Lefort Marches On

My first book purchase of 2008, thanks to Paul Anderson over at Gauche, is Claude Lefort's Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy. In the Comments section of the post below, I hubristically suggested one or two texts that might contribute to a new left for the 21st century. Even though Lefort's writing is frequently difficult, what he tells us about the past, what he knows, and what he remembers are essential to the creation of a new "new left" if it is not to make the same mistakes as both the old, "old left" and the old "new left." This is a book that I am sure won't receive the attention it deserves. Or perhaps it's fairer to say that the level of attention it receives is an indication of how much or how little we deserve.