Jacques Rancière “Figures of History”

Rancière, Jacques 2014. Figures of History. Cambridge; Malden: Polity Press.

Part 2 – Senses and figures of history
History is first an anthology of what is worthy of being memorialized. Not necessarily what was, and what witnesses testify to, but what deserves to be focused on, meditated upon, imitated, because of its greatness. Legends offer such a brand of history as much as chronicles do, and Homer more than Thucydides. No matter what has been claimed, it is not events that lie at the heart of this kind of history, but examples. (61)

Examples of fortune and misfortune, of virtue and vice. Not that far removed, in a sense, from the concern of the new history with moments and gestures that signal a way of occupying a world. Only, memorial-history doesn’t propose reading the sense of a world through that world’s signs. It proposes examples to imitate. This supposes a continuity between the scene that is worthy of being imitated and the act of imitating in its double sense: the work of the painter and the lesson drawn by the involved spectator. (62)

History secondly means a story. In a painting, a specific moment, significant for the action, commands attention. The movements of the characters converge on this central point or reflect its effect right to the outer edges of the scene. Eyes stare at it, outstretched arms direct us to it, faces broadcast its emotion, mimed conversations comment on its significance. In short, the painting itself is a story – that is, an arrangement of actions, a meaningful fable endowed with appropriate means of expression. (63)

In the meantime, a third type of history was to secure its dominion by destroying the harmony between the expressive disposition of bodies over a canvas and the effect of an exemplary grandeur communicated by the scene. This is History as an ontological power in which any ‘story’ – any represented example and any linked action – finds itself included. History as a specific mode of time, a way in which time itself is made the principle behind sequences of events and their significance. History as movement directed towards achievement of some kind, defining conditions and tasks of the moment and promises of the future, but also threats for anyone who gets the sequence of conditions and promises wrong; like the common destiny that men make for themselves but that they only make to a certain extent, since it constantly eludes them and its promises are constantly reversed as catastrophes. (66)

[…] as a matter of principle, no action or figure can ever be adequate to the sense of its movement. The distinctive feature of this form of History is that none of its scenes or figures is ever equal to it. (67)

History with a capital H is not just the power of sense to exceed action which is turned upside-down as a demonstration of non-sense, referring form to the material from which it emerges and to the gesture that pulls it from that material. History is not just the saturnine power that devours all individuality. It is also the new fabric in which each and every person’s perceptions and sensations are captured. Historical time is not just the time of great collective destinies. It is the time where anyone and anything at all make history and bear witness to history. (68-69)

Anthology of examples; arrangement of fables; historial power of necessary, common destiny; historicized fabric of the sensible. Four different types of ‘history’, at least, come together or come apart, contrast or interlace, variously reshaping the relationships between pictorial genres and the powers of figuration. (71)

But the opposite of the representational system is not the unrepresentable. The system is not, in fact, based on the sole imperative to imitate and make the image like the model. It is based on two fundamental propositions. One defines the relationships between what is represented and the forms its representation takes; the other defines the relationship between those forms and the material in which they are executed. The first rule is one of differentiation: a specific style and form are suited to a given subject – the noble style of tragedy, the epic or history painting for kings, the familiar colour of comedy or of genre painting for the little people. The second rule, on the contrary, is one of in-difference: the general laws of epresentation apply equally no matter what the material medium used in the representation, whether it be language, painted canvas or sculpted stone. (73)

The first poetics, which we might call abstract symbolist, deals the most radically with the collapse of the representational world as a whole and settles on art the historic task of replacing that world with an equivalent order: an order that produces a system of actions equivalent to the old order of mimesisand plays a role in the community equivalent to the banished vanities of representation. It contrasts the imitation of things or beings with the exact expression of the relationships that link them, and with the outline of the ‘rhythms of the idea’ that are able to serve as a foundation for a new ritual, sealing the duty that links the ‘multiple action’ of men. (75-76)

The second poetics is quite specifically dedicated to revoking the principle of the indifference of matter. It identifies the power of the work of art and of history as a bringing to light of the capacity for form and idea immanent in all matter. This poetics of nature, as ‘unconscious poem’ (Schelling), locates the work of art within the continuous movement by which matter already takes form, sketches its own idea in the folds of the mineral or the prints of the fossil and rises to ever higher forms of selfexpression and self-symbolization. Let’s agree to call this poetics, whose features are set out in the theoretical texts of Auguste Schlegel and the ‘naturalist’ works of Michelet, expressionist symbolist. (76)

