10.13135/2036-542X/8135



The article argues that the dominant approach on political foundings as standing in for ordinary political acts loses sight of their uniqueness as polity–establishing acts. Relying on Claude Lefort and Eric Voegelin, it recovers founding moments phenomenally and philosophically by distinguishing them from revolutions. Phenomenally, it argues that whereas revolutions follow a three–stage form of mobilization, downfall, and constitution, foundings are missing such a pre–defined form. Accordingly, revolutions can be understood in the consecutive time–sequence in which the event unfolded in history, while foundings are endowed with a form only retrospectively, through the effort to understand them. A founding, therefore, cannot be a pre–fixed discrete event in history but is found in the displacement of that event in time by the understanding effort. Philosophically, the nature of the problem of founding reemerges out of (a) the constitution of a founding act as the difference between the visible phenomenon and its invisible form, and (b) the common experience of philosophizing and founding as an act of resistance to the pre–existing political order. Accordingly, the social sciences may be more appropriate to the conceptualization and study of revolutions, political philosophy is more appropriate to the conceptualization of foundings and the hermeneutic sciences are more appropriate to the study of particular founding moments.



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Eno Trimçev
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Claude Lefort
Pathways to the Problem of Founding in Contemporary Political Thought
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2018-12-01
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Eno Trimçev
2018/12/01
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75
Greifswald University
2036-542X
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Claude Lefort
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Pathways to the Problem of Founding in Contemporary Political Thought
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                                                                                    – ISBN 978-88-255-2179-5
                                                       DOI 10.4399/97888255217956 – pag. 75-91 (dicembre 2018)




                        Pathways to the Problem of Founding
                          in Contemporary Political Thought
                                                                                  Eno Trimçev*




Abstract: The article argues that the dominant approach on political foundings as standing
in for ordinary political acts loses sight of their uniqueness as polity–establishing acts.
Relying on Claude Lefort and Eric Voegelin, it recovers founding moments phenomenally
and philosophically by distinguishing them from revolutions. Phenomenally, it argues that
whereas revolutions follow a three–stage form of mobilization, downfall, and constitution,
foundings are missing such a pre–deﬁned form. Accordingly, revolutions can be understood
in the consecutive time–sequence in which the event unfolded in history, while foundings
are endowed with a form only retrospectively, through the eﬀort to understand them.
A founding, therefore, cannot be a pre–ﬁxed discrete event in history but is found in
the displacement of that event in time by the understanding eﬀort. Philosophically, the
nature of the problem of founding reemerges out of (a) the constitution of a founding
act as the diﬀerence between the visible phenomenon and its invisible form, and (b)
the common experience of philosophizing and founding as an act of resistance to the
pre–existing political order. Accordingly, the social sciences may be more appropriate to
the conceptualization and study of revolutions, political philosophy is more appropriate to
the conceptualization of foundings and the hermeneutic sciences are more appropriate to
the study of particular founding moments.

Keywords: Founding, Revolution, Post–Foundationalism, Eric Voegelin, Claude Lefort.


1. Introduction

There is an understandable degree of confusion regarding the relationship
between revolution and founding in political life.1 At times, the confusion
is compounded by the political science literature on revolutions which is
prone to subsume founding under the generic term — and, phenomenally,
far more visible occurrence — of «revolution» (e.g. Huntington 1968: 264;
Goodwin 2001: 4; Pincus 2011: 398). But a moment’s reﬂection may serve
to question this: foundings and revolutions sometimes overlap; sometimes
    ∗
       Institut für Politik– und Kommunikationswissenschaft, Greifswald University; trimcev@
uni-greifswald.de.
    1. The article develops ideas ﬁrst presented in Trimçev 2017.


