Can democracy emancipate itself from political theology? Habermas and Lefort on the permanence of the theologico-political

Political theology seems hard to get around. Ever since Carl Schmitt famously asserted at the

beginning of the 1920s that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are

secularized theological concepts”1 political theorists have been grappling with the multiple and

often uncanny ways in which essentially theological structures appear to re-emerge within

contemporary political formations.

In the following paper, I want to address the question of the relation between political

theology and the modern democratic form. To do so, I will compare the writings of two authors

who have much more solid democratic credentials than Carl Schmitt: Jurgen Habermas and

Claude Lefort. My argument shall be that both attempt to put forwards a conception of modern

democracy that emancipates itself from the dimension of political theology, but that they achieve

this goal to a different extent. Habermas develops a conception of democracy articulated around

the notion of “communicative rationality” which ultimately ends up reintroducing an element of

political theology through the very means that were sought to overcome it. Lefort, on the other

hand, delineates a conception of democracy articulated around the notion of an “empty place of

power” which proves more sophisticated in extricating itself from the dimension of political

theology because it recognizes the persistence of an irreducible locus of transcendence within the

structure of the political itself, but construes it in such a way as to pervert its theologico-political

character.

From a political point of view, this contrast is instructive because it gives an indication as

to what strategies might be more effective for advancing a secularist response to the recent

resurgence of attempts at colonizing the political with the theological. The abstract opposition

between political theology and rationality merely ends up substituting one fetish for another.

Instead, the idea that the ultimate source of authority in a society must be construed as an absence

opens the way for a truly secular conception of democracy, because it inscribes it within a

horizon of doubt that forces social actors to negotiate their political purposes fallibly and

provisionally, in confrontation with each other.

Before I delve into this argument, let me clarify one more important aspect concerning

the terms I shall be using to compare Habermas’ and Lefort’s respective conceptions of

democracy: what I understand by political theology. I am aware that any attempt at definition will

likely be considered arbitrary and therefore either too inclusive or exclusive. However, for the

1 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 36

sake of clarity, I will bite the bullet and define political theology as the attempt to ground political

legitimacy on a transcendent source. Even if this definition does not succeed in capturing all the

wealth of conceptual attributes that have historically been associated with the notion of political

theology, my impression is that it captures at least one important dimension of the contemporary

debate on the relationship between political theology and democracy. For, the question of the

relation between democracy and transcendence touches upon the core of the democratic ideal

itself: whether it is possible for the people to effectively govern themselves or whether there must

always be another entity exercising power in their place.

JURGEN HABERMAS: LINGUISTIFICATION OF THE SACRED OR SACRALISATION OF THE LIGUISTIC?

Habermas’ conception and defense of democracy is predicated on his general theory of

modernity, which is articulated in his magnum opus, the Theory of Communicative Action. Thus,

to examine the relation between his conception of democracy and what I have defined as political

theology it is necessary to start from an engagement with this text.

One of its principal purposes is to articulate a philosophy of history constructed around

the developmental process that Habermas calls the “rationalization of the lifeworld”. The latter

term is defined essentially as the set of background assumptions and practical dispositions that

define our orientation to the world. “Rationalization”, on the other hand, is assumed to

correspond to the progressive appropriation by social agents of previously un-thematized contents

through a communicative process that opens them up to reflective thematization. Thus, history for

Habermas can be understood broadly as the progressive unfolding of a communicative form of

rationality that allows social agents to reflect critically and cooperatively on the basic conditions

that determine their theoretical and practical orientation to the world.

This process is not assumed to follow a linear path, but rather decomposed in three

developmental “stages”, or “epochs”. “Primitive” or “archaic” societies are assumed to be ones

where the lifeworld retains a “mythical” structure, not accessible to reflective thematization.

“Traditional” societies are assumed to have developed centralized “religious” or “metaphysical”

world-views, which for the first time open the space for a reflective thematization of the life-

world. Finally, “modernity” is assumed to correspond to the spread of instrumental forms of

rationality, which undermine the authority of the traditional religious or metaphysical world-

views and therefore open up the space for a fuller “rationalization of the life-world”.

It is important to note that Habermas does not intend these three developmental stages, or

even his philosophy of history at large, to be understood positivistically, as a simple description

of reality. What he is interested in putting forwards is a critical theory of modernity; and the way

he proposes to arrive at it is through a “rational reconstruction” that seeks to extrapolate from

modernity’s own self-understanding a normative conception that can be used as a foil to evaluate

concrete historical processes. This means that Habermas is not committed to assuming that

‘progress’ is always necessarily taking place. As a matter of fact, for him, history can go both

ways. However, it is only on the basis of a framework such as the one that he attempts to put

forwards that such evaluations can be made in the first place.

The implication is that Habermas’ philosophy of history has an important normative

dimension, inseparable from the empirical one. This is what enables it to function as the

foundation for his defense of democracy. The starting point is that modernity can be understood

as a “post-metaphysical” age, in the sense that “religious” or “metaphysical” guarantees of the

social order have lost theory credibility, at least for large sections of the population. This poses a

problem of legitimacy, which for Habermas is irreducibly double-sided because it refers both to

what actual social agents consider legitimate as a matter of fact, and to what can be considered

legitimate from a context-transcending point of view.

As was pertinently pointed out by Thomas McCarthy2, Habermas can be seen to be

grappling here with two of the most classical problems posed by western political theory. On one

hand, there is the problem of social order and stability. This is essentially Hobbes’ problem:

starting from the premise that modernity may run the risk of being marred by an irreducible

relativism concerning ultimate ends, the question becomes that of establishing the conditions for

political legitimacy. On the other hand, Habermas is also interested in establishing the conditions

for a normatively acceptable conception of collective autonomy. This is a problem which he

inherits from the classical philosophers of the European Enlightenment; amongst which, most

notably, Rousseau and Kant.

