Division and democracy: On Claude Lefort's post-foundational political philosophy

In this article I contend that Claude Lefort is both a contingency theorist and a post-foundationalist. Both contingency and the emptiness of the plac e of power indicate that society is not built on a stable ground: they desi gnate the absence of social or historical necessity, the absence of a posit ive foundation of society. What they also designate, though, is that the di mension of ground does not simply disappear since it remains present as abs ent. This is the point where democracy enters the stage. Our interpretation of Lefort's work will substantiate the following claim: Democracy must be understood as the ontic recognition of society's ontological condition. By this we understand the institutional recognition and discursive actualizati on of the absence of a positive ground of society. By actualizing the absen t ground within the particular institutional, cultural and discursive dispo sitive of democracy, a place, or rather: a 'non-place' is symbolically allo cated to it. It is obvious, we must add immediately, that this can only be a paradoxical enterprise since it is impossible to fully institutionalize s omething purely negative and absent into a presence. Therefore, democracy h as to aim at the recognition of absence as absence, that is, the recognitio n of the impossibility of founding society once and for all. By accepting t he logic of groundlessness and self-division as constitutive, the dimension of ground does not disappear. Rather, it is emptied of any positive conten t and retained as something which is absent. This is what makes democracy-a nd Lefort's theory of democracy-post-foundational. For, unlike any other fo rm of society, democracy is founded upon the recognition of the very absenc e of any definite foundation.