[…] this poetics establishes one of the main processes by means of which the art of the twentieth century was to ‘catch up with history’ – namely, the play of metamorphoses through which what is represented, matter and form, change places and exchange their powers. (77)

The third poetics emphasizes the destruction of the relationship between form and subject. It not only plays on the equality of all those represented but, more broadly, on the multiple forms that the de-subordination of figures to the hierarchy of subjects and dispositions may take. (77)

Let’s agree to call this poetics (sur)realist to indicate the following: ‘realism’ is not a return to the triviality of real things as opposed to the conventions of representation. It is the total system of possible variations of the indicators and values of reality, of forms of connecting and disconnecting figures and stories that their destruction makes possible. (78)

The age of History, then, is not the age of a kind of painting that is driven by world catastrophe, and by its own movement, towards rarefaction and aphasia. It is rather the age of the proliferation of senses of history and the metamorphoses that allow the interplay of these to be staged. (79)

If every object immediately has the potential to become subject, form or material, this is not only, as has sometimes been suggested a bit too hastily in the age of Pop, because of its ‘documentary’ value, which turns it into a vehicle of a critical function. It is because, in the age of history, every object leads a double life, holds a potential for historicity that is at the very heart of its nature as an ordinary perceptual object. History as the sensible fabric of things is doubled by history as fate-dealing power. Freeing historyas-example and (hi)story-as-composition from their subjection to representation, it multiplies the figurative possibilities which all forms of defiguration then enjoy. And this multiplication supports the various forms of historicization of art, making compossible, or co-existent, two ‘fates for art’: the constructivist-unanimist project of ‘transforming the whole world into one gigantic work of art’ (Schwitters), but also its apparent opposite – the critical project of an art that eliminates its own lie in order to speak truthfully about the lie and the violence of the society that produces it. (80-81)

The completion and selfelimination of art go together, because it is the very particularity of history as a fate-dealing power that, in it, any existing form aims for a completion that is identical to its own elimination. And the age of History also confers upon all formless matter, just as it does on all established writing, the possibility of being turned into an element in the play of forms. The age of the anti-representation is not the age of the unrepresentable. It is the age of high realism. (81)

Charles Ramond “”Traduisez-vous les uns les autres””

Ramond, Charles 2014. « Traduisez-vous les uns les autres ». Logique, politique et anthropologie de la traduction dans Le Maître Ignorant de Jacques Rancière. Noesis 21 : 107-124.

Exact opposé d’un charlatan, Jacotot soutenait en effet que les hommes peuvent tout apprendre par eux-mêmes, sans leçons, par tâtonnements, comme les petits enfants en donnent tous les jours l’exemple en acquérant leur langue maternelle. Celui qui avait demandé que l’on inscrive sur sa tombe, au cimetière du Père Lachaise, « Je crois que Dieu a créé l’âme humaine capable de s’instruire seule et sans maître », représente pour Rancière le modèle même de « l’émancipation », c’est-à-dire la croyance première et inébranlable en l’égalité des intelligences.

L’idée de « l’égalité des intelligences », ou, ce qui revient au même, l’idée de « l’émancipation » est en effet presque palpable dans la pratique de la traduction. Deux textes sont mis en parallèle, à égalité. L’un éclaire l’autre et réciproquement s’en trouve éclairé, par un va-et-vient de l’intelligence et de l’attention. La disposition même des deux textes suggère une horizontalité bien plus qu’une verticalité : les phrases des deux textes sont à la même hauteur sur leurs pages respectives, tout est à plat. C’est déjà une image de l’égalité, c’est-à-dire d’un processus dynamique, proliférant. L’égalité est transitive : si a=b et b=c, alors a=c.

Pour Jacotot (et Rancière ne le critique jamais sur ce point), l’apprentissage de la langue maternelle , par devinettes, répétitions, essais et erreurs, pouvait et devait être considéré comme le modèle de tout apprentissage humain, et, pour commencer, comme le modèle de tout apprentissage d’une langue étrangère.

