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THINKING THE ‘SOCIAL’

WITH CLAUDE LEFORT

Brian C. J. Singer

ABSTRACT This article examines Claude Lefort’s writings in order to think

about the ‘social’, understood as separate from the political, and in its separ-
ation, as a strictly modern ‘phenomenon’. Prior to the modern democratic revol-
ution, the collective order was presented through the representation of power,
itself identified with both law and knowledge, and referred to a transcendent
source. At a first moment, the modern democratic revolution, under the sign
of the general will, renders power immanent. At a second moment, it separ-
ates power from law and, above all, knowledge, such that three domains
emerge, each with its own logic, its own notion of representation, its own
divisions. The ‘social’, in a sense, arises between these two moments. At one
level, it appears as an event in, and in consequence an object of, knowledge,
once knowledge need no longer be, primarily, a knowledge of power or law,
that is the enunciation of the principles by which the latter establish the order,
coherence and sense of the world. At another level the ‘social’ emerges as a
response to the difficulties presented by a strictly political representation of
societal order – difficulties in no small part due to the revolutionaries’ inability
to countenance the separation between the three domains. In this regard the
‘social’ appears as a presupposition that serves to stabilize an inherently
conflictual political order. It is, however, an ‘empty’ presupposition, without
determinate content, and therefore also a source of uncertainty. While this
emptiness proves a stimulus for the construction of new savoirs, it also accounts
for the fragility of all discourses that would speak in its name (social science,
social theory, sociology). The article concludes with a few words about the
‘death of the social’.
KEYWORDS Claude Lefort • political • power • representation • social

Claude Lefort is known primarily as a thinker of the ‘political’, particu-

larly as it emerges with modern democracy. This article asks if his thought

Thesis Eleven, Number 87, November 2006: 83–95

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd
DOI: 10.1177/0725513606068777
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84 Thesis Eleven (Number 87 2006)

can also serve to think about the ‘social’. The claim of this article is that the
social was only ‘discovered’ during the 18th and 19th centuries, and that this
discovery must be related to the modern democratic revolution. Warrant for
this claim can be found in one of Lefort’s more difficult essays, ‘Outline of
the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies’ (Lefort, 1982). As this essay’s
central thematic concerns ideology, his comments on the social remain quite
brief. They are, nonetheless, highly suggestive, and need to be unpacked
and expanded.
Near the beginning of the essay, Lefort draws a distinction between
the ‘institution of the social’ and the ‘discourse on the social’, which corre-
sponds roughly to that between ‘an order of practice and an order of repre-
sentation’ (1982: 183). The social here applies to all societies. Still, he makes
it clear that the social appears explicitly as such, in discourse, only in modern
societies. Earlier societies spoke of the social in non-social terms, as they
had not disentangled ‘the social order’ from ‘the order of the world’
(1982: 187). The suggestion is that the social order was confused with the
natural or, as more likely, the super-natural world, such that the institution
of that order was represented as proceeding from an extra-social, transcen-
dental source. In modern societies the social order is deemed immanent to
society and, therefore, intelligible in its own terms – this ultimately being
what is meant by the ‘discovery’ of the social. Of course, many have noted
that, as long as religion remained dominant, the nature of social being was
misrecognized. The promise of Lefort’s discussion lies in its association of
secularization with the idea of a change in the ‘symbolic order’. The latter
is defined not just as ‘a system of oppositions by which social forms can be
identified and articulated with one another’ (1982: 194). He adds that the
character of these oppositions depends on ‘the configuration of the signi-
fiers of law, power and knowledge’ (1982: 186). With a change in the
symbolic order, there is a change in the relations between law, power and
knowledge, and consequently, in each of these terms’ signification. Consider
the character of this change, if only schematically.

