CLAUDE LEFORTTo simplify the argument to extremes: what philosophical thought cannot adopt as
its own, on pain of betraying its ideal of intelligibility, is the assertion that the man Jesus
is the Son of God; what it must accept is the meaning of the advent of a representation
of theGod-Man, because it sees it as a Change that recreates humanity’s opening onto
itself, in both the senses in which we have defined it. Modern philosophy cannot ignore
its debt to modern religion; it can no longer distance itself from the work of the imagina-
tion or appropriate it as a pure object of knowledge; once it finds itself grappling with the
question of its own advent, once it no longer conceals from itself that there is also such a
thing as the philosophicalwork of thoughtand that the focus of its investigations can be
displaced, even though it may indulge in the fantasy of being able to put a halt to its
displacements. The philosopher’s pretensions to Absolute Knowledge notwithstanding,
the substitution of the concept for the image leaves intact the experience of alterity in
language and of a division between creation and unveiling, between activity and passivity,
and between the expression and impression of meaning.
These last remarks may, perhaps, bring us closer to the most secret reasons for the
philosopher’s continued attachment to the religious. Justified as his demand for the right
to think may be, and even though it frees him from every established authority, he not
only realizes that any society that forgets its religious basis is laboring under the illusion
of pure self-immanence and thus obliterates the locus of philosophy, he also senses that
philosophy is bound up with religion because they are both caught up in an adventure to
which philosophy does not possess the main key. And so when he proclaims that Chris-
tianity’s end has come, he still invokes the birth of a new faith, because he is unable to
divorce his knowledge from a primordial knowledge that is at once latent and widely
shared. Despite appearances, he therefore refuses to accept the historical fact of the sepa-
ration of the religious and the political. As we have said, he argues that those who accept
it as an established fact have a mistaken notion of the political. But in doing so he runs the
risk of denying that appearances have sufficient consistency to represent a new practice, to
inscribe themselves in some way in the reality of power and the state. But, given that he
accords representation a symbolic status and that he still thinks it impossible to divorce
the position of power from its representation, a problem should now arise as to how to
evaluate the change implied by the representation of a form of power that has no religious
basis. Unless this problem arises, a philosophical critique will have no import or will
consist simply in the denunciation of erroneous opinions. But, as we have already seen,
that was not its objective; its object was the possibility of so shaping society that the
religious world would be merely misrecognized or disavowed.
The future that the thinkers of the nineteenth century were attempting to decipher is to
some extent our past and our present. The meaning of our present itself is, of course,
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