The French Revolution and the Craft of the Liminal Void

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.