THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL?dependent upon an indeterminate future; but we enjoy the advantage of an experience
that was denied them and that brings a new relief to their debates. In their day, the
political form we know as modern democracy was only just coming into being. All its
premises had been established, but it still kept its secret, even though its dynamic and its
ambiguities were partly visible, as we can see, in particular, from certain of Tocqueville’s
extraordinary insights into the future. The project of totalitarianism, however, still lay
beyond the horizons of their political thought, and there can be no doubt that it both
helps shed light on the secret of democracy and urges us to investigate anew the religious
and the political.
Modern democracy testifies to a highly specific shaping [mise en forme] of society,
and we would try in vain to find models for it in the past, even though it is not without
its heritage. The new determination—representation of theplace of power—bears witness
to its shaping. And it is certainly this distinctive feature that designates the political. I
deliberately refrained from stressing this earlier because I was concerned with bringing
out the difference between political science and political philosophy by showing that the
former attempts to circumscribe an order of particular factswithinthe social and that the
task of the latter is to conceptualize the principle of the institution of the social. But now
that the danger of ambiguity has been removed, we no longer need to be afraid to advance
the view that any political philosophy and any political science is governed by a reflection
upon power. Precisely because of this, they do not deal with specifics but with a primal
division that is constitutive of the space we call society. And the fact that this space is
organized asonedespite (or because of ) its multiple divisions and that it is organized as
the samein all its multiple dimensions implies reference to a place from which it can be
seen, read, and named. Even before we examine it in its empirical determinations, this
symbolic pole proves to be power; it manifests society’s self-externality and ensures that
society can achieve a quasi-representation of itself. We must, of course, be careful not to
project this externality onto the real; if we did so it would no longer have any meaning
for society. It would be more accurate to say that power makes a gesture toward some-
thingoutside, and that it defines itself in terms of that outside. Whatever its form, it
always refers to the same enigma: that of an internal-external articulation, of a division
that institutes a common space, of a break that establishes relations, of a movement of
the externalization of the social that goes hand in hand with its internalization. I have for
a long time concentrated upon this peculiarity of modern democracy: of all the regimes
of which we know, it is the only one to have represented power in such a way as to show
that power is anempty placeand to have thereby maintained a gap between the symbolic
and the real. It does so by virtue of a discourse which reveals that power belongs to no
one; that those who exercise power do not possess it; that they do not, indeed, embody
it; that the exercise of power requires a periodic and repeated contest; that the authority
of those vested with power is created and re-created as a result of the manifestation of the
will of the people. It could, of course, rightly be pointed out that the principle of a power
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