16 Facts About Claude Lefort

Claude Lefort was a French philosopher and activist.

Claude Lefort was politically active by 1942 under the influence of his tutor, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Claude Lefort was for a long time uncomfortable with Socialisme ou Barbarie's "organisationalist" tendencies.

Claude Lefort became a Marxist in his youth under the influence of his teacher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

The intellectual work of Claude Lefort is strongly tied to his participation, often tension filled, in successive journals.

Claude Lefort was involved in Textures from 1971 to the end and there he brought in Castoriadis and Miguel Abensour.

When Merleau-Ponty died in 1961, Claude Lefort took charge of the publication of his manuscripts.

Claude Lefort read The Gulag Archipelago and published a book on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Claude Lefort was part of the political theorists who put forward the relevance of a notion of totalitarianism which was relevant to Stalinism as well as fascism, and considered totalitarianism as different in its essence from the big categories used in the western world since ancient Greece, like the notions of dictatorship or tyranny.

However, contrary to the authors like Hannah Arendt who limited the notion to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1953, Claude Lefort applied it to the regimes of Eastern Europe in the second half of the century, that is, to an era when terror, a central element of totalitarianism for the other authors, had lost its most extreme dimensions.

Totalitarianism denies what Claude Lefort calls "the principle of internal divisions of society", and its conception of society is marked by "the affirmation of the totality".

Claude Lefort returns to the theories of Ernst Kantorowicz on the "two bodies of the king", in which the person of the totalitarian leader, besides his physical and mortal body, is a political body representing the one-people.

Claude Lefort insists on the fact that "the constitution of the One-people necessitates the incessant production of enemies" and speaks of their "invention".

Claude Lefort didn't consider totalitarianism as a situation almost as an ideal type, which could potentially be realized through terror and extermination.

Claude Lefort rather sees in it a set of processes which have endings that cannot be known, thus their success cannot be determined.

For Claude Lefort democracy is the form of society characterized by the institutionalization of conflict within society, the division of social body; it recognizes and even considers legitimate the existence of divergent interests, conflicting opinions, visions of the world that are opposed and even incompatible.