claude permanence: 214: It has been the monstrous blunder of our times to try to look upon these inseparables as

separable from one another, and even as mutually indifferent. The view taken of the relationship of religion and the state has been that, whereas the state had an independent existence of its own, springing from some source and power, religion was a later addition, something desirable perhaps for strengthening the political bulwarks, but purely subjective in individuals: - or it may be, religion is treated as something without effect on the moral life of the state, i.e., its reasonable law and constitution which are based on a ground of their own. !hegel" # $ - %: what hidden part of society establishes mode of being in the social, ie that guarantee permanence of regime in time& # %: religious: The expression 'religious sensibility ' retains a fairly precise content if we relate it to
historically and culturally determined phenomena: in other words not to religion in general but to the (hristian religion, whose various manifestations we can identify without any risk of error. # %: le)la poltici*ue: - when we define a political object: In other words, the epistemological operation through which we relate to the object - be it posited as 'real' or as 'ideal' - makes it appear by separating it from other defined or definable objects. - we separate it from other objects - # +:whereas the politics: defined only as what is non-politica. becaue science strives for the particulars. - try to find something intelligible in it through marxist analysis: ,-ut it is still true to say that any attempt to conceptuali.e the ways in which the combinations vary derives from the preliminary operation of breaking down social data in order to find something intelligible. /nd it is also true to say that that operation is inspired by a principle which erects the subject into being a pure subject of knowledge, gives it a scientific neutrality, and guarantees it its self-assurance by virtue of the coherence of its constructs or observations., - # 0: we must grasp the regime that forms the 12/34 of society,, the institution of the social otherwise: ,If we fail to grasp this primordial reference to the mode of the institution of the social, to generative principles or to an overall schema governing both the temporal and the spatial configur ation of society, we lapse into a positivist fiction5 we inevitably adopt the notion of a pre-social society, and posit as elements aspects that can only be grasped on the basis of an experience that is already social., - ,if we make a rigid distinction between what belongs to the realm of economics or politics !defined in modern science's sense of the term", or between what belongs to the juridical or the religious in an attempt to find within them signs of specific systems, we forget that we can arrive at that analytic distinction only because we already have a subjective idea of the primal dimensionality of the social, and that this implies an idea of its primal form, of its political form., - # 0: not political sicence, which is looking for its total object. but political philosophy: The philosopher is not necessarily in search of an elusive object such as a totality5 he looks at different regimes or forms of society in order to identify a principle of internali.ation which can account for a specific mode of differentiation and articulation between classes, groups and social ranks, and, at the same time, for a specific mode of discrimination between markers - economic, juridical, aesthetic, religious markers - which order the experience of coexistence., # 0 - 6: mise en form - givine sense, firstly and then staging it, secondly. ,we can say that the advent of a society capable of organi.ing social relations can come about only if it can institute the conditions of their intelligibility, and only if it can use a multiplicity of signs to arrive at a *uasirepresentation of itself., - # 6: different to political scientist who sees these things as problems to be circumvented, ,The elaboration attested to by any political society - and not simply the society in which the subject who is trying to decipher it lives - therefore involves an investigation into the world, into -eing as such., ## : ,/lternatively, we have a combination of a dialectical or evolutionary theory and the idea that the elimination of religion from the political field marks the formation of a rational, or potentially rational, type of society in which institutions and practices appear. or begin to appear, for what they really are. -ut in that case, the fact of the separation of the religious and the political tells us nothing in itself5, ## -#: I7389T/:T ;4<I:ITI8:: ,It does, however, mean that one cannot separate the elaboration of a political form - by virtue of which the nature and representation of power and social divison !divisions between classes and groups" can stabili.e, and by virtue of which the various dimensions of the human experience of the world can simultaneously become organi.ed - from the elaboration of a religious form - by virtue of which the realm of the visible can ac*uire death, and by virtue of which the living can name themselves with reference to the dead, whilst the human word can be guaranteed by a primal pact, and whilst rights and duties can be

