place in the spatial structure of the villages.51 Lyotard and Thébaud, Au Juste: Conversations, 138.52 Clastres, La Société Contre l’état. Recherches d’anthropologie Politique, 175.53 Clastres, 179.54 Clastres, “Entretien Avec Pierre Clastres,” 16.55 Clastres, 15–6. (emphasis added)56 Lefort and Gauchet, “Sur La Démocratie: Le Politique et l’institution Du Social,” 14, 17. The publication of these notes, officially jointly authored by Gauchet and Lefort, occasioned their fall out.57 Lefort and Gauchet, 78.58 See the formulations in the 1979 text “L’image du corps et le totalitarisme” (Lefort, “L’image Du Corps et Le Totalitarisme.”), the 1981 texts “L’impensé de l’Union de la gauche” (first published in Lefort, L’invention Démocratique. Les Limites de La Domination Totalitaire.) and “Permanence du théologico-politique?” (Lefort, “Permanence Du Théologico-Politique?”), the 1982 text “Démocratie et Avènement d’un ‘Lieu Vide’” (Lefort, “Démocratie et Avènement d’un 'Lieu Vide'.”) and the well-known 1983 text “La question de la démocratie” (Lefort, “La Question de La Démocratie.”).59 Clastres, La Société Contre l’état. Recherches d’anthropologie Politique, 23.60 Holman, “Pierre Clastres as Comparative Political Theorist,” 83–4.Additional informationFundingThe research for this article was made possible by a grant from FWO - Research Foundation Flanders [grant number G0D4520N].Notes on contributorsRaf GeenensRaf Geenens is Professor of Ethics and Legal Philosophy at KU Leuven's Institute of Philosophy. His research is situated at the intersection of ethics, political philosophy, and legal theory. In the past years he was the principal investigator of several large research projects in the field of constitutional theory, focussing on such notions as sovereignty and constitutional identity, especially in the context of the Belgian Constitution. He is currently completing a monograph on French philosopher Claude Lefort. In addition, Raf Geenens has a vivid interest in the history and philosophy of dance.