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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?
Keywords: political theory; Lefort, Claude; Alighieri, Dante; the One; the common
Rights: © Judith Revel© Jennifer Rushworth for this English translation. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Part of Dante’s Modernity Containing:
Preface / Christiane Frey
Translator’s Note: Translating Lefort on Dante / Jennifer Rushworth
Dante’s Modernity / Claude Lefort
Lefort/Dante: Reading, Misreading, Transforming
Title
Lefort/Dante
Subtitle
Reading, Misreading, Transforming
Author(s)
Judith Revel
Identifier
https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-16_04
Description
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?
Is Part Of
Dante’s Modernity
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
4 February 2020
Subject
political theory
Lefort, Claude
Alighieri, Dante
the One
the common
Rights
© Judith Revel© Jennifer Rushworth for this English translation
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Language
en-GB
page start
87
page end
108
Source
Claude Lefort, Dante’s Modernity: An Introduction to the ‘Monarchia’. With an Essay by Judith Revel, ed. by Christiane Frey, Manuele Gragnolati, Christoph F. E. Holzhey, and Arnd Wedemeyer, trans. by Jennifer Rushworth, Cultural Inquiry, 16 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020), pp. 87–108

References

  • Lefort, Claude, ‘Dante’s Modernity’, in Claude Lefort, Dante’s Modernity: An Introduction to the Monarchia and Its Political Thought. With an Essay by Judith Revel, ed. by Christiane Frey, Manuele Gragnolati, Christoph F. E. Holzhey, and Arnd Wedemeyer, trans. by Jennifer Rushworth, Cultural Inquiry, 16 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020), pp. 1–85 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-16_03>
  • Alighieri, Dante, Monarchy, ed. and trans. by Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), text also available online, <https://www.danteonline.it/monarchia> [accessed 5 December 2019]
  • Alighieri, Dante, Monarchia, ed. by Prue Shaw, Edizione Nazionale delle opere di Dante Alighieri a cura della Società Dantesca Italiana, V (Florence: Le Lettere, 2009), Latin text also available online, <http://www.danteonline.it/monarchia> [accessed 5 December 2019]
  • Alighieri, Dante, Convivio: A Dual-Language Critical Edition, ed. and trans. by Andrew Frisardi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)
  • Dadot, Pierre, and Christian Laval, Commun: Essai sur la révolution au XXIe siècle (Paris: La Découverte, 2014), English as Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2019)
  • Gilson, Étienne, Dante the Philosopher, trans. by David Moore (London: Sheed & Ward, 1948)
  • Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York, NY: The Penguin Press, 2004)
  • Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009) <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjsf48h>
  • Hartog, François, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. by Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) <https://doi.org/10.7312/columbia/9780231163767.001.0001>
  • Kantorowicz, Ernst H., The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)
  • La Boétie, Étienne de, Anti-Dictator: The ‘Discours sur la servitude volontaire’ of Étienne de La Boétie, Rendered into English, trans. by Harry Kurz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942)
  • Laval, Christian, Pierre Sauvêtre, and Ferhat Taylan, eds, L’Alternative du commun (Paris: Hermann, 2019)
  • Lefort, Claude, ‘Maintenant’, Libre, 1 (1977), pp. 3–28, English as ‘Then and Now’, trans. by Dick Howard, Jean Cohen, Patricia Tummons, Mark Poster, and Andrew Arato, Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Radical Thought, 36 (1978), pp. 29–42 <https://doi.org/10.3817/0678036029>
  • Lefort, Claude, ‘Le Nom d’Un’, in Étienne de La Boétie, Le Discours de la servitude volontaire, ed. by Pierre Léonard, intro. by Miguel Abensour and Marcel Gauchet, accompanying essays by Pierre Clastres and Claude Lefort, with additional texts by Félicité Lamennais, Pierre Leroux, Auguste Vermorel, Gustav Landauer, and Simone Weil (Paris: Payot, 1976), pp. 247–307
  • Revel, Judith, and Antonio Negri, ‘Inventer le commun des hommes’,  Multitudes, 31.4 (2007), pp. 5–10 <https://doi.org/10.3917/mult.031.0005>; English as ‘Inventing the Common’, transl. by N. Lavey (2008) <http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_revel5.htm> [accessed 8 December 2019]
  • Seneca, Epistles, trans. by Richard M. Gunmere, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2001)

Cite as: Judith Revel, ‘Lefort/Dante: Reading, Misreading, Transforming’, in Claude Lefort, Dante’s Modernity: An Introduction to the Monarchia, ed. by Christiane Frey, Manuele Gragnolati, Christoph F. E. Holzhey, and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 16 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020), pp. 87-108 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-16_04>