From body to flesh: Lefort,Merleau-Ponty,and democratic indeterminacy

Democratic indeterminacy

The most original aspect of Lefort’s democratic theory is its reconstruction of historical transformations with phenomenological concepts of body and flesh. While neither of these concepts are Lefort’s own, the way Lefort appropriates them allows him to introduce democracy as a novel perceptional and experiential condition, which he calls democratic “indeterminacy” (Lefort, 1988: 16–19).

According to Lefort (2000a: 96), the “metaphor of body” played a “key role” in sustaining the political and social absolutism of the Ancien Régime. The king’s body provided society with the perception of unity, and a “latent but effective knowledge of what one meant to the other throughout the social” (Lefort, 1988: 17, emphasis in original). Symbolically uniting the society within his personhood and under his rule, the king’s body projected a unity onto society, and gave society an orderly “body politic” (Lefort, 1988: 253, emphasis in original) in such a way that political power, hierarchies, and distinctions were perceived to have a natural and theological basis (Lefort, 1988: 17). Lefort claims that the most emblematic aspect of the “democratic revolution” (Lefort, 1988: 14, emphasis in original) was the dissolution of this “theologico-political” basis of social unity (Lefort, 1988: 242–251). The “originality” of democracy, Lefort (1988: 34) asserts, “is signaled by a double phenomenon:” “a power which is henceforth involved in a constant search for basis because law and knowledge are no longer embodied in the person or persons who exercise it,” and an ungraspable society because “the markers which once allowed people to situate themselves in relation to another in a determinate manner have disappeared.” In other words, the destruction of the monarchy creates a perception of a political and social “vacuum” where the king once stood as an omnipresent and omnipotent figure (Lefort, 1988: 27). To describe this political vacuum, Lefort proposes his famous notion of the “empty place” of power (Lefort, 1988: 226). The place of power in democracies is empty not only because it lacks a determinate figure but also because the democratic societies are “without any positive determination” (Lefort, 1988: 226). Hence the social vacuum: the democratic destruction of the figure of the prince leads to a novel perception of the society in which ranks, classes, and distinctions “no longer go unchallenged” (Lefort, 1988: 19). According to Lefort, only totalitarian regimes can fill this political and social vacuum with the image of a unitary body—with the image of a “People-as-One” (Lefort 1986: 287; 1988: 13). If this social experience of indeterminacy negates the metaphor of the body, what alternative metaphor is available? Here, Lefort turns to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh.

Despite Lefort’s explicit invitation to look at the flesh to grasp the “indeterminacy of history and of the being of the social,” his references to it are scattered and cursory. One reference comes in the context of Lefort’s reading of Guizot, which forwards flesh as the direct opposite of the “social body” (Lefort, 2000a: 96). Lefort comments: “[N]o doubt that he [Guizot] has given up the image of the organic body or the mystical body; nevertheless he confers flesh only upon a carefully circumscribed society, within a social ocean that is ever ready to change into an abyss” (Lefort, 2000a: 106, emphasis in original). Significant here is what the metaphor of flesh does, namely, it shapes a perception of society out of radical indeterminacy. In other words, democratic indeterminacy does not mean the complete absence of relationships or identities around which individuals experience collective bonds. The metaphor of flesh does not denote, to use Oliver Marchart’s (2007: 98) apt comparison, a “Hobbesian state of nature;” nor does it mean the triumph of atomistic individualism. As Samuel Moyn (2012: 289) comments, Lefort’s thought demonstrates a consistent concern with advancing a “phenomenological account of human sociality” beyond an “individualistic social ontology.” Lefort’s use of flesh further testifies to this concern as it seeks to retain a phenomenological account of collectivism.

