As one of his translators, I would like to say a few words about Claude Lefort’s style; Raymond Aron, who was on Lefort’s doctoral commit- tee, commented on it. I have the following information in the form of a note Lefort wrote to me as I was about to take on the transla- tion of his thesis (Le travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel: The Work of the Oeuvre
Machiavelli). It reads as follows: “I am sure my book is difficult to trans-
late. My thesis director, Raymond Aron, vigorously criticized my style, which he considered to be Proustian; that was by no means a compli- ment! Since those days I have tried to be more concise.” He goes on to authorize my shortening and/or simplifying of his sentences, which I was indeed sometimes able to do. But was Aron’s allusion to Proust entirely negative? Or did his ears hear all that his lips were saying? And does Lefort’s propensity for jovial self-deprecation forbid our applica- tion of a broader interpretation of the Proustian allusion? For, although in this early (1972) thesis the sentences do indeed tend to meander- ings and tucked-in afterthoughts (or what the French call “repentirs”), both authors thereby remain faithful to their mental movements’ rang- ing through the depths of a meditation followed through to its reluctant release. A case in point: at the very beginning of his book, Lefort imag- ines a critic accusing him of the “perversion” of desiring to pursue the discourse of his interpretation of Machiavelli even beyond the silence that would hypothetically be imposed, were one to stumble upon an interpretation that would end that discourse. And, just as Proust inserts the origin of his text within the text of Remembrance of Things Past itself, so Lefort manages to foreshadow, not only his technique of interpret- ing the oeuvre of Machiavelli, but his own interpretive work as well, as oeuvre of the oeuvre: he defers the end of Machiavelli’s discourse “by freeing it from the fatal cycle in which it was lodged, by attaching it
to the possibility of a new origin, by soliciting its further survival in a reader.” If I insist on this example, it is to emphasize that the fertile dif- ficulty of Lefort’s text is not just one of translation. If all translation is to some degree or in some sense interpretation, let me say that the trans- lation of Lefort is mostly interpretation. His language is in the mode of “entendement,” that is, of “understanding.” You read the lines, you read between the lines, you read the words in their current meaning, and if you come up short you try running the gamut of their etymological resonances. . . The context, the historical milieu, everything is relevant. Sometimes one finds oneself speaking, as old couples are wont to do, “à
demi-mots.”
All translation is made possible (and impossible) by the same fallacy: the separability of form and content. Strip down the content baby, bun- dle it up in a new form, and you have a spanking new translation. But form is not an envelope, and this is the truth conveyed by the term “style”. Let us not be misled by the metaphorical origin. The stylus, the pen, the “stylo,” is far more than an incidental instrumentality. Merleau- Ponty (and the intertwining of his thought with that of Claude Lefort has already been, and will continue to be, touched upon in this volume) had much to say about style, and that is a rich labyrinth I will not enter here, but only pause at the brink to say that style is an affair of move- ment, and that its mystery has two modes: the active and the passive. We have style, and style has us. It is the former – the active – that Lefort had in mind, of course, when he wrote in his note to me, since those days
I have tried to be more concise. Yet the “repentir” style to which I alluded is,
after all, part of an entire philosophy of communication, and one that is not foreign to him: the first approximation has a certain value, which, being crossed-out but not erased by what follows, has a cumulative effect that cannot be denied. By participating vicariously in the spontaneous generation of ideas, the reader may achieve a sense of what the author means that is fuller and livelier than the most accurate summary or “pré-
cis.” Was Lefort saying that he was willing to give up this doubling back
of language upon itself? Perhaps he was aware that there is a trap here: the danger of becoming a “stylist.” The writer who goes too far in this direction, who outlives himself (l’écrivain qui se survit), or who imitates himself, may be the one who fails to understand that language does not accept such homage, but prefers, as Lefort quotes Machiavelli as saying, to seek out approval among the young, and, like Fortuna, favors from her master a more impetuous, commanding approach.
