Claude Lefort died on October 4, 2010. Author of a large number of works of political philosophy, attentive to both the history of thought and the interpretation of the event, he has not stopped ‘Ask about the political conditions of freedom.
Claude Lefort was one of the great figures of the revival of political and social theory in the second half of XXe century. In a very different mode from that of the big Anglo-Saxon names like Rawls, Dworkin, or Habermas, to name a few. Claude Lefort’s thought has indeed been constantly forged to the event of events, in the linked research of their elucidation and the determination of the conditions of an emancipatory action.
He thought of democracy from chasms that threatened it, or ambiguities that constituted it, as much as the release movements that it expressed. For him, democracy was not of the order of a model which he would have agreed to apply, but of an experience from which the conditions and the problems had to decipher. He was first for this the great thinker of totalitarianism. Far from seeing in him only a form of illusion or aggravated despotism, like the liberals, he had indeed analyzed it as a form of reversal of democracy against herself, linked to the claim of a party to adequately embody a company one. It is for this reason that Claude Lefort tried to meticulously analyze all forms of indeterminacy of democracy, in his inseparable relationship with the question of social division.
His work was also inseparable from a certain understanding of what the intellectual commitment at a distance from mechanical petitioners meant, as much as liberal disenchanted. He has always been able to link a lucid thought and an unconditional call to transform the world. A committed intellectual, Claude Lefort gave this notion his densest meaning: because his commitment was confused with his work.
The following interview traces in a living way the great moments of his intellectual route, and presents the great themes of his work.
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