Thus, it is clear that the metaphor of flesh indicates that democratic societies hold a peculiar perception of collective life, which is neither a closed unity (i.e. body), nor a sheer antagonism of the state of nature; nor is it a simple aggregation of asocial individuals. While these are the explanations of what flesh is not, they do not tell us what flesh is. Lefort’s most explicit definition of the term perhaps comes through a discussion of Tocqueville. Lefort (2000b: 48, emphasis in original) comments that Tocqueville’s explanations of the “ambiguities of democratic revolution” are an “incision into the flesh of the social.” ³ Lefort (2000b: 48) qualifies:

I advance this latter term [the flesh of the social] – which I borrow from Maurice Merleau-Ponty – to designate a differentiated setting [milieu] that develops as it is put to the test of its internal division and is sensitive to itself in all its parts.

This is a difficult definition. Flesh implies both a dimension of totality (i.e. flesh as “a milieu”) and divisiveness (i.e. the “internal division”). Lefort’s insistence on flesh-as-one-milieu is understandable because, as we saw above, flesh suggests that democratic societies still hold a perception of collectivity. And, it is obvious why Lefort insists on flesh’s divisiveness, because without such divisiveness, society becomes a unitary and closed “body.” What is not immediately clear however is why the “internal division” refers to one division—rather than, for instance, a multiplicity of divisions. There is a general consensus among readers of Lefort that “internal” division implies not only divisions within the society but also the internalization of divisions, namely, the common awareness and acceptance of internal conflicts and a multiplicity of ideas as the basis of social coexistence. ⁴ Although this explanation helps us understand why Lefort sees indeterminacy as a constitutive affirmation of internal divisions, it does not explain why he refers to a single division. The explanation of this single division can be found in Lefort’s earlier work on Machiavelli. ⁵ In Lefort’s eyes, “Machiavelli is the thinker of the social division” because he is the “first” thinker who simultaneously had the idea of the “people as a national identity” and the “distinction between the people and the great [grands]” (Lefort and Rosanvallon, 2011: 20, my translation). Lefort (2012: 230) learns from Machiavelli that such opposition between the great, whose desire is to “dominate,” and the people, whose desire is “not to be dominated,” is what sustains freedom. Taking this idea further, Lefort (1988: 215, 242) argues that this class opposition becomes the constitutive “symbolic dimension” of societies after the democratic revolution. That is, this class division becomes the “guiding principle” of democratic societies, signifying a constitutive image located at a different level (i.e. “the symbolic”) than the reality of multiple divisions (Breckman, 2013: 150–151; Labelle, 2003: 31–33; Weymans, 2005: 265).

We encounter a political problem here, however. Although we see what Lefort conceptually means by a “single division” (i.e. the “symbolic” class division between ruler and ruled, between dominator and dominated), the term proposes two different senses of democratic politics. Note, for instance, Lefort’s (1988: 225, emphasis in original) claim that the “primal division of which is constitutive of the space we call society” enables the perception of “one” society “despite (or because of) its multiple divisions,” and “implies a reference to a place [the symbolic place—SEG] from which it can be seen, read, named.” I argue that Lefort’s failure to specify whether this one division emerges “despite” or “because of” the multiplicity of divisions is a sign of the ambiguity in his democratic theory. If flesh enables us to talk about a society because of its multiple divisions, it stresses that democratic societies accept the multiplicity of divisions as its condition of possibility. Consequently, democratic indeterminacy becomes an unprecedented opportunity for experiencing novel forms of social relations and coexistence. ⁶ An example of this idea can be found in Lefort’s celebration of the democratic revolution as a condition of “adventure” in which the “boundaries of the possible and the thinkable constantly recede” (Lefort, 1988: 179).

But, if flesh enables us to talk about a society despite multiple divisions, it—in a more Machiavellian vein—signifies that democratic societies are primarily constituted by the symbolic division between ruler and ruled. This characterization significantly amends what democratic indeterminacy means, as it suggests that democratic revolution did not completely do away with the “theologico-political” images of society but only inverted them. Perhaps the most overt example of this reading comes when Lefort accepts that democratic societies inherited a “movement which tends to actualize the image of the people, the state and the nation” (Lefort, 1988: 232) Yet, none of these images can become determinate and incontestable because such movements are “thwarted” by the “experience of social division” (Lefort, 1988: 232). In this Machiavellian sense, democratic politics become the inverse movement of undermining these images in order to ensure that political power does not license domination on behalf of a so-called real people or “people-as-One.”

