CLAUDE LEFORTmeans to reconstitute a pole of unity that could ward off the threat of the breakup of the
social that arose out of the defeat of the ancien re ́gime.
This, then, is the question to which we return after our digression through Michelet’s
problematic and which we must now reformulate. Rather than attempt to redefine rela-
tions between the political and the religious in order to assess the degree to which one is
subordinated to the other and to examine the question of the permanence or nonperma-
nence of a sensitivity to religious thought in modern society, might it not be more appro-
priate to posit the view that a theologico-politicalformationis, logically and historically,
a primary datum? We might then be able to see in the oppositions it implies the principle
of an evolution or, if we prefer to put it this way, the principle of a symbolic operation
that takes place in the face of events and to detect how certain schemata of organization
and representation survive thanks to the displacement and transference onto new entities
of the image of the body and of its double nature, of the idea of the One, and of a
mediation between visible and invisible, between the eternal and the temporal. We would
then be in a better position to ask whether democracy is the theater of a new mode of
transference, or whether the only thing that survives in it is the phantom of the theolog-
ico-political.
If this is so, what we will discover is a network of determinations, of which the
‘‘priestly monarchy’’ supplies only one element, albeit a constituent element, and in which
the development of city-states, urban corporations, and trade guilds, and the exploitation
of the heritage of classical humanism, all become caught up in their turn. We will also
discover a dynamic schema imprinted upon the complex play of chiasmata that Kantoro-
wicz analyzes with such subtlety. These are not, I repeat, chiasmata between the theologi-
cal and the political, as his formulations sometimes suggest, but, if I may be forgiven
the barbarism, between the already politicized theological and the already theologized
political.
It need scarcely be stressed that this schema is legible only if we bear in mind the
horizons of the real history in which take place changes in the economic, technological,
demographic, and military realms, changes in the balance of power between the dominant
actors, and changes in the categories of knowledge—and in that realm, the renaissance of
Roman law and of ancient philosophy marks a decisive moment. If, moreover, we accept
Kantorowicz’s argument, that schema cannot be projected in its entirety onto empirical
history, even though its articulations can be grasped within a temporal dimension. The
four formations identified by the author—Christo-centric, juridico-centric, politico-cen-
tric, and humano-centric kingdoms—testify to a displacement of the representation of
the king’s two bodies, but what is displaced on each occasion is not eradicated and proves
to contain the kernel of a future symbolic configuration. Thus, the fact that royalty is
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