CONFIGURATIONS OF POWER, LAW AND KNOWLEDGE

In the religious symbolic order, at least in its pre-modern Christian
variant, the three terms are all referred to a divinity that is all-powerful and
all-knowing, the source of all law, and guarantor of the world’s coherence,
integrity and intelligibility. Human power, knowledge and law must partici-
pate in, and be modelled on, divine power, knowledge and law in order to
render the latter visibly present to the human world. As power, law and
knowledge converge within the figure of the divinity, they will also converge,
if less perfectly, when re-presented in human institutions. Thus there is
neither law nor knowledge outside the position of power: the law is defined
through the power that gives it substance, while power is defined through
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Singer: Thinking the ‘Social’ with Claude Lefort 85

the law that gives it form. A power that separates from its law is no longer
power, but its corruption. Similarly, knowledge is only genuine knowledge
if it is validated by power, and serves to sustain power and its law. Ulti-
mately, power speaks truth in order to sustain a lawful world. Truths that
lie outside the orbit of power appear senseless because they would refer to
a disorderly and incoherent world.
This has implications for the distinction between ‘the institution of the
social’ and the ‘discourse on the social’ (here a politico-theological discourse
on a social ‘under erasure’). Institution appears present only to the extent
that it is represented in the theological-political discourse, for the latter
renders present the power, law and knowledge without which there would
be no institution. Institution thus appears via discourse, the latter appearing
less a discourse about the ‘social’ than a discourse constitutive of the ‘social’,
as it relays the divine word constitutive of the order of the world from which
the ‘social’ is not yet disentangled. Words are often not just words; they
mould the institutional world. And acts are often ritual acts because they
communicate between worlds. Power here bears, comparatively speaking,
an explicitly symbolic dimension.
Modern democratic power is less explicitly symbolic: as the place of
power is ‘empty’, its occupants no longer incarnate the constitution of an
order. Nonetheless, modern democratic regimes still entail a symbolic order,
the emptying of the place of power itself implying a new ‘configuration of
the signifiers of power, law and knowledge’. In effect, as the three terms no
longer refer to a single extra-social source, they separate and pursue their
own particular ‘logics’. This article looks at this separation from, above all,
the perspective of knowledge and its transformation. The latter is, indirectly,
the focus of Lefort’s essay, ideology being a form of knowledge, an un-
satisfactory form to be sure, but one still subject to the changes being
examined.
In modern democratic regimes, knowledge (like power and law,
moreover) is general, and in several senses. Everyone can, in principle,
become knowledgeable, and should receive an education. Everyone is a
potential source of knowledge, and deserves to be heard regardless of
position. And everyone can become his own object of knowledge, with his
own personal archive. All this supposes that knowledge, if it is not to become
an instrument of oppression by the few, must be dissociated from the
position of power, or at least the position of the power-holders. This last
statement suggests a qualification, for power is divided between the immedi-
ately visible positions occupied by the power-holders and the sovereign
position they claim to represent. One wonders if this separation from knowl-
edge also applies to the sovereign, particularly in matters of political judge-
ment. After all, if constitutions never declare the all-powerful sovereign
people to be all-knowing, knowledge and power are still conjoined, if only
tentatively, in the figures of the general will, common sense and public
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86 Thesis Eleven (Number 87 2006)

opinion (Singer, 2004b). These are figures with considerable symbolic

potency, for much of their truth value depends on their place of enunciation.
A similar argument can be made regarding the relation of knowledge
to law. Knowledge is no longer restricted to a concern with (the power of)
law. Paradoxically, the separation of knowledge from law is perhaps first
evidenced by the development of a division in law, between scientific and
juridical law – a division crucial to ‘the disentangling of the social order from
the order of the world’. This division implies not just a distinction between
two forms of causality, but between laws that must be stated in order to be
effective, and laws that do not. Stones fall according to the law of gravity
independent of whether anyone, the stones included, recognizes these laws;
by contrast, juridical laws will not be obeyed if not known. This is to say
that the statement of juridical law, when enunciated from a position of
power, bears considerable symbolic efficacy (an efficacy greater than the
figures of the previous paragraph). Scientific laws, of course, are even more
effective for being ‘real’ rather than symbolic.
And yet, if the division between the two laws rigorously corresponded
to that between ‘the social order and the order of the world’, knowledge
and law would not be separated relative to the social order. For knowledge
of the social order would still be restricted to knowledge of juridical law,
even as knowledge of the latter would be considered directly constitutive
of that order. The discovery of the social thus requires the development of
an extra-juridical knowledge of the social order which, if not necessarily
modelled on scientific law, still has to gesture to an underlying ‘reality’. Such
knowledge, however, is not, at first, demanded by the modern democratic
revolution. When democracy is defined in terms of a general accord that
establishes the nation, the existence of the national society depends on
general knowledge of the accord and agreement as to its wisdom. To pose
the existence of a ‘hidden’, non-consensual social order, that demands a
different kind of knowledge, cannot but appear to interfere with the accord’s
transparency and, potentially, its purchase.

