L'enigma della modernità. Claude Lefort lettore di Ernst Kantorowicz e Jules Michelet

Claude Lefort’s theologico-political reflection is far from being explored in its richness. This essay aims to help fill this gap by showing how this speculation is linked to the question of the political and to a non-teleological conception of history as well as by bringing to light his sources. First, the essay shows the permanence of The King’s Two Bodies symbolic configuration until the ancien régime and second, it stages, through Jules Michelet’s thought, the ambiguities in his break with the French Revolution. What we want to emphasize is how Lefort reads the religious interpretation of the revolution as an opening toward a democratic-type sensibility. Finally, it highlights by contrast the peculiarities of the unprecedented democratic institution of the social, allowing us to grasp the enigma underlying all political forms of society, accepted as such only by modernity.