THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL?institutionalization of conflict. Its institutionalization is the result of a juridical elabora-
tion, and, in this first sense, it allows us to identify a field specific to politics: the field of
competition between protagonists whose modes of action and programs explicitly desig-
nate them as laying claim to the exercise of public authority. This immediately reveals the
link between the legitimacy of power and the legitimacy of a conflict that seems to consti-
tute politics, but it must also be noted that this phenomenon presupposes the coming
together of a number of conditions relating to social life as a whole: freedom of association
and of expression, and the freedom of ideas and of people to circulate. In this respect, the
idea of a division between the sphere of the state and the sphere of civil society, which is
so often invoked, seems to blur rather than to elucidate the features of the democratic
phenomenon. It prevents us from identifying a general configuration of social relations
in which diversity and opposition are made visible. It is, I believe, also noteworthy that
the delineation of a specifically political activity has the effect of erecting astageon which
conflict is acted out for all to see (once citizenship is no longer reserved for a small
number) and is represented as being necessary, irreducible, and legitimate. That each
party claims to have a vocation to defend thegeneralinterest and to bring aboutunionis
of little importance; the antagonism between them sanctions another vocation: society’s
vocation for division. It is also of little importance that what is at stake in the political
conflict does not coincide with what is at stake in the class struggle, or the struggle be-
tween interests; whatever the degree of distortion introduced by the shift from the politi-
cal level to the social level, the important point is that all de facto divisions are
transfigured and transposed onto a stage on which division appears to exist de jure. This
phenomenon is, as we have noted, combined with the singular procedure of universal
suffrage, which is based upon the principle of popular sovereignty but which, at the very
moment when the people are supposed to express their will, transforms them into a pure
diversity of individuals, each one of whom is abstracted from the network of social ties
within which his existence is determined—into a plurality of atoms or, to be more precise,
into statistics. In short, the ultimate reference to the identity of the people, to the institut-
ing subject, proves to mask the enigmatic arbitration of number.
Let us stop and retrace our steps after this first stage in our analysis. The representa-
tion of politics that lies at the origins of social science is, it must be agreed, generated by
the very constitution of democracy, for it is indeed true, as social science asserts, that
power no longer makes any gesture toward anoutside, that it is no longer articulated with
anyotherforce that can be represented, and that, in that sense, it is disentangled from the
religious. It is indeed true that power no longer refers to any point of origin that coincides
with the origins of Law and Knowledge and that, in that sense, the type of actions and
relations that cluster around its pole can be distinguished from other types of actions and
relations that might be termed juridical, economic, and cultural, and it is therefore true
that something can be circumscribed as beingpolitics[la politique]. The one thing that
remains hidden from the gaze of the scientific observer is the symbolic form that, as a
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