THE SOCIAL DISTINGUISHED FROM THE POLITICAL

When one speaks of a ‘social contract’ in, say, the manner of Rousseau,
one has yet to discover the social, at least as distinct from the political.1
Lefort speaks of two disentanglings: first, ‘the disentangling of the political
and the mythical-religious’, and second, ‘the disentangling of the political
and the non-political within the social order’ (1982: 187). This second disen-
tangling, the discovery of the social proper, should be understood as
proceeding from the political, as its discovery of a terrain that marks the
limits of its empire. This accords with what we know about those generally
considered the pre-revolutionary precursors of social theory: Montesquieu
criticized contractualism, and legislative hubris more generally, while the
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Singer: Thinking the ‘Social’ with Claude Lefort 87

Scottish Enlightenment sought to oppose civic republicanism (Pocock, 1985;

Singer, 2004a). It also accords with the common argument that the post-
revolutionary development of social thought in the 19th century was a
response to the shortcomings of the French Revolution.2 The discovery of a
non-political social was not, however, simply a matter of intellectual history;
it also served to stabilize the separation of knowledge, law and power which
the democratic revolution momentarily threatened to erase.
Consider for a moment this revolutionary democratic imaginary that
refuses to separate the political from the non-political. Power, law and
knowledge here all appear general: the sovereign encompasses all citizens;
the law brooks no privileges; and the political truth is born of a general
accord. Moreover, the generality of one term blends into the generality of
the others: if the voluntas of power is not general, then the laws passed will
not be in the general interest, and the nation will not live up to its concept.
In a sense, the three terms again converge, though from within a position
of immanence. This renders what Lefort terms the ‘play of divisions’ diffi-
cult and, in the context of the French Revolution, murderous, any sign of
division threatening the republic one and indivisible with symbolic collapse
(Singer, 1986). Thus the continuous purges, as well as the festivals that re-
iterate the original act of political constitution with a display of general
assent. A non-political social, by contrast, points to a half-buried stratum of
collective existence not directly encompassed by rights, laws or powers – a
stratum that bears signs of a minimal consistency and intelligibility, though
it is not the immediate object of a knowing gaze or consenting will.
Much of our problematic can be resituated in terms of the question of
representation. With the political disentangled from the mythical-religious,
representation no longer refers to the rendering present to this world of an
order that originates in another through a power that bridges both. But what
then does representation refer to? What does it mean to represent a collec-
tivity? The answer is less simple than it appears. One cannot simply say that
representation no longer participates in the formation of the represented,
that the representation merely reflects, at a distance, a pre-existing, sovereign
principle. Much depends on what sort of representation one is talking about
– a representation of power, law or knowledge? The problem with the revol-
utionary democratic imaginary is that it confuses the three forms, which then
makes it difficult to separate the representation from the represented.
What is the nation? Within social contract theory it is given through its
constitution. As a written document, the latter is by definition a representa-
tion, but a representation of what? Let us say that it reiterates truths that, by
virtue of their self-evidence (and by the self-evidence of their virtue), are
present to each and every citizen – as if the constitution were merely a piece
of paper representing a contract already present in hearts and minds. But
even what is based on purportedly self-evident truths does not really exist
until it has been declared to exist. Moreover, here we are speaking of a
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88 Thesis Eleven (Number 87 2006)

declaration of law that constitutes the sovereign nation that declares the law.
If, then, a constitution genuinely takes hold, it will be no mere piece of
paper; it will appear sacrosanct, not because inspired by God, but because
confounded with the sovereign act that founds the nation. One cannot under-
estimate the enormous symbolic efficacy of the representation of the law
here.
The real problem emerges with the translation from the representation
of law to that of power. One might think such a translation unnecessary,
even impossible. After all, if in the register of the law the referent (the repre-
sented) cannot be easily separated from its enunciation (the representation),
in the register of power the representatives and represented refer to two
different groups of people. However, as the sovereign people is constituted
through the (fundamental) law, the representational logics of law and power
overlap, opening the way for a logic of substitution that operates in the
following manner. The sovereign power constituted by the (fundamental)
law refers to the general will of the people that exists to maintain and extend
the law. But this will cannot manifest itself directly, at least not continuously,
as the nation is too large to assemble in person. Instead it must manifest
itself indirectly through its political representation, with the proviso that the
latter reflect the national will as closely as possible (a proviso that appears
all the more necessary as, prior to the Revolution, political representation
was considered inherently aristocratic, a filtering mechanism for the promotion
of superior individuals to positions of authority). The tendency, then, is to
read not just the ‘general will’, but the nation’s very existence, off the repre-
sentative will. Thus the propensity to postpone elections which, while peri-
odically permitting the direct manifestation of the sovereign will, threaten to
reveal that will as internally divided and different from its representation.
Indeed, all political divisions, whether within or between representatives and
represented, appear as a direct menace to the nation one and indivisible,
the Terror being the attempt to ensure the survival of the sovereign by forcing
nation and representation to coincide.
The dramatic, ultimately unsustainable, character of such a logic under-
lines the need to separate polity and society. If events at the level of politi-
cal representation are not to directly threaten the ‘order of society’, the latter
must appear as existing relatively independent of political representation,
which is to say, it must be represented in terms other than those of law or
power. The second disentangling, in short, supposes the existence of differ-
ent forms of representation corresponding to the different spheres.
Once polity and society can be distinguished, democratic political
representation no longer represents the collectivity, identified with the sover-
eign power and its act of foundation. When the order, coherence and identity
of the collectivity are no longer suspended on its political representation,
politics can be ‘desacralized’. Political representation need no longer embody
the wholeness and wholesomeness of the social bond. It refers instead to a
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Singer: Thinking the ‘Social’ with Claude Lefort 89

political competition only loosely connected to a society that exists on its

own terms. If modern democracies have instituted a distinct political sphere
open to the play of division, it is not just because of the establishment of a
division within power (between the sovereign people and its representa-
tives), but also because of a division from power that allows the national
society to appear as more and other than the sovereign.
Everything that has been said so far suggests that the discovery of the
social is not exclusively a matter of knowledge. Nonetheless it remains
primarily such as the presence of the social depends on a change in the
representation of knowledge consequent to its separation from power and
law. In the religious symbolic regime, where the ‘order of the social’ is
rendered present through the representation of an extra-social power, knowl-
edge appears as a necessary moment of, and inseparable from, power and
its representation. In the revolutionary democratic imaginary, as knowledge
of the social order is still equated with knowledge of power at its source
(even if the latter is no longer extra-social), the enunciation of knowledge
remains joined to the expressions of law and power, with all the correspond-
ing symbolic effects. By contrast, the emergence of the social from the politi-
cal supposes a form of knowledge that separates political representation
from national existence, discourse from institution, enunciation from its
referent, and words from things. This last phrase refers to Foucault’s Les mots
et les choses and, more precisely, his discussion of the shift from the classic
to the modern episteme that separates words from things. ‘The space of order,
which served as a common place for representation and for things, for
empirical visibility and for the essential rules . . . is from now on shattered.’
This order resides ‘henceforth outside representation, beyond its immediate
visibility, in a sort of behind-the-scenes world even deeper and more dense
than representation itself’ (Foucault, 2002: 259). It seems odd to pair Foucault
with Lefort3 – still, Foucault’s history illuminates a change, relative to knowl-
edge, in the very sense of representation, a change that, I am arguing,
consummates the differentiation of knowledge from law and power. Hence-
forth, the social appears as the moment of collective existence that lies
‘outside representation’, the signifier of a reality that slips beneath the surface
of law’s empire, and resists power’s diktat. As such, the social appears as
that which is not immediately apparent, a tangled skein at once synchronic
and diachronic, an index of the depths below that replaces the light from
above. In its gesture to an underlying reality, the social solicits new savoirs
– social sciences, social theories, sociology – themselves the occasion for
the creation of new empiricities.
Returning to Lefort’s original terms, the emergence of the social
requires a separation between ‘the institution of the social’ and the ‘discourse
on the social’. Once the latter admits its distance from institution, it becomes
a discourse about the social, i.e. a discourse that makes truth claims about
social institution. Here the sense of the term institution must be specified. I
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90 Thesis Eleven (Number 87 2006)

assume that Claude Lefort draws it from Merleau-Ponty, and notably from
his 1954–5 course at the Collège de France, which Lefort recently edited. In
the preface he writes:

Merleau-Ponty explicitly distinguishes between the problematic of institution

and that of constitution (in the Kantian sense). He rejects, with the idea of a
constituting consciousness, the idea of a world within which nothing can be
discovered that has not been constituted by that consciousness’ activities.
Understood in its double sense, institution supposes that the instituting and
the instituted do not coincide. (Lefort, 2003: 7)

The discovery of the social, then, implies a discovery of the institutional

dimension of collective life beyond the constituting consciousness of the
political. This discovery points beyond the sense of the social as an associ-
ation formed by the enunciation of an action in common. In its refusal to
be reduced to the terms of power, law and contract – terms that are inevi-
tably the expression of a (conjunction of) will(s) – the social now demands
the ‘admission’ of a difference between discourse and institution, enuncia-
tion and referent, representation and ‘reality’. Such is the supposition of the
emergence of genuine social knowledge: ‘the attempt . . . on the basis of
instituted knowledge, to bring thought into contact with the instituting
moment’ (1982: 202). One must add, if the non-coincidence of the institut-
ing and instituted is to be acknowledged, it is not just the difference between
discourse and institution, but the irreducibility of this difference, that must
be admitted.
According to Lefort, ideology is the attempt, once the difference
between representation and reality has been posed, to dissimulate the ‘real’,
or what in reality is unwanted and unexpected. In this attempt, ideology
tries to narrow this difference in order to neutralize the effects of division
and historicity that bespeak the uncertainties of ‘the instituting moment’. But
where once institution could only be presented through discourse, and
reality only through representation, the temptation now is to seek to narrow
the distance from the side of reality, i.e. by enjoining a discourse that would
hide behind the facts. Such a discourse would represent reality as devoid of
discourse (including an instituting discourse) and represent itself as the self-
decipherment of that non-discursive reality. It would, in effect, conceal its
own coherence behind the erasure of the signs of its difference, as though
the coherence of its speech were immanent to ‘reality’ alone. Here we touch
on a matter that goes beyond ideology: the illusion that shadows the emer-
gence of the social, ‘namely that the institution of the social can account for
itself’ (1982: 201) – as if social reality could be represented as independent
of representation, and simultaneously as the latter’s source or cause. In what
Lefort disparagingly refers to as ‘sociologisms’, the discourse on the social
speaks in the name of reality by presenting itself as simultaneously external
to and engendered by the reality it ‘reflects’. However, the difference cannot
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Singer: Thinking the ‘Social’ with Claude Lefort 91

be indefinitely disguised; eventually the facts escape even the most ‘realist’
discourse, which can then only play catch-up. Representation inevitably falls
short of social reality, and not just because the distance between the place
of enunciation and its referent cannot, in the end, be disguised. Nor because
there is no single place of enunciation and, therefore, no single perspective
on the referent (politicians, lawyers and sociologists all represent social
reality differently, as do economists, artists, shopkeepers, workers, industri-
alists, etc.). Ultimately, the failure is inscribed in the very nature of the object,
the social, wherein the instituting continuously breaks through the instituted.
The social, once distinguished from the political, is a source of stability.
Being rooted in the bedrock of an evolving history, and dispersed through
a variety of spheres, it proves relatively impervious to shifts in power. The
social is also a source of uncertainty – the topos of an ‘institution’ ultimately
experienced as ‘ïnsaisissable’ and ‘immaîtrisable’ (Lefort, 1981: 173). The
discovery of the social signals a new ontology of collective life, suggestive
of a new openness to institutional creativity, and a new sensitivity to reality’s
indeterminacy. In its dual aspect this discovery must be considered a politi-
cal event (if one that points beyond the political4), as well as an event in
knowledge. Indeed, as a source both of stability and uncertainty, the social
appears as the necessary presupposition of modern democracy, serving to
ground its regime of representations. However, as a presupposition, the
social is without determinate content, and all attempts to specify its content
prove rather fragile.