The solution to both problems is found in a theory of communicative rationality, which

Habermas spells out in the first volume of the Theory of Communicative Action. The gist of the

argument is that the only principles which can enjoy a presumption of rationality in a post-

metaphysical context are those that “emerge from an ideally expanded communicative process,

oriented towards reaching an understanding”3. It is not necessary at this stage to enter into the

details of how Habermas pretends to deduce this from a universal pragmatics of language itself: I

2 see Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas, MIT Press, 1981 3 Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, Beacon Press, 1981, p. 26

will get back to it later. What is important to establish here is that the notion of an “ideal speech

situation” is posited as the procedural condition for the generation of presumptively rational

outcomes.

In Habermas’ political writings, this idea is then applied back to the sociological

conditions of modernity, leading to the conclusion that the only way in which post-metaphysical

societies can hope to stabilize into legitimate forms is by setting up institutions that enable social

actors to suppose that social outcomes are the result of communicative processes that

approximate the “ideal speech situation”. The medium of law therefore becomes the vehicle for a

mechanism of social stabilization that can enjoy the presumption of rational legitimacy within a

post-metaphysical context.

From a normative point of view, this institutional configuration is also assumed to

provide the conditions for collective autonomy, because a communicative process that

approximates the “ideal speech situation” enables social actors to rationally appropriate the

determinants of social outcomes and therefore aspire towards a collective authorship of political

configurations. In this way, Habermas takes himself to have provided a rational reconstruction of

the connection drawn by the philosophers of the European Enlightenment between the principle

of autonomy and that of rationality.

Thus, Habermas’ political theory ultimately resolves into a deliberative conception of

democracy postulating as a criterion for both empirical and normative legitimacy the extent to

which social outcomes can be assumed to be the result of a communicative process

approximating the “ideal speech situation”.

On the basis of this summary account, it is possible to examine the relation between

Habermas’ conception of democracy and political theology. The first thing to note is that the two

terms correspond to two distinct stages in the history of the “rationalization of the life-world” I

mentioned above. That modernity is a democratic age, for Habermas, should be evident on the

basis of what I have said so far: the bulk of his political writings are focused on the attempt to

demonstrate precisely that. What needs to be emphasized in addition is that political theology, in

the sense in which I have defined it, corresponds to the second developmental stage, which

Habermas calls “traditional” or “metaphysical”. For, the distinctive feature of the centralized

world-views that replace the previous “mythical” structures of the lifeworld is precisely that they

attempt to ground political legitimacy on a transcendent source4.

4 Consider for example what Habermas says in a passage from the second volume of the Theory of Communicative

Action: “These world-views are more or less dichotomous in structure; they set up a ‘world beyond’ and leave a de-

The implication is that the relation between democracy and political theology is complex

and double-edged. On one hand, the positing of a transcendent source of ultimate authority

initially poses the conditions for the rationalization of the lifeworld by breaking down the

“mythical” structures that prevented its reflexive thematization and therefore opening the way for

a rational reappropriation of the ultimate loci of legitimacy. On the other hand, the conception of

the ultimate sources of authority as transcendent also becomes a fetter for the very process of

rationalization it has initiated, because it implies that they can never be fully re-appropriated by

social agents themselves. Therefore, from the perspective of modernity, the rationalization of the

lifeworld must correspond to the progressive “overcoming” of political theology through a

communicative procedure that enables social actors to reach a consensual understanding on the

sources of societal legitimacy.

As was pointedly noted by Eduardo Mendieta, the structure of this relationship is

quintessentially dialectical, because Habermas’ position is that political theology poses the

conditions for the emergence of communicative rationality, but is ultimately undermined by it in

return, thereby sowing the seeds of its own overcoming: “Religious world views, in fact, hasten

the process of the sublimation of the compulsive power of terrifying divine power into the

normative binding power of social norms. It is not that political or social power compels religion

to surrender its grip over the cowed masses; rather, inasmuch as religion itself is ritualized, and

then made a part of tradition, which is reflexively appropriated and rendered accessible to

criticism, religion itself compels subjects to adopt universalizing and critical attitudes towards its

own myths and theologemes”.5

The complex, dialectical structure of this argument should not blind us to the most

important implication. From the perspective of modernity, and therefore of deliberative

democracy, political theology is presented as a fetter, or rather precisely as the limit that needs to

be “overcome”. Habermas himself says this rather explicitly in the Theory of Communicative

Action:

Only in and through communicative action can the energies of social solidarity attached

to religious symbolism branch out and be imparted, in the form of moral authority, both

to institutions and to persons … neither science nor art can inherit the mantle of religion;

only a morality, set communicatively aflow into a discourse ethics, can replace the

authority of the sacred.6

mythologized ‘this world’ or de-socialized ‘world of appearances to a disenchanted everyday practice … Corresponding to such worldviews is a sacramental practice with forms of prayer or exercises and a de-magicalized

communication between the individual believer and the divine being”. Cf. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, p. 180. 5 Eduardo Mendieta, ‘Introduction’, in Jurgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality, MIT Press, 2002, pp. 22-23. 6 Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p. 92

Although here Habermas prefers not to use the loaded term “overcoming”, he speaks of

an “inheritance”: an expression which carries the implication of a foreseeable death of “religious

symbolism”. Even more explicitly, then, he talks of a “replacement” of the authority of the sacred

by communicative discourse ethics. Both of these terms – “inheritance” and “replacement” –

illustrate that the underlying structure of Habermas’ conception of democracy is profoundly

teleological, in the sense that it is predicated on a philosophy of history that has as its principal

telos the overcoming of what I have defined as political theology.

The means that Habermas identifies to achieve this telos are condensed in the notion of

the “linguistification of the sacred”, which corresponds to the process whereby contents that were

previously inaccessible to reflexive thematization because they were located in a “separate” or

“transcendent” realm are delivered over to a communicative inquiry that seeks to establish their

rationality from the perspective of an idealized orientation towards discursive consensus; that is,

from the perspective of what could be agreed to in an “ideal speech situation”. For Habermas, this

process effectively “de-transcendentalizes” the sacred because it makes its contents at least in

principle accessible to social actors, and therefore immanently available at their disposal for

critical evaluation. In this sense, the structuring axis of Habermas’ deliberative conception of

democracy becomes the dynamic opposition which is set up between communicative rationality

and what I have defined as political theology.

