THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL?‘‘flesh’’ (to use Merleau-Ponty’s expression); insofar as its terms are determined by rela-
tions, but also insofar as those relations are themselves determined by their common
inscription within the same space and testify to a common awareness of their inscription
therein. Similarly, if we make a rigid distinction between what belongs to the realm of
economics or politics (defined in modern science’s sense of the term), or between what
belongs to the juridical or the religious in an attempt to find within them signs of specific
systems, we forget that we can arrive at that analytic distinction only because we already
have a subjective idea of the primal dimensionality of the social, and that this implies an
idea of its primalform, of its politicalform.
The difference between the idea of the political (in all its variants and all its moments)
and political science (in all its variants and all its moments) is not that the latter is con-
cerned with society as a totality and that the former rejects ‘‘totality’’ as an illusory object.
Marxist science, for example (and I am not referring here to Marx himself; his thought is
at once more ambiguous and more subtle than this), does indeed claim to be able to
reconstruct a real or ideal totality; Parsonian science also claims to be able to rearticulate
systems of functions within what it terms a ‘‘general system.’’ The opposition manifests
itself at a different level. The philosopher is not necessarily in search of an elusive object
such as a totality; he looks at different regimes or forms of society in order to identify a
principle of internalization that can account for a specific mode of differentiation and
articulation between classes, groups, and social ranks, and, at the same time, for a specific
mode of discrimination between markers—economic, juridical, aesthetic, religious mark-
ers—that order the experience of coexistence.
We can further specify the notion of shaping [mise en forme] that we have introduced
by pointing out that it implies both the notion of giving meaning [mise en sens] to social
relations (the expressionmise en sensis taken from Piera Aulagnier) and that of staging
them [mise en sce`ne]. 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-representa-
tion of itself. But we must again stress that the shaping or institution of the political
cannot be reduced to the limits of the social as such. As soon as we posit asrealthe
distinction between what is social and what is not social, we enter the realm of fiction.
We have just said that the principle of internalization that enables us to conceptualize the
political presupposes a mode of discriminating between the various markers that organize
the experience of coexistence, and that experience is inseparable from the experience of
the world, from the experience of the visible and the invisible in every register. It need
scarcely be stressed that discrimination between real and imaginary, true and false, just
and unjust, natural and supernatural, and normal and abnormal is not restricted to the
relations people establish in social life. The elaboration attested to by any political soci-
ety—and not simply the society in which the subject who is trying to decipher it lives—
therefore involves an investigation into the world, into Being as such. Understanding how
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