My title makes a clear reference to the celebrated article of Merleau-Ponty, “the Philosopher and his Shadow.” In this work Merleau-Ponty argues that in his late work, and in some of the unpublished manuscripts, Husserl effects a critique of the transcendental idealism so much in evidence in the period of his Ideas1. Whether Merleau-Ponty successfully makes his case is still debated by Husserl scholars. This is not the subject of this paper, Thank God! Lefort’s shadow, in my view, is not an implicit auto critique. In fact, in a number of his articles, for example, “The Image of the body and Totalitarianism” he clearly lays out the itinerary of his thought in both its philosophical and its political dimensions. He was not content, as Merleau-Ponty wrote, to produce ideas as a steam engine produces smoke. Nor did he think, like Foucault, that to explain the changes in one's position was like ascending to a cop's request to see your papers? What I am calling Lefort’s shadow is the latent resources in his thought to engage with philosophers, that he did not do so explicitly himself, or did so only tangentially. The Swedish philosopher Hans Ruin. in his work Being with the Dead1 explains the manner in which the dead remain with us. He does so without evoking anything supernatural or spooky. There is an obvious sense in which the dead remain with us as we read and interpret the works that they have left us. In this aspect all the activity is on the part of the living. Ruin argues that our relationship with the dead is a two ways street. He evokes the example of the relation of Alfred Schutz, a former student of Husserl, with Max Weber that shows his philosophical work as a dialogue with the sociology of Weber at times, critical, at times celebratory. He was provoked by Weber long after the latter was dead. In his autobiography, The Words Jean-Paul Sartre claims that he has written all these thousands of pages that nobody asked for, all to please his grandfather, 50 years dead.

In the years since Claude’s death, I have staged a number of encounters between Lefort and other philosophers. In papers entitled “Modernity as a Philosophical Problem: Merleau-Ponty, Pippin, Lefort” and “The Use and Abuse of the King’s body: Claude Lefort and Eric Santer” I addressed Robert Pippin and Eric Santer through the works of Lefort. Today I will view the work of Michel Foucault in this context. Ruin then proceeds to a very interesting discussion of Derrida’s concept of hauntology. I will not follow him in this direction, but instead turn to Lefort himself.

In his Introduction to the Institution and Passivity lectures of Merleau-Ponty2 Lefort writes:

“We donate sense to what appears only by responding to a solicitation from the outside, following an orientation that a certain field imposes on us, a field that involves levels and dimensions that opens horizons.”

Lefort’s work, for those of us who have been privileged to study it, has become a part of “that field that solicits our response”; and sometimes, for those of us who were his friends, demands it. In this paper, I will trace my response to Lefort’s solicitation. Merleau-Ponty more than once cites lines from Paul Valery, “the dying man takes from his vest his watch and asks ‘Where am I? What time is it?’” Here Merleau-Ponty wants to stress the importance of orientation. In which field do we think? He cites this line in order to stress the importance of orientation. Both Merleau-Ponty and Lefort reject the idea of a radical starting point. For example, for Descartes, it was the experience of the Cogito. Both reject the myth of origins. We begin, as Kafka said, as Lefort cited him, not at the root of things, but as somewhere towards the middle of them.

At issue between Lefort and Foucault is the visibility of power. Lefort responses to classical political philosophies’ question “what are the natures of the different regimes”. He considers different regimes as forms of society “in order to identify a principle of internalization that can account for a specific mode of differentiation and articulation between classes, groups, social ranks, and at the same time, a specific mode of this incarnation between the markers, be they economic, juridical, aesthetic, religion.”3 A putting into form (mise en forme) by which a society is instituted which involves an engendering (mise en sens) of a system of intertwined meanings. There is also a mise en sens of social relationships by which a society gives itself a quasi-image of itself. The mise en sens, by which a society constitutes its own identity, is like a quasi representation consisting of a synthesis, an intertwining of the visible and the invisible. In the experience of touching/touched, Merleau-Ponty saw that a “sort of reflection that the body effects on itself” is nevertheless never completed. It is always short circuited at the last moment, and thus the body’s identity with itself is suspended across a gap, an écart. Immanence is never achieved. The phenomenological reduction cannot be completed. Nevertheless, the body does not experience itself as parts outside of parts. Likewise, the identity of the body politic is suspended across a gap or an abyss, but it is not annulled. Lefore criticizes political science for its failure to think the fragile identity of society.

For Lefort, Machiavelli is central in the history of political thought. For Foucault he is “overrated” when seen in relationship to Francis Bacon. For Lefort it is the lack of a theological or natural foundation that marks the novelty of the Florentine, who remained silent on the issue of a divine or natural foundation of political authority. “His silence is deafening” Machiavelli introduces a void in the place where classical political thought formerly found reassurance in the presence of a divine or natural order.

