Can Political Authority be Founded on a Ruse? Derrida and Lefort on Machiavelli’s Use of Political Deception

I. Ruse of Law and Political Authority

For Lefort, the heterogeneity of the political is the central problem of The Prince, and is already apparent in its Dedication to Lorenzo De Medici in which Machiavelli points to the irreducible double perspective of the political:

I hope it will not be thought presumptuous if a man of low and inferior station dare to debate and regulate the government of princes; for just as those who sketch landscapes place themselves in a low position on the plain in order to study the nature of the mountains and highlights, and in order to study the lowlands place themselves high on the top of the mountains, in like fashion, in order to know well the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to know well the nature of princes one must be a common citizen. ⁶

Already in the Dedication, and this is Lefort’s interest, Machiavelli is signaling a politics that emerges out of an inherently divided perspective. The perspective of the prince is not the perspective of the common people, nor is the perspective of the common people that of the prince. At first glance this is a commonplace and signals nothing new. But Machiavelli says something more: only the common people understand the nature of the prince and only the prince understands the nature of the common people. The self-understanding of each is gained through the reflected viewpoint of the other. Still further, Machiavelli compares this shared, yet differentiated, viewpoint to a landscape painting. The space between the prince and the common people is an aesthetic space, the space of an image. Machiavelli returns to the inherent division at the heart of the political in Chapter Nine of The Prince arguing that the prince must choose between the people and the nobles because there are two contradictory and heterogeneous desires subtending every city and every politics, namely, “the common people do not wish to be governed nor oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles wish to govern and oppress the common people.” ⁷

As Lefort notes, unlike Hobbes’ and Schmitt’s sovereign, the prince does not unify the two desires through a singular sovereign force; he cannot offer a solution to the struggle between the nobles and the common people. Given the irreconcilable conflict, Machiavelli advises the prince to align himself with the common people because the “prince cannot be safe when the common people are his enemy … and a prince must always live with the same common people; but he certainly can do without the same nobles.” ⁸ Lefort points out that the people will only be faithful to a power that ensures against the oppression of the nobles and this because their desire not to be oppressed is initially a powerless desire; it needs the power of the prince in order to be realized.

Machiavelli is clear that the alliance between the prince and the people does not take the form of a Hobbesian contract. Instead the people’s desire joins with the desire of the prince in an alliance against the nobles. As indicated in the Dedication, the people and the prince are aligned in an image of political unity in which the desire of each is reflected back through the other. As just noted, the reflected unity remains at the level of an image insofar as it masks the irreconcilable struggle of desire at the heart of the political. Moreover, and again contra Hobbes, the alliance between the people and the prince is not one of protection in exchange for obedience. Lefort argues that the radicality of Machiavelli’s political thought lies in his distinguishing “the imperative of security” from the “imperative of government.” Not only are the two imperatives different, they occur at different levels and indeed, “being able to respond to the second frees us from the first.” ⁹ The people’s desire not to be oppressed is a desire for a life of freedom while the desire for security is a desire to avoid violence and untimely death. ¹⁰

Politics therefore is something more than conquest and the managing of violence which for Machiavelli characterizes the realm of necessity. More precisely, politics occurs at a different register in which the prince’s desire to rule must be aligned with the people’s desire for a life of freedom. Lefort goes on to suggest that this requires that “necessity is suspended before reestablishing itself in a different register, at the point where the image that the prince projects of himself merges with the overlay of the one reflected back by his subjects.” ¹¹ The image of the prince, reflected back to the people, is an image of goodness and beneficence which then joins with their desire, reflected back to him, not to be oppressed. Still further, this double image that lies between them constitutes the space of the political. In other words, the political space is nothing more than a double image of beneficence and freedom. ¹² Insofar as the joining of the two desires is not a merging, the double image retains the sense of difference and conflict.

Going further, Lefort argues that Machiavelli understands that the double image requires the art of government which institutionalizes the people’s desire and, thereby, creates political subjects who actively participate, one in which the people can legitimately air their grievances and voice their resistance to oppression. It is precisely because Machiavelli understands the need to transform the realm of security into the political realm that he advocates in Discourses on Livy for the tribunal of the plebs that permits them to “vent their ambitions” to be free. ¹³ Moreover, Machiavelli is clear that the tribune of the plebs requires a “new order,” the order of the law and political institutions because the nobles cannot mask for long “the poison against the plebs that they had held in their breasts …” ¹⁴ He reminds his readers again in the Discourses that “in every republic are two diverse humors, that of the people and that of the great,” ¹⁵ and it is precisely from “those tumults that many inconsiderately damn” ¹⁶ that good laws emerge. Notably it is the people’s resistance, their “tumults,” and not the edicts of the prince that is generative of good laws. I will return to this momentarily.

