CLAUDE LEFORTresult of the mutation in power, makes this new distinction possible: the essence ofthe
political[du politique]. The illusion that the political can be localized within society is
therefore not without a certain consistency, and to dismiss it as a mistaken opinion would
mean surrendering to one more illusion.
Modern democracy is, we have said, the only regime to indicate the gap between the
symbolic and the real by using the notion of a power that no one—no prince and no
minority—can seize. It has the virtue of relating society to the experience of its institution.
When an empty place emerges, there can be no possible conjunction between power, law,
and knowledge, and their foundations cannot possibly be enunciated. The being of the
social vanishes or, more accurately, presents itself in the shape of an endless series of
questions (witness the incessant, shifting debates between ideologies). The ultimate mark-
ers of certainty are destroyed, and at the same time there is born a new awareness of the
unknown element in history, of the gestation of humanity in all the variety of its figures.
It must, however, also be made clear that the gap is merely indicated, that it is operative,
but that it is not visible, that it does not have the status of an object of knowledge. It is
the attributes of power that are exposed to our gaze, the distinctive features of the contest
in which power appears to be the prize. The things that capture our attention and that
are designated as objects to be known are the mechanisms that control the formation of
a public authority, the selection of leaders, and, more generally, the nature of the institu-
tions vested with the exercise and control of that authority. And so the symbolic dimen-
sion of the social passes unnoticed, precisely because it is no longer masked beneath a
representation of the difference between the visible world and the invisible world.
This, then, is the paradox: regimes in which the figure of power stands out against
anotherforce do not completely obscure the political principle behind the social order.
Where the religious basis of power is fully affirmed, it appears to be both the guarantor
and the guardian of the certainty that supports the experience of the world; at the same
time, it appears to be the keeper of the law that finds its expression in social relations and
that maintains their unity. By contrast, democracy, in which the figure of theotheris
abolished, in which power is not divorced from the division that generates it—I will not
say that power is stripped bare, as that would imply surrendering to yet another realist
fiction—and in which power therefore eludes our grasp (escapes appropriation and repre-
sentation), is a regime that cannot be apprehended in its political form. While the con-
tours of society become blurred, and while the markers of certainty become unstable,
there arises the illusion of a reality that can explain its own determination in terms of a
combination of multiple de facto relations.
Now, does not an analysis of this type also lead us to ask whether political philosophy,
which does, for its part, continue to search for the principles that generate modern society,
might not be caught in the trap of appearances in that it takes the view that society’s
religious basis is indestructible? That conviction is no doubt based upon the idea that no
human society, whatever it may be, can be organized in terms of pure self-immanence.
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