请将“As interesting as the parallels in Schürmann and Lefort’s thought may be, they are not for all that exclusive of dissonances. First of all, there is the question of humanism, and Schürmann’s emphasis on the threefold break with humanism implemented by Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger that implies a structure of anarchic presence. Without presently developing this apparent dissonance, one need only recall that if Lefort’s notion of savage democracy explicitly refers to human rights, humanity is not for all that established as a pedestal of determinations but is on the contrary conceived as a focal-point of indetermination. Lefort’s thought is all the more removed from an anthropocentrism given the incompatibility of his thought with a philosophy of the subject, or of a metaphysics of subjectivity. At the heart of history Lefort posits the originary division of the social that is always already there - in truth a redoubled division, since the desire for liberty is permanently measured by its inversion into servitude (lured by “the charm of the name of One”) - a division that brings the indétermination specific to the human being before the endless ordeal of being.
And this difference from a philosophy of the subject is all the greater if one considers that the people to which democracy refers are, as Michelet and Quinet have argued, affected by an identity which is at the least problematic; either the people are above themselves - the people in the heroic state that constitute themselves in the very invention of liberty - or they are below themselves, when the experience of liberty threatens to revert into its opposite, servitude. In short, never coinciding with themselves, never equal to themselves, the people at the moment they are manifest, that they come to existence, experience the ordeal of an insurmountable self-discrepancy. To this may be added that democracy opens - or opens itself to - an unexplored reserve of indetermination by the relation it maintains with what Lefort calls, without further description, the human element, taking advantage of the enigma that surrounds it to discredit and condemn the historical projects, such as totalitarianism, that claim to create the human element or that attempt to organize it as if it were a material that could be shaped by the will: “Suppressing the human element, or rather believing that it can as such be treated as matter, this is how we can recognize the reign of organization . . . What is at stake in the new State is precisely this ... to obtain finally abstract human beings, without links that unite them, without property, without family, without attachment to a professional milieu, without an established space, without history - uprooted people.”17
What defines democracy proper is the immersion in this immaterial element and the fusion with its texture in all its complexity, the opening to the contours of this element in its diversity and plurality, the tendency to accompany its movement in its unpredictability, unlike totalitarian domination which negates the specificity of the human element by identifying it with matter, doing it violence to the point of risking its utter destruction. Seeking through its will for omnipotence to pass as a power for constructing or organizing the human element, totalitarian domination subordinates the properly human to a rule or to a homogeneous norm, in contempt of the nonidentical. Is this not what Adorno has in mind when he declares “the political form of democracy is infinitely closer to humanity” ?
But it is not enough for democracy to respect the human element; better yet, it is sure enough within it, in this center of complications caused by the proliferation of links (those that unite as well as those that separate) - and amid the possible figures and combinations of turmoil (encroachment, entanglement, but also antagonism) - that democracy finds the source of its untamable power. It is by bathing ceaselessly in this reserve of indetermination that democracy becomes uncontrollable, savage, a destruction of established rule - not in order to establish itself as a sovereign power, but so as to welcome without compromise the ordeal of an instituting form that recognizes this human element that is itself savage (endowed with the “savage barbarism of otherness” according to Levinas). Democracy is predisposed, then, to engender new forms of relations, to let the heterogeneous happen, to be a “new disorder” that excavates a nonplace (to borrow a beautiful phrase from Lefort), that is to say a new space or series of spaces of invention and evasion that, as it were, puncture the massiveness of the real: “Here the possible is reborn, an undetermined possible, a possible that will be renewed and redefined with each event. . .”18
Here the places of conflict and division are increased according to the multiplicity of human ties and their interlacement, so that the desire for liberty emerges as a form of resistance to the constant threat of domination. A chain of living paradoxes, the human element realizes in what happens, in the course of the event, the ontological play of exchange and human struggle, of friendship and servitude. Democracy, to the extent that one allows for its savage manifestation, is that form of society where the “flesh of the social” is in harmony with the style of being of the human element, with its unpredictability and resistance.
This proximity, this affinity even, brings about another question that I will merely mention given the difficulties it implies: must we only think the human as the ontological play that animates it, or should we instead interpret it with Levinas as an interruption of being, as a break with the effort of being, as a rupture with the perseverance in being - and in its wake the rise of the one-for-the-other, the responsibility for the other with all the disunity that this implies. In other words, should we not see the human element as otherwise than being, as if the metapolitical should be apprehended in the relationship between democracy and the event of the ethical? Can we consider that democracy - given its necessary relation to justice, to the responsibility of the democratic person, and given its non-indifference to those it does not know - would fail to heed the “otherness” of the human? Once the question is reformulated in this way, we may begin to think the relations between democracy, the originary division of the social realm, and the human element.
Moreover, can we be satisfied with this comparison between a new conception of the political realm and the principle of anarchy? If it is
true that thinking the political as a site implies a deconstruction of the metaphysics of political order, the generality intrinsic to Heidegger’s conception of the site caries dangerous ambiguities. In fact, the definition of the site - and therefore of the political realm - as that which brings together, seems to privilege mistakenly the unitary, and in this way covers over the division of the human city in two antagonistic desires. If the topological conception of the site is maintained, would not the political realm rather be the place where the originary fissure of the social, the division of all human societies, is first elaborated and instituted? For how could the principle of anarchy not take into consideration two of the essential characteristics of modern democracy, the separation of Power, Law, and Knowledge, and with regards to the question of place, the fact that the place of power is empty?
In the last analysis, can one accept this philosophically founded indifference and this doubt in relation to democracy? Is it in the name of a principle of anarchy that one can ignore the difference between a free political regime and a despotism? Should one see in this distinction a return of a finalist schema? If the becoming anarchic of action is action given back to itself - action becoming its own end - could action be engaged in a direction other than that of a free regime? A free regime implies the liberty of action, especially since democracy in its savage form, far from trying to be equivalent to a political solution, instead dismisses its very idea. In the quest for its identity, in the grip of indetermination, by virtue of its excess, democracy sides with the infinite movement of liberty that, according to Kant, “oversteps all assigned limits.”19”翻译为中文