This is an aspect which has already been pointed out by various commentators of

Habermas, who emphasized the extent to which his defense of a deliberative conception of

democracy appropriates many of the key elements of the classic theories of secularization7. What

I want to consider in what follows is whether this construction lives up to its teleological

objective; that is, whether Habermas’ conception of communicative rationality effectively

manages to indicate the way for a progressive overcoming of the dimension of political theology,

as Habermas supposes.

Before moving on to this critical evaluation, it is worth pursuing a brief digression to

consider the import on the question under consideration of Habermas’ most recent writings on the

topic of religion. Perhaps because Habermas chooses to appropriate the term ‘post-secularism’

(albeit in an idiosyncratic way, which I shall elucidate more fully in what follows) these writings

7 See for instance the essays collected in Browning and Fiorenza, Habermas, Modernity and Public Theology,

Crossroad Publications, 1992; and also Donald Jay Rothberg, ‘Rationality and Religion in Habermas’ Recent Work: Some Remarks on the Relation between Critical Theory and the Phenomenology of Religion’, Philosophy and Social

Criticism, (11), 1986.

have been interpreted as a revision of the staunchly secularist perspective of his previous work8.

My impression, however, is that this interpretation is mistaken. Far from constituting a revision of

his previous secular perspective, Habermas’ recent writings on the topic of religion constitute an

attempt to explicate the original implications of his secularist conception of deliberative

democracy and to apply it more fully to the contemporary situation.

The term post-secularism is used in this context merely to refer to a situation of fact: that

contrary to the expectations of most sociologists of the past (including Habermas himself, to a

large extent), a significant proportion of citizens in contemporary liberal democracies remain

distinctively religious, in the specific sense that they pretend to make public political arguments

based on the reference to a transcendent source of authority. Taking this as a sociological datum,

Habermas addresses the issue of whether and how his deliberative conception of democracy can

still be made to function in such a context. Thus, his recent texts on the topic of religion can be

read as an attempt to incorporate the empirical fact of the persistence of religion within the

essentially secularist structure of his conception of democracy.

Habermas’ mode of entry into the issue is through a consideration of the basic obligations

that religious and secular citizens must respectively recognize each other in order to successfully

coexist and participate in a modern liberal democratic state. The thesis is that, on one hand,

religious citizens must recognize that the formal laws of a liberal democratic state must

necessarily be justifiable in terms of communicatively rational principles, accessible to all

independently of their particular world-views. On the other hand, secular citizens must not

dismiss a priori the possibility that contributions made by their religious fellows on the basis of

their own faith could contain a “rational content” universally accessible to all through a

communicative process oriented towards reaching an understanding. This implies that also

secular citizens must learn to relate reflexively to their secularism, in order to make the space for

potentially rational contributions to be made by religious citizens as well.

The question of whether there is indeed such a residual “rational content” in any position

that is articulated from a religious perspective is not one that can be decided in advance: for

Habermas, such a conclusion can only be the outcome of a communicative process. However, the

broad orientation of his theory should already be apparent: religion is seen as one of the possible

‘inputs’ of the communicative process, but the outcome must necessarily be rational from a

communicative point of view, and therefore purged of any residue of political theology.

8 See for instance the introduction to the volume of collected essays edited by Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan, Political Theologies – Public Religions in the Post-Secular World, Fordham University Press, 2006

This leads to a conception of the public sphere as a sort of “collective translation process”

whose purpose is to extract communicative rational contents from the varying beliefs and world-

views of its participants:

The requirement of translation must be conceived as a cooperative task, in which the non-

religious citizens must likewise participate if their religious fellow-citizens are not to be

burdened in an asymmetrical way … For, the truth contents of religious contributions can

enter into the institutionalized practice of deliberation and decision-making only when

the necessary translation has already occurred in the pre-parliamentarian domain, i.e. in

the public sphere itself9.

From these few lines it should be clearly apparent that the basic conception of the

relationship between democracy and political theology remains essentially unchanged compared

to Habermas’ previous writings. The overarching telos is the same: to extrapolate collectively

rational outcomes from the elements of political theology that persist within society. Moreover,

also the means identified to achieve this purpose are analogous: the “collective translation

process” effectively amounts to a way of “de-transcendentalizing” religious contributions by

extrapolating only those contents that could at least in principle be accepted by all social actors in

an ideally expanded discursive procedure oriented towards reaching an understanding (the “ideal

speech situation”). In terms of the definition of political theology I have been working with, this

effectively amounts to a way of emptying it of its very essence.

Thus, in the final analysis Habermas’ “post-secular” writings do not seem to go beyond a

clarification of the implications of his deliberative conception of democracy from the start. What

this clarification amounts to is a recognition that the communicative “rationalization of the life-

world” is not yet complete. For this reason, Habermas urges secular thinkers to engage with

religious views and beliefs in order to establish what residual rational contents can be

extrapolated from them. But the fundamental orientation with respect to the relation between

deliberative democracy and political theology remains the same: political theology is still seen at

the same time as the basic condition and the limit of the deliberative process. A limit which must

be progressively “overcome” through a process of translation that has as its telos the

“replacement” of political theology with a fully accessible set of communicatively rational

principles.

Having therefore established that there is a strong continuity between Habermas’ early

and later writings on the relationship between democracy and political theology, I will now move

on to a critical evaluation of his arguments seeking to establish whether they effectively succeed

9 Jurgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, Polity Press, 2008, p. 131

in achieving their purpose. As I have already anticipated in the introductory part of this paper, my

contention is that they don’t. The basic reason is that the very means that Habermas identifies for

overcoming political theology are themselves theologico-political. Habermas’ notion of

communicative rationality is organized around the figure of an “ideal speech situation”, which is

theologico-political in the sense that it exercises the structural function of a transcendent source

of political legitimacy.