Again it is important to contrast Machiavelli’s description of the political alliance between the prince and the people with the Hobbesian contract in which the multitude give up their power in exchange for security. The contract is such that the multitude gains no political subjectivity. Indeed, there is no political space between the sovereign and his subjects; instead, as seen in the Frontispiece to Leviathan, the multitude is incorporated into the sovereign’s body. In fact, as the Frontispiece depicts, the eyes of the incorporated multitude are all facing the sovereign who towers above and rules absolutely over the domains of the theological and the civil. In other words, the Hobbesian sovereign looks over his dominion and sees only himself.

In contrast, as we have seen, the respective desires of the prince and the people reflect back to each other and form an image of unity in which one desire is overlaid on the other, a kind of double image, as it were, that lays between them much like the space that exists between the valley and the height of the mountain. It is no accident that Machiavelli continually uses “alliance” to describe the relation between the prince and the people. As Hannah Arendt notes, the Roman conception of law as alliance, a conception profoundly different with the Greek notion of nomos as wall or border, brings together two domains and establishes a new space or world between them. Law as alliance regulates and brings together the domain of the powerful prince with the powerless people and in doing so the people gain an institutionalized power that not only give political expression to their desire not to be oppressed but serves as the basis of new laws. ¹⁷

In Chapter 18 of The Prince, in the context of whether the prince should “live honestly and not (by) deceit,” Machiavelli explicitly addresses the question of how to found a state vis-à-vis the nobles and the people. Here he takes up the “ruse or cunning” at the heart of the law and political authority. Addressing the question of how the prince gains political authority in the face of the struggle of the two desires, a struggle that constantly threatens the political existence of the prince and the city, he states:

How praiseworthy it is for a prince to keep his word and live by honesty and not deceit, everyone knows; nevertheless we see, by what goes on in our own times, that those princes who have accomplished great things are the ones who had cared little for keeping promises and who knew how to manipulate the minds of men with shrewdness; and in the end they won over those who founded themselves on loyalty (si sono fondati in su la lealta). ¹⁸

Loyalty alone will not found the authority of the prince. Instead, the authority of the prince will be founded on how well he combats the struggle of desires that threaten to rend the city. The combat requires laws and force. As Machiavelli puts it, “This combat must be fought in two ways: one with the law, the other with force: the first way is peculiar to man, the other to beasts.” ¹⁹ Machiavelli goes on to say that the law is “not enough” and must be supplemented with the beasts, specifically the fox and the lion: “Since a prince must know how to make good use of the beast he should choose then the fox and the lion; for the lion has no protection from the traps, and the fox is defenseless against the wolves.” ²⁰ Lefort notes Machiavelli’s profound break with the metaphysical tradition in which there is a radical distinction between animals and humans. Just as for Machiavelli there is no distinction between animals and humans, so too there is no distinction between law, ruse, and force. Thus, according to Lefort, “the law is effective only when tied to force and force is effective only when tied to ruse.” ²¹ Most significantly, he argues that in Machiavelli’s thought there is a “condensation of law, force, and ruse … they are ‘consubstantial’ – one cannot fail to see a radically new political trinity at work here.’’ ²²

In Lefort’s reading, this new political trinity emerges from an ontology that no longer admits the distinction between being and appearance. Being is phenomenal, a realm where “time drives everything before it.” Thus, the ruse of law cannot be understood as masking a reality or a domain of being that would contain the truth of politics or legal authority. Given that being is appearance and politics a phenomenal affair, Lefort points out that for Machiavelli it is not useful “to try to distinguish between being and appearance, deceiver and deceived. There is between the prince and the people a certain ‘connivance’ — a common interest in surmounting violence and this requires a shared ‘ruse’ about the law and power.” ²³ Having already established that the prince must align with the people, Machiavelli is clear when he states in The Prince: “… the ordinary people are always taken by the appearance and the outcome of the thing; and in the world there is nothing but ordinary people; and there is no room for the few while the many have a place to lean on.” ²⁴ The ruse that effectively establishes the unity of the city and the authority of the law is nothing other than an image or representation mutually leaned upon. The people and the prince both lean on the ruse of law whereby power and authority are rooted in an image of freedom, goodness, and beneficence. To borrow an image from Arendt, the ruse of law establishes the political space between the prince and the people in the way a table gathers together those who sit around it and allows them to lean upon it.