Which sense of democratic indeterminacy does the flesh convey? Does it indicate the radical possibility to create democratic collectivities, or the radical possibility to contest the images of the people that tend to gain an absolute character? As I will discuss in the next section, these two readings are not mutually exclusive, and it is possible to move from the second to the first sense. However, such a move requires a thick phenomenological thematization of how undermining collective images such as those of people, society, or community simultaneously entails creating novel images of collectivities. Lefort’s account of flesh, as it appears in his democratic theory, does not provide us with such thematization. It is at this point that Lefort’s suggestion to turn to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology gains more significance: Can we find such thematization in Lefort’s reading of Merleau-Ponty? Or, can Merleau-Ponty’s own phenomenology offer us such thematization? To answer these questions, I now turn to Merleau-Ponty.

From body to flesh

Following Edmund Husserl’s phrase “return to the things themselves,” Merleau-Ponty (1962: ix–x) dedicates his phenomenology to moving to the other side of the subject, to the side of “things” and the “world,” with the aim of challenging governing philosophical categories such as consciousness and the constituting subject. To this end, in his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty turns to the perceptual experience of the body. More specifically, Merleau-Ponty takes up bodily perception in order to reveal the limitedness and inexactitude of subjective knowledge. “Only at the cost of losing the basis of all my certainties can I question what is conveyed to me by my presence to myself,” writes Merleau-Ponty (1962: 504), redefining phenomenology as a “movement” to relearn to look at phenomena, to incessantly begin without a stable and foundational knowledge and objectivity (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: xxiii–xxiv). When the subject understands her contact with phenomena and things in this uncertain manner, without any original knowledge of the world, she recognizes herself as a project of the world toward which she is “perpetually directed” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: xx). Thus, there is no “absolute choice” of the subject but only the subjective navigations of worldly obstacles and possibilities (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 527). The acknowledgment of this limitedness and uncertainty is a good first step toward furnishing the subject with a critical and reflexive “ethos” (Coole, 2007: 118)—an ethos that leads the subject to question her sovereign position and to critically ask what she leaves neglected, denied, or excluded when she claims that she knows.

However, Merleau-Ponty discerns that such a turn to perceptual experience is not sufficient to firmly establish this critical and reflexive attitude. This is due to a strong tendency inherent in perception, which Merleau-Ponty calls the “tacit thesis,” namely, perception’s “quasi-teleological” move “towards a truth in itself, through which the reason underlying all appearances is to be found” and all “contradictions” of the world are removed in favor of rendering the intersubjective experience “one unbroken text” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 62, emphasis in original). Put differently, although the subject acknowledges the limitedness of her subjective perception, this acknowledgement does not engender a critical attitude toward the very idea of perception. The subject still holds an “unquestioning faith” in perception’s power to achieve a “complete knowledge” of the world, and sees her own perception as one of the pieces of this complete image of the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 62). Therefore, Merleau-Ponty realizes that he needs to ensure that the subject does not succumb to this impulse of removing perceptional indeterminacies, surrendering her critical and reflexive attitude. This realization leads to Merleau-Ponty’s self-critique in his later, incomplete work—The Visible and the Invisible—where he coins the concept of flesh.

In one of his working notes, Merleau-Ponty locates the main problem as such: “[T]he problems posed in [Phenomenology of Perception] are insoluble because I start there from the ‘consciousness’-‘object’ distinction” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968c: 200). In the same note, Merleau-Ponty (1968c: 200) adds: “The Self to be understood … as the unity by transgression or by correlative encroachment of ‘thing’ and ‘world.’” What is noticeable in these notes is a difficulty Merleau-Ponty finds in his own conceptualization of body, namely, the dualistic ontology between subject and object, between body and phenomena. Thus, Merleau-Ponty in his later phenomenology intends to cancel this very subject-object binary. Furthermore, as the note’s reference to “correlative encroachment” implies, Merleau-Ponty thinks that such cancelation can be achieved by establishing a more reciprocal relation between body and phenomenal world, ⁷ which leads him to the “reversibility thesis,” and, concomitantly, to the concept of “flesh.”