To show this will require a return to Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action. The

notion of an “ideal speech situation” is here introduced as a set of conditions that must necessarily

be presupposed by the universal pragmatics of language itself. When I talk to you I must

necessarily be implicitly presupposing that you are at least capable of understanding what I am

saying. This notion of understanding must in turn be implicitly predicated around the idealized

notion of a situation in which we reach a mutual agreement on the basis of an exchange of

criticizable validity claims that ultimately rests on what Habermas calls “the force of the better

argument”.

Of course, Habermas is well aware that such an “ideal speech situation” is never realized

in practice. As a matter of fact there will always be “disturbances” which have to do with the

inequality inherent in the power relations that exist amongst actual interlocutors. However,

Habermas claims that this notion of an “ideal speech situation” offers the only criterion for

establishing what counts as such “disturbances” in the first place, and therefore for establishing

which kind of agreements can enjoy the presumption of rationality. A succinct summary of this

reconstruction of the communicative conception of rationality is offered at the beginning of

Between Facts and Norms:

Rationality is inscribed in the linguistic telos of mutual understanding and forms an

ensemble of conditions that both enable and limit. Whoever makes use of a natural

language in order to come to an understanding with an addressee about something in the

world is required to take a performative attitude and commit to certain presuppositions …

Amongst other things, natural language users must assume that the participants pursue

their illocutionary goals without reservations, that they tie their agreement to the

intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims and that they are ready to take

on the obligations resulting from consensus … A set of unavoidable idealizations therefore forms the counterfactual basis of an actual practice of reaching understanding, a

practice that can critically turn against its own results and transcend itself … [In this

way,] communicative reason makes an orientation to validity claims possible.10

My claim is that this conception of communicative rationality retains an essentially

theological structure because it postulates a criterion of validity that transcends concrete practice,

thereby reintroducing an absolute standard that exercises precisely the same structural function as

10 Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 4

the theological referents of the previous conceptions of practical reason. The fact that this

transcendent standard of validity is assumed to have been derived from the necessary

presuppositions of a universal pragmatics of language itself does not alter the fact that the

structure is essentially theological. All it means is that the presupposition of such a transcendent

standard of validity is taken to be all the more unavoidable.

Since this conception of communicative rationality is then used to ground Habermas’

deliberative conception of democracy, it follows that also this democracy must also retain an

essentially theologico-political dimension. The figure of an “ideal speech situation” is posited as

the organizing telos for a set of institutions that are supposed to solve the dual problem of

empirical and normative legitimacy. However, if it is true that the “ideal speech situation” refers

to a transcendent criterion of validity, does it not follow that Habermas is postulating a

transcendent source of political legitimacy? This is precisely the definition of political theology I

have been working with throughout.

Of course, Habermas would reply that there is a qualitative difference between his

conception of the transcendent source of legitimacy and the traditional forms of political

theology, because his conception of communicative rationality is not “substantive” but

“procedural”. This refers to the fact that rational outcomes cannot be determined a priori but

require actually going through the deliberative procedure he outlines. However, this reply is

disingenuous, because the procedure itself is an idealized construction, which can only be

approximated in practice. Thus, concretely, communicative rationality boils down to a

hermeneutic attempt at deciphering a truth that always exceeds social actors: what they could

agree to hypothetically under the conditions of an “ideal speech situation”. Such a hermeneutic

procedure is present in all forms of political theology, because from the moment that the ultimate

locus of authority is posited in a transcendent source, human beings are forced to interpret it in

order to bring it to bear on this world.

The teleological structure of Habermas’ account merely inverts the direction of this

distinctively theological movement: if previously political legitimacy was assumed to flow top-

down from a transcendent source (the will of God), Habermas assumes it to be constituted

bottom-up through a progressive approximation of a transcendent telos (the “ideal speech

situation”). What remains unproblematized, however, is the quintessentially theological idea that

political legitimacy flows into this world in virtue of its relation with an absolute pole, located in

a transcendent source.

Habermas himself comes closest to recognizing this in an interesting text entitled,

significantly, ‘Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World’. This constitutes an

attempt to respond to a number of theologians such as Helmut Peukert and Charles Davis who

already raised precisely the same objection I am attempting to put forwards here: “that the

discourse theory of morality and ethics gets so entangled in limit questions that it finds itself in

need of a theological foundation”11

. Habermas’ response to this objection is surprisingly

conciliatory:

In communicative action, we orient ourselves towards validity claims that, practically, we

can raise only in the context of our languages and of our forms of life, even if the

convertibility that we implicitly co-posit points beyond the provinciality of our respective

historical standpoints. We are exposed to the movement of a transcendence from within,

which is just as little at our disposal as the actuality of the spoken word turns us into

masters of the structures of language.12

This idea of a “transcendence from within” appears to correspond rather precisely to the

movement I was trying to describe above, whereby Habermas’ conception of democracy involves

a bottom-up constitution of political legitimacy through the progressive approximation of a

transcendent ideal. My contention is that this construction remains distinctively theologico-

political because it does not shed what I have identified as its principal defining feature: the

notion of a transcendent pole of legitimacy, around which the whole domain of the political ought

to be organized.

CLAUDE LEFORT: THE PERMANENCE OF THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL OR ITS

EMPTYING OUT?

Although Lefort’s work emerges from a very different set of concerns than Habermas’,

their respective conceptions of democracy have a number of important aspects in common. These

unexpected areas of overlap have already been pointed out by several commentators.13

In what

follows, I will focus more on what separates them. For, my argument is that from the point of

view of its relation with political theology, Lefort’s conception of democracy remains profoundly

different from Habermas’. Ultimately, this is what will lead me to identify in it a possible path for

the overcoming of the residual dimension of political theology in Habermas’ conception.

To make this argument I will proceed from an analysis of Lefort’s notorious definition of

modern democracy as a form of society in which “the place of power is represented as an empty

place”. This is a complex image which needs to be unpacked. First, I shall focus on the notion of

11 Jurgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality, MIT Press, 2002, p. 79 12 Ibid., p. 80 13

see for instance Stefan Rummens, ‘Deliberation interrupted: Confronting Jurgen Habermas with Claude Lefort’,

Philosophy and Social Criticism, 34 (4), 2008

a “place of power”. This refers to the fact that for Lefort all human societies are organized in

terms of a set of “generative principles” which structure the coordinates of what is intelligible and

practicable within them: a classical assumption in western political theory, which can be traced

back to Aristotle’s notion of the basic underlying “forms” of society, Montesquieu’s idea of the

organizing “principles”, and most immediately to Merleau Ponty’s conception of an “overall

schema governing both the temporal and the spatial configuration of society”.

Lefort calls this set of “generative principles” which structure a society’s basic

organizational form its “place of power”:

Political philosophy is governed by a reflection upon power. Precisely because of this it

does not deal with specifics, but with a primal division that is constitutive of the space we

call society. And the fact that this space is organized as one despite (or because of) its

multiple divisions … implies a reference to a place from which it can be seen, read and

named. Even before we examine it in its empirical determination, this symbolic pole

proves to be power; it manifests society’s self-externality and ensures that it can achieve

a quasi-representation of itself … We can further specify this notion of shaping [mise en

forme] by pointing out that it implies both the notion of giving meaning [mise en sens] to

social relations and that of staging them [mise en scene]. Alternatively, we can say that

the advent of a society capable of organizing social relations can come about only if it can institute the conditions of their intelligibility, and only if it can use a multiplicity of

signs to arrive at a quasi-representation of itself 14.

This is a dense quote, which shows that the notion of the “place of power” is doing a lot

of work for Lefort. The way in which it is assumed to structure the social space is threefold: first

of all, it provides a principle of internalization which defines society’s basic unity and coherence

in spite of its internal divisions and also in relation to the outside (mise en forme); secondly, it

defines the basic coordinates of intelligibility within a society, what its members are capable of

thinking and therefore of doing within the social space (mise en sens); thirdly, it provides society

with a symbolic pole of representation through which it can dramatize for itself its own basic

structure and therefore make it accessible and intelligible to its members (mise en scene).

What is most important for our present purposes, however, is that because this three-fold

structuring of the social space defines the basic coordinates of intelligibility within society it

cannot be fully accessible to the members of that society itself. This is what Lefort means when

he says that the “place of power” also “manifests society’s self-externality”: that the principle of

the organization of meaning within any given society must necessarily transcend the grasp of its

members. Lefort himself puts this even more explicitly when he goes on to write that: “power

always makes a gesture towards something outside, it defines itself in terms of that outside”15

.

14 Claude Lefort, ‘The Permanence of the Theologico Political’; reprinted in Hent de Vries ed., Political Theologies:

Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, Fordham University Press, 2006, pp. 153-159 15 Ibid., p. 159

Later on, Lefort also refers to this irreducible element of transcendence as an “excess of being

over appearance”, or the fact that “human societies can only open onto themselves by being held

in an opening they did not create”16

.

As Lefort is fully aware, this irreducible element of self-transcendence introduces a

theological element in his conception of the social, and therefore the political, because “every

religion states in its own way that human society can only open onto itself by being held in an

opening it did not create. Philosophy says the same, but religion said it first”17

. This leads Lefort

to the conclusion that the secularist project of cleanly separating out the domain of the political

from that of the religious is a misguided illusion: “When he thinks of the principles that generate

society and names them ‘the political’, [the philosopher] automatically includes religious

phenomena within his field of reference”18

.

Despite this emphasis on the inextricable interconnection between the domain of the

political and that of the religious, Lefort does not think that there are no significant differences in

the ways societies have been structured over the course of human history. The French Revolution,

for example, is assumed to constitute a fundamental turning point, mediating the transition

between the ancien regime and what Lefort calls “modern mass democracy”. However, Lefort

does not think that this transition can be understood in terms of a linear developmental

framework. Rather, it must be conceived in terms of a re-articulation of the way in which the

ultimate locus of transcendence, or “place of power”, is conceived and therefore structured.

This brings us to the second part of the complex image I have been trying to elucidate:

the idea that modern mass democracy should be understood as a form of society in which the

“place of power” is represented as an “empty place”. This notion of an “empty place” should be

analyzed carefully because it does not mean that the “place of power” is abolished entirely, but

rather that the organizing principle that gives a distinctive form to society is constructed as an

absence, that is a non-structure. Paradoxically therefore modern mass democracy is being here

presented as a form of society that is structured around the idea of a non-structure. Its distinctive

form is precisely that it has no fixed, definite form. Or, to put it another way: that all social

relations are always open to being constantly renegotiated and re-defined.

The idea can be perhaps be elucidated somewhat more clearly if we follow the historical

development that Lefort himself is tracing: that of the transition between the ancien regime and

modern mass democracy. Lefort understands the former as a form of society in which the “place

16 Ibid., p. 157 17 Ibid., p. 159 18 Ibid., p. 159

of power” is occupied, very concretely, by a specific representation of the King’s body. This

refers to the fact that the body politic itself was conceived as an incarnation of the King, who was

notoriously assumed to have two bodies: a ‘mystical’ one, which incorporated the entirety of the

body politic, and a ‘natural’ one, which was incarnated in the King’s material body. This

representation offered society a very concrete picture of its own structure, which assigned to each

of its members a corresponding set of rights and duties in relation to the central organizing pole.

Thus, the idea that the King was the ‘head’ of the body politic and that the individual subjects

were its ‘members’ is assumed to have had a very literal relevance.

Modern mass democracy, on the other hand, is assumed to correspond to a form of

society that has done away with the structuring reference to the King’s body and left the “place of

power” empty. This means that there is no concrete representation which determines in advance

the basic structure of society, the respective social roles of its members, or the duties that they

owe one another. All social relations are left open, and it is up to the actors themselves to

determine them, fallibly and provisionally, because there is no ultimate guarantee that can justify

the crystallization of any configuration of power relations.

As Lefort also puts it: “the ultimate markers of certainty are destroyed”. This implies a

“dissolution of all social relations” and an “institutionalization of conflict”. In other words: “a

society without any positive determination, which cannot be represented by the figure of a

community”19

. Society is thus delivered over to a constant process of self-critique; because since

the ultimate markers of certainty are destroyed, no concrete form of organization can ever be

considered fully adequate to itself, and therefore a democratic society must always be in the

process of redefining and renegotiating its organizational form.

Lefort puts this most clearly in the essay on ‘Politics and Human Rights’, where he

discusses the way in which human rights constitute the space for democratic politics precisely

because they are grounded on a basis which is philosophically indeterminate and therefore

ultimately “empty”:

The rights of man reduce right to a basis which, despite its name, is without shape, is

given as interior to itself and, for this reason, eludes all power which could claim to take

hold of it – whether religious of mythical, monarchical or popular. Consequently these

rights go beyond any particular formulation which has been given of them; and this

means that their formulation contains the demand for their reformulation … From the

moment when the rights of man are posited as the ultimate reference, established right is

open to question. And where right is in question, society – that is, the established order –

is in question.20

19 Ibid., p. 160 20 Calude Lefort, ‘Politics and Human Rights’ in The Political Forms of Modern Society, MIT Press, 1986, p. 258

On the basis of this summary account of Lefort’s conception of modern democracy it is

possible to step back to re-consider its relation with political theology. This task may appear

facilitated by the fact that Lefort himself wrote an entire article on this topic, entitled precisely

‘The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’. However, as the ambiguity in this title already

suggests, this is a very complex and puzzling text, which is open to a variety of conflicting

interpretations.

One of Lefort’s most authoritative commentators, Bernard Flynn, reads it as an

unambiguous affirmation of the fact that for Lefort modern democracy retains an essentially

theologico-political structure. Flynn does not consider this to be a problem for Lefort’s theory,

but rather one of its merits, because it is consistent with Lefort’s claim that the domain of the

political itself is ultimately inseparable from a theological element of self-transcendence: “A

merit of Lefort’s political philosophy, he writes, is to recognize that even with the disappearance

of another place, modern society continues to manifest an exteriority of society with itself,

insuring it of a quasi-representation of itself”21

.

This interpretation is based on the recognition that the notion of an “empty place” does

not mean that the “place of power” is abolished entirely, but rather that it is preserved precisely as

an absence: “Modern society effaces the figure, but not the dimension of the Other. This

dimension of the Other cannot be materialized in a determinate figure of the Other. It remains

radically indefinite”22

. In other words, Flynn’s point seems to be that modern democracy changes

the way in which the classical locus of political theology is conceived and therefore structured,

but doesn’t at all alter the fact that the political form of society is structured in terms of a

transcendent source.

To substantiate this claim, Flynn emphasizes what Lefort says about the structural

analogy between the way ‘the people’ is conceived in modern mass democracy and the

theologico-political notion of the King’s two bodies that was characteristic of the ancien regime:

“The source of legitimacy in a democratic regime is the people, but ‘the people’ remains

indeterminate” 23

This forces another body – the body of representatives – to always speak in its

name.

From the perspective of the question under consideration here, this can be interpreted as a

way of pointing out the dark underside of the classical formula Vox Populi, Vox Dei: just as

God’s will was always conceived as a transcendent and therefore elusive reality which needed to

21 Bernard Flynn, The Philosophy of Claude Lefort , Northwestern University Press, 2005, p.151 22 Ibid., p. 151 23 Ibid., 152

be articulated by a temporal power (the priestly class), the people’s will is an abstract entity

which is never manifested concretely and therefore always requires to be articulated by a class of

privileged interpreters (the representatives). In this sense, to say that the bearer of sovereignty is

the ‘people’ doesn’t mean that the ultimate source of political legitimacy isn’t located in a

transcendent source; or, in other words, that modern democracy isn’t a form of political theology.

On this basis, Flynn provides a simple interpretation of the enigmatic question mark that

inflects the title of Lefort’s essay on ‘The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’: “We can see

that the question mark … refers to both the continuity and the discontinuity between

premodernity and modernity. It is continuous insofar as the theologico-political refers us to the

experience of society’s non-identity with itself, which is to say insofar as it refers us to our

relation to the Other, to that which is not within human history. In this sense there is a

permanence … With regard to what is discontinuous, modernity is the condition in which the

figure but not the place of the other is effaced.”24

.

In what follows, I will attempt to provide a different interpretation of this enigmatic

question mark, and therefore of the relation between Lefort’s conception of modern democracy

and political theology more generally. This does not mean that I consider Flynn’s interpretation

mistaken, or ungrounded. Indeed, the idea that in modern mass democracy “it is not the

dimension but the figure of the other that is abolished” is stated explicitly by Lefort himself in the

essay on ‘The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’25

. However, what I would like to suggest

is that this element of permanence does not constitute sufficient grounds to reach the conclusion

that Lefort’s conception of democracy remains theologico-political in the sense in which I have

defined the term.

To substantiate this interpretation, I would like to draw more attention to the second part

of that essay, on which Flynn does not comment, but which appears significant because it casts

some doubt on what he takes Lefort to be saying. Lefort begins this new section by asserting that

the “reluctance to admit that there is a separation between the political and the religious” needs to

be “evaluated more fully”, and this requires going “beyond the level of analysis at which we have

been working”: “It is in fact impossible to ignore the fact that the image of union is generated or

re-generated at the very heart of modern democracy. The new position of power is accompanied

by a new symbolic elaboration, and, as a result, the notions of state, people, nation, fatherland and

24 Ibid., 125 25 Claude Lefort, ‘The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’, p.159

humanity acquire equally new meanings … The only problem is to determine whether or not they

are essentially religious”26

.