THE FRAGILITY OF THE SOCIAL

When the social was still indistinguishable from the political, and
conceived as an association, its meaning was clear. It was the result of an
explicit conjunction of wills based on a shared interest. In its dependence
on the will, it appeared an abstraction, at once descriptive and normative,
from all the particulars of position, communal belonging or regime type. Its
instrument, the contract, appeared as both the most natural (as it accords
with the nature of the free will) and most artificial of devices (as that will,
freed of all natural constraints, produces a purely conventional agreement).
Modern liberalism still draws on the individualism, egalitarianism and ‘spir-
itualism’ that such an understanding implies.5 However, once the social is
distinguished from the political, it is no longer an object of volition, and
appears neither natural nor artificial, but seems to occupy an intermediary
zone of its own, wherein conventions appear ‘natural’ while nature appears
mutable. Society is now presented as a given, a strictly empirical entity,
devoid of any normative imperative to conform to its definition as a general,
conscious accord. The result is that the idea of the social becomes even more
abstract, to the point where it loses even its descriptive value, encompass-
ing all of collective life in all its aspects. Thus the tendency of sociologists
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92 Thesis Eleven (Number 87 2006)

to define their discipline tautologically, as the study of society, or of social

relations, social interactions, etc.
In truth, the new, institutional sense of the social does not simply
replace an earlier, contractual sense, the idea of a contractual association
being too deeply rooted in the democratic imaginary to simply disappear.
Not only is the idea of social relations as constituted of a common accord
still very much present in normative political theory, but the idea that such
relations are constituted of individual wills comes to define the basis of
economic theory. One is tempted to speak of a shift in the apprehension of
‘the order of the social’ from the one big contract of the general political will
to the many little contracts of the market economy. The latter economic repre-
sentation points to an invisible principle of order that limits and, thereby,
stabilizes the political, while maintaining much of the contractual imagination.
In other words, it does what the properly social does, but in a way that is,
at once, more certain (given its law-like determinations), more providential
(given its promise of a utilitarian utopia), more flexible (with its mix of nature
and artifice, it appears to reconcile the instituting and the instituted), yet still
upholds the free will as the source of all action. Thus there are those – most
famously, Margaret Thatcher – who claim that society does not exist; as well
as those for whom society exists, but as the sum of the interaction of indi-
vidual wills, sometimes associating, sometimes competing.
Most often the inaugural gesture of the disciplines that speak in the
name of the social is to deny, if not necessarily the hegemony of the polity
or economy, then the hegemony of their associated paradigms. One calls
on the social in order to criticize the ‘spiritualism’ of political theorists and
the ‘instrumentalism’ of economists, and to invoke some broader, denser and
ultimately more realistic perspective. Yet the prestige of the two more estab-
lished disciplines remains largely unscathed. Anyone who has taught soci-
ology knows that the pull of the discipline, however large its claims, is
towards ‘residual’ areas like deviance, gender, race and ethnicity, etc. The
social, however, need not seek to encompass the political or the economic
in the name of the whole. It can claim an intermediary status, sometimes
pitched diacritically towards the political, as with Hegel’s concept of civil
society squeezed between family and state, or Hannah Arendt’s concept of
the social distended between oikos and polis. And sometimes towards the
economic, as in the neo-Habermassian version of civil society (Arato and
Cohen, 1992) or more indirectly, in the attempts to supplement economic
capital with social capital or trust (Putnam, 1994; Seligman, 1997). Often the
social is invoked to speak less of the theoretical limits than the very real
failings of economy and polity. One thinks of the designation, beginning in
the 1830s, of ‘the social problem’ at that point where democratic republi-
canism appeared incapable of responding to market dysfunctions (Castel,
1995; Donzelot, 1984); or of the responses to that problem, ranging from
Social Catholicism to socialism, social democracy and the World Social
Forum. Or one thinks, in related terms, of the social as a set of policies,
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Singer: Thinking the ‘Social’ with Claude Lefort 93