Beyond the rather strict dichotomy between the active and the passive lies the realm Merleau-Ponty sometimes referred to as that
of spontaneity, in which the distinctions between commanding and obeying, purpose and instrumentality, are transcended. This aspect of expression did not escape Lefort’s notice. Let us listen in as he speaks to this aspect of style in his own words, through my good offices of naturalization. He does so most abundantly and eloquently in the last chapter of Machiavelli in the Making, titled: “The Oeuvre, Ideology and Interpretation.” Speaking of Machiavelli’s oeuvre, and justifying his use of the term, which is often reserved for works of an artistic nature, he writes:
But meanings do not permit of being unraveled from the discur- sive weave, and if we contemplate securing them in this way we are left with a message drained of all vitality; if we press on to extract a quintessential meaning, what remains is lackluster knowledge – a knowledge so harshly won from the living language of the author, so fatally rescued from his inner turmoil, that, all ebullience bypassed, we are baffled that so much effort of writing and reading should have been expended for the sole purpose of perpetuating the mediocre formulation of a chain of reasoning.1
After this brief declaration of allegiance to the contours of discourse, Lefort launches into what must seem to the English reader a world of strangely human abstraction. The world rendered reassuringly opaque and solid by custom is swept away by one in which all that exists is time and space, though not of the Cartesian variety. It is the inner and outer space, the dynamics of expression and interpretation, of history, of the proximate versus the remote reader, of the writer who both speaks and interprets. This field of forces is then projected onto the work of Machiavelli and his interpreters. The epistemological subject never gets to stand back, clear of the action of interpretation. His or her ability to know is inextricably bound up with those of understanding, interrogat- ing, and speaking. Eras communicate, but only through the hic et nunc, here and now, so that one only knows the past on one’s own terms. All of these philosophical principles are brought to bear philologically on the basis of historical texts surrounding the Quattrocento period.
I remember being reprimanded by one of my professors at the Sorbonne’s Institut des Professeurs de Français à l’Etranger, the late Jacques Netzer, for having spoken of Proust’s style. “Which one?” he said. The analytic one, in which he dissects feelings and emotions? The narrative one? The conversationalist one, in which he imitates collo- quial ways of speaking? The lyric one, in which he stands in ecstasy,
overcome with memories? He was right, of course. So I would have to say that Lefort had a number of styles as well. The one I have just described, his way of dealing with the abstract entities that regulate dis- course, interpretation, and ideology, is one of his styles. That is the one I think of most, probably because it is the one I struggled with most as a translator. It is the style most foreign to English. It is also, remarkably, the one in which he somehow seemed most comfortable in working in allusions to his own experience, as if the level of abstraction made it possible for him to transmit the personal directly, by bypassing any- thing that smacked of the autobiographical. It goes without saying, of course, that the authorial “nous” or “we” was the norm for him.
Style is movement; but movement without what moves is an empty abstraction. Thus, a more detailed and concrete textual exploration of the actual workings of Lefort’s analyses is necessary if we are to go beyond generalizations. I have chosen a passage in which Lefort unfolds an inaugural rupture: the historical “decision” or break that he describes in his commentary on Book Two of Machiavelli’s Discorsi. This rup- ture opens up the political space between the political and a “radical alterity,” that is, the “pure indetermination of the outside,” and “expo- sure to death.” I will concentrate my analysis on pp. 551–2 of Lefort’s Le
travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel. I intend to highlight the way in which his
analytic exposition reveals Machiavelli’s creative dichotomy between war with the external enemy (and natural disasters such as famine) on the one hand, and civil war, which involves the relations between conflicting desires within the state, on the other.
War perceived as a natural cataclysm makes us discover something other than the universal clash of appetites; it reveals the impossi- bility of containing the space-world of politics within the limits of reason. It reveals that impossibility the moment there is a felt neces- sity to think the origin of war and of states in the diversity of times and places. Indeed, we cannot truly assess Machiavelli’s thought if we fail to recognize the strength of the movement that spreads out the world’s expanse as one sole space – freeing it of any particular domain from whose perspective of the border between human and barbaric lands would be drawn, erasing any center of perspective, and thereby defining it as one in its partitioning.2
Lefort’s text goes on to emphasize the happenstance of the surround- ing, radical otherness of nature, and to posit a rupture separating the
political space from the cruel facts of famine, floods, and “the pure indetermination of the outside,. . . exposure to death.” The wars of com- peting empires, vying for hegemony, are not the prototype, then, of warfare. Rather, there is a fundamental “logic of action” superimposed on the absolute necessity of survival. The dichotomy, Lefort surmises, may be reflected within the human realm as that separating nature and culture.
Tempting as it is to reach for the conclusion that we have here a movement akin to the thought of Heraclitus, that all is war, an orig- inary dichotomy, or an ontological model in which there is only an inside (the human) and the outside (nature), both of which may be reflected back into the inside as the nature–culture distinction, Lefort constantly refuses to leave the texts of Machiavelli, and he does so for stated epistemological reasons.