                                                                                                          75
76    Eno Trimçev


they occur with a time gap; we can even think of revolutions without
foundings and of foundings without revolutions. For example, the Amer-
ican founding seems to be inextricably linked to the ﬁre and fury of the
Revolutionary War (Bailyn 1992). But even here the coincidence is not com-
plete — the revolution was a rather protracted, drawn–out aﬀair, while
the founding seems to have occurred later, at a far more ﬁxed point in
time and space, in the summer of 1787 at the Pennsylvania State House in
Philadelphia. Further, the governing principles and practices of American
political life have substantively changed over time suggesting additional
moments of re–founding. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the Populism of
the Gilded Age, the activism of the Progressive Era, Roosevelt’s New Deal,
or the Anti–War and Civil Rights movements of the Vietnam era — are
all these founding moments at times bloody and at times so peaceful and
unassuming that we may miss them altogether? Does political failure (e.g.
the Populists) or success (e.g. the New Deal) reliably mark the boundary
between extraordinary foundings and ordinary politics? These questions
indicate two things. First, it may be the revolution rather than the founding
that occurs at a discrete, ﬁxed point in history. Second, we can even think of
the possibility of obscured or non–evident foundings — concealed rather
than revealed by phenomenal events — which is impossible in the case of
revolutions. Further examples show that the confusion, if anything, is liable
to increase the closer we come to our own time. Is Konrad Adenauer, the
non–revolutionary founder of the Bonner Republik, the true founder of con-
temporary Germany, or is the honor to go the failed revolutionaries of 1968?
Or, is the present Federal Republic haunted by multiple, competing found-
ing narratives all devoid of a revolution? Has Maoist China been re–founded
and, if yes, by Deng, by Xi or both? Is Brexit a founding moment? Is Donald
Trump a founder? It seems impossible to say; more impossible, indeed, than
with recent revolutions whose success (Tunisia 2011), equivocity (Egypt
2011) or failure (Syria 2011) seems to follow a more evident 3–stage form of (1)
collective, extra–institutional forms of political mobilization; (2) downfall
of old regime, and; (3) constitution of new regime. In the case of founding,
however, that form seems to be not apparent.
    This paper grows out of these practical puzzles. But, turning to political
theory for some clarity, it confronts an even greater puzzle; namely, the
disappearance of foundings altogether. Curiously, in that part of contempo-
rary political theory that has a speciﬁc interest on foundings, founding acts
seem to have lost their phenomenal speciﬁcity. In the attempt to overcome
the alleged reduction of founding to a problem of logic by the tradition
of Western political philosophy, foundings have been dissolved into ordi-
nary political acts ( Jenco 2010: 13–4). Jean–Jacques Rousseau’s articulation in
Book II of the Social Contract is perhaps the most famous example of this
                Pathways to the Problem of Founding in Contemporary Political Thought               77


supposedly reductionist view (Rousseau 1968: 86–7).2 Rousseau famously
solved the problem by positing a Lawgiver; a perfect outsider who in his
genius, virtue, perspective (longue durée), and place (simultaneously outside
and within the people) is the exact opposite of the people he is founding.
His perfection is, of course, a logical requirement of the task awaiting him;
not only must he frame suitable laws, but he is to mold each individual into
a citizen and the folk into a political community. The act of denaturation
with which he has been tasked is as perfect as divinity.
    It has been rightly observed that this ratiocination works neither for polit-
ical theory (Honig 2007: 3; cf. also Agamben 1995: 15; Arendt 1973: 183–4) nor
for religion (McCabe 2007). The very starkness of the paradox seems to have
forced Rousseau’s hand to deliver a solution. For this reason, contemporary
post–foundationalist theory3 has transformed the extraordinary paradox of
founding into the ordinary paradox of politics; all political acts now stand for
founding acts. This transformation of the problem — or, its dislocation from
the abstract (logic) to the concrete (politics) — has productively brought the
open–ended nature of politics more sharply into view. It has come, however,
at a cost. Foundings no longer exist either as phenomenal events in history
or as an independent theoretical problem. Our common sense, however,
rightly resists this dissolution: politically, does it not matter that foundings
are acts that aim to subvert and re–substantiate existing forms of politics
while other ordinary acts (e.g. voting) aim to legitimate them (Wolin 1973:
344)? That foundings, revolutions and everyday political acts can no longer
be properly distinguished from one another? Philosophically, does it not
matter that we can think it — we even, indeed, seem to be required to think
it by thinking’s need to grab hold of its own beginning (cf. Voegelin 1999:
27–62)? Does it not matter that the thought of founding refuses to ﬂatten
out to particular founding acts?
    This paper sets out to recover founding moments along both planes.
It argues that, diﬀerently from revolutions whose phenomenality is more
evident, a founding occurs only if our retrospective account of it diﬀers
from — or displaces — what is commonly taken to be the historical found-

     2. Exemplary of this interpretation of the traditional view is also Plato’s view who, in the Laws,
depicts founding as a deliberate act of will that replaces custom (Plato 1980: 681d; cf. also 752 c–d)
while in the Republic the beautiful city (449a–541b) must begin out of nothing (Plato 1991: 540e–541b).
But this observation ought to be qualiﬁed. After all, Rousseau gave us also an eminently narrative
account of founding in the Second Discourse while the speech–nature of Plato’s best regime (Plato
1991: 369c; 473a) and the sheer multiplicity of foundings in the Platonic account radically transforms
its meaning in the Platonic oeuvre away from a purely logical construction.
     3. I use Oliver Marchart’s deﬁnition of post–foundationalism as «the assumption of the im-
possibility of a ﬁnal ground» which views «the political as the moment of partial and always,
in the last instance, unsuccessful grounding». Thus, post–foundationalism is distinguished from
anti–foundationalism or the «assumption of the total absence of all grounds» (Marchart 2007: 2).
78    Eno Trimçev