Ce qui est frappant au contraire, à la réflexion, et ce sur quoi Jacotot et Rancière attirent très justement l’attention, est le caractère tout à fait exceptionnel de l’apprentissage de la langue maternelle dans la vie de chacun de nous, et son caractère de permanente exceptionnalité. Nous ne parvenons jamais à parler ni à comprendre une autre langue aussi bien que notre langue maternelle.

L’opposition entre la langue maternelle et les autr es langues conduit ainsi à poser pour eux-mêmes les rapports entre signification et traduction. D’un côté, la signification n’existe, ne s’enlève, que sur fond de traductibilité, y compris d’auto traductibilité. Un discours non traduisible serait sans signification. C’est là une contrainte logique, donc invincible. Pour savoir si quelqu’un a compris un discours, on ne peut pas lui demander seulement de le « réciter », car une récitation ne prouve aucune compréhension. On doit donc lui demander de le « traduire », ou de le « redire à sa façon », c’est-à-dire d’une façon différente de l’original. La preuve de la compréhension, c’est-à-dire l’apparition de la signification, n’est rien d’autre que cet écart entre les deux discours. Et si cet écart de la traduction, de la glose, ou du commentaire, n’est pas présent, si le discours demeure semblable à lui-même, il ne dit simplement rien. Le sens d’un discours est donc toujours dans un autre discours.

Mais ce qui est valable pour Dasein ou Imperium aurait pu être considéré comme valable aussi pour d’autres termes de l’allemand ou du latin ; et ainsi, peu à peu, on aurait obtenu des « traductions » françaises pleine de termes allemands ou latins, donc de plus en plus « fidèles » à l’original, jusqu’à la traduction ultime, bien sûr, telle que l’évoque Borges dans Pierre Ménard auteur du Quichotte, une traduction qui aurait poussé la « fidélité » jusqu’à être exactement semblable, en tout point, à l’original, et donc à ne plus du tout en éclairer ou à en fournir le sens. Donc, au fur et à mesure que croît la fidélité de la traduction, le sens se fait d’abord de plus en plus présent, puis, paradoxalement, à partir d’un certain point, recule, s’éloigne, jusqu’à s’évanouir tout à fait.

L’expérience que nous faisons quotidiennement du sens, dans notre langue maternelle, est en effet celle de l’immédiateté et de la transparence. Nous n’avons pas besoin d’un interprète ou d’un traducteur pour comprendre ce qu’on nous dit dans la conversation courante, ni dans ce que nous lisons, du moins n’en avons-nous pas l’impression. S’il en fallait, ne se jetterait-on pas immédiatement dans une régression à l’infini, et dans une
multiplication infinie des voix, propre à rendre fou n’importe qui et à empêcher l’intelligence de quelque discours que ce soit ?

La possession de la langue maternel le ne procure donc pas toujours la compréhension des discours qui y sont tenus. L’évolution constante des vocabulaires spécialisés entraîne le recours aux manuels, aux hot-lines, aux forums de discussions, bref à un exercice constant d’herméneutique et de traduction.

Les développements considérables du modèle de la traduction, dans la suite du Maître Ignorant, ne sont donc pas, quoi qu’en dise Jacotot, une extension du modèle de l’apprentissage de la langue maternelle à celui des autres langues. Tout au contraire, le modèle de l’apprentissage d’une langue étrangère par l’exercice de la traduction sera importé dans l’apprentissage de la langue maternelle, puis, au-delà, étendu à toutes les sphères de l’expérience humaine. Pour cela, tous les discours, y compris ceux tenus dans la langue maternelle, devront pouvoir être considérés comme des traductions de bien d’autres choses que des textes : traductions de sensations, d’émotions, de culture, d’intentions, de pensées, etc.

De là sans doute la facilité avec laquelle on peut passer, comme c’est le cas chez Jacotot, de la traduction envisagée comme traduction d’un texte, à la traduction envisagée comme traduction d’autre chose qu’un texte, et introduire par là une continuité entre le textuel et le non-textuel, qui permet au modèle de la traduction de s’étendre à l’ensemble des pratiques humaines.

De façon peut-être moins moralisatrice, la théorie de la pantraductibilité développée dans Le Maître Ignorant pourrait être présentée –c’est du moins ce à quoi nous nous serons ici essayé- comme la résolution d’un faisceau de difficiles problèmes (ici, les relations entre traduction, signification et apprentissage) par la transformation en axiome (ici, la pan-traductibilité) de ce qui semblait jusque-là rendre la solution impossible.

