COMMENTAIRE SUR LA PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIE ET LE MARXISME DANS L’OEUVRE DE CLAUDE LEFORT
COMMENTARY ON MARXISM AND PHENOMENOLOGY IN THE WORKS OF CLAUDE LEFORT

Summary/Abstract: This article is conceived as a rather unusual investigation. On the one hand, it treats of the relationsbetween phenomenology and Marxism in the work of the early Claude Lefort. Scholars emphasizethat the amalgamation of the phenomenology and Marxism of Lefort is due to Merleau-Ponty’sphenomenology of perception. But we think it does not prohibit him from applyingphenomenology to the social domain. Thanks to phenomenological methods, Lefort has accessboth to the philosophy of history and theoretical sociology. So we try to develop the ‘socialcritique’ of Lefort in a phenomenological sense. This article analyzes the work of the early Lefortin the context of the thought of and debates between Merleau-Ponty, Castoriadis, and Sartre. Butthese investigations are not only historical; the article also raises questions about the realconnections between phenomenology and Marxism. The original side of our research is toassociate the phenomenology of Lefort with the material phenomenology of M. Henry. So we facea double task. From one side, our objectives are historico-philosophical. We try to discover themeaning of the Lefort’s phenomenological Marxism. From the other side they arephenomenological: we try to describe the phenomenon of the materiality of a social class in theaim to study the fundamental concepts of Lefort’s philosophy. We investigate the problem of theclass consciousness in the terms of the being of a phenomenon in the world. As a result, we haveto do with the problem of a renewal of the concept of the matter and the praxis. This problem isnot easy to solve in one text. But we think we have arrived at the following result: in the Russianliterature Lefort is considered only as a political thinker, and we showed that he is both a politicalphilosopher and a phenomenologist. Moreover, in a sense his phenomenological approach can bemore important to elucidate social phenomena.

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