ing. The phenomenality of a founding must be retrospectively uncovered.
The coincidence between what founding seemed to be (the historically given
account) and what it is (the displaced account) cannot occur because under-
standing proceeds dialectically. In this account, foundings may be singular
or multiple, noisy and seemingly evident or silent and obscured by the
actual phenomena until they are unsuspectedly found. By comparison, the
phenomenality of revolutions is less controversial; the completion of the
three–stages of the form of revolution makes for a successful revolution.
Foundings, on the other hand, may or may not be so extraordinarily evident
from a phenomenal perspective; they may or may not follow a revolution;
in fact, they may even proceed it, as the argument has been made for the
American case (cf. Kirk 1991; Kendall 1970). An a priori phenomenal deﬁni-
tion of founding — of what a founding looks like in history — is not available.
Indeed, as I show in Part III, this non–availability is key to recovering the
theoretical problem of founding. The diﬀerence between revolution and
founding, it turns out, is not unlike the diﬀerence between Appearance and
Being in philosophy (Arendt 1971, 19ﬀ.). Accordingly, the science appropriate
to the study of revolutions is social science (e.g. Tilly 1993, 2006; Skocpol
1979) while the science appropriate to the problem of foundings is political
philosophy in the precise sense that Claude Lefort (1988, 11) gives to this
term as the inquiry into the (invisible) form of a society.
    I proceed in three steps. First, I examine the resurgence of interest on
the problem of founding in contemporary post–foundationalist theory on
which I built my contribution. Second, I note that if founding acts have come
to symbolize political acts more generally, they are things to be understood,
i.e. their symbolic narrative nature must be deciphered. In the third and
ﬁnal step, I sketch out how the phenomenal and theoretical speciﬁcity of
foundings in post–foundational theory.



2. The Dissolution of Founding in Contemporary Post–Foundational
   Political Theory

After a relatively long silence (Isaac 1995), the last decade and a half has
witnessed a great resurgence of interest on founding moments. This return
is, unsurprisingly, prompted by both practical and theoretical motives. On
the ﬁrst, political theory is rethinking foundings to recover an emancipatory
dimension of politics judged to be missing in more deliberative or consen-
sual theories of politics. On the second, political theory returns to past texts
to enrich our theoretical understanding of foundings.This section argues
that both lead to what I call the punctuated view of foundings as a series of
              Pathways to the Problem of Founding in Contemporary Political Thought   79


iterations in time of the paradox or incapacity of ordinary politics.4 As a
result, founding acts dissolve into ordinary political acts and the founding
problem disappears into the problem of politics.
    Emancipatory readings of founding moments have challenged the lib-
eral democratic consensus (Arditi 2007, chs. 4–5); expanded or changed the
nature of contemporary political debates (Honig 2001); found new ways
to motivate action in concert in extra–institutional settings (Honig 2009;
Ackerman 1992; Kalyvas 2008); or shed light on problems facing modern so-
cieties as a result of profound theoretical misunderstandings of our political
situation (Agamben 1995: 15–26; Markell 2003). Actual founding moments,
such as the American Declaration of Independence, are used primarily
to raise questions and re–theorize politics in a manner that reverses the
perceived anomie of our contemporary political situation (e.g. Honig 2007).
While this has enriched theoretical debates on issues such as sovereignty,
the exception, and recognition in politics, the primary aim has been to
challenge the perceived pre–existing theoretico–political consensus.
    Bonnie Honig’s rearticulation of the problem of founding is represen-
tative of this practical strand of contemporary thought. Honig displaces
the problem away from its traditional philosophical expression as a logical
paradox opposed to everyday, ordinary politics. Foundings no longer signify
extraordinary moments; they become immanent to every genuine political
act. For Honig, this paradox of politics is «to be negotiated, not [. . . ] to be
solved or overcome» (Honig 2009: 13). Indeed, the very displacement of the
paradox into the political everyday lessens its stark, almost absurd, logical
formulation that demands a solution. Accordingly, the demiurgic founders,
architectural metaphors, and transcendent grounds of the traditional ac-
count have given way to plural, continuous, and contestable re–foundings
between actors and communities.
    On the other hand, the representative text of theoretically–motivated re-
turns to the problem of founding may be Oliver Marchart’s reconstruction
of political diﬀerence in the post–foundationalist texts of French «Left Heideg-
gerians» (Marchart 2007). Marchart points to the necessity of philosophical
engagement with the problem of foundings because of the diﬀerence be-
tween «politics», which operates at the empirical level of historical materials,
and «the political» as an ontological concept that points to an «empty»
cause beyond politics in a post–foundationalist sense (Marchart 2007: 18–19).
Similarly to Honig, every properly political act signals this overﬂowing of
the empirical; a «dislocating and disruptive moment in which foundations
crumble» (Marchart 2007: 2). But, diﬀerently than Honig, no direct practical
conclusions follow to substantively determine a particular form of politics.

   4. The name recalls Urbinati’s «punctuated sovereignty» (2006: 28).
80     Eno Trimçev


At stake here is the theoretical illumination of the tragic character of poli-
tics as expressed by the necessity of grounding acts and the contingency of
all actual grounds in politics.
    In contemporary post–foundational theory, then, a founding moment is
no longer a unique disruption of time, but a series of iterations in time. Since
each properly political act is neither caused nor justified by what precedes it,
foundings unfold as a discrete series of acts in time. In this punctuated view
of founding, precisely because each act may freely affect time, none stages
time. The series is thus not founded, but always already there. Yet, while this
dissolution of foundings in political acts is complete on the first practical strand,
on the second the possibility of recovering the distinction between founding
and ordinary politics remains in principle open. The second approach has the
advantage that it has the potential to a) restore the theoretical autonomy of the
question of founding, while; b) insisting on the importance of its actual, empir-
ical embodiments, by drawing attention to the difference between the visible
(«politics») and its absent or invisible ground («the political»). But the split is
subtly subversive of these very gains. The result is a double–movement that
concomitantly calls on us to understand politics through its historical materials
and discourages such understanding by interrogating the materials through a
non–material outside cause — however «absent». By itself, politics is seen as
structurally deficient (cf. Chaitin 1996: 4–5); it «necessarily fails to deliver what
it has promised» (Marchart 2007: 8; cf. Stavrakakis 1999). If politics always seeks
its own closure, and post–foundationalism is the commitment to open up the
instances of closure, post–foundationalism is necessarily suspicious of politics.
But something that is condemned to fail cannot ultimately give an account
of itself; it is to be rejected, transcended, or manipulated but not understood
on its own terms. Yet, this view is appealing because it holds out the promise
of bringing philosophy back into political science. This must be a peculiar
sort of philosophizing though; a philosophizing wedded to the empirical ma-
terials for foundings are now understood as concrete re–symbolizations of
socio–political space. The shift of the problem of founding away from abstract
logic to concrete politics is analogous to a shift away from pure thought or
philosophy to situated understanding or political science.


3. The Phenomenal Re–emergence of Founding

By displacing the problem of founding away from ratiocinated abstractions,
post–foundational theory has transformed it into the problem of under-
standing. As we have seen, this dissolves the phenomenal speciﬁcity of
founding acts as well as their theoretical articulation. To recover them, I
harken back to the post–foundationalist thought of Eric Voegelin (Dallmayr
                Pathways to the Problem of Founding in Contemporary Political Thought                 81


1989: 421; Petrakis and Eubanks 2004: 21). True, the problem of founding
is not systematically treated by Voegelin for whom, in a way that recalls
post–foundationalist theorists, founding was a ubiquitous rather than in-
dependent problem (Trimçev 2017: 225). Accordingly, Voegelin carries the
same displacement of founding that we observed in Part I. There is how-
ever a diﬀerence. In my reading, Voegelin’s view that human acts require
a displacement in time in order to be meaningful opens the possibility of
reconnecting the post–foundationalist series of undiﬀerentiated discrete acts
in time; a possibility which I draw out more fully in the next section.
    On a ﬁrst step, Voegelin reiterates the post–foundationalist dissolution
of foundings into all political acts when he deﬁnes both as narrative acts. If
political acts in general have a narrational structure (Heilke 1996), Voegelin
maintains the same for foundings: «to set up a government is an essay
in world creation». Founding is an evocative act through which a «little
world of order» emerges, which gives human life «a semblance of meaning»
(Voegelin 1997: 225).
    The diﬀerence between Voegelin’s and others’ treatment of founding
arises in the structure of human acts. As I read it, narrative gets its meaning
from being displaced in time. That is, a narrative is, at the same time, what it is
— the written text, the ﬁnite speech or deed — and radically dependent on
what it points to, beyond or before itself.5 Each act is therefore simultaneously
complete and incomplete; or, it is apparently complete (e.g. the ﬁnished
speech, the published text), but in actuality it remains incomplete — by
itself, the speech is meaningless. It is in the process of understanding the
meaning of an act that we become conscious of its radical incompleteness;
that neither its beginning nor its end stands on its own. In Voegelin’s words
«[n]either the beginning nor the end comes ﬁrst», (Voegelin 1999: 27) for
«the story cannot begin unless it starts in the middle» (Voegelin 1999: 41).6
Hermeneutics is the science of this displacement.

      5. Voegelin illustrates the paradox of narrative with the example of beginning to write a book.
Nothing in the process of writing is pre–determined (e.g. the ﬁrst sentence says nothing about the
ﬁnal form of the work). The narrative is composed of its materials — ﬁrst sentence, chapter, book,
and the social debate to which it responds — but, each of these relentlessly points beyond itself (e.g.
the sentence points before itself to authorial intentions and the social debate that provoked it, and
beyond itself to the book chapter etc.). For Voegelin, no narrative can exist without this relationship
to what it points to (Voegelin 1999: 27–8).
      6. In his meditation, Voegelin illustrates the radically unstoppable displacement from beginning
to beginning: «By now the Beginning has wandered from the opening of the chapter to its end,
from the end of the chapter to its whole, from the whole to the English language as the means of
communication between reader and writer, and from the process of communication in English to a
philosophers’ language that communicates among the participants in the millennial process of the
quest for truth. And still the way of the beginning has not reached the end that would be intelligible as
its true beginning; for the appearance of a ‘philosophers’ language’ raises new questions concerning
a problem that begins to look rather like a complex of problems» (Voegelin 1999: 28–9). Note the
82      Eno Trimçev


    The paradoxical deﬁnition of all human acts recalls, of course, the ubiq-
uitous paradox of politics in post–foundationalist theory. Consequently, just
like for other post–foundationalists, for Voegelin no founding act stands
alone as an absolute beginning. Since all human acts have a plural structure,
the singular, divine Legislator is dethroned. Human beings, says Voegelin,
«encounter a plurality of middles, validating a plurality of quests, telling a
plurality of stories, all having valid beginnings». And plurality is not merely
a theoretical presupposition; it is an empirically veriﬁable «structure in real-
ity» (Voegelin 1999: 43). If truth — like all human things — is encountered
only experientially, and experience is never singular (cf. Voegelin 1978: 179),
then truth unfolds only in plurality rather than from a singular source in or
even outside of time.
    The very displacement in time which undercuts the possibility of an
objective, singular ﬁrst act, however, opens the possibility of the retrospective
constitution of a meaningful ﬁrst act. Voegelin illustrates this point with the
best candidate for a singular founding act — «where the Beginning makes
its beginning» (Voegelin 1999: 33) — namely the act of creation in Genesis I.
Even this ﬁrst beginning, says Voegelin, shares the narrative structure of all
beginnings. Insofar as Genesis narrates the divine command, it is bound to
make the divine appear humanely:
    The authors of Genesis I, we prefer to assume, were human beings of
the same kind as we are; they had to face the same kind of reality, with the
same kind of consciousness, as we do; and when, in their pursuit of truth,
they put down their words on whatever material, they had to raise, and to
cope with, the same questions we confront when we put down our words
(Voegelin 1999: 33–4).
    The task of its authors was to ﬁnd the language symbols that adequately
express the formative movement that founds the world; Genesis 1:2 re-
sponds with the symbols of «the ruach, of God, or rather of a plural divinity,
elohim» (Voegelin 1999: 34) moving over and giving shape to an «emptiness»
or a «formless waste» (tohu). As Voegelin notes, tohu is no material nothing;
it is «neither nothing nor not–nothing» (Voegelin 1999: 22) It is not noth-
ing, for then no creative evocation would be necessary. Indeed, there is a
presumption in the Genesis text that the evocative act of God encountered
some «passive resistance» (Voegelin 1999: 34) from the «formless waste».
Yet, it is nothing because it is experienced as unreal after the founding act.
The crucial point of Voegelin’s exegesis is that pre–creational reality qua
Gestalt–less tohu comes into being only retrospectively.


nature of that displacement from the apparent narrative materials to philosophical speculation, which
shifts reality «from the position of an intended object to that of a subject» (Voegelin 1990c: 29–30).
              Pathways to the Problem of Founding in Contemporary Political Thought          83


