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INTRODUCTION

not to religion in general but to the Christian religion, whose various manifestations we
can identify without any risk of error’’ (pp. 150–51).
The same, Lefort cautions, cannot be said of ‘‘the political,’’ as distinguished from
‘‘politics.’’ Already the mere fact that this terminological distinction is possible and that
we can thus ‘‘choose to say eitherthe politicalorpolitics’’ is, Lefort suggests, ‘‘an index of
this ambiguity’’ (p. 151), which is conceptual and has analytical consequences. Of course,
one could ask whether the distinction betweenthe politicalandpoliticsdoes not merely
parallel that betweenreligionandreligion(s)(or betweenmessianicityandmessianismor
betweenChristianicityandChristendom).^111 Lefort, however, argues that ‘‘We arrive at a
very different idea ofthe political’’ from what results simply by opposing it to thenonpolit-
ical‘‘if we remain true to philosophy’s oldest and most constant inspiration, if we use the
term to refer to the principles that generate society or, more accurately, different forms
of society’’ (p. 152).
In Lefort’s characterization of the ‘‘theologico-political labyrinth,’’ its very ‘‘schema’’
stipulates that ‘‘any move toward immanence is also a move toward transcendence; that
any attempt to explain the contours of social relations implies an internalization of unity;
that any attempt to define objective, impersonal entities implies a personification of those
entities’’; to which he adds: ‘‘The workings of the mechanisms of incarnation ensure the
imbrication of religion and politics, even in areas where we thought we were dealing
simply with purely religious or purely profane practices or representations’’ (p. 187).
Far from clear, however, is Lefort’s answer to the question that gives the title to his
essay, namely, whether this very schema is also permanent. He ends his essay:

shouldwenotconclude...thatanewexperienceoftheinstitutionofthesocialbegan

to take shape, that the religious is reactivated at the weak points of the social, that its

efficacy is no longer symbolic but imaginary, and that, ultimately, it is an expression

of the unavoidable—and no doubt ontological—difficulty democracy has in reading

its own story, as well as of the difficulty political or philosophical thought has in

assuming, without making it a travesty, the tragedy of the modern condition? (p. 187)

The theologico-political finds its ‘‘permanence’’ in what seems anirrevocable latency,
that is to say, in the reactivation of the religious—a transcendence in immanence—but
only ‘‘at the weak points of the social,’’ whose ‘‘institution’’ can, in modernity, be experi-
enced in a novel way, one that is disincorporated. The theologico-political erupts as the
difficulty this novel experience has in making sense of itself, a difficulty Lefort calls both
‘‘unavoidable’’ and ‘‘ontological.’’ The religious can no longer claim to have a ‘‘symbolic’’
working, only an ‘‘imaginary’’ one, meaning that it has no further force in structuring the
political and can no longer occupy the center—the empty place—of what was once an
embodied, incarnate power. Wherever it tries to do so, it turns the ‘‘tragedy’’ of the
human condition into a farce.

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