The “reversibility thesis” is a key step in Merleau-Ponty’s endeavor to put the body in a reciprocal relation with the world:

[A]s many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by things, my activity is equally passivity—which is the second and more profound sense of narcissism: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. (Merleau-Ponty, 1968b: 139, emphasis mine)

Now we can clearly see how the concept of flesh allows Merleau-Ponty to overcome the problem he diagnosed in his concept of bodily perception, namely, the strong tendency toward the “tacit thesis”—the subject’s undoubted faith in her perception. The flesh decenters the sovereign position of the subject and pushes the vocabulary of subject, object, and world to a limit so that we can no longer safely speak of a subject-object-world separation. Even when the body tries to enclose itself (i.e. self-as-seer), it finds in itself another self (i.e. self-as-seen). This internal division is ineluctable because the body-as-flesh is always in the flesh of the world.

It is precisely this internal division of the subject that Lefort (2009) celebrates in his reading of Merleau-Ponty. Lefort agrees with Merleau-Ponty that although the concept of the body emphasizes the locality of the subject and its perceptual experience, it does not question the identity of the body as the sovereign subject. ⁹ According to Lefort, the flesh allows Merleau-Ponty to take the experiential indeterminacy to the heart of the body-as-subject. Thus, Lefort (2009) concludes that Merleau-Ponty’s move from body to flesh achieves the radical indeterminacy of the body-as-subject. This phenomenological formulation of the experience of uncertainty, in Lefort’s eyes, gives expression to the democratic experience of indeterminacy—an indeterminacy that should instruct us about the dividedness and openness of democratic societies.

Yet, Lefort’s interpretation of Merleau-Ponty also takes an interesting turn at this point. Lefort (2009: 285) thinks that Merleau-Ponty defines the “defeat of the body” through the notion of “lack.” ¹⁰ In fact, Lefort (2009: 288) argues that the “sense of lack … accompanies the draining of being.” Lefort’s accentuation of “lack” and “draining” is crucial because it captures his appropriation of the concept of flesh in his democratic theory. How does Lefort arrive at this interpretation? Here is one of the passages of Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible on which Lefort’s reading hinges:

The visible can … fill me and occupy me only because I who see it do not see it from the depths of nothingness, but from the midst of itself; I the seer am also visible. What makes the weight, the thickness, the flesh of each color, of each sound, of each tactile texture, of the present and of the world is the fact that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogeneous with them; he feels that he is the sensible itself coming to itself and that in return the sensible is in his eyes as it were his double or an extension of his own flesh. (Merleau-Ponty, 1968a: 113–114)

Lefort thinks that Merleau-Ponty never resolves this difficulty. ¹¹ Yet, Lefort proposes a solution by diluting the meaning of homogeneity, by approaching it not as of the same substance, but as in the same milieu. Put differently, Lefort (1990: 5) suggests that homogeneity does not mean that the body and its exterior are of the same substance, but rather that they both belong to flesh. Considering Merleau-Ponty’s remark in the above-quoted passage that there is a “double” experience of the same being in the process of the body’s “coming of itself to itself,” Lefort (1990: 6–7) asserts that the return-to-self does not mean that the body closes itself. ¹² Quite the contrary. The “double” signals the internal division of the body-as-flesh (i.e. its “seer” and “seen” positions), which also signals that the body’s return-to-self is nothing other than a discovery of the body’s non-identity with itself (Lefort, 1990: 6; 2009: 285–287). It is at this point that Lefort (1990: 6; 2009: 285–288) advances his conclusion that flesh establishes the “lack” of the body: Flesh decisively undermines any tendency to self-closure because it describes a twoness in the body, namely, the body as seer, and the body as seen. The latter position testifies to the body’s openness to visibility (i.e. body-as-flesh as part of the flesh of the world) and reveals to the body that it “lacks” a determinate self-image. According to Lefort (2009: 286), this sense of “lack” refers to the body’s “draining” to the extent that we lose any point of reference to a body-as-subject. Put differently, Lefort concludes that the openness of the body leads to the effacement of the body-as-flesh in the flesh of the world.

