Is Claude Lefort Constipating: part 1

There is no doubt that Claude Lefort is a precise thinker: his penetrating evaluation of totalitarianism leaves any theoretical attempts to re-establish Stalinist or Hitler-esque regimes in shambles. Specifically, Lefort argues that the totalitarian regime holds a place so absolute that it neglects the forces of society—the very chaos of its conflicts, the Lacanian Real of our nations. And it is especially true!

In the Stalinist Soviet Union, the rhetoric of its harrowing oppression (or mistakes, if you don’t believe that) is “it is all necessary.” And after the end of Stalinism, the narrative essentially boils down to the same joke presented by Adam McKay in his movie Vice (2018): “The US doesn’t torture; therefore, if the US does it, it is not torture,” where the Soviet Union version would be, “The Soviet Union does not oppress; therefore, if the Soviet Union does it, it is not oppression.” Here, the symbol—“the Soviet Union”—holds the same position that kings held in pre-industrial times—a place of absolute power. In the king, Lefort sees a “master signifier” that rounds up all other signifiers into one single meaning: in the Soviet Union, it is the “Soviet Union” or “Stalin” that gives meaning to “the Socialist Cause.” Therefore, this creates a field of no return, as once the totalitarian regime is created, the symbolic field loses all its vibrancy; its place gets taken up by the “master signifier.” This is what he sees as the true power of totalitarian states. Now, the forces of the Real, the forces of society (i.e., workers’ demands in the Soviet Union), get repressed, and no progress, as often promised by such regimes, is ever made.

During his time, Lefort extended his critique to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In contrast, he turned his praise to systems of institutionalized democracy (be it representational or whatever else there is). He finds that in democracy, there is an void in the symbolic field, that there are no kings taking up space and repressing the problems—leaving what he calls an empty space of power. This way, Lefort thinks democracies create what he calls the indeterminacy of power: all the repressed problems will then surface and resolve—we can see the repressed voices and the depleted vibrancy in the totalitarian system.

Yet, the immediate question that comes to mind is: What is power, or the king in symbolic spaces? Is it a man? An ideal? A concept? If the answer is all three, then Lefort’s theory has big problems: why is the concept of democracy itself not powerful? Why couldn’t it be the king in the story?

And we see this manifest precisely in those nations that embody democracy: “The US doesn’t torture; therefore, if the US does it, it is not torture” is one step away from “The US doesn’t repress; therefore, if the US does it, it is not repression.” Agamben’s theory serves as a testament to this: democratic powers need to repress in the most absolute way (suspend their promise of democracy) in order to remain democratic (for example, Guantanamo Bay).

However, I see this critique as superficial—it does not strike at the core of Lefort’s problem: a problem of faulty synthesis or, as Žižek would dub it, a problem of constipation.