Dans une lettre, Merleau-Ponty décrit ainsi l'intention qu'il a développée dans cet ouvrage, écrit pour l'essentiel en 1952 et resté depuis en chantier : «Toute grande prose est aussi une recréation de l'instrument signifiant, désormais manié selon une syntaxe neuve. Le prosaïque se borne à toucher par des signes convenus des significations déjà installées dans la culture. La grande prose est l'art de capter un sens qui n'avait jamais été objectivé jusque-là et de le rendre accessible à tous ceux qui (...) parlent la même langue. Un écrivain se survit lorsqu'il n'est plus capable de fonder ainsi une universalité nouvelle, et de communiquer dans le risque.»Le philosophe nous livre ici ses réflexions sur le langage en général, mais aussi une théorie de l'expression qui l'engage autant vers les thèmes du dialogue et du rapport à autrui, vers la problématique anthropologique de la communication, que vers l'expressivité dans l'art et dans ses premières manifestations chez l'enfant. (shrink)

Claude Lefort is one of the leading social and political theorists in France today. This anthology of his most important work published over the last four decades makes his writing widely accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time. With exceptional skill Lefort combines the analysis of contemporary political events with a sensitivity to the history of political thought. His critical account of the development of bureaucracy and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is a timely contribution (...) to current debates about the nature and shortcomings of these societies. His incisive analyses of Marx's theory of history and concept of ideology provide the backdrop for a highly original account of the role of symbolism in modern societies. While critical of many traditional assumptions and doctrines, Lefort develops a political position based on a reappraisal of the idea of human rights and a reconsideration of what "democracy" means today. The Political Forms of Modern Society is a major contribution to contemporary social and political theory. The volume includes a substantial introduction that describes the context of Lefort's writings and highlights the central themes of his work. (shrink)

Writing involves risks—the risk that one will be misunderstood, the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion for causes in which one does not believe, this risk of inadvertently supporting a reader’s prejudices, to name a few. In trying to give expression to what is true, the writer must “clear a passage within the agitated world of passions,” an undertaking that always to some extent fails: writers are never the master of their own speech. In _Writing: (...) The Political Test, _France’s leading political philosopher, Claude Lefort, illuminates the process by which writers negotiate difficult path to free themselves from the ideological and contextual traps that would doom their attempts to articulate a new vision. Lefort examines writers whose works provide special insights into this problem of risk, both literary artists and political philosophers. Among them are Salman Rushdie, Sade, Tocqueville,m Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, Orwell, Kant, Robespierre, Guizot, and Pierre Clastres. In Tocqueville, for example, Lefort finds that the author’s improvisatory and open-ended expression represents the character of the democratic experience. Orwell’s work on totalitarianism shows up the totalitarian subject’s complicity in this political regime. And Rushdie is remarkable for his solid attack on relativism. With the character and fate of the political forms of modernity, democracy, and totalitarianism a central theme, Lefort concludes with some reflections on the collapse of the Soviet Union. This intriguing and accessible exploration of literature’s political aspects and political philosophy’s literary ones will be welcomed by those who have been stymied by current efforts to bridge these two fields. Taken together, the essays in this volume also stand as an intellectual autobiography of Lefort, making it an excellent introduction to his work for less experience students of political theory or philosophy. (shrink)

Al-Jazeera and other satellite television stations have transformed Arab politics over the last decade.

The question of the oeuvre -- The concept of Machiavellianism -- Reading The prince. First signs -- The logic of force -- The social abyss and attachment to power -- Good and evil, the stable and the unstable, the real and the imaginary -- The present and the possible -- Reading The discourses. From The prince to The discourses -- Rome and the "historical" society -- Class difference -- War, and the difference of times -- Authority and the political subject (...) -- The oeuvre, ideology, and interpretation. (shrink)

There is a tendency today to substitute the affirmation of the absolute value of peace for an earlier, fully-formulated ideal of universal peace. This formula, if I am not mistaken, bears the mark of a new exigency: how to maintain the philosophical task, that is, give a basis to the idea of peace that does not arise solely from circumstantial considerations—however imperious they may be, since they come from the knowledge of the danger that a new world war would bring (...) to entire populations—without again falling under Utopian illusions that have fed the projects of perpetual peace. However, some of the difficulties with which the present consideration will deal give a glimpse of the definition of peace as an absolute value. I think it would be wise to examine this definition briefly in order to clear a way for myself. (shrink)

Por que o nome do um encanta? Não será porque, mesmo ao preço do mais cruel sofrimento, os homens têm nele a ilusão de guardarem sua própria nomeação e, ao mesmo tempo, permanecerem associados? La Boétie parece ensinar, assim, que os homens perdem a liberdade, mas não o desejo de se tornarem livres.

Tocqueville's judgment of the role of 18 th century men of letters in the preparation of the Revolution is well known. Under their influence, “each public passion disguised itself… in philosophy; political life was violendy forced back into the literature.” Less attention is paid to Tocqueville's reflections on the rise of new theoreticians — so-called “economists or physiocrats.” Tocqueville himself admits that they were not as influential as the philosophies, but he thinks that it is in their writings “that one (...) can best study the true nature” of the Revolution. Further: “One recognizes already in their books mis revolutionary, democratic temperament we know so well. (shrink)

If we take 1968 as a vantage point, certain ideological displacements become evident. When comparing the decade before with the one after the great tumult—which, although not a revolution, still briefly shook French society—one notices a change in the intellectual climate. It is not simply that actors have aged and sometimes changed their costumes, nor that others have come on the scene: the play itself is no longer the same. Since in the following pages I will argue that there has (...) been a renaissance in political thought, it might be useful to begin by listing the most significant ideas that have emerged during the last 50 years and to explain why they have to be interpreted differently. (shrink)

The work that Maurice Merleau-Ponty planned to call _The Prose of the World,_ or _Introduction to the Prose of the World,_ was unfinished at the time of his death. The book was to constitute the first section of a two-part work whose aim was to offer, as an extension of his Phenomenology of Perception, a theory of truth. This edition's editor, Claude Lefort, has interpreted and transcribed the surviving typescript, reproducing Merleau-Ponty's own notes and adding documentation and commentary.