COMMENTAIRE SUR LA PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIE ET LE MARXISME DANS L’ŒUVRE DE CLAUDE LEFORT

This article is conceived as a rather unusual investigation. On the one hand, it treats of the relations between phenomenology and Marxism in the work of the early Claude Lefort. Scholars emphasize that the amalgamation of the phenomenology and Marxism of Lefort is due to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception. But we think it does not prohibit him from applying phenomenology to the social domain. Thanks to phenomenological methods, Lefort has access both to the philosophy of history and theoretical sociology. So we try to develop the ‘social critique' of Lefort in a phenomenological sense. This article analyzes the work of the early Lefort in the context of the thought of and debates between Merleau-Ponty, Castoriadis, and Sartre. But these investigations are not only historical; the article also raises questions about the real connections between phenomenology and Marxism. The original side of our research is to associate the phenomenology of Lefort with the material phenomenology of M. Henry. So we face a double task. From one side, our objectives are historico-philosophical. We try to discover the meaning of the Lefort's phenomenological Marxism. From the other side they are phenomenological: we try to describe the phenomenon of the materiality of a social class in the aim to study the fundamental concepts of Lefort's philosophy. We investigate the problem of the class consciousness in the terms of the being of a phenomenon in the world. As a result, we have to do with the problem of a renewal of the concept of the matter and the praxis. This problem is not easy to solve in one text. But we think we have arrived at the following result: in the Russian literature Lefort is considered only as a political thinker, and we showed that he is both a political philosopher and a phenomenologist. Moreover, in a sense his phenomenological approach can be more important to elucidate social phenomena.