Claude Lefort and the democratic enigma: strengths and limits of a modern political invention

Author(s)

Martha Gabrielly Coletto Costa

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2020-02-28

Examining board members

Marilena de Souza Chaui; Helton Machado Adverse; Sergio Cardoso; Maria Isabel de Magalhães Papaterra Limongi

• Advisor: Marilena de Souza Chaui

Abstract

The core of this research is to investigate the place of the reflection on democracy at the thought of Claude Lefort and his contribution to the political and philosophical debate in the twentieth century. Therefore, this research aims to reconstruct the paths of lefortian intellectual trajectory in order to show the genesis of his reflection on the democratic regime, the different characterizations that he provides about this regime and the historical and theoretical contrasts that the philosopher displays in order to catch the singularity of modern democracy compared to the social formations of the Ancien Régime on the one hand, and the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, on the other. In this sense, it is necessary to build a dialogue with some political classical authors such as Machiavelli, Tocqueville and Marx, to show the developments of lefortian conception about democracy as a regime established by an unprecedented revolution against the pillars of a political order based on the image of the body and in the grounds of power from transcendent principles. Regime that is instituted by the disembodiment of power and society, the democracy is singular because it is radically open to the history, indeterminate and without a telos, accepting the division and the conflict in a ceaseless movement of interrogation, establishment and creation of new rights. Acting as a conducting wire of our research, the fundamental question that culminates in the present investigation can be enunciated: does the place occupied by Lefort\'s democratic conception mean an alternative to the polarization of the debate on democracy, which opposes, in the theoretical scene of the 20th century, the Marxist and liberal perspectives? Having moved away from Marxism and reflection on political economy, is your conception capable of facing the effects of the new neoliberal economic order, which tends to inaugurate \"a post-democratic system\"? (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 15/24050-2 - Claude Lefort and the democratic enigma: strengths and limits of a modern political invention
• Grantee: Martha Gabrielly Coletto Costa
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate