In other words, Lefort is saying, if his theorization of democracy seems to be nourished by psychoanalysis, this is only proper, since psychoanalysis was originally nourished by the experience of democracy.

One might expect that psychoanalysis would demur from this position, but in fact it is in full accord. Setting aside, for the moment, the great works of Freud, Totem and Taboo, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Civilization and its Discontents, works which attempt to theorize the modern (as opposed to the classical, predemocratic) phenomenon of the crowd, I will simply draw your attention to the fact that one of the founding facts of psychoanalysis, i.e., primary repression, is a clear registration of the founding fact of democracy: that it is no longer possible completely to determine the image of the social whole, "the substance of the body politic." Starting from the enigmatic notion of anticathexis  which is the process that defines primary repression  not only is the complete hypercathexis of the social doomed to fail, but so, in addition, is the total withdrawal of cathexis from the social onto the ego. In Freud's structural description, some libidinal fraction always remains as left-over to de-complete each image, that of the individual ego as well as that of "the people." The bodily ego and the body politic both break up, modern man becomes "lost in the crowd."

[...]

From [Foucault's] angle the paradox of modern power (it subjects all, but is wielded by no one) begins to look quite familiar. Is this not the same paradox which is manifest in scientific statements, maxims, the l9th century realist novel, that entire class of statements whose badge of truth is their erasure of all the traces of enunciation? If, despite all the well-meaning and careful attempts by Foucault and others to dispel the "paranoid" interpretations of his theory, modern power, as he describes it, still seems inescapable, then this is surely the result of the fact that by announcing themselves in such a neutral, general form (that is, as coming from nowhere), the discourses of power seem to embrace everyone in their address.

[...] We are left with the crucial and obvious question: what is the difference between taking desire literally and taking a statement literally?

What makes this question crucial is the fact that neither Lefort nor psychoanalysis posits a subject 'outside' history or society; each assumes, rather, that the subject is completely absorbed in it. And yet neither makes the subject the idiot of history by taking his statements literally, that is, by reducing them to their historical referent. When instead one reads the subject's 'desire' literally, one adds nothing to his statements, except, as we mentioned, the grain which is nothing positive. The grain "has no civil identity, no personality;" it is in no way equivalent to the "accent of an era, a class, or a regime." In brief, it is "not personal; it expresses nothing" of the subject who speaks.