While ruse is a kind of deception, not all deceptions are ruses. In other words, a ruse must be distinguished from a vulgar deception or what Derrida calls a “frank lie,” in which “the liar knows, consciously in explicit, thematic, current consciousness” that the assertions made are “totally or partially false.” ²⁵ “Ruse” on the other hand is not a conscious intention to deceive. A ruse is a trick, a detour, an effective strategy that seeks to accomplish something and it must be understood against the background of Machiavelli’s understanding the political as an aesthetic space, a space of appearance. Nowhere is this better illuminated than in Chapter Fifteen of The Prince where Machiavelli states that “in writing something useful for whoever understands it, it seemed to me more appropriate to pursue the effectual truth of the matter (verita effettuale della cosa) rather than its imagined one.” ²⁶ In appealing to verita effettuale Machiavelli is not pointing to an objective reality that could somehow be grasped as an object of inquiry by the theoretician or political scientist. Rather, “truth” is an effect of disruptions, alterations, and discontinuities in a field of forces marked by the double desire of the people and the prince. For Machiavelli, that which is the case (della cosa) is that the political space of appearance is marked by inequalities, exclusions, oppressive practices and unequal power relations as well as with unnoticed possibilities in which freedom is an effective possibility, the latter capturing the sense of cosa as “cause” as in politically making something happen or bringing something about. ²⁷ As Althusser puts it, “There is no truth other than what is actual, that is, born by its effects, nonexistent outside them; and that the effectivity of the true is always merged with the activity of men; and that, politically speaking, it exists only in the confrontation between forces, the struggle between parties.” ²⁸ Lefort agrees, arguing that Machiavelli understands verita effettuale in terms of historical forces, noting that “there is nothing else in history but what appears, that is, the actions of men and the events around which they are interwoven.” ²⁹

Here Machiavelli’s insistence on the distinction between verita effettuale and the imagination is essential insofar it prevents grasping the ruse as a kind of deception in which reality is replaced by a fiction as Arendt views the totalitarian lie or as a myth mobilizing the people into action as Schmitt enthusiastically views Mussolini’s use of myth. ³⁰ Both the totalitarian lie and the political myth are for Machiavelli examples of the imagination exercised by those who “have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for there is such a gap between how one lives and how one should live that he who neglects what is being done for what should be done will learn his destruction rather than his preservation.” ³¹ While the imagination seeks to impose a particular vision, theoretical or practical, on the political, Machiavelli’s understanding of the verita effettuale is rooted in a historical materialism that seeks to grasp concrete historical struggles and forces at work in constituting the political and which allow for other possibilities to emerge. ³² Gramsci’s discussion of the verita effettuale both illuminates and adds to Lefort’s analysis, arguing that Machiavelli understands reality as “a relationship of forces in a continuous movement and change of equilibrium.” Moreover, and this is important to distinguish it from political myth-making, for Gramsci the verita effettuale is engaged with “showing concretely how the historical forces ought to have worked in order to be effective.” ³³

While Lefort’s reading rightly emphasizes the shared ruse between the prince and the people as the foundation of political authority and the law, in my view he underemphasizes the knowing complicity of the people in the ruse, arguing instead that the people are totally blind and have no inkling that something is afoot. Lefort argues that the people in lending their support to the prince “do not know what they are doing.” ³⁴ However, Machiavelli is clear: the prince does not engage in the ruse alone. Writing in the active tense, he claims that the ordinary person “allows himself to be deceived,” ³⁵ indicating that the people take an active part in the ruse of law that establishes its authority. As Lefort points out that it is the people’s active participation in the ruse that transforms them from passive material for the nobles’ oppression to political subjects who have an institutionalized voice in the new political state. In other words, the ruse transforms the powerless desire of the people into a politically active voice that articulates their desire not to be oppressed. For example in the Discourses, speaking of the creation of the tribunal of the plebs which institutes a political space for the people to voice their grievances, Machiavelli points out that the tribunal emerged, “after the people rose up against it [the Senate and the consul]; so as not to lose the whole, it was constrained to yield to the people its part …” ³⁶ As Lefort himself points, “What matters to him [Machiavelli] is to bring to light the tie between liberty and law, to show that in a genuine Republic, men have a hold upon the laws and their dissensions, far from being destructive of all civil life, are generative thereof.” ³⁷ As mentioned earlier, and this again is the radicality of Machiavelli’s democratic politics, the “tumults” of the people are generative of new laws that better reflect the people’s desire not to be oppressed. The source of new laws lies with the people, not with the prince, and these laws are not generated blindly. ³⁸

Numerous examples of the people as an active force of resistance follow in the Discourses. For example, Machiavelli discusses at some length the plebian revolt against the Agrarian Law which favored the nobles and the “ambition of the great.” As Machiavelli claims:

For so great is the ambition of the great that it soon brings that city to its ruin if it is not beaten down in a city by various ways and various modes. So, if the contention over the Agrarian law took three hundred years to make Rome servile, it would have perhaps been led into servitude much sooner if the plebs had not checked the ambition of the nobles, both with this law and with its other appetites. ³⁹

The plebs are the active force that “beats down in various ways and various modes” the appetites of the nobles. And Machiavelli is clear, “the plebs kept Rome free by giving rise to laws in favor of freedom.” ⁴⁰ Further along he points out that when comparing the prince and the plebs, “more virtue will always be seen in the people than in the prince; if one reasons about both as unshackled, fewer errors will be seen in the people than the prince.” ⁴¹ Against Hobbes, the prince needs the limitation of law far more than the people. Indeed, Machiavelli goes on to claim that the cruelties of the prince are to be feared far more than the cruelties of the people: “The cruelties of the multitude are against whoever they fear will seize the common good; those of a prince are against whoever he fears will seize his own good.” ⁴² That the life of freedom includes laws governing the distribution of wealth and property indicates that Machiavelli does not understand a life of freedom as a Hobbesian life of private commodious living, but instead, as a life lived in common with others in which material goods are viewed as belonging to the common. As Machiavelli states in the context of the growing inequality of Rome brought about by the agrarian laws: “well-ordered republics have to keep the public rich and their citizens poor.” ⁴³

The numerous examples in the Discourses of the people’s revolt against oppressive measures by the Senate and the consuls reveal that Machiavelli understands freedom in the active sense of resisting oppression in all its various shapes, most especially, its material form. ⁴⁴ Consistent with this, Negri and Hardt point out that the multiplicity of different social practices rooted in varying historical and material conditions indicates that for Machiavelli “Humanity is never naked, never characterized by bare life, but rather always dressed, endowed with not only histories of suffering but also capacities to produce and the power to rebel.” ⁴⁵

In summary, contrary to Lefort’s and also Strauss’s claims, the people are not blind to the ways of the prince. How could they give voice to their grievances unless they know the ways in which they were being oppressed? The people know their desire and their conditions, just as they know the ways of the prince and the desire of the nobles; they have knowingly joined in an alliance with the prince to keep the nobles at bay. This is not a blind alliance as Obama’s appearance before the national press in August 2013 indicates: the people desire security and they will join in an alliance with the prince to keep the wolves away; however, this desire takes the political form of a desire for a life of freedom. As the extent of the NSA surveillance activities unfolded including the almost complete disregard for the fourth amendment stipulating the citizens’ right to privacy against government intrusion, the people began to resist.

At the same time, and this is my second disagreement with his reading, Lefort claims that the ruse elevates the image of the prince and the authority of the law above the conflict of society. In other words for Lefort the image of the prince transcends the conflict between the two desires, and in so doing, unifies the city from a standpoint above both the people and the nobles. This misses the radicality of Machiavelli’s understanding of the foundation of political authority in secular democratic politics. The passages from The Prince cited above make it clear that Machiavelli understands the ruse of law as an alliance between the people and the prince against the nobles who do not share in the ruse and who require the force of the lion. Here again we must recall the Dedication: only the people see the prince for who he is, just as only the prince can see the people for who they are. The people see the foxy nature of the prince; they judge the appearance of it, because they participate in the cunning. Machiavelli therefore refuses a theological understanding of authority rooted in the transcendent image of the prince who towers over and rules from above the political space. Instead, the image or representation of power and authority lies between the prince and the people like the space between the low valley and the mountain peaks. Thus, the prince cannot simply suspend the law in a state of exception because the law has its foundation in a political alliance that is not constituted by the prince alone. As we have seen the ruse of law moves us to a different register: the register of political representation in which the people’s right to resist is generative of the constitution of the political space. ⁴⁶

