Lefort/Dante

How can a reader from 1993 attend to a text from the 1310s? This question haunts the text Claude Lefort devotes to Dante’s Monarchia. It is certainly a question of returning to the content of Dante’s essay, but also of nourishing contemporary reflection: reading a text also means yielding to inquiries that do not always belong to it, and testing, by this deformation and transformation, its fruitfulness for today. Can one thus oppose to the government of the One something that would be more like a community of ones? Can one hear in Dante the sketch of a thought of the common?

Preface

‘Dante’s Modernity’ pursues ambitions that go far beyond its ostensible editorial function as a preface to the medieval author’s early 14th-century political treatise. The text exemplifies Lefort’s signature method of taking political philosophy in new directions by drawing on the fundamental indeterminacy and openness of key works from the history of political philosophy. The result is as much an interpretation of the Monarchia as it is of political modernity itself.

Dante’s Modernity

Claude Lefort’s ‘Dante’s Modernity’ presents a detailed and highly original interpretation of Dante’s Monarchia. Lefort casts Dante as the first political thinker with a concept of humanity defined as the whole of the human race, the first to imagine a universal society in political terms, and the first to reveal the formative role of force, of wars and division in the advent of such a political unity. Tracing the career of Dante’s innovations in the political thought and praxis of the succeeding centuries, Lefort then shows how what is ‘new’ in Dante cannot be separated from its later avatars — from the varied realizations, distortions, and misapplications it would inspire at later historical junctures. Any contemporary realization of the potential inherent in Dante’s innovative idea of sovereignty would require the project of ‘disentangling’ the links between universalism, imperialism, and nationalism that have been instituted in its name.