请翻译成通顺、自然、准确的汉语，I will close by returning to Machiavelli's formula for revolution: the ‘return to beginnings'. What is interesting in this formula is that it does not refer to a reduction of the political into the social, whether this reduction is for the sake of socializing the political, as in Negri, or for the sake of politicizing the social, as in Arendt. Whenever the ‘people', the bearers of the desire for no-rule, become constituent power, what returns is the originary sense of the separation of the political: what returns is the irreducible difference between ruling and no-rule, the absoluteness of the facticity of resistance. Above all, what returns is the expression of this difference, the originary sense of the separation of the political, which is nothing short of the separation between beginning and founding. In Machiavelli, the ‘people' become constituent power by returning to the beginning in its sovereign indifference to the project of founding any form of government whatsoever. The return to beginnings does not disclose the possibility of founding a form of revolutionary government, as Negri claims, nor does it disclose the possibility of founding a new, revolutionary form of government, as Arendt claims, but something quite different: the anti- foundational uncoupling of revolution from foundation, or, to put it in other terms, the dissemination of beginnings, which only as disseminated can be revolutionary. Such an understanding of Machiavellian democracy calls for two theoretical tasks: reformulating a theory of democracy as commune/ ist, as the expression of a sovereign resistance to rule, which is the sole content of the constituent power of the people; and the formulation of a political theory of originary repetition as matrix of radical innovation, for the uncoupling of revolution and foundation requires that the event of political freedom be thought in terms of the coincidence of difference and repetition, of singularity and iterability. These are the unfinished tasks for radical democratic thinking today.
NOTES
1.	The exemplary cases of such juridification of freedom in liberal-democratic discourse remain John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas.
2.	In the 1920s and 1930s, Schmitt and Gramsci are among those who try to think about dictatorship (of the proletariat and otherwise) through the connection of Marx and Machiavelli. After the war, Cassirer, Aron, Strauss, and Arendt are among those who see this connection as tendentially totalitarian.
3.	There are some important precedents to Lefort’s project. See, for instance, the reading of Machiavelli with Marx offered by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his 1949 text, 'A Note on Machiavelli’ (Merleau-Ponty 1949: 211-23). In Italy, see the reading of Machiavelli proposed by Gennaro Sasso in the late 1950s. The appropriation of Machiavelli to the so-called 'republican revival’ occurs later, beginning with Pocock’s work and pursued, in different directions, by Skinner and, lately, Viroli and Pettit. In the American context, see the work of Michelman and Sunstein.
4.	On the history and idea of freedom as nondomination, see Skinner 1998 and Pettit 1997.
5.	Emphasis mine. The full citation runs as follows: 'Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propres as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed’ (Marx 1975: 234). On the later critique of republicanism and on its social realization, see Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Civil War in France in Marx 1996.
6.	See the crucial essay by Pasquale Pasquino, 'The constitutional republicanism of Emmanuel Sieyes’ (Pasquino 1994: 107-17).
7.	The 'space of appearance’ which is coeval with political freedom 'predates . . . all formal constitution of the public realm and various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organized’ (Arendt 1958: 199). For sure, Arendt does problematize the potential for this space of appearance, considered on its own terms, to last in time. In this context she elaborates a complex theory of promising. But one thing is to promise freedom, quite another is to give freedom a foundation, to secure it in a way that sidesteps the well-known adage that 'promises are only promises’. If promising may well have an essential relation to free action, foundation does not; or, at the very least, this relation is far from evident.
8.	Only 'where the liberation from oppression aims at least at the constitution of freedom can we speak of revolution’ (Arendt 1963: 35).
9.	See Arendt’s clear distinction between a 'free republic’ and 'limited government’ or 'civilized government’ or 'civil rights’: 'For political freedom, generally speaking, means the right “to be a participator in government”, or it means nothing’ (Arendt 1963: 218).
10.	'The direction of the American Revolution remained committed to the foundation of freedom and the establishment of lasting institutions, and to those who acted in this direction nothing was permitted that would have been outside the range of civil law. The direction of the French Revolution was deflected almost from its beginning from this course of foundation through the immediacy of suffering; it was determined by the exigencies of liberation not from tyranny but from necessity, and it was actuated by the limitless immensity of both the people’s misery and the pity this misery inspired. The lawlessness of the “all is permitted” sprang here still from the sentiments of the heart whose very boundlessness helped in the unleashing of a stream of boundless violence’ (Arendt 1963: 92).
11.	The belief that one cannot free oneself from necessity without becoming enslaved is fundamental to Arendt. Here she departs from Machiavelli and the moderns and joins the ancients, for whom the distinction between what is necessary and what is contingent is determined by nature. Since every form of activity that is done 'from necessity’, such as taking care of one’s basic needs, seems to be, by definition, an unfree or enslaving form of activity; and given that the cause of such slavery, i.e. what is necessary, is determined by nature, it follows that the domain of necessity calls for a ‘natural’ slavery, or a ‘natural’ and ‘prepolitical’ form of domination. For Arendt, the activity of labor, along with its division, and, in general, the whole realm of the social, is essentially linked to the domain of necessity and need, with its engendering of quasi-natural relations of enslavement.
12.	In On Revolution, Arendt offers the following formulation: ‘To the extent that the greatest event in every revolution is the act of foundation, the spirit of revolution contains two elements which to us seem irreconcilable and even contradictory. The act of founding the new body politic, of devising the new form of government, involves the grave concern with the stability and durability of the new structure; the experience, on the other hand, which those who are engaged in this grave business are bound to have is the exhilarating awareness of the human capacity of beginning, the high spirits which have always attended the birth of something new on earth’ (Arendt 1963: 223).
13.	The key point here is that for Arendt the ‘separation of powers’ amounts to the creation of powers. Here one sees the positive character of constituent power as the power of ‘separation’.
14.	For the definition of power as an ‘end in itself’, see Arendt 1972: 150-1.
15.	Elsewhere Arendt does say that power ‘needs legitimacy’, but she immediately adds that ‘legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past’ (Arendt 1972: 151, emphasis mine). But if ‘power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert’ (Arendt 1972: 151, emphasis mine), then there is obviously a tension between power (which belongs to any possible present) and legitimacy (which belongs to a given past).