Now that we understand Lefort’s interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh, we can briefly return to the problem posed in the previous section, namely, the political ambiguity of the “flesh of the social.” Does Lefort’s phenomenological account of flesh clarify this ambiguity? I think not. In fact, it shows that Lefort settles on the Machiavellian sense of democratic politics: preventing the closure of society. Note the striking resonance between this “draining” of the body-as-flesh and Lefort’s idea of democratic indeterminacy as the undoing of social images. As Lefort interprets Merleau-Ponty’s move from body to flesh as a movement from subjective closure to openness, he sees democratic indeterminacy as a move from the social experience of closure (“social body”) to openness (“flesh of the social”). The political upshot of this interpretation of flesh is that it forwards a solely negative subjectivity: the experience of indeterminacy leads democratic societies to undo their own self-images.

I contend that it is possible to go beyond this solely negative account but that doing so requires us to change our interpretive posture in reading Merleau-Ponty. That is, it requires us to question Lefort’s reading of the body-as-flesh as the effacement of the body. If we are to get out of Lefort’s negative circle of disidentification, we should not approach openness and closure primarily as subjective qualities but as a worldly condition. We must attend to one central element that Lefort’s interpretation of flesh overlooks: The flesh as the flesh of the world.

From body to flesh and to world

I contend that we should read Merleau-Ponty’s move toward the concept of the flesh not only as a move to affirm the openness of the subject, but as a move to decisively replace his earlier subject-centered phenomenology with a world-centered phenomenology, and to decisively affirm the openness of the world. ¹³ The purpose of Merleau-Ponty’s conceptual trajectory is to stress—to use a distinctly Merleau-Pontyian (1968b) term—the intertwinement of the openness and closure in intersubjective perceptual experience. Lefort’s (1990: 12) subject-centered reading is most evident when he claims that the difficulty in the flesh is symptomatic of Merleau-Ponty’s insufficient attention to the role of “alterity.” More specifically, Lefort (1990: 12) contends that Merleau-Ponty’s formulation of the flesh refers to the reversible relation between the body and its outside, but it does so without “taking into account the other, the third one.” In other words, for Lefort (1990: 7–12), the body-as-flesh’s self-opening creates a form of internal alterity (i.e. the “dehiscence” between body-as-seer and body-as-seen) but this internal alterity falls short of taking other bodies into account. What is evident here is how Lefort’s interpretation of Merleau-Ponty is trapped in the subject-centered vocabulary of a distinct self and other, in which the “world” never thematically appears. Consider, for instance, Lefort’s (2009: 289) argument that the body-as-flesh is “open” and its “borders” are no longer “covered over” because the body is “built … around vision.” Although Lefort (2009: 289) here implies the importance of the flesh of the world in disrupting the body’s self-image, he retreats to his subject-centered framework and claims in the next sentence that this opening is the “internal opening” of the body (i.e. body-as-flesh). As such, Lefort fails to pay attention to the flesh of the world.

My suggestion to read flesh in a world-centered framework is not at all unorthodox. As I discussed above, since his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty aimed to move toward the other side of the subject. Let us consider the “tacit thesis” once again but with a stronger attention to the world. Recall that the tacit thesis implies the body’s tendency to self-closure; the body’s tendency to remove the contradictions and indeterminacies in its perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 62). When considered in a world-centered framework, it is possible to see that this tendency is part of the body’s oscillation between an “attraction to the richness” of the world and an anxious “warning against getting lost or absolved” in the same richness (Tønder, 2013: 119). Therefore, the body constantly negotiates closure (i.e. “anxiety”) and openness (i.e. “attraction”) against the indeterminacy of the world. Note, for instance, Merleau-Ponty’s following sentences in his Phenomenology: “[The body’s] unity is always implicit and vague. It is always something other than what it is … never hermetically sealed and never left behind” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 231). Merleau-Ponty uses terms that imply openness (i.e. “vague,” “never hermetically sealed”) and closure (i.e. “unity,” “never left behind”) simultaneously. The body’s unity, although not overt and never decisively sealed, is also never left behind. Merleau-Ponty (1962: 231) after this sentence writes that we must approach the body as if it is “a provisional sketch of our total being.” We can take the hint from the “provisional sketch:” The body never decisively achieves its own closure. At most, the closure is a temporal closure always threatened by the indeterminacy of the body-in-the-world. We are “born of the world” and “into the world” holds Merleau-Ponty (1962: 527). We are already constituted in the former, but not completely, since we are open to a “number of possibilities” in the latter (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 527). As evident, since his early phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty aims to understand subjectivity as a response to worldly possibilities—responses which entail provisional subjective openings and closures. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty’s conceptual transition to the flesh is not to accentuate the openness of the body but to accentuate the situatedness of the body in the world.

In fact, the prominence of the flesh of the world becomes more overt when we return to the question of “alterity.” Merleau-Ponty, in a working note, speaks about otherness as follows:

To say that the body is a seer is, curiously enough, not to say anything else than: it is visible. When I study what I mean in saying that it is the body that sees, I find nothing else than: it is “from somewhere” (from the point of view of the other – or: in the mirror for me, in the three-paneled mirror, for example) visible in the act of looking … It is through the world first that I am seen or thought. (Merleau-Ponty, 1968c: 273–274)

So much then depends on how the flesh characterizes the relationship between the body and the world, and how the body and the other express themselves as “opennesses” in the world. Merleau-Ponty (1968b: 132) is explicit that the flesh of the world does not subsume the body, the other, or the things because it is not a total “indivisible being” that, in Lefort’s terms, erases every subject, body, or thing. MC Dillon (1988: 167) eloquently describes the relationship between the body and the world as “grounded differentiation.” The body and the world are on common ground because, qua visible, the body, the things, the others, and the world are part of the same flesh. Yet, they are also different because sharing flesh does not mean having the same substance (Dillon, 1988: 167–170). ¹⁶ Alterity cannot be subsumed in the flesh of the world because there is no pre-given content, substance, or identity of the body and the world that would confirm their sameness. Instead, Merleau-Ponty sees alterity as “latency” in the flesh of the world: “Between the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which, for its part not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968b: 132–133, emphasis in original). The body, the other, and the things are potentialities arising from and sustained by the flesh of the world.

Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on potentiality is significant, for it has an important impact on how we understand alterity. Alterity becomes not a simple difference between given positions or visions, but a potential for creativity. Put in Dillon’s terms once again, the “grounded differentiation” is “always in a process of unfinished incarnation” because it is always a potentiality (Merleau-Ponty, 1968c: 209–210). The differentiation is always incomplete because it always bears excess for further differentiation, for creating anew. Merleau-Ponty (1968c: 170) notes that:

the “amorphous” perceptual world … is more than all painting, than all speech, than every “attitude,” and which, apprehended by philosophy in its universality, appears as containing everything that will ever be said, and yet leaving us to create it.

To fully grasp this dual character of the world, we should turn to Merleau-Ponty’s correlation of perception with expression. Merleau-Ponty (1973: 35) writes that:

to express oneself is a paradoxical enterprise since it presupposes that there is a fund of kindred expressions, already established and thoroughly evident, and from this fund the form used should detach itself and remain new enough to arouse attention.

