The intention of Claude Lefort is not, according to the authoress, to describe concrete totalitarian systems, such as Nazism or Communism, but to make the underlying assumptions and imageries explicit. The basic phantasm of totalitarianism is supposed to be the ability to incarnate the undetermined people, which is so essential to democracy, in a certain community, and amalgamating this community with its authorities that would incarnate both law and knowledge. This logic of incarnation would be equivalent not only to the logic of unity, but also to the logic of certainty, being the product of the need to find certain, univocal answers to questions that remain forever open in democracy.
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