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Notes

  1. This is a reworked text of the introductory lecture of the Memorial Symposium for Claude Lefort at The New School for Social Research (New York), October 30, 2010. Finding myself for the moment in Paris, and therefore separated from my library, I allowed myself to retranslate or to paraphrase in French the quotations from Lefort which I could not verify to the letter

  2. His commitment was not just academic or polemical. He explains that already in 1941 he had organized resistance to the Occupation in 1941, giving him hope that in spite of his disagreements with the prevailing views of the Trotskyites, he could mobilize support for his political views inside the resistance. Later, after permanently leaving Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1958, he joined other comrades to create a journal for workers’ self-expression called ILO (Informations et liaisons ouvrières). When this project came to naught, he joined a discussion group called the Cercle Saint-Juste, where he rejoined Castoriadis, Vidal-Naquet, Vernant, Chatelet and others in discussions of Greek history and the French Revolution.

  3. One can find most of the texts to which I refer here in his anthology Le temps present (2007). See also Sur une colonne absente. Écrits autour de Merleau-Ponty (1978).

  4. The editorial committee of Libre was composed of Miguel Abensour, Cornelius Castoriadis, Pierre Clastres, Marcel Gauchet, Claude Lefort and Maurice Luciani. The journal, which appeared twice yearly, was subtitled “Politique-anthropologie-philosophie.”

  5. “de déceler ce qui advient, ce qui se fait signe du temps présent.”

  6. Comparing his own attitude toward Marx to that of Castoriadis, in the interview with the group Anti-Mythes (collected in Le Temps présent), Lefort asserts that Castoriadis’ critique of Marxism and Marx is “entirely justified.” But, he continues, Castoriadis does not admit what his critique itself owes to Marx: “His desire to desacralize Marx, which is legitimate, pushes him to accentuate his break with Marx.” Lefort, who has returned again and again to Marx—notably in a long essay “D’une forme d’histoire à une autre,” later in a rereading of the Communist Manifesto, and more recently in his critique of Marxist criticism of human rights—sees in this attitude “the illusion of knowing what Marx is doing” which is a displaced version of the illusion that there can be an ultimate knowledge of society, which would permit the surpassing of its divisions.

  7. Translator’s note: This work will appear in English, trans. Michael B. Smith, Northwestern University Press.

  8. Cf. Miguel Abensour’s analysis of the two phases of Lefort’s critique of totalitarianism based on this distinction, in La démocratie à l’oeuvre. Autour de Claude Lefort, edited by Claude Habib and Claude Mouchard (Paris: Editions Esprit, 1993), pp. 79–136.

  9. During the time of Libre, Lefort joined with Clastres, Gauchet and Abensour in a collective study-group that produced a re-edition of Étienne de la Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, touching another theme that remained central to his political thought, reappearing for example in his 1999 book, Complication to explain the acceptance by party members of their subordination to the leadership.

  10. See the essay, “Democratie et l’art d’écrire” in Écrire. A l’épreuve du politique, whose title suggests that writing itself is the test of the political. Unlike nearly all of the leading thinkers of his generation, Lefort never accepted offers by friends or editors to produce the kind of biographical dialogue that would popularize the conceptual apparatus that he had developed. Worth noting, however, is his essay “Philosopher?” whose interrogative title is significant. Lefort suggests that his true ambition was to be a writer (in op. cit.).

  11. The English translation is Complications. Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy, translated by Julian Bourg with a Foreword by Dick Howard (Columbia University Press, 2007).

  12. Text printed in Festschrift zur Verleihung des Hannah-Arendt-Preises für politisches Denken 1998 (Bremen: Boll Stiftung).

  13. I have just added the last sentences in the French translation; they are not included in the German version to be published this month in the journal Kommune.

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Correspondence to Dick Howard.

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Translation from the French by Don Beith, Phenomenology Research Center, Carbondale IL, 2011 (don.beith@mail.mcgill.ca). Additions were made from notes provided by the author. In preparing this translation I conferred with a French translation by Christian Ruby.

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Howard, D. Claude Lefort: a political biography. Cont Philos Rev 44, 145–150 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-011-9174-9

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