Hence, Machiavelli, in contrast to Hobbes, politicizes “natural cunning” which has the effect of the disincorporation of power: the sovereign does not incarnate the people and no longer appears above the law. In other words, the image of a sovereign singularity imposing itself on all is replaced with a representation of divided and resistant power that lies between the prince and the people. The resistant force of the people is also generative of new laws. Still further, the source of the law and political authority is no longer embodied in the prince or the people, but instead, is located in the space of the image – the symbolic space – that lies between them. I will return to this in the conclusion of the article.

II. Sovereign Truths and Democratic Deceptions

As indicated at the outset of this article, in my view Derrida’s inability to find a way out of a theological framework of sovereignty other than through the messianic appeal of a democracy “to come” (an appeal which remains within the theological) is due to his ignoring the deception or ruse necessary for a non-sovereign conception of law and political authority. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his reading of Machiavelli in The Beast & the Sovereign I, a reading that focuses on Chapter 18 of The Prince, especially the role of the cunning fox.

Significantly, Derrida prefaces his reading of Machiavelli with a long discussion of Schmitt’s concept of the political, specifically addressing Schmitt’s notion of a “dishonest fiction,” ⁴⁷ which, according to Derrida’s reading, is the fiction of a universal peace, a universality that is nothing other than the “depoliticization and renunciation of the state.” ⁴⁸ Insofar as a dishonest fiction makes false claims regarding universal peace, Derrida claims that an honest politics for Schmitt would be one aligned with war which “dares to speak its name,” a politics of honor founded on loyalty to one’s word. Loyalty to one’s word is loyalty to the posited law:

… it is the sworn institution – a faith sworn, and therefore structurally fictional, figural, invented, conventional, as Hobbes clearly shows, moreover – the institution of a law that was never found in nature; but precisely the question then returns of the link between this right, the force of law, and force tout court, the disposition of force tout court, a force that makes right, of a reason of the strongest which is or is not the best …” ⁴⁹

Never entirely distancing himself from Schmitt, Derrida suggests that an “honest fiction” is the fiction of the conventional, institutionalized law that dares to speak its name, that is, the name of war and force. An honest politics therefore is one in which there is loyalty to the sovereign force of law, a law that is just precisely because it admits its connection to violence.

It is at this point that Derrida turns to Machiavelli. In the context of fidelity to the force of law, a force that makes right, Derrida takes up Machiavelli, who he argues was a “great, positive hero of Schmitt.” ⁵⁰ Addressing the central question of Chapter Eighteen of The Prince, namely, whether the prince should be faithful to his word, Derrida argues that for Machiavelli this question is linked to the question of what is proper to man: “this same question of the fidelity of the prince to his given word or sworn faith appears to be inseparable from the question of what is ‘proper to man’ … The question of the proper of man is indeed placed at the center of a debate about the force of law, between force and law.” ⁵¹ In the context of the question of the proper, Derrida reads the opening sentence of Chapter Eighteen, “it is praiseworthy for a prince to keep his word and live by honesty and not deceit …” Derrida claims that Machiavelli is admitting that political reality is a reality based on the fidelity to truth. He states: “In this chapter, which passes for one of the most Machiavellian in Machiavelli, he begins by admitting a fact (I stress the word fact): in fact, de facto, one judges praiseworthy the fidelity of a prince to his commitments … it’s a recognized fact that everyone regards the fidelity to the prince to his given word as laudable …” ⁵² Yet, Derrida points out, this fact is countered by another fact, namely, that the prince cannot always keep his word if he wants to remain in power. Sometimes lies are required in order for the prince to be faithful to his word. Thus, for Derrida, the political struggle at the heart of Machiavelli’s thought is that between truth and a lie.

Given that the prince only succeeds at times by lying and deceit, Derrida cites Machiavelli: “‘there are two ways of combating, one with laws, the other with force,’” claiming that Machiavelli is speaking here of a political logic that vacillates between right and justice on the one hand and lies and brutal force, on the other. Derrida locates law on the side of a fidelity to truth and justice while aligning deceit with brute force. The law is not deceitful, although sometimes it fails, and when it does it must be supplemented with deceit and force. Moreover, Derrida claims that this vacillating logic between truth and deception, justice and force emerges from “a situation of war and not peaceful management of the city (… a situation of war, which seems to him to be more revealing, exemplary, more paradigmatic of the essence of the vocation of the prince, namely response or riposte to the enemy, dealing with the other city as enemy city).” ⁵³ Derrida reads Machiavelli as the ancestor of Hobbes and Schmitt, both of whom give us a concept of the political that emerges out of violence and defined in relation to an enemy. In this reading, Machiavelli’s prince, very much in the mold of Schmitt’s sovereign, is authorized to make any decision, including those that are deceptive and cunning, to defeat the enemy and restore order to the city. Once the enemy has been defeated, the sovereign can again rule rationally with a fidelity to truth, justice, and the law.

However, as I have tried to show above, the combat Machiavelli is describing, the combat involving both laws and force, is not that of an actual war with an enemy from without, but instead the combat or struggle between two heterogeneous desires that subtend any city or political space and which the prince must manage in order to remain in power. In other words and against Derrida’s reading, rather than beginning with a contrast between war with an enemy without and peaceful management of the city from within, Machiavelli’s concern is with the struggle or combat at the very heart of the political that continually threatens the peace of the city and must therefore be addressed politically. Hence when Machiavelli claims that combat with the law “is peculiar to man,” he is not claiming as Derrida asserts, “a Kantian argument in its principle, as it were: not to lie, to have the duty not to lie or perjure, is proper to man and his dignity.” ⁵⁴ Neither ethical duty nor human nature concerns Machiavelli. Again, for Machiavelli there is no single human nature underlying the political and to which one could remain true and faithful. Instead there are two heterogeneous desires, desires always inserted in time, history and fortune, which pose the political problem. Thus when Machiavelli claims that laws are “proper to men” (proprio dello unomo) he is only claiming that laws are proper to the political realm which is the realm of human beings, although as we have seen, he immediately goes on to argue that the distinction between humans and animals cannot be upheld. As Machiavelli states, “a prince must know how to make good use (sapere bene) of the beast and the man” ⁵⁵ and he repeats this claim a few sentences later, “… the prince ought to know how to make use (sapere usare) of both natures; and the one without other cannot endure.” ⁵⁶ Nowhere in this passage is Machiavelli speaking of the proper nature of the human being per se nor is he speaking of lies per se. As we have seen, for Machiavelli there is no vacillating logic between truth and lies, between the human and the animal. Instead, he is claiming that the political realm, specifically the law, needs to be infused with the force of the lion and the cunning of the fox, most especially the cunning of the fox. Thus no distinction can be made between the law, force, and cunning. As Lefort claims, these three terms are “consubstantial,” and form a new political trinity.

In contrast, Derrida reads the fox’s cunning as aligned with the force of the lion and not with the laws of the prince. The law, associated with what is proper to the human being, is rational (hence his reference to the Kantian duty to the law) while cunning is nothing but a different kind of irrational force, a “know-how” that understands how best to use violence against the enemy. Here Derrida’s understanding of cunning is very close to Hobbes’ account. For both, cunning is cleverness aligned with violence for the sake of self-preservation which is why for Hobbes it must be transferred along with power to the sovereign. Indeed, Derrida goes further than Hobbes, arguing that Machiavelli’s fox is bound up with a double cunning: the cunning of cunning in which the fox is able to mask the use of lies, to cover his tracks. Significantly, Derrida compares the foxy-prince to the sick and the slaves in Nietzsche’s account of morality: “The fox, the fox-prince is already (like the slaves and the sick in Nietzsche) one who inverts the originary order of things and makes of his weakness a supplementary force.” ⁵⁷ The “originary order” is the order of the lion in which force shows itself as force; it appears as “natural force or simple life force.” ⁵⁸ The fox’s cunning points to the weakness of force, a weakness that must be supplemented by “the cunning that consists in knowing how to dissimulate, pretend, lie, perjure, and thereby pretend to be what is not …” ⁵⁹ The prince then is one who vacillates between reason and truth on the one hand, and force and cunning on the other. More precisely, the prince vacillates between truth and law proper to the dignity of man and a foxy cunning that has come to supplement force. The reference to Nietzsche is significant, suggesting that the modern prince is not a noble who rules from the strength and vitality of life (which would be more in keeping with Machiavelli’s understanding of an “originary order” always divided between those who desire to rule and those who do not wish to be oppressed), but one who is sick, a slave who subverts the force of life by cunning in order to establish the authority of the law. By contrast, as shown above, Lefort understands (rightly in my view) Machiavelli’s cunning as precisely the way in which the realm of necessity is transformed into the life of freedom.

The ruse of law in Derrida’s reading is therefore aligned with infidelity, mask, the lie, and perjury. Speaking of the fox’s need to mask his cunning, he writes: “The fox’s cunning allows him to do what the lion cannot do, i.e. to dissimulate his fox-being and pretend to be what he is not. To lie. The fox is the animal who knows how to lie.” Deception or cunning allows him to ‘‘pretend to be what he is not.’’ ⁶⁰ For Derrida, the cunning of the fox masks the true reality of things; it masks the weakness of rational truth and the dignity of its laws and its need to be supplemented with a forceful cunning that masks what it is doing. Again, a double mask is at work: “That is the essence of lie, fable or simulacrum, namely to present itself as truth or veracity, to swear that one is faithful, which will always be the condition of infidelity.” ⁶¹ The cunning of the fox in Derrida’s reading is therefore nothing but vulgar deceit, an infidelity that covers over the true fact of political life, namely, that the prince ought to keep his word, to remain faithful to his promises. The combining of fact and right depends on the prince finding the strength to remain loyal to the truth and this will require that truth and fidelity be connected to an unmasked violence that dares to speak its name.

Significantly, Derrida overlooks entirely the prince’s alignment with the people, how this alignment is constituted by a shared ruse and how this alignment renders impossible a distinction between truth and a certain kind of political deception understood as ruse; instead, Derrida’s reading suggests that the prince ought to rule through a singular sovereign rational force that avoids cunning and deception. Weakness alone prevents this from happening. We are still in the domain of Hobbes and Schmitt: sovereign, rational truths aligned with honest force constitute the proper domain of political authority and the law.

Significantly, Derrida turns away from Machiavelli and toward Agamben at the very moment in Chapter 18 of The Prince when Machiavelli tells us why the law is infused with dissimulation; it ends at the place where Machiavelli once again reminds his readers that the reality of politics is the reality of appearances – the appearance of time, history, and fortuna – a reality that depends upon the alliance between the prince and the people who judge on the basis of appearance alone: “And men, in general, judge more according to their eyes than their hands; since everyone is in a position to observe, few to touch. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few touch what you are; and those few do not dare oppose the opinions of the many who have the majesty of the state defending them …” ⁶² Here Machiavelli answers Derrida’s question, “where have the wolves gone?” ⁶³ The wolves – those nobles not aligned with either the prince or the people – have been frightened away not by a prince who as rational sovereign wields the force of violence, but instead, by the cunning alliance between the prince and the people, the people “who have the majesty of the state defending them.” Machiavelli is clear: the wolves dare not oppose the people who have entered into an alliance with the prince, a cunning or strategic alliance that gives them political standing and transforms the imperative of necessity (the realm of force) into the imperative of government (the realm of politics). Wolves are held at bay so long as the people and the prince can lean on a shared ruse of goodness and freedom that establishes the authority of power and the effectiveness of the law.