Lefort then proceeds to examine a few of these key notions in more detail, showing that

even if they emerge out of a historical elaboration that is inseparable from political theology,

within the context of modern democracy their meanings are fundamentally transformed. The

notion of the state, for example, is “de-transcendentalized” to the extent that the idea of

sovereignty is dissolved into a perpetual process of renegotiation and redefinition of social forms:

“When we speak of the state as a transcendent power, we mean that it has its own raison d’etre,

that in its absence society would have neither coherence nor permanence … But we then fail to

see that democracy disassociates political power from the existence of the state. It is no doubt as a

result of that disassociation that the state acquires its great might … But it is equally certain that

this tendency is held in check, because the political competition and social conflict mobilized by

the democratic process of contesting the exercise of power led to an indefinite transformation of

right and to a modification of the public space”27

.

Indeed, even what Lefort says about the notion of the people appears to be far more

ambiguous than what Flynn suggests concerning the analogy with the medieval construct of the

King’s two bodies: “Our brief comments on the notion of the people in democracy suggest that it

is bound up with an ambiguity that cannot adequately be translated in religious terms … Quite

apart from the fact that the notion of the people is dependent upon a discourse that names it, that

is itself multiple, and lends the people multiple dimensions, the people are, as we have noted,

dissolved into a numerical element at the very moment of the manifestation of their will”28

.

It is difficult to establish exactly what Lefort is trying to get at with these reflections,

because they are only discussed very briefly; after which Lefort immediately moves on to an

analysis of Michelet’s works on the French Revolution. However, the concluding paragraph of

the entire essay seems to provide a pretty unambiguous clarification of the meaning of these

reflections and also of the enigmatic question mark in the title of the essay:

Far from leading us to conclude that the fabric of history is continuous, does not a

reconstruction of the genealogy of democratic representations reveal the extent of the

break with it? And so, rather than seeing democracy as a new episode in the transfer of

the religious into the political, should we not conclude that the old transfers from one

register to the other were intended to ensure the preservation of a form that has since been

abolished, that the theological and the political became divorced, that a new experience

of the institution of the social began to take form, that the religious is reactivated at the

weak points of the social and that, ultimately, it is an expression of the unavoidable – and

26 Ibid., pp. 163-164 27 Ibid., p. 164-165 28 ibid., p. 164

no doubt ontological – difficulty democracy has in reading its own story, as well as of the

difficulty political or philosophical thought has in assuming, without making it a travesty,

the tragedy of the modern condition?29

The way I read this passage, it gives a completely different twist to Lefort’s text

compared to Flynn’s interpretation. Lefort explicitly says here that with the emergence of modern

mass democracy “the theological and the political have become divorced” and that “a new

experience of the institution of the social has begun to take form”. This suggests that the

theological dimensions which Lefort himself had identified as inseparable from the domain of the

political in the first part of his essay are re-configured and transformed to such an extent as to be

perverted and perhaps even entirely overcome.

To clarify this point it might be useful to emphasize an important distinction between two

senses in which it can be said that a theologico-political dimension persists within the modern

democratic form. What Lefort seems to be referring to in the first part of his essay when he talks

of the “excess of being over appearance” are the unavoidable limits of society’s own

understanding of itself; that is, the “black spot” which is implicit in every form of self-

understanding. The persistence of such an irreducible locus of transcendence is an

epistemological necessity: a society cannot ever succeed in being fully transparent to itself

because the very conceptual structures it uses to reflect upon itself must always exceed its

conceptual grasp.

This is the dimension of transcendence that Flynn appears to be referring to when he

interprets Lefort’s essay as reaffirming the permanence of a theological element within the

context of modern mass democracy. It is not, however, the notion of political theology I have

been working with throughout this essay. The way I have defined it, political theology consists in

the attempt to ground political legitimacy on a transcendent source. This is a ‘thicker’ notion

because it doesn’t just refer to the epistemological limits of society’s own self-understanding but

to the political question of the ultimate foundations for legitimacy. From this point of view,

Lefort’s notion of an “empty place of power” seems to suggest precisely that democracy is a form

of society in which there are no such ultimate foundations for political legitimacy.

The way I have interpreted the image of an “empty place of power”, it refers to the fact

that society is structured around an absence, that is the idea of a non-structure. The implication is

that all appeals to authority become problematic; a fact which produces “a society without any

positive determination, which cannot be represented by the figure of a community”. What is

absent is therefore precisely the theologico-political element that grounds legitimacy on a stable

29 Ibid., p. 187

foundation, giving society a fixed and definite representation of how it ought to organize itself –

like the medieval notion of the King’s mystical body, or Habermas’ teleological conception of the

“ideal speech situation”.

Lefort writes that in the modern democratic form the ultimate “markers of certainty” are

“destroyed” and that this delivers society to a perpetual process of constant “renegotiation and

redefinition” of itself. Such a process can only be the work of human beings themselves, which is

why politics is conceived as a fallible and provisional “experiment”. Of course, the themes of

fallibility and experimentality are also present in Habermas’ work, since he conceives of the

democratic process as an approximation to the “ideal speech situation”. However, the difference

is that for Lefort there is no such transcendent telos that orients the democratic experiment.

Politics is conducted within the context of an insoluble indeterminacy concerning ultimate ends

and basic foundations; and it is in this sense that I claim that Lefort’s conception of democracy

extricates itself from the dimension of political theology, such as I have defined it.

The subtlety of the procedure must be appreciated. Lefort does not deny that there is an

irreducible locus of transcendence around which the political is organized. However, he

conceives it as “empty”. This has a subversive effect, because it undermines the possibility of

grounding any claim to legitimacy on that transcendent pole, and therefore of what I have defined

as political theology. From this perspective, an “empty” universal is therefore very different from

a substantive conception of God’s will or a procedural conception of rationality, because the latter

two offer absolute foundations in terms of which politics is to be structured, while Lefort’s lesson

seems to be precisely that political theology can be overcome only once the drive for absolute

foundations has been left behind.