formulated with reference to a primal law. In short, both the political and the religious bring philosophical thought face to face with the symbolic, not in the sense in which the social sciences understand that term, but in the sense that, through their internal articulations, both the political and the religious govern access to the world. , - ###: revolution: philosophy's grasp of historiy that allows individuals to overthrow and self-emancipate to escape fatalims imposed on their lives by subjugation of the social order to religious law. - does not mean that religious has to disappear, or be relegated to proviate opinion. - ##=: philosophy sees religious truth as a lie, but ,it does not assume that untruth is a lie or a lure. :or, when it remains true to its inspiration, does it want to preserve untruth for the simple reason that it may contain beliefs which help to preserve the established political order., - ###: ,4very religion states in its own way that human society can only open on to itself by being held in an opening it did not create. , .... so ##=: ,8nce we recogni.e that humanity opens on to itself by being held in an opening it does not create, we have to accept that the change in religion is not to be read simply as a sign that the divine is a human invention, but as a sign of the deciphering of the divine or, beneath the appearance of the divine, of the excess of being over appearance., - ##>: ,self-immanence: he not only reali.es that any society which forgets its religious basis is labouring under the illusion of pure self-immanence and thus obliterates the locus of philosophy5 he also senses that philosophy is bound up with religion because they are both caught up in an adventure to which philosophy does not possess the main key., - ##$: power in society: ,It would be more accurate to say that power makes a gesture towards something outside, and that it defines itself in terms of that outside. ?hatever its form, it always refers to the same enigma: that of an internal-external articulation, of a division which institutes a common space, of a break which establishes relations, of a movement of the externali.ation of the social which goes hand in hand with its internali.ation., - demoncracy: empty place of this power, that needs continual contestation because it belongs to no one - ##%: on the meaning of the empty place. no reference to the one or to the other, power cannot become an incarnation - ##%: ,It is enough to recall that thI1 re*@Ires an institutionali.ation of conflict and a *uasi-dissolution of social relations at the very moment of the manifestation of the will of the pople. These two phenomena are both indicative of the above-mentI8ned articulation between the idea that power is a purely symbolic agency and the idea that society has no substantial unity. The institutionali.ation of conflict is not within the remit of power5 it is rather that power depends upon the institutionali.ation of conflict., - ##+: ,the idea of a division between the sphere of the state and the sphere of civil society that is so often invoked seems to blur rather than to elucidate the features of the democratic phenomenon., - the institutionalised of conflict and power - That each party claims to have a vocation to defend the general interest and to bring about ullioll is of little importance5 the antagonism between them sanctions another vocation: society's vocation for division. - the important point is that all de facto divisions are transfigured and transposed on to a stage on which division appears to exist de jure.
- ##0: modern democracy - power inicated by empty space, gap between real and symbolic. no conjunction between power, law and knowlesge, society emerges as having no foundation or essence and just an eternity of conflict and *uestions. this gap is indicated bugtt not symbolised as an oejcgt, not visible. ##0: ,then, is the paradox: regimes in which the figure of power stands out against an other force do not

completely obscure the political principle behind the social order. /s the religious basis of power is fully affirmed, it appears to be both the guarantor and the guardian of the certainty which supports the experience of the world5 at the same time, it appears to be the keeper of the law which finds its expression in social relations and which maintains their unity. In contrast, democracy, in which the figure of the other is abolished, in which power is not divorced from the division which gen.erates it - I will not say that power is stripped bare, as that would imply surrendering to yet another realist fiction - and in which power therefore eludes our grasp !escapes appropriation and representation", is a regime which cannot be apprehended in its political form., - democracy defines power as separate from the state. !