In the final analysis, the object of Machiavelli’s discourse in Book 2 is neither the moral guidance of the power of Rome, nor the difference between ancient and modern warfare; nor is it war in general, nor the relationship between politics and war, nor the Christian discourse on politics and war. For us, its readers, it would be giving in to the illu- sion of materialized power3to want to seize upon these objects and
assign them a function of knowledge. But neither can we dispense with the work of discovery and destruction of these objects, and deprive the discourse of its moorings to time and place, and make it speak the timeless language of metaphysics. For thus we would forget that the reading draws on the invisible wellsprings of the experience of the agent’s own times and places, and that interpretation is itself activation of temporal difference.4
But, while the movement of Lefort’s style remains that of an inter- weaving of times, its cumulative effect is to expose the historical development of that most unusual style of thought we recognize as “Machiavellianism.” Let me take as an example of that turn of mind the famous judgment by a contemporary on the assassination by Napoleon Bonaparte of the Duc d’Enghien: “C’est pire qu’un crime. C’est une erreur” (It’s worse than a crime: it’s a mistake). Beneath the apparent bathos we may detect the awareness of both a distinction and an undivided space: a hierarchical system of values and a logic of action based on implaca- ble necessity. In developing an undivided line along which are situated actions viewed from a “moral” or legal point of view – an agent-centered
view – and those same actions or events seen indifferently as causes or effects, we enter the Machiavellian universe. As in a history of violence in which no special distinction is made between natural and man- made catastrophes, floods, wars of invasion, famine, persecutions, and plagues mingle meaninglessly. Prudence, resolve, boldness, foresight, calculation have no inherent value, beyond their ability to comport successfully with fortune – luck personified5 – in specific and typically
complex, possibly unique circumstances. In this unforgiving climate, failures are “mistakes,” whose gravity makes “crimes” seem quaint in comparison.
Without straying entirely from my topic, since no less a figure than Buffon has declared style to be man himself, let me close on a per- sonal note by mentioning several occasions on which Claude showed me great warmth and generosity. The first occasion was in 1978, when he gave me access to the original manuscript of Merleau-Ponty’s Le Vis-
ible et l’invisible, and discussed the interpretation of several texts with
me. Then, in 1989, in Kingston, Rhode Island, at a Merleau-Ponty con- ference, my friend Galen Johnson, the organizer, called upon me to interpret questions for Lefort, which I did to the best of my ability, though I recall being completely stumped by a three-part phenomeno- logical disquisition disguised as a question. . . At the end of the session, Lefort, who thereafter asked me to call him Claude, gave me an inscribed copy of his work Sur une colonne absente (On an Absent Column), essays in the vicinity of Merleau-Ponty. I did not see him again until I began translating his work in 2007. The visit to his fifth-floor apartment, rue du Bac, was arranged by my dear friend Judith Walz. His wife Annie greeted us. He had taken a bad fall in a bus, but we were able, over a glass of Chivas, to discuss the translation of the Machiavelli book, and he was considerate enough to present me with an out-of-print, first- edition copy, which he felt might be helpful to me, since the type was just a bit larger than in the second edition. For the sake of complete- ness, let me add that there was a third meeting, during Claude’s short bereavement. Our conversation was warm and cordial, and of a private nature.
If style is the man, or the integer of the man and the work, then what I have always looked upon as the greatest recompense for my line of work is also the most necessary asset: closeness. To come to a thought that is not your own, and cover it as with your flesh and bone (here I enlist a line from Yeats) – this is essentially the work of the translator. It has been my great honor to introduce some of the thoughts of this remarkable man in the English-speaking world.
Notes
1. C. Lefort (2012) Machiavelli in the Making (Evanston: Northwestern University Press).
2. Ibid., 297.
3. The term “materialized power” appears only twice in Machiavelli in the Making: here, and two paragraphs earlier, where it refers to chapter 32 (not chapter 22, as stated erroneously in the first printing of that work) of The Discourses, in which Machiavelli describes the modalities of Roman warfare. In Lefort’s view, the town or the siege symbolizes “the illusion of a materialized power,” contrasted with “the war of movement and of the word (parole) of alliance.” To simplify Lefort’s general movement of thought here, we may say that it is an epistemological mistake to think that knowledge can be circumscribed and “besieged” by the student of history, and thus “taken” in the end. Such an approach to the facticity of history is only propaedeutic. Yet it would be equally mistaken on our part to “faire l’économie” of this labor, and to rush to metaphysical elucubration. Historical enlightenment is to be found neither in immersion in time nor in the atemporal, but precisely in temporal difference, the “difference of times.”
4. Ibid., 326–7.
5. An analysis of the concept of luck would offer an excellent point of depar- ture for a study of Machiavelli, and beyond. Phenomenologically speaking, luck is the objective correlate of Sorge, or care. But the concept taken “neat,” to use a bibulous metaphor, is neither favorable nor unfavorable (to wit the residual ambiguity of the “fortuitous”). Machiavelli’s celebrated amorality is meaningful, not straight on, but sideways, as being historically indirect. It is, like the book of Job, the inveterate renewal of moral reflection. It reflects the Anknüpfungspunkt of man and world, and the dichotomy in which we are constantly – tragically and ludicrously – constrained to take sides; or take refuge, perhaps, in the Stranger’s penultimate “tendre indifference du monde.”