Jacques Rancière “La démocratie est-elle à venir?”

Rancière, Jacques 2012. La démocratie est-elle à venir ? Éthique et politique chez Derrida. Les Temps Modernes, 669-670 : 157-173

La « démocratie à venir », c’est une démocratie avec quelque chose de plus, suspendue à ce « quelque chose de plus ». Il est clair que ce supplément n’est pas quelque chose qu’il faudrait apporter de l’extérieur à la démocratie ; clair aussi que la «  démocratie à venir  » ne veut pas dire la démocratie future. Cela veut dire « la démocratie comme démocratie à venir ». (158)

Le dèmos est le sujet de la politique pour autant qu’il est hétérogène au compte des parties de la société. C’est un heteron, mais un heteron d’un genre très particulier puisque son hétérogénéité est fondée sur le principe de substituabilité. Sa différence propre est l’indifférence aux différences — c’est-à-dire aux inégalités — qui constituent un ordre social. (161)

Le dissensus est l’acte qui met deux mondes, deux logiques hétérogènes, sur la même scène, dans le même monde. (161)

C’est là pour moi la dimension esthétique de la politique : la mise en scène d’un dissensus— d’un conflit entre plusieurs mondes sensibles — par des sujets qui agissent comme s’ils étaient le peuple formé par le compte incomptable des n’importe qui. (162)

C’est ainsi que je comprends le supplément démocratique : comme le principe de la politique elle-même. Je pense que l’interprétation de Derrida est toute différente. […] Mais la « démocratie à venir » n’est pas, pour lui, le supplément qui rend possible la politique. C’est un supplément à la politique. Il en est ainsi parce que sa démocratie est une démocratie sans dèmos. Dans sa vision de la politique, l’idée du sujet politique, de la capacité politique est absente. (162)

Tout comme il identifie politique et souveraineté, Derrida identifie la notion du sujet politique à celle de la fraternité. De son point de vue, il n’y a pas de rupture entre pouvoir familial et pouvoir politique. De même que l’Etat-nation est un père souverain, le sujet politique est un frère. Même le concept de citoyen dont on a abondamment usé et mésusé dans le discours politique français des vingt dernières années est sans pertinence dans sa conceptualisation. Le citoyen n’est qu’un autre nom du frère. (163)

Le point essentiel est que la fraternité signifie pour Derrida une certaine équivalence, une certaine substituabilité. En d’autres termes, la charge contre la fraternité pourrait bien être une façon de se débarrasser, sans l’affronter de face, d’un autre concept, celui d’égalité — un concept avec lequel Derrida est mal à l’aise, mais qu’il se sentirait plus mal à l’aise encore d’avoir à exclure. (163)

L’hôte est le sujet qui vient à la place du dèmos. Tel que Derrida l’entend, l’hôte signifie bien plus qu’un lien d’hospitalité qui outrepasse les frontières des Etatsnations. Ce qu’il outrepasse, en fait, c’est toutes les frontières au sein desquelles il peut y avoir réciprocité. Le personnage de l’hôte ouvre un abîme irréconciliable entre la scène du possible — ou du calculable — et la scène de l’inconditionnel — de l’impossible ou de l’incalculable. (165)

L’un des traits frappants dans l’approche derridienne de la politique, c’est la violence — et, osons le dire, le simplisme de son opposition entre l’idée de la règle et celle de la justice. Très souvent nous rencontrons dans ses écrits politiques, le plus souvent dans des termes identiques, l’affirmation que, là où il y a une règle simple, il ne peut y avoir de justice. (165-166)

S’il y a une règle, s’il y a un savoir qui fonde notre décision, ce n’est plus une décision. Comme il l’écrit dans Voyous : « On sait quel chemin prendre, on n’hésite plus, la décision ne décide plus, elle est prise d’avance et donc d’avance annulée, elle se déploie déjà, sans retard, présentement, avec l’automatisme qu’on attribue aux machines. » (166 – Derrida, Voyous ; Paris, Galilée, 2003, p. 124).

C’est ce qu’implique l’« à-venir » de la démocratie chez Derrida : la démocratie ne peut pas être présentée, même dans la figure dissensuelle du dèmos, du sujet qui fait comme s’il était le dèmos. Dans la « démocratie à venir », le « à » sépare en fait les deux termes : démