Pour un rapport sauvage entre alter et ego : une lecture de la pensée politique de Claude Lefort

Claude Lefort’s thinking of democracy operates with and implies an original concept of Otherness: one’s humanity and individuality are constituted by one’s interaction with an equal other. In order to stress this idea, it is not sufficient to merely extract from Lefort’s work the experience of Otherness that democracy allows. Since the totalitarian phenomenon defines itself in relation with the democratic experience, it is also crucial to compare the concepts of Otherness that these two political forms respectively draw. Indeed, both the definition of the other as a malefic figure and the concept of the Egocrat show how totalitarianism negates the essential dynamic character of democracy. Moreover, since these figures are ideological, they render explicit how only the democratic relationship with the other is an authentic one, because it endorses the indetermination and the disincorporation of the political that modernity inaugurates.