THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL?is destroyed. If, in effect, the mode of the establishment of power and the nature of its
exercise or, more generally, political competition prove incapable of giving form and
meaning to social division, a de facto conflict will appear throughout society. The distinc-
tion between power as symbolic agency and power as real organ disappears. The reference
to an empty place gives way to the unbearable image of a real vacuum. The authority of
those who make public decisions or who are trying to do so vanishes, leaving only the
spectacle of individuals or clans whose one concern is to satisfy their appetite for power.
Society is put to the test of a collapse of legitimacy by the opposition between the interests
of classes and various categories, by the opposition between opinions, values, and
norms—and these are no less important—and by all the signs of the fragmentation of the
social space, of heterogeneity. In these extreme situations, representations that can supply
an index of social unity and identity become invested with a fantastic power, and the
totalitarian adventure is under way.
For our purposes, it is not important to distinguish between the various modes of
the formation of totalitarianism. We cannot, of course, ignore the fact that in one case
the image of the people is actualized through the sanctification of the proletariat, and that
in the other it is actualized through the sanctification of the nation, that the former
process is shored up by a redefinition of humanity and that the latter is shored up by a
redefinition of a race: communism and fascism are not to be confused. But, in terms of
the question we are posing, the similarity between the two is striking. Both attempt, in
one way or another, to give power a substantial reality, to bring the principles of Law and
Knowledge within its orbit, to deny social division in all its forms, and to give society a
bodyonce more. And, it should be noted in passing, we find here an explanation as to
why so many contemporary philosophers—and by no means only minor figures—have
become compromised in the adventures of Nazism, fascism, or communism. The attach-
ment to the religious that we noted earlier traps them in the illusion that unity and
identity can be restored as such, and they see signs of its advent in theunionof the social
body. It is not because they submit to a charismatic authority that they lend their support
to totalitarian regimes, particularly not if they rally to communism; they surrender to the
attractions of a renewed certainty and, paradoxically, they use it as a pretext to assert their
right to contemplate freely the basis of any experience of the world.
We should, of course, be careful not to reduce the totalitarian phenomenon to its
religious aspects, as certain imprudent commentators have done. It is, rather, by exploring
the genesis of ideology, by identifying the metamorphoses of a discourse that, by placing
itself under the aegis of knowledge of the real, claims to escape the indeterminacy of the
social, to master the principle of its institution, to rise above division so as to enunciate
its terms and conditions and to inscribe it within rationality, either by preserving it in its
present state or by subjecting it to the movement of its own abolition; it is by detecting the
new relationship that is established between the viewpoint of science and the viewpoint of
the social order that we can best arrive at an understanding of totalitarianism. This regime
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