   If God’s speech is a literal ﬁrst, why then — or, better, to whom —
asks Voegelin, does He speak? It seems that He speaks necessarily: «The
spoken word [«Light be! Light became». Genesis 1:3 — E.T.], it appears, is
more than a mere sign signifying something; it is a power in reality that
evokes structures in reality by naming them» (Voegelin 1999: 33). Like all
founders, this founder must put the founding act into words before an
audience capable of hearing Him:
   If the story is to evoke authoritatively the order of a social ﬁeld, the word
must be spoken with an authority recognizable as such by the men to whom
the appeal is addressed; the appeal will have no authority of truth unless it
speaks with an authority commonly present in everybody’s consciousness,
however inarticulate, deformed, or suppressed the consciousness in the
concrete case may be (Voegelin 1999: 40).
   Hence, the story «cannot begin unless it starts in the middle» (Voegelin
1999: 41). Even the divine founding, it seems, must conform to the narrative
structure of all foundings and convey its truth through «an aura of analogy
with the human process» (Voegelin 1999: 34).
   God’s speech act founds by clearing a space for human acts. Its paradoxic
nature consists in the fact that it is simultaneously an act like all human acts
that will proceed it and the ﬁrst act which makes them all possible — the
paradox of founding. Indeed, the text succeeds only insofar as it illumines
how the divine act overﬂows its apparent, objective boundaries (Voegelin
1999: 34–5).7 In order to be understood, Genesis I must be read symbolically.


4. Founding re–found

Voegelin’s preservation of the post–foundationalist transformation of the
founding problem, I argue, consists of a sublation; it aﬃrms the philosophi-
cal nature of the problem as well as its phenomenal rescue from dissolution
into ordinary politics. This double–rescue is mirrored in the doubled–up
nature of the science appropriate to foundings — what Lefort calls «political
philosophy» understood as a sublation of political science as the science
appropriate to phenomena proper and «pure thought» (Lefort 2000: XL)
organized solely on the principle of inner consistency. From Voegelin’s per-
spective, however, this science of «forms of society» (1988: 11) — or, of the
diﬀerence that brings them to light — is not a new (post–foundationalist or
other) political philosophy, but political philosophy as it ﬁrst emerged in the
Platonic tradition. In other words, Voegelin’s intervention opens the way to
a transformation of our relationship to the tradition of political philosophy

   7. Recall the common religious prohibition against the visible iconic depiction of God.
84      Eno Trimçev


away from its foundationalist self–interpretation as the articulation of the
ground and the post– and anti–foundationalist critique of that ground.
    The upshot of Voegelin’s paradox of narrative is that (1) every phenome-
nal beginning is embedded in further narrational contexts — i.e. in a Beyond
— and (2) the narrative and the Beyond to which it points have diﬀerent
structures. The former calls for interpretative, empirical work while the
latter requires philosophy to make that diﬀerence transparent. Narrative,
namely, has an irreducible, objective and apparent dimension which the
Beyond, as «unobjectiﬁable diﬀerence» (de Beistegui 2004: x), lacks. How-
ever, while this structural diﬀerence between Appearances and their Other
requires philosophising, for Voegelin philosophising must remain bound
to the Appearanes in order not to make of the Beyond what it is not: a
free–ﬂoating object of thought, independent of the experience that gives
rise to it. The Beyond thus falls within the domain of empirical study; it
is, an «exegetic, not descriptive» term (Voegelin 1990b: 185; cf. Heidegger
1997: 43). Yet by being a structure that cannot be collapsed into the narrative
materials simply, it cannot be thought by positivistic scientism. Appropri-
ately, this doubled nature presents itself under a double–name: political
philosophy.
    The diﬀerence between a narrative and what it points to is equivalent to
the traditional diﬀerence between Appearance and Being;8 or, what seems to
be and what is. Crucially for us, nowhere does this diﬀerence emerge with
more clarity than in a founding act. As an extraordinary ﬁrst appearance
with «nothing whatsoever to hold on to» (Arendt 1973: 206), a founding act
cannot gesture unproblematically beyond itself to other appearances like
it — for it does not so much presuppose them but acts as their «clearing»
(Agamben 2004, 50 ﬀ.; Heidegger 1994: 379). Therefore, the displacement
that is crucial to make sense of all appearances is particularly tricky in
the case of founding acts for, as ﬁrst appearances, they cannot be simply
displaced along historical time. The kind of positivistic scientism that looks
for the prior causes of the event in time therefore will not do.
    These reﬂections allow us to diﬀerentiate between founding and rev-
olution. As already noted, revolutions have a more apparent three–stage
form. This is suggested also by their causes — a non–exhaustive list includes
ideology, class, modernization (Pincus 2011), institutional regime form and
performance, demography, ecology (Goldstone 1991) and external factors
such as war (Walt 1996) — which all have a strongly phenomenal dimension.
Indeed, the very partisan division of the literature into acclamatoryand nega-