#= " - #=A: stuff on religioun, community, love, coherence - #==: the advent of totalitarianism and breakdown of gap between real and symbolic power. democracy is predicated on giving <897 /:; 74/:I:B to the divisions of society - ,-oth attempt, in one way or another, to give power a substantial reality, to bring the principles of Caw and Dnowledge within its orbit, to deny social division in all its forms, and to give society a body once more. /nd, it should be noted in passing, we find here an explanation as to why so many contemporary philosophers - and by no means only minor figures - have become compromised in the adventure of :a.ism, fascism or communism5 the attachment to the religious which we noted earlier traps them in the illusion that unity and identity can be restored as such, and they see signs of its advent in the union of the social body.,

- tehcnosicneitfic basis of totalitarianism: #=>: der, that we can best arrive at an understanding of totalitarianism. This regime represents the culmination of an artificialist project which begins to take shape in the nineteenth century: the project of creating a self-organi.ing society which allows the discourse of technical rationality to be imprinted on the very form of social relations, and which, ultimately, reveals 'social raw material' or 'human raw material' to be fully amenable to organi.ation., - #=>: marja= al ta*lid: ,:ot only does extreme artificialism tend to be interchangeable with extreme organicism because of the demand for the full affirmation of the social entity5 this discourse can only hold up if it becomes a body and only if - no pun intended - it can embody the subjects who speak it: it tends to abolish the distance between enunciation and utterance, and to be imprinted on every subject, regardless of the signification of words., - #>=: The human monarchy is constructed in the image of the divine monarchy: both govern on behalf of an elect. /rbitrary power, masked as justice, has taken up its abode in society: it is found 'with depressing regularity in political institutions', It is a 'carnal principle' that supports the social organi.ation, the division between the orders and the hierarchy of conditions5 this is a principle which 'puts justice and injustice in the blood, which makes them circulate along with the 2ux of life from one generation to the next', The theologicopolitical system is. he suggests. such that it glorifies love. the personal relationship that exists between man and Bod. between man and king5 the spiritual notion of justice is materiali.ed5 love is put 'in the place of law', To paraphrase freely, using the same terms that we used earlier: when the law is fully asserted and when divine might and human might are condensed within a single person, Caw is imprinted upon power5 Caw as such is abolished5 the motive behind obedience is no longer fear, but a loving submission to the monarch, /t the same time. the obverse of the love demanded by (hristianity is revealed to be its hatred of all who perturb order:, - #>$: . /nd it is through the double operation of sacrifice and pleasure @ouissanceE that the king's subjects experience rapture. Cove both nourishes their life and justifies their death. It is the image of the natural body, the image of a Bod made flesh, the image of his marriage, his paternity, his liaisons, his festivals, his amusements and his feasts, hut also the image of his weaknesses or even his cruelties, in short all the images of his humanity, that people their imaginary, that assure them that the king and the people are conjoined. / carnal union is established between the great individual and his mass of servants, from the lowliest to the most important, and it is indissociable from the mystical union between king and kingdom. /ccording to theology and the jurists, the immortal king possesses the gift of clairvoyance as well as that of ubi*uity5 but, at the same time and even as he escapes the ga.e of his subjects, he has the gift of attracting the ga.e of all, of concentrating upon himself the absolute visibility of man-as-being: since he is a uni*ue focal point, he abolishes differences between points of view and ensures that all merge in the 8ne., - #>6: ,9ather than attempting to redefine relations between the political and the religious in order to assess the degree to which one is subordinated to the other and to examine the *uestion of the permanence or non permanence of a sensitivity to religious thought in modern society, might it not be more appropriate to posit the view that a theologico political formation is, logically and historically, a primary datum& , - ,the principle of a symbolic operation which takes place in the face of events5 and to detect how certan schemata of organi.ation and representation survive thanks to the displacement and transference on to new entities of the image of the body and of its double nature, of the idea of the 8ne, and of a mediation between visible and invisible, between the eternal and the temporal. ?e would then be in a better position to ask whether democracy is the