The articulation of ruler and ruled in pre modern society is founded on religious principles. For Machiavelli, modern political society is generated by a symbolic exchange. In Chapter 9 of The Prince, he writes, two classes exist in every society and they are in conflict. The conflict is between two desires. The common people want neither to be governed nor oppressed by the grande, the big shots, who want to govern and oppress the common people. A regime is instituted by an exchange between the prince and the people. Why must the prince not align himself with the grandy? The prince is motivated by his desire for power, as are the grandy. If the prince aligns himself with the grande, he will just be one of them, useful in the pursuit of their class interest. However, his alliance with the people, who want not to be oppressed by the grande, puts him in a position to command both the grandy and the people. Assuredly the prince will oppress the people in his turn, but the violence of his power is of a different nature from that of the grandy. In the grandy the people encountered their natural adversary, the other who constitutes them as an immediate object of desire. The prince frees them from this relationship by the very fact of not being part of it. By his presence, the prince disabuses the grande of their natural right to domination prior to the institution of the symbolic exchange between the people and the prince. There are two poles. The grande and the people, their relationship is immediate and natural. Big fish eat little fish. However, when the prince forms an alliance with the people, he institutes a third position above the conflict of class. There is no ontological or theological foundation for the position of the third. The position of the third is instituted by a symbolic exchange. It is suspended over a void. The metamorphosis of force into political power is what is accomplished by the institution of the political. Violence and coercion remain, but they are no longer immediate and natural rather, they are mediated through the position of the third. Nevertheless, the institution of the political involves a sort of deception.

“The people support the prince to be protected against the big shots, but in lending him their support, they do not know what they are doing. While they struggle not to be oppressed by the grande, they are about to take on a new kind of oppression. What they expected is the good; what they received is the lesser evil.”4

Here we see the anti utopianism of both Machiavelli and Lefort. The third institutes the unity of society, “but such an image cannot hold up against the discovery that irreducible conflicts rend society.” The prince can modify these conflicts and create conditions of forms of coexistence, but he cannot resolve it. If the people do not get what they want, the dissolution of power, they get the next best thing, its political institution. The symbolic exchange which engenders the position of the third has what Levi Strauss called symbolic efficacity. It does something, it confers on society a fragile unity in default of which it would devolve into the immediate and natural conflict between the people and the big shots. Political power covers over a pit that cannot be filled. It gives identity to a society that does not have one. The institution of the third is the mise en scène through which a society constitutes its fragile identity.

Lefort insists that the prince, in the thought of Machiavelli, must deflect onto his image the affect, even the love, that the people wish to project on him. In a particularly scandalous part of The Prince, the Florentine lists the virtues that the prince must appear to have, but not actually have. If he must appear to have virtues, to whom must he appear? Obviously to the people. The being of the prince is being recognized. The place of power must appear. Political power is essentially visible. The prince far from occupying a place outside of society. His position is constituted by a sort of reflection that society effects on itself. Foucault interprets The Prince as follows.

“The Prince is characterized by a simple principle. The prince exists in a relationship of singularity and exteriority, of transcendence to his principality. He is not a part of it, but external to it.  As a consequence. of this externality, his hold on power is fragile. Thus his sole interest is the maintenance of his power, which is under constant threat. The prince must be consistently on alert for conspiracies and plots arising from the grandy.”5

I will now contrast this reading with Lefort’s reading and explore the consequences for the political thought of Foucault. The three philosophy themes that I wish to reflect on are: singularity, exteriority and transcendence. According to Lefort, the new object that Machiavelli wishes to bring center stage is the becoming anonymous of political power. In the monarchy, the king in his person is transformed by the sacrament of coronation through the grace of God. His body is doubled, body of nature and body of grace. He is not deified, but he has a special relationship to God that is not shared with other men. According to Lefort’s reading of The Prince, there is no such transformation of the person of the prince. Political power is invested not in his body, but in the place that he occupies by virtue of a symbiotic exchange with the people. According to Foucault, the transcendence of the prince is a consequence of his exteriority. Since there’s no rational natural relationship between the prince and his principality, he is not part of it. There is no blood and soil relationship. As we have seen for Lefort the transcendence of the prince exists in virtue of the constitution of the position of the third. His power is based on the projection or the fantasy of a position above the conflict of classes. It is in this sense external to each of the parties of the conflict. When Foucault claims that political philosophy has not yet cut off the head of the king, he means that concerns with questions of sovereignty and the juridical approach to law where power is framed as law are not yet fully secularized. His rejection of the symbolic dimension of the political is clear in the beginning of Discipline and Punish where there is a juxtaposition between the tortured body of the prisoner and the magnificent body of the King. Foucault invokes Kantorowicz’s analysis of the two bodies of the king, however, he misinterprets it. I bring this up not out of pedantry, but because his misreading reveals his denigration of the symbolic. In Discipline and Punish Foucault writes: “The surplus power of the king gives rise to a duplication of his body.”6 For Kantorowicz as well as for Lefort. it is not the King’s power that gives rise to the duplication of his body. It is, on the contrary, the symbolic dimension of his body that gives rise to his legitimate power. In detail I cannot rehearse here, there is a secularization of the Christian notion of the dual nature of Christ, both God and man. The mystical body of Christ as the head of the church issues in the idea of the king not as a God, but as a representative of God on earth, the doubling of his body is the basis of its sovereignty. It is precisely the problem of sovereignty which Foucault wishes to reject, he writes: “What we need, however, is a political philosophy that is not erected round the problem of sovereignty, and therefore around the problem of law and prohibition”7. This is to say, we need to cut the head off of the King. For Foucault, the representation of the King’s body is not the source of his power, rather it masks it. The figure of the sovereign and the law occult the true operations of power. As we have seen in Lefort’s reflection on Machiavelli, the representation of power is the mise en scène through which the society gives itself a fragile unity. For Foucault, this representation occultes the true operations of power, he writes: “The state is superstructural in its relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology and so forth”8. It is striking that Foucault employs a Marxist vocabulary to express this conception of the relationship of the state to power, and a very problematic one at that.

