Ontologies et phenomenologies du corps politique: les voies de l’analogie. En chemin avec Claude Lefort.

Abstract

This paper focuses on the analogy between the body and the political body, and presents the problem that is still – for our political time – this very analogy. It is done, at first, by following and developing the original work of the French political thinker Claude Lefort, who changed the terms and even the meaning of political phenomenology itself. Yet, if Claude Lefort’s inheritance has to be increased in phenomenology, his thought also reveals a strange paradox which opens with it a critical confrontation that a second article will fully develop, and that is here synthesized: indeed, the analogy of the political body is at the same time what in its very refusal unifies contemporary political philosophies – dismissing the analogy either as the language of another age of politics or as the language of the totalitarian wish of reincorporation –, and what nevertheless continues to resist implicitly in all these political writings, even if it is at times under the mask of the complicated lexicon of some Flesh of the social. By coming back to the concept of Flesh itself and its origin in the thought of M. Merleau-Ponty, the end of the article opens a confrontation between the political phenomenology renewed by Claude Lefort and our own attempt to phenomenologically reform the analogy of the political body.