social policies, and their corresponding forms of ‘governance’, e.g. social

welfare, social insurance or social work.
Once the question of the social’s emergence is posed, the possibility
of its disappearance has to be countenanced. Indeed, ‘the end of the social’
has already been announced; though as the term has several meanings, the
social has been subjected, rhetorically at least, to several deaths. Sometimes
its death or decline is attributed to the increased hegemony of (the repre-
sentation of) the economic. If identified with a form of governance, the end
of the social refers simply to the waning of the welfare state (Rose, 1999).
If identified with a bounded society, understood as the container of the
nation-state, the reference is to economic globalization (Giddens, 1990:
63–78). Sometimes what is understood is the end of the ‘idea’ of society –
society as a normative order underwritten by an idea of justice embedded
in the public sphere – an idea crushed by the sheer positivity of system
functioning (Freitag, 2002). At other times, one seems to be speaking of the
death of the ‘instituted’, with the social turning liquid, dissolving the dura-
bility and externality that sociologists equate with social structure (Bauman,
2000; Dubet, 2002). Lastly, there is the death associated with a loss of refer-
entiality, the claim that the social no longer seems real, but appears a simu-
lation, the product of the increasingly tactile immediacy of media
representations (Baudrillard, 1983). All these different deaths, though not
entirely coherent with each other,6 appear to touch, in almost systematic
fashion, on the different elements of the emergence of the social as described
here. The more interesting of these deaths speak to the difficulty of engaging
the distance established by the division between institution and representa-
tion, practice and discourse, fact and value, which afford the social its prin-
ciple of visibility. Something of this is anticipated by Claude Lefort when, at
the end of the essay under discussion, he speaks of an ‘invisible ideology’
– though the very fact that he still calls this an ideology suggests a note of
caution.7 The implication is that the division between the institution of the
social and the discourse on the social still holds, although it may now be
harder to represent. After all, if ‘the configuration of the signifiers of law,
knowledge and power’ are no longer quite the same as they were, no-one
would suggest that they have fused into the representation of a constituting
consciousness at the source of collective life. Rather the implication is that
the disarticulation of these signifiers has proceeded apace, such that the
diacritical markers that demarcated the social no longer hold with the same
firmness, leaving the social both more pervasive and more difficult to pin
down. The elaboration of this claim, however, would require another article.

Brian Singer teaches at Glendon College in sociology, and in the graduate

programmes in Sociology and Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto.
He has written one book, some dozen articles in different journals, and translated
several works from the French. [email: [email protected]]
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94 Thesis Eleven (Number 87 2006)

Notes
1. Though there can be no doubt that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book of the same
name did much to spread the use of the term ‘social’ (Williams, 1976: 243–7).
2. Saint-Simon, Tocqueville, Marx, Comte and Durkheim can and have all been
read in this manner. There is no need to turn to a Bonald or de Maistre, with
their attempt to ground a community – as opposed to a society – in a revived
political theology.
3. Foucault hardly speaks about the appearance of the social (not least because
of his difficulties in speaking about the political); he does, however, speak of
the emergence of the ‘human sciences’.
4. Much of what is called nation-building should be understood as the attempt
to establish the presence of a ‘pre-political’ society. In an earlier article I tried
to examine the emergence, within the French Revolution, of elements of a
‘cultural’ understanding of the nation in response to the aporias of a strictly
voluntary, contractual understanding (Singer, 1996).
5. The representative principle, at its root, consists in wanting to produce
the political and, more generally, the social bond, by the will alone, that
is, from the human soul alone. Our period is perhaps not very religious,
but, in the political and social order, it is quite “spiritualist.” We want all
our ties, even corporal ties, to have their origin, cause and duration in a
purely and sovereignly spiritual decision. (Manent, 2004: 230; my trans-
lation).
Note the author, a political theorist, tends to fold the social into the political.
6. One death suggests the end of social work; another that the social has been
reduced to social work. One sees representation (the representation of the
norm) absorbed into the facts, while another sees the facts absorbed into repre-
sentation (by the media).
7. He describes the ‘invisible ideology’ in terms of a double movement: ‘elimi-
nating the distance between the discourse on the social and social discourse,
inserting the first into the second’; and ‘dissociating [this latter enterprise] from
the affirmation of totality’ (1982: 225).

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