Constitutive Division, Savage Democracy and Anarchism

To what extent can democracy be conceived of as ‘savage’? Does the savagery in question have anything to do with those primitive societies that anthropologists talk about? Claude Lefort, by theorising the constitutive division of the social, and Miguel Abensour, by insisting on the principle of anarchy that negatively affects any positive order, have in fact a very modern conception of the savage that refers to the irruption and conflict that are so many notions taken in a meaning precisely averted by the savages that we find notably in Pierre Clastres. And yet the savage, in his rejection of social division (and therefore of the state and social classes), still has many things to remind us about the possibility of a society free of relations of domination. By acknowledging the need for conflict and plurality that marks our modernity when it is not caught up in the fantasy of totalitarianism, it then becomes possible to conceive of a new order that is not reduced to negativity, and yet is in the full force of the term anarchist. A new savage order, perhaps, but one that goes beyond the archaic savage as well as savage democracy by affirming the possibility of positivity without archè.