The French Revolution and the Craft of the Liminal Void: From the Sanctity of Power to the Political Power of the Limitless Sacred

This paper argues for a political anthropological approach to the study of the French revolution. Looking at the revolution as a moment of liminality, it substantiates two interconnected points. The first is that a proper understanding of the revolutionary dynamic and its lasting effects have to engage closely with the transformation of the sacred and its relation to the existential void. Situated in post-Durkheimian sociology and post-Kantian philosophy, this argument advocates the methodological normalization of metaphysics, drawing attention to the fact that faith belongs to the symbolic, existential and representational realities of any political order, and hence also of its underlying knowledge systems. The second point argues that through the sacrifice of Louis XVI, the French revolution consecrated the ritual and existential sacrifice of the Christian Father. This historical experience is conceptualized as the people’s third body, and the new configuration of the sacred to which it gives birth is interpreted in terms of the liminal void. In this way, the French revolution is shown to constitute the transition from a political order of embodiment – participation in the divine, symbolized by the sacred royal body to a political order of bodies; participation in the liminal void, symbolized by the sacred empty place of the power of the modern democratic imagination.