theatre of a new mode of transference, or whether the only thing that survives in it is the phantom of the theologico political., - #$ : a new relationship between the particular, which is still inscribed within the limits of a body, of an entity which is organi.ed spatially and temporally, and the universal, which is still related to the operation of transcendance . The ideas of reason, justice and right, which inspire both a return to the principles of classical thought and a movement towards a seculari.ed ethic, are themselves caught up in a theologico-political elaboration. - #$>: ?hat conclusions are we to draw from this brief incursion into the theologico-political labyrinth& That we must recogni.e that, according to its schema, any move towards immanence is also a move towards transcendance5 that any attempt to explain the contours of social relations implies an internali.ation of unity5 that any attempt to define objective, impersonal entities implies a personification of those entities. The workings of the mechanisms of incarnation ensure the imbrication of religion and politics even in areas where we thought we were dealing simply with purely religious or purely profane practices or representations., - #$$: - one fiction: ,8ne effect of this fiction is immediately obvI8@1: modern democratic societies are characteri.ed by. among other things. the delimitation of a sphere of institutions. relations and activities which appears to be political, as distinct from other spheres whIch appear to be economic, juridical. and so on., F ,This even raises the *uestion of the constitutI8n of the social space, of the form of society, of the essence of

what was once termed the 'city'. The political is thus revealed, not in what we call political activity, but in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured. , - particular societies are given <897 and given 74/:I:B and are 1T/B4; =: ,7odern totalitarianism arises from a political mutation, from a mutation of a symbolic order, and the change in the status of power is its clearest expression. ?hat in fact happens is that a party arises, claiming to be by its very nature different from traditional parties, to represent the aspirations of the whole people, and to possess a legitimacy which places it above the law. It takes power by destroying all opposition5 the new power is accountable to n8 one and is beyond all legal control. , - totalitarianism: complete immanence - society achieving its own destiny as a society: ,The distinctively modern feature of totalitarianism is that it combines a radically artificialist ideal with a radically organicist ideal. The image of the body comes to be combined with the image of the machine. 1ociety appears to be a community all of whose members are strictly interdependent5 at the same time it is assumed to be constructing itself day by day. to be striving towards a goal - the creation of the new man - and to be living in a state of permanent mobili.ation., - ,It is in effect within the framew;rk ;f the m;narchy, ;r that ;f a particular type ;f m;narchy which, originally developed in a theologico-political matri., gave the prince s;vereign p;wer within the b;undaries ;f a ternt;ry and made hIm b;th a secular agency and a representative ;f B;d, that the features, ;f state and s;ciety were first ;utlined, and that the first separatI8n ;f state and civil s;ciety ;ccurred., % - The prince was a mediator between m;rtals and g;ds ;r, as p;litical activity became seculari.ed and laici.ed, between mortals and the transcendental agencies represented by a s;vereign Gustice and a s;vereign 9eas;n. -eing at ;nce subject to. the law and placed ab;ve laws, - he c;ndensed within his b;dy, which was at ;nce m;rtal and imm;rtal, the principle that generated the order ;f the kingd;m. 2is p;wer p;inted t;wards an unconditi;nal, ;ther-w;rldly p;le, while at the same time he was, in his ;wn pers;n, the guarant;r and representative ;f the unity ;f the kingd;m. + - democratic power:-ut this agency is no. I;nger referred to. an unc;nditi;nal p;le5 and in that sense, it marks a divisi;n between the inside and the outside ;f the s;cial, institutes relati;ns beween th;se dimensi;ns, and is tacitly rec;gni.ed as being purely symb;lic - disincorporation: is the disentangling of sphere of law, knowledge and power HHHH I738T/:T + - 0 :/nd just as the figure of power in its materiality and its substantiality disappears, just as the exercise of power proves to be bound up with the temporality of its reproduction and to be subordinated to the conflict of collective wills, so the autonomy of law is bound up with the impossibility of establishing its essence - the paradox: 6: ,when popular sovereignty is assumed to manifest itself, when the people is assumed to actuali.e itself by expressing its will, that social Interdependence breaks down and that the citi.en is abstracted from all the networks in which his social life develops and becomes a mere statistic. :umber replaces substance., - 6 -#A: when democracy breaks down, this is when power appears I: society -