A growing interest in Claude Lefort is bringing to light his radical insights on modern democracy, totalitarianism, and human rights. While the notion perhaps most closely associated with Lefort is that of ‘the empty place of power,’ this article offers a reading of Lefort from a unique angle: his concept of the myth of the One. I demonstrate that to Lefort, the phantasmagorical appeal of the One – the desire for harmony, unity and stability – is the force that continually endangers the democratic project, while the distinctive and unavoidable characteristic of democratic society is its ‘inability’ to name itself as One – a coherent and established social self. Thus, the main challenge of society is its symbolic self-institution. The discussion illuminates Lefort’s singular stance in the study of totalitarianism (Arendt), his rejection of the imaginary (next to Castoriadis), his debt to the structuralism scheme (Lévi-Strauss), as well as his conversation with anarchist voices (La Boétie, Clastres) and with psychoanalysis (Lacan). Ultimately, what Lefort coins ‘symbolic division’ condenses the pledge of democracy to embrace a neurotic self, a bodiless body, a nameless identity in an empty space of power. As such, Lefort’s anti-myth of the One promises to be a vexing objective.

The ambition of the present volume is to explore the (dis)ordering impact of emotions and gender ideologies, or how emotions and gender transform the strengthening or weakening of social structures. This book should definitely be seen as the twin volume of Ordering Emotions in Europe, 1100-1800 also edited by Susan Broomhall (2015). In her introductory paper Broomhall asserts that "states of emotions" have structuring purposes as well as the power to affect secure social balances: "We thus explore how gender and emotions operated to effect real or perceived forms of order and disorder" (1). While states of disarray are in some of the cases studies a consequence of concrete historical events involving much instability, such as revolts, crusades, or wars, in other cases they are themselves emotions, such as anxiety caused by personal changes (such as travel, for instance). In other words, disorder can itself be a matter of feelings of alarm. Such a wide-ranging notion of "(dis)order" can be perplexing.

Contrary to most readers who have emphasized the notions of passage or liminality, I demonstrate in this study that Van Gennep’s Rites de passage is articulated around the four notions of sequences, margins, passages, and schema. Subsequently, the main claim of this article is to propose the idea of social kinesis—or social rhythm—as the crux of Van Gennep’s theory. Such a fresh reappraisal of Van Gennep is also an opportunity to show how Pierre Bourdieu sought for social laws and regularities in a rather deterministic fashion, and completely overlooked Van Gennep’s idea of motion. More importantly, this article is an invitation to reconsider Van Gennep’s epistemological approach as a bridge between the social and the life sciences. Indeed, Van Gennep’s so-called méthode des séquences emerges from a dialogue between the social sciences and biology on the one hand, and with cosmology on the other. Indeed, I illuminate how Van Gennep investigated the enigmas of social life and dynamics within the framework of his understanding of metabolism and regenerative processes.