Introduction

Abstract

Claude Lefort died on October 3, 2010. His “oeuvre,” a term dear to him, which developed over a period of six decades, is now more than ever an institution: it faces a closure that is also an opening. In his preface to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s L’Institution-La Pasivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954–1955),¹ Lefort argues that Merleau-Ponty perfectly understood all the ambiguity proper to the notion of institution, thus taking it

in its double sense—the action that provides a beginning and a state of the thing established … —but with this essential difference, that institution as foundation is not considered as the product of an act and that institution as establishment contains at the same time the possibility of its perpetuation … as well as the possibility of the reactivation of the instituting force. The philosophical scope of this reformulation of the concept of institution is explicit. Merleau-Ponty distinguishes immediately the problematic of institution from that of constitution (in the Kantian sense). He rejects, along with the idea of a constituting consciousness, that of a world in which nothing would be discovered that had not been constituted by its operations. Understood in this double sense, institution presupposes a non-coincidence between the institutor and the instituted. This is what makes him say that time is the model of institution. If institution is openness to, openness to is always produced on the basis of.²

> Originally formulated by Merleau-Ponty–who himself had followed Husserl in his turn, since, as we are suggesting, there is no origin that is absolute and no closing that is final–the model of the institution, of its temporality, of its openness to endurance, and to a generality that does not disassociate itself from the event captured with precision the core of the theoretical and interpretive sensibility characteristic of Lefort’s political philosophy.