Claude Lefort and Democratic Writing

Abstract

The question of Modernity is at the heart of Claude Lefort’s writing. If so many authors help him to think it, if precise events, especially the French Revolution, brought it to light, it must be said that Machiavelli plays a crucial role there. The work of the Machiavellian work teaches that, between license and tyranny, the Free City is balanced, not at a point where power can be definitively justified, much less according to a good order that would abolish conflict and disorder, or which would escape the possibility of temporary suspension of the very Law that organizes it symbolically. Marked by indeterminacy, the Modernity seen by Machiavelli helps to understand the democratic invention, that is, the experience of the politics who is not anchored in a fixed identity either of power, of citizenship or even of the body politic itself. Our work seeks to investigate the modern link between this experience and the democratic writing according to the vision of Claude Lefort.