The Advent of the Aesthetico-Political

Book Chapter

Summary *

French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic introduced a break in the history of Marxist thought. The move represented the earliest and more fundamental rejection of both the revolutionary “solution” to the indeterminate and conflictive character of social life and also to the technocratic and ideological attempt to eliminate democratic politics in the name of market efficiency and neoliberal radicalism – and Claude Lefort was the author who made the most out of this break. In theorizing the historical breakdown of the horizon of radical transcendence implied in the theologico-political regime and in denouncing the re-embracement of the One in the horizon of radical immanence in the totalitarian party’s claim to having access to a complete knowledge of the social, Lefort developed a comprehensive understanding of the social in terms of flesh and of the political as its mise-en-forme, mise-en-sens, and mise-en-scène. The model, however, implies a lack of flexibility that I in this chapter I try to correct, offering a new typology of political regimes, understood in Rancierian terms. The typology is tripartite: theologico-political, aesthetico-political, and epistemological-political. Information provided by the agent in SIGEVA