It is not an accident that Derrida’s reading of Machiavelli breaks off at this point, turning to Agamben’s thought of sovereignty. While Derrida is critical of Agamben’s claims of who is the first to say something – for Derrida, a classic gesture of sovereignty – he does not engage with Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty in Homo Sacer and elsewhere. This is not surprising. As I indicated at the outset of these remarks, Derrida’s reading of Machiavelli remains firmly rooted in a theological framework by which I mean a conception of political authority as rooted in a sovereign figure or force (be it the prince or the Kantian ideal of the unconditional) which transcends and imposes itself on the political. Because of the theological framework, his reading of Machiavelli specifically and his political thought more generally surprisingly engages in a kind of realism that makes strict distinctions between truth and lies, fidelity and infidelity, force and right, the properly human and the non-human. The question that immediately comes to the fore is why a thinker known for his subtlety and nuance when it comes to philosophy, literature, science and art, engages in such crude realism when thinking the political? My suggestion is that Derrida’s efforts to rethink the political continually avoids an engagement with the aesthetic dimension which, I submit, is necessary for thinking the foundation of political authority and the law in a secular, democratic politics. Strikingly, both Hobbes and Schmitt also refuse the aesthetic dimension, a dimension that requires attention be paid to how image and ruse transform the force of law into the authority of political institutions. Missing the political efficacy of the image and ruse in establishing the political space between the people and the prince, Derrida’s only alternative to the sovereign force of law is an appeal to the mystical foundation of authority which, paradoxically, continues to think political authority in terms of a transcendent, theological foundation.

III. Political Aesthetics: The Deceptive Foundation of Political Authority

As I claimed at the outset of this article, Lefort’s and Derrida’s respective readings of Machiavelli’s cunning provide insights into each thinker’s respective view of the source of political authority and the law. It is my argument that Lefort, embracing as he does Machiavelli’s politicization of Hobbes’ “natural cunning,” the shared ruse between the people and the prince, offers a way out of the Hobbesian framework of sovereignty, tethered as it is to a theological framework. Derrida, on the other hand, understands Machiavelli’s cunning as the negative inverse of a sovereign prince that ought to rule with honesty and fidelity to truth. As I just suggested, this may seem surprising for a thinker whose work is rooted in the deconstruction of notions of truth, honesty, and fidelity; however, it is my contention that Derrida’s political thought continues to be animated by a notion of reason that ties him to a theological framework, however much it may be transformed into the messianic.

It could be objected that Derrida’s reading of Machiavelli is far too brief to draw this conclusion. Yet one has only to turn to the conclusion of the second essay of Rogues, titled, “The ‘World’ of the Enlightenment to Come: (Exception, Calculation, and Sovereignty),” to find a lingering conception of sovereignty linked to rational truth in Derrida’s political thought. Here Derrida juxtaposes the unconditional with the conditional, the incalculable with the calculable, sovereignty and the beyond of sovereignty. Certainly for Derrida the juxtaposition is something other than the logic of either-or. Instead, he claims that we need to think both together, both sides of the limit. He claims that the two sides are the two figures of reason: “… we have to think together the two figures of rationality that, on either side of a limit, at once call for and exceed one another. The incalculable unconditionality of hospitality … exceeds the calculation of conditions, just as justice exceeds law, the juridical, and the political.” ⁶⁴ Situated on both sides and between is reason, the “responsibility of reason,” which is engaged in an “impossible transaction between the conditional and the unconditional, calculation and the incalculable.” ⁶⁵ Indeed, he argues that the transaction between reason and the excess of reason requires faith or belief, “without which there is no social bond, no address to the other, no uprightness or honesty …” Honesty, uprightness, the social bond itself, requires faith and belief. In other words, the political, and for Derrida must continue to be tethered to a theological framework in which the ideal of the unconditional, itself a sovereign notion, continues to hold sway.

Lefort, on the other hand, insists that Machiavelli’s cunning, the deceptive ruse of the fox, opens the way for a secular democratic politics in which there is an alliance between the prince and the people, the prince, who, as Derrida admits, “never cared to be a prince.” ⁶⁶ The Prince is dedicated to a potential prince who never cared to be a sovereign and this because Machiavelli has instructed him on the effectiveness of a shared ruse between himself and the people. While the ruse establishes the alliance between the prince and the people, they are not one, each is the other’s other. In other words, the ruse establishes a gap, an aesthetic gap, between the prince and the people. For Lefort, Machiavelli replaces a sovereign, theological politics with a political aesthetics understood as a realm of appearance in which the people and the prince both appear as different forces in a historical, material field of different formations of power, production, oppressions, and shared alliances. A shared cunning founds political authority in which the voicing of conflicting interests, beliefs, and opinions becomes legitimate and generative of new laws. A shared ruse effectively establishes the image of a political space in which the people do not feel oppressed and the prince lawfully rules through an appearance of being good. The image is a ruse, but this does not make it a lie.