    8. Plato’s Socrates alludes to the congruence of the Beyond and Being of human things when
he designates the site of Being as «[t]he place beyond heaven» (Plato 1995: 247c); cf., Plato 1991: 508
and the analysis of epekeina in Voegelin 1999: 30–31.
                Pathways to the Problem of Founding in Contemporary Political Thought                85


tory camps (Kollmorgen, Bartels and Stopinska 2007: 10) points to a visible,
phenomenal form that is missing in the case of foundings. Accordingly,
explanations of a revolution may follow the course of events as they unfold
in historical time, which is precisely the way not to recognize a founding.
    On the other hand, a founding act is that species of the genus narrative
that is unable to unproblematically gesture beyond itself to others of its
genus; it is the species of ﬁrst speeches and deeds.9 The semiotic name for
this species is ‘symbol.’ The paradox — of founding, politics and narrative —
that we have been unfolding comes at a rest here, in the paradox that deﬁnes
a symbol.10 On one hand, symbols are phenomenal appearances that stand,
as it were, by themselves; diﬀerently than a sign, a symbol «displays itself
with all it has created» (Tindall 1955: 19–20). On the other hand, symbols
do not have to resemble their referent or Beyond (e.g. ﬁsh as symbol for
Christ). It is in fact more appropriate if they do not, for a symbol is an
«exact reference to something indeﬁnite» (Tindall 1955: 6) which we cannot
exhaust in words, i.e. convert into an appearance.
    An act or event, then, is discovered to be foundational when the hermeneu-
tic eﬀort is constrained to become philosophical.In these cases, the hermeneu-
tic displacement happens symbolically through thinking rather than in his-
torical time through the investigation of prior causes, actors and events. The
conjunction of philosophy to founding is made even more appropriate if phi-
losophy is understood as the inquiry into the symbolic nature of existence
through «the creation of an order of symbols through which man’s position
in the world is understood» (Voegelin 2002: 83). In this account, symbols
are nothing but «carriers of a truth about nonexistent reality» (Voegelin
1990c: 52) (e.g. Christ). It is the experience of what is not visible, however,
that orders appearances by making possible their recognition (cf. Augustine
1998: 12.28). According to Voegelin, the philosophical tradition ought to
be undrestood as talk of this symbolic referent through symbols. Not only
then is philosophy appropriate to the problem of founding, but it is appro-
priate insofar as it is not merely abstract logic but concretely metaphysical
understood as the «process in which a philosopher explicates in rational
symbols his various experiences, especially the experiences of transcen-
dence» (Voegelin 2007: 187). And these experiences, for Voegelin, are an
empirical fact of order explicated in his ﬁve–volume Order and History.
    But the recovery of the theoretical nature of the founding problem also
recovers the phenomena of founding acts. If, indeed, a founding act does

    9. We may recognize foundings even without being able to trace them back to particular
phenomenal acts. For an excellent literary example, see the recognition of police captain Stres in
Kadare (2010: 139ﬀ.).
   10. Note that it is far easier to think and describe, say, politics free of its paradox; one would be
hard pressed, however, to do the same with symbol.
86    Eno Trimçev


not easily gesture beyond itself to other acts — if founding suggests prima
facie ﬁxity as a discrete event in historical time — we, now, let it emerge
by way of a retrospective account that displaces the original account of
founding that has been handed over to us. Founding, then, is when it is
other than what it seemed to be; it is achieved — or found, as it were — in the
hermeneutical eﬀort of understanding. That is, it is no longer the founders
then, but the scholar, story–teller, or political partisan now that founds. Two
things follow in comparison to revolutions. First, we may be surprised by
the retrospective uncovering a founding moment of whose existence we
were not aware. This cannot be the case with revolutions. Second, founding
demands of us to move in the exact opposite temporal dimension than
revolution. That is, to ﬁnd out whether a revolution constitutes a founding,
we cannot proceed simply to unfold its three–stage form in historical time.
    It is the nature of the materials as «traces in the world of sense percep-
tion» (Voegelin 1990c: 53) that commands this retrospective displacement.
If they are taken for what they are, i.e. symbols — «the exterior residue of
an original full truth comprising both the experience and its articulation»
(Voegelin 1990c: 53) — they must be re–evoked by those seeking to under-
stand them. But, as it is clear by now, to re–evoke symbols is to decisively
move beyond them towards what they gesture. The techniques of this dis-
placement in historiography are many and well–known; what counts here
is that their mobilization excludes their mimetic retelling.
    A clear example of this phenomenal displacement which has a long tradi-
tion in historiography is, I think, Jules Michelet’s naïve «republican–romantic»
account of the French Revolution in History of the French Revolution as Jacques
Rancière tells it (Rancière 1994: 42–56). Michelet’s account restores the event-
ful nature of the Revolution by doubly displacing it (1) in phenomenal time
and; (2) in symbolic space. More specifically, the displacement occurs: a) in
time–space — from Bastille and Versailles to the peaceful Festival of Unity;
b) in speech away from «les mots» of the documentary evidence to its own
invented «narrative discourse»; c) in the causes of founding, away from the
recognized causes, whether material — the misery of the sans culottes, the
arrogance of Versailles — or theoretical — Rousseau’s volonté générale, the
hybris of the philosophes — to an uncaused event, and; d) in the symbolic
result of what is founded: France the «incarnated abstraction» of Michelet’s
account which cannot be superimposed on the real France. Michelet achieves
his founding, Rancière tells us, by resolutely avoiding the logic of mimesis
that continuously haunts historiography.
    Finally, in this thought–movement beyond what appears to be we may note
the ground common to both philosophizing and founding. For both, the
philosopher and the founder, at stake is the «right order in human existence»
(Voegelin 1990c: 53). If founding is to be seen in light of its symbolic nature,
               Pathways to the Problem of Founding in Contemporary Political Thought   87


