The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere

Claude Lefort appeals to the difference between le politique (the political) and la politique (politics) in order to make us aware “that any society which forgets it religious basis is laboring under the illusion of pure self-immanence.”

At least for some contemporary French and Italian philosophers, in the tradition of Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt, and for some students of Jacques Derrida, the classical concept of “the political” serves as an antidote against those depoliticizing tendencies of the age (let me only mention Ernesto Laclau, Giorgio Agamben, Claude Lefort, and Jean-Luc Nancy).

ccording to this interpretation, politics as a means of democratic self-determination has become as impossible as it is superfluous.

“The political” has been transformed into the code of a self-maintaining administrative subsystem, so that democracy is in danger of becoming a mere facade, which the executive agencies turn toward their helpless clients.