This world-centered reading of flesh illustrates that Merleau-Ponty places indeterminacy not only in the subject, but also in the world, albeit in two contrasting ways. Indeterminacy manifests itself as abundance in the world, because the intersubjective world supplies experiences (e.g. the experiences of “reversibility,” “dehiscence,” “otherness”) that always exceeds subjective mastery and dismantles the “narcissism” of the subject (Merleau-Ponty, 1968b: 139). Against this abundance of the world the subject faces her lack of subjectivity—her inability to attain certainty and to close her self-image. Thus, in Merleau-Ponty’s eyes, subjective lack is a response to worldly abundance. This attention to worldly indeterminacy does not mean negating subjective closures. Instead, it means putting the experiences of openness and closure in a productive relation with each other. Merleau-Ponty writes:

The flesh (of the world or my own) is not contingency, chaos, but a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself. I will never see my own retinas, but if one thing is certain for me it is that … the spectacle of the world that is my own … does not notably differ from that of the others, with me as with them refers with evidence to typical dimensions of visibility … so that at the joints of the opaque body and the opaque world there is a ray of generality and of light. (Merleau-Ponty, 1968b: 146)

Back to democratic indeterminacy and rethinking democratic politics

What does democratic indeterminacy look like in this world-centered framework? To see the political upshot of worldly indeterminacy, we can start with one of the more politically charged concepts that Merleau-Ponty and Lefort share, namely, the concept of institution. Merleau-Ponty uses the concept of institution to underline the positive moment of identifying collective experiences. ¹⁷ Institution refers to the “events in an experience, which endow the experience with durable dimensions” and to “the events which deposit a sense” in the subject “not just as something surviving or as a residue, but as the call to follow, the demand of a future” (Merleau-Ponty, 2010a: 77). In Merleau-Ponty’s eyes, institution is primarily a phenomenological concept, but it is possible to find its implicit political expressions in Merleau-Ponty’s other writings. Perhaps the most political expression of this sense of institution emerges when Merleau-Ponty (1964d: 211–215) claims that the “milieu proper to politics” is the “collective life,” which is fraught with antagonisms and uncertainties of human action (Dietz 2002: 149–50). ¹⁸ The difficult task of politics for Merleau-Ponty is to find the “conditions for a power”—a power that is not the power to rule or dominate but the power to “participat[e] in common situation” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964d: 215). Merleau-Ponty, therefore, does not approach politics as relationships of ruling or domination but as being and acting with others (Mazzocchi, 2015b: 74–76). For instance, Merleau-Ponty claims that the transformative power of action lies in its ability to “open or close hidden fissures in the block of the general consent, and trigger a general molecular process which may modify the whole course of events” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964d: 216). Noticeable in this sentence is Merleau-Ponty’s reiteration of the intertwinement of opening and closure as worldly, intersubjective movements. In this world-centered reading of the two movements, the rewards of the experience of indeterminacy lie not only in preventing the closure of society but also in sustaining the capacity to attend to collective experiences and render them anew. Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s conception of institution is consistent with his conception of flesh since it posits worldly indeterminacy as an abundant condition for new collective beginnings.

Lefort, on the other hand, uses the concept of institution in the opposite sense. Lefort (1988: 227) maintains that democratic suffrage is the main example of the institutionalization of the affirmation of democratic indeterminacy because it transforms the people—the “instituting Subject”—into a “pure diversity of individuals.”

It is at the very moment [of elections] when popular sovereignty is assumed to manifest itself, when the people is assumed to actualize itself by expressing its will, that social interdependence breaks down and that the citizen is abstracted from all the networks in which his social life develops and becomes a mere statistic. Number replaces substance. (Lefort 1988: 18–19) ¹⁹

We now know the phenomenological reasons why Lefort reads the institution of suffrage as a process of disintegration: just as he interprets the openness of the body-as-flesh as “lack” and “draining,” he devises the openness of the “flesh of the social” as the society’s revocation of its own images. And, because his phenomenological reading of flesh conceives of the experience of indeterminacy as the body’s self-effacement, he conceives of the democratic politics as the constant subversion of the identifications of the people. As a result, Lefort’s democratic theory ends up with a “negative” and “holistic bias” (Ingram, 2006: 42): It is negative because the promise of democratic indeterminacy lies in the impossibility of closing the images of the people; ²⁰ it is holistic because democratic indeterminacy is formulated against the background of a “theologico-political” imaginary that perceives the collective life (in phenomenological terms: the world) from the vantage point of totality—from the vantage point of a single “symbolic” place. These two biases also assert themselves when Lefort insists on a single division (i.e. the Machiavellian division between ruler and ruled) and on a single place of power (i.e. the empty place of power). Lefort thinks that a society can politically see itself in the image of the sovereign people, and this image can only be formed when people imagine themselves to be occupying the place of power. Yet because democracies are constituted by the Machiavellian ruler-ruled division, no image of people can unitarily and decisively fill the place of power. Inasmuch as the “milieu” of politics is reduced to the place of power, democratic politics becomes an “unending circuit” of opening the images of the people (Markell, 2003: 187–188; 2006). ²¹ The ultimate shortcoming of this account of democratic politics is its failure to explain how the experience of democratic indeterminacy can be an opportunity for expanding the places and experiences of collective subjectivity. Once again returning to the phenomenological reasons, this failure stems from Lefort’s inattention to worldly indeterminacy as an abundant condition for intersubjective creativity.

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological emphasis on collective responsiveness, creativity, and futurity can help us fill this gap in Lefort’s democratic theory. To begin, it reveals that democratic theory must go beyond Lefort’s inverted “theologico-political” framework. ²² Inasmuch as Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology aims to translate the subjective experience of indeterminacy to an intersubjective opportunity for rethinking collective life, it shows that there are no reasons to limit this idea of openness to one symbolic division and to one place of power. In other words, Merleau-Ponty’s world centered formulation of the indeterminacy, when translated into the language of democratic indeterminacy, approaches the “milieu” of politics as the abundant world of collective life. Therefore, within this world-centered framework, the promise of democratic politics does not stem from emptying the place of power but from proliferating places of power. In a sense, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of flesh connects the two competing ontologies that Tønder and Thomassen (2015) locate within radical democratic theory: the ontologies of “lack” and “abundance.” ²³ The democratic indeterminacy becomes not only a condition of subjective lack, namely, a condition that ensures the defeat of every attempt to achieve “people-as-One.” It also becomes a condition of abundance, namely, a condition for creating and multiplying identities of people in many areas of common life. The accent here is on how democratic indeterminacy at once consists of “disidentification” and “reidentification” of the people (Norval, 2012: 818, emphasis mine); ²⁴ on how democratic politics can invoke an image of sovereign people to empower the excluded and the disenfranchised—an appeal that would not only disidentify the governing image of the people but also reidentify who constitutes the sovereign people, inviting a “future” people (Frank, 2010: 235). ²⁵

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology has much to offer to democratic theory, especially in explaining the peculiar experience of “indeterminacy” that democratic times inaugurate—on this point Lefort is right. Yet, an examination of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology reveals that his understanding of indeterminacy is different than the one Lefort assumes. In this article, I claimed that the political ambiguity inherent in Lefort’s democratic theory stems from his problematic subject-centered reading of the concept of flesh. Against Lefort’s interpretation, I offered a different reading of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology—one that sees indeterminacy as an intersubjective, worldly condition. Thus, I suggested to approach democratic indeterminacy not only as an opportunity for questioning the closure of the identity of people but also as an opportunity for mobilizing collective experiences and activities toward new democratic beginnings.

This is an invitation to envision novel ways of reinvigorating the collective subjectivity of ordinary people. In other words, I would like to suggest that democratic theorists should focus on the question of how affirmation of the impossibility of achieving a definitive self-image of people can translate into possibilities of articulating democratic collectivities in the name of the people, and I would like to insist that this question is especially meaningful in contemporary plutocratic ²⁶ and neoliberal ²⁷ times. Given the simultaneous erosion of common public concerns and the disenfranchisement of ordinary citizens under pervasive and increasing inequalities, contemporary democratic theory must reemphasize the importance of vivifying and strengthening the democratic capacity of people. ²⁸ To this end, Lefort’s idea of democratic indeterminacy is certainly a crucial start: the most important aspect of the democratic revolution is its dissemination of the experience of political power previously possessed by kings and nobility. Yet, the challenge today is to render this experience a formative and collective experience – one that motivates ordinary people to invent and experiment with collectivities in many spheres of their common life.