it is neither a contract, nor an act of constitution–making, or still less a
rightist putsch or leftist revolution; it is nothing more or less than the
transformation of the prior substance into something new. The task of the
founder is indeed that of Rousseau’s Legislator: the movement from untruth
(what seems to be) to truth (what is and should be).11 It thus consists of a
doubled experience of resistance to what is and creation of what ought to be;
a displacement of reality tout court through its symbolic re–evocation.
    But this doubled experience is what, for Voegelin, lies at the founding
moment of Western political philosophy. If philosophy is to be understood
as a quest for truth — one of many types of such quest — then it must
be «a movement of resistance to the prevalent disorder» (Voegelin 1999:
39; cf. also Hollweck 2012: 111–2). Plato’s dialogues, for example, may be
understood as his act of resistance to the apparent order surrounding him;
an act which led him to found doubly:
    Philosophy [. . . ] has its origin in the resistance of the soul to its destruc-
tion by society. Philosophy in this sense, as an act of resistance illuminated
by conceptual understanding, has two functions for Plato. It is ﬁrst, and
most importantly, an act of salvation for himself and others, in that the
evocation of right order and its reconstitution in his own soul becomes the
substantive center of a new community which, by its existence, relieves
the pressure of the surrounding corrupt society. Under this aspect Plato is
the founder of the community of philosophers that lives through the ages.
Philosophy is, second, an act of judgment—we remember the messenger
to mankind sent from Hades by the Judges. Since the order of the soul
is recaptured through resistance to the surrounding disorder, the pairs of
concepts that illuminate the act of resistance develop into the criteria (in the
pregnant sense of instruments or standards of judgment) of social order and
disorder. Under this second aspect Plato is the founder of political science
(Voegelin 1990a: 123).
    The act of philosophical judgment is, simultaneously, an act of political
opposition. It does not, however, stand in perfect symmetry to other political
acts in the order it opposes — like, say, a socialist to a free market ideologue.
Plato’s response to the prevalent disorder founds right order. The salviﬁc
act constitutes a turning–around (periagoge) from one to the other (Voegelin
1990a: 169–70) through education whose «proper result is not merely a new
intellectual perspective, but a new way of life» (Heilke 1994: 736). It is in
this newly–found order that we, for better or worse, continue to participate
(cf. Voegelin’s analysis of the situation of «[t]he Western philosopher in the
twentieth century» in Voegelin 1990c: 64ﬀ.).


   11. Recall the ﬁgure of the founding–prophet in history.
88      Eno Trimçev


    In this sense, both philosopher and founder are «quintessentially au-
thor[s] of political presuppositions» (Wolin 1981: 401). It is, perhaps, a telling
coincidence that the two philosophers most commonly associated with
founding in the tradition of Western political philosophy — Machiavelli and
Plato — also moved away from the abstract logical paradox. Machiavelli,
the political thinker most concerned with foundings, brought the narrative
form of political theorizing to the tradition. The eﬀort to understand found-
ings, which began with the aim of advising the Prince, spurred a thinking
movement that theoretically illumined the whole political dynamic. Simi-
larly, when Plato, the founder of the tradition, turned to politics, he got his
Socrates to found and found repeatedly in the Republic and the Laws. And is
not the ﬁnal founding of the «pattern in speech of a good city» (Plato 1991:
472e)the displacement of the actual city of Athens which, like the luxurious
city (Plato 1991; 372c–376e), has become feverish in pursuit of money and
power towards what it ought to become, i.e. the re–founding of Athens?12
Both founding thinkers are constrained by the subject matter to reconcile
politics with philosophy in a manner other than what is politically — or
apparently — available.


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