Foucault and the left proletarian leader Pierre Victor (also known as Benny Levy) debate the merits of popular justice in Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes. Benny Levy wants to set up people’s courts to carry out popular justice. He proposes as an example the popular justice of the people’s courts. Set up by the Red Army in China, “the people who love the army delegate a part of their power to the army, which established the people’s courts.” Foucault is adamantly opposed to this because he claims that a People's Court would too much resemble normal juridical institutions. It would not express the people's justice, but rather subject it to the juridical ideology of the bourgeoisie. At base, what Foucault objects to is the idea of the third. It is the idea that there can be a position that is neutral in relationship to the two parties of the conflict, and that their judgment must be acted upon. “I believe all this is removed and foreign to the idea of popular justice. In the case of popular justice, you do not have three elements, you have two: the masses and their enemy. He contends that when the people identify the enemy, they do not rely on an authoritative judgment which has the power to enforce their decision. They pure and simply carry it out.” At this point, it seems that Foucault is advocating lynching. Foucault dissolves the state into a network of operations of power. This engenders a change in the role of the intellectual. In the past, the intellectual represents the voice of the universal. However, with the demise of grand narratives and the centrality of sovereignty, the intellectual becomes a “specific intellectual,” one who studies the micropolitics by which power acts directly on the body: biopolitics, the action of governance, which acts on the population. These are people like Foucault himself who study in great detail the institutions that effect operations of power such as asylums and prisons. The question I would like to pose is how specific is the specific intellectual. Foucault does not hesitate to generalize his conceptual system, drawn from the study of prisons, on to society at large, thus the extravagant role he attributes to the panopticon in modernity.

Now I wish to turn briefly to Foucault’s reflection on the Iranian revolution. That he thoroughly misunderstood what he witnessed in Tehran, goes without saying. But what is interesting is how he misunderstood it. According to Janet Albright and Kenneth Anderson in their book on Foucault in Iran what Foucault actually saw in Tehran was a religiously inspired insurrection against an authoritarian modernizing regime which was consciously framed by Khomeini as a reenactionment of the battle between Hassan, the grandson of the Prophet, and the evil Yadda. The battle happened in the 7^th century and it ended in the massacre of Hassan and the martyrdom of his supporters. What Foucault thought he saw was the birth of the concept of “political spirituality,” lost to the West since the days of Savonarola and Oliver Cromwell. The willingness to die for a cause is the expression of a perfectly unified collective will. He claimed that Khomeini is the focal point of the collective will of the Iranian people. Khomeini is not a politician. He is the incarnation of the collective will of the Iranian people. He is the incarnation of the people as one. The ‘notion of the people,’ is familiar to those who those who have knowledge of Lefort’s conception of the totalitarian fantasy. While, I am not claiming that Foucault is a totalitarian thinker, I am claiming that his rejection of the symbolic and the political opens the door to a form of thought well expressed by one sympathetic to him:

“The idea of political spirituality is an exploration and recognition of the ontological structure of messianism inherent in politics. Political spirituality is an attempt to contribute a completely different understanding of the political. The political interruption of all previous history opens up an unrealized future of a world yet to come. Politics is the realm of the messianic, a realm in which everything is possible, a realm of hope and the promise of a completely different world9.”

Through the concept of political spirituality, the specific intellectual has become something of a prophet. It is my hope that this profoundly creepy concept of political spirituality does not become rooted in the political culture of the Left. The political spirituality which Foucault waxes nostalgic over is alive and well in the USA in the form of White Christian Nationalism which has just elected, the fascist psychopath Donald Trump as President of the United States.