TWO MODELS OF SECULARISM

The above analysis can prove useful from the point of view of advancing a secularist

response to the attempts at reintroducing political theology in contemporary democratic politics.

This has been an increasingly common strategy of organized religion in recent times, which is

extremely worrying from a democratic perspective because it touches upon the very essence of

the democratic ideal itself. At the very minimum, this ideal implies that political power should

belong to the same subjects on whom it is exercised: the demos. Even though this opens the space

for a debate on how this notion of the demos ought to be conceived, it is clear that the ideal refers

to an immanent conception of political power. Thus, any attempt at grounding legitimacy on a

transcendent source must necessarily be in contradiction with it, because it constitutes a way of

delivering political power to an ‘other’ entity, different from the subjects on whom it is exercised.

In this sense, a thorough secularization of the political space is inseparable from the fulfillment of

the democratic ideal.

The works of the two authors I have been comparing illustrate two different ways of

conceiving such a democratic secularism. Habermas’ is organized around the opposition between

political theology and communicative rationality. My argument has been that it fails because it

ultimately substitutes one form of political theology for another: the hypothetical notion of a

consensus achieved under the conditions of an “ideal speech situation” for the sovereign

command of a transcendent God. This abstract opposition runs the risk of reintroducing precisely

the same problems that secularism was originally intended to overcome.

First of all, it fits badly with the condition of religious pluralism. The reason is that the

elevation of rationality to a transcendent principle of legitimacy relates to the other forms of

political theology as a superior and homogenizing alternative, which negates them externally and

abstractly. This makes it prone to an escalation of conflicts, because no mediation is possible

between transcendent absolutes. After all, both history books and newspapers abundantly show

that the clash between religious fundamentalism and the fundamentalism of reason can be as

destructive as the clash between any two other forms of political theology.

Habermas himself proved to be sensitive to this problem in his most recent writings on

the topic of religion, since these explicitly set themselves the objective of mitigating some of the

most “exclusionary” implications of his previous formulations. What I have attempted to show,

however, is that these writings do not really succeed in dealing with the problem, because they

remain oriented towards the overarching telos of communicative rationality. The conception of

the public sphere as a “collective translation process” merely reasserts the superiority of one form

of political theology over the others, since it asks religious citizens to extrapolate from their own

views those contents that can be considered rational from the point of view of a different criterion

of validity, which remains transcendent, but incompatible with other forms of political theology.

It seems unlikely that religious citizens will be willing to participate under these conditions.

Moreover, also from the point of view of the fulfillment of the democratic ideal itself

Habermas’ conception of secularism appears problematic. The reason is that it locates the

ultimate locus of legitimacy in a domain that is distinct from the concrete subjects on whom

political power is to be exercised. Even though the image of a transcendent God is overcome, the

abstract projection of a people communicating under the conditions of an “ideal speech situation”

is put in its place. The actual people on whom political power is to be exercised are required to

submit to this projection and attempt to approximate the outcomes of what it hypothetically

dictates. This is a form of fetishism like the other and therefore essentially anti-democratic,

because it means that concrete and actual people don’t exercise political power over themselves.

Lefort’s conception of democratic secularism, on the other hand, appears more promising

because it is not organized around the opposition between political theology and rationality, but

around the idea of a “place of power” represented as an “empty place”. This does not substitute

one transcendent source of legitimacy with another, but inscribes the whole domain of the

political within a framework of indeterminacy concerning ultimate foundations, thereby

introducing an element of doubt at its very heart.

Doubt appears more effective than rationality in overcoming political theology because it

subverts the possibility of grounding political legitimacy on any absolute or transcendent source.

In this sense it undercuts the very possibility of political theology from the root. Paradoxically,

however, it is also less prone to the escalation of theologico-political conflicts because it doesn’t

situate itself in abstract opposition to them. It leaves a space for theologico-political demands

within a democratic context; however, it requires them to adopt a self-reflexive attitude which

recognizes their particularity. This drives a wedge between faith and certainty and therefore

initiates a critical process which can transform political theology from within, making it into a

resource for democracy itself and providing immunity against absolutism.

The objection that the absence of an absolute is itself an absolute, which reintroduces a

dimension of political theology, misunderstands the subtlety of Lefort’s position. The idea that

the “place of power” is to be represented as an “empty place” is qualitatively different from all

other representations of the absolute, because it forces human beings to structure their society in

terms of representations that are consciously of their own making, and therefore always open to

being renegotiated and redefined. This undermines the very notion of an absolute, without

negating it absolutely.

More importantly, the inscription of the domain of the political within a framework of

indeterminacy concerning ultimate foundations is the stepping stone for the fulfillment of the

democratic ideal. The reason is that when there are no ultimate foundations, political subjects are

forced to invent the forms of their coexistence in confrontation with each other, without any

external guidance. This reconfigures the space of the political as a creative and experimental

process run by concrete human beings as they are. There can be no criterion for evaluating the

conflicting political demands that exist within society. Thus, political questions are played out

immanently on the basis of what human beings are capable of coming up with. This defuses the

theologico-political mechanism whereby human beings end up being governed by the

representation of something that exceeds them, because beyond the immanent plane of politics

there is precisely nothing: an absence.

Of course, this conception of democracy implies some risk, precisely because it does not

set any a priori limits on what the subjects of politics can do to themselves. If political power is

delivered over to the demos without any tutelage, it is possible that it might do things we don’t

like. At the limit, it can also subvert democracy itself, and relapse into a form of political

theology. Lefort is very conscious of this: ultimately, it is the basis for his theory of

totalitarianism. However, for him this is a risk that is inherent in the democratic form itself. If we

want democracy to be anything more than another way for legitimating the power of one class of

people over another it is a risk we must be prepared to face, without any certainties.