Starting from Claude Lefort's 1976 reading of Etienne de La Boétie's Discours sur la Servitude Volontaire, the purpose of this talk is to observe how Lefort's reflection on adherence to totalitarianism is nourished by the notion of voluntary servitude. After a brief passage through the reading of Lefort's "Nom d'Un", in order to extract from it the elements that can contribute to flesh out Lefort's reflection on the subject, the talk will focus on the reappearance of these formulations - voluntary servitude, the reversion of the desire for freedom into the desire for servitude - in Lefort's texts subsequent to his long essay on La Boétie, in order to relate them to Lefort's own developments on adherence to totalitarianism or on what, following Hannah Arendt, Lefort has called domination from within. From there, and in particular, from the intersection of the interrogation of voluntary servitude and the Machiavellian topos of the division of the grandi and the people that we find in the Lefortian reading of La Boétie, the question will be raised as to the way in which Lefort's interrogation can open the way to try to think different figures, different modalities of this inversion of freedom into servitude.
Presented by the Politics Department at New School for Social Research.Â
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Claudia Hilb is a professor of Political Theory at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, and a senior researcher at the National Council for Scientific Research in Argentina. Her areas of interest are modern and contemporary political theory, in which she has particularly explored the work of Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Claude Lefort, and the political-theoretical reflection on the relationship between violence and politics in Latin America, particularly in Argentina. Among her published books are Leo Strauss. El arte de leer (2004), Silencio Cuba. La izquierda latinoamericana frente al régimen de la Revolución cubana (2010), Abismos de la modernidad. Reflexiones en torno de Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort y Leo Strauss (2016) and ¿Por qué no pasan los 70? (2018).
