CLAUDE LEFORTrepresents the culmination of an artificialist project that begins to take shape in the nine-
teenth century: the project of creating a self-organizing society that allows the discourse
of technical rationality to be imprinted on the very form of social relations and that,
ultimately, reveals ‘‘social raw material’’ or ‘‘human raw material’’ to be fully amenable
to organization. It would, however, be futile to make a sharp distinction between the
ideological and the religious, for while the latter is disavowed insofar as it indicates an
otherplace, we can also see that it is reactivated in the quest for amysticalunion and in
the representation of a body, part of which—the proletariat, the political party, the lead-
ing organ, the egocrat (to use Solzhenitsyn’s phrase)—represents both the head of the
people and the people in its entirety. The reproduction of this model in one sector of
society after another then converts individuals into members of multiple micro-bodies.
Within the framework of ideological discourse, it is even conceivable that the repre-
sentation of the organization (or, more accurately, of the machine) can combine with that
of the body. Not only does extreme artificialism tend to be interchangeable with extreme
organicism because of the demand for the full affirmation of the social entity, this dis-
course can only hold up if the social entity becomes a body and only if—no pun in-
tended—it can embody the subjects who speak it: it tends to abolish the distance between
enunciation and utterance, and to be imprinted on every subject, regardless of the signi-
fication of words.
The increasingly perceptible effects of the failure of totalitarian ideology are no less
instructive. The reappearance of a divide—deeper here than in any other regime—
between the discourse of power and people’s experience of their situation indicates the
impossibility of precipitating the symbolic into the real, of reducing power to a purely
social definition, of materializing power in the persons of those vested with it, of repre-
senting society as a body without supplying it with an external guarantor of its organiza-
tion and limits, and of abolishing social division. The nature of this discourse is in fact
such that the subject either loses all notion of its own position or perceives it as being
totally alien, as a mere product of a group that manipulates words in order to conceal
facts. Once belief in communism is shaken, it gives way to the image of a party or a power
that rules through force; to the image of an external force that subjugates the society it
claims to embody; to the image of a law that is its property, of a law that is designed to
conceal the rule of the arbitrary; to the image of a truth of history that is designed to
conceal lies. And when signs are inverted, when the plenitude of communism reveals a
void, when the people break up and morals break down, or when, to use Hegel’s language
once more, social morality and the state collapse, we see the return of democratic aspira-
tions and, along with them, the old faith, which means primarily the Christian faith. In
response to the fantastic attempt to compress space and time into the limits of the social
body, there reappears a reference to an absent body which symbolizes a time-span that
can be neither appropriated, mastered, nor reduced. Certainty is reborn, together with a
PAGE 168168.................16224$ $CH6 10-13-06 12:35:00 PS