CLAUDE LEFORTphenomenon of separation becomes an index of one general system among others; and
science assumes a resolutely relativist stance. When this happens, science conceals the
conditions of its own formation and, along with them, the basis for the claim that its
operations have a universal validity, as it is the fact of separation that allows it to identify
the specificity of politics. On the other hand, we have a combination of a dialectical or
evolutionary theory and the idea that the elimination of religion from the political field
marks the formation of a rational, or potentially rational, type of society in which institu-
tions and practices appear, or begin to appear, for what they really are. But in that case,
the fact of the separation of the religious and the political tells us nothing in itself; its
meaning is established by reference to a law of historical development or to the laws of
the dynamic of social structures.
The philosopher finds himself in a different position. When he thinks of the princi-
ples that generate society and names them ‘‘the political,’’ he automatically includes reli-
gious phenomena within his field of reference. This does not mean that, in his view, the
religious and the political can coincide. It does, however, mean that one cannot separate
the elaboration of a political form—by virtue of which the nature and representation of
power and social division (divisions between classes and groups) can stabilize, and by
virtue of which the various dimensions of the human experience of the world can simulta-
neously become organized—from the elaboration of a religious form, by virtue of which
the realm of the visible can acquire death, and by virtue of which the living can name
themselves with reference to the dead, whilst the human word can be guaranteed by a
primal pact, and whereas rights and duties can be formulated with reference to a primal
law. In short, both the political and the religious bring philosophical thought face to face
with the symbolic, not in the sense in which the social sciences understand that term, but
in the sense that, through their internal articulations, both the political and the religious
govern access to the world. This does not make it inconceivable that there is, in any
society, a potential conflict between the two principles, or even that it is universally, if
tacitly, recognized to exist. Nor does the fact that there is in the modern world an impera-
tive to make a clear distinction between the realms they regulate create difficulties for
political thought; this state of affairs in fact meets its requirements, as it has never been
able to submit to the authority of religion without demeaning itself, and as it demands
the right to seek its foundations within its own activities. In a sense, this revolutionary
event is the accomplishment of philosophy’s destiny; philosophy is bound up with that
event in that it finds the conditions for its own emancipation at the very moment when
human beings acquire a potential grasp of their own history, a means to escape the fatal-
ism imposed on their lives by the subjugation of the social order to religious law, and a
means to detect the possibility of a better regime in their practices and the novelties they
create. But it would be quite illegitimate to leap to the conclusion that religion as such
must disappear or, to be more accurate, that it must be confined to the realm of personal
opinion. How, in fact, could we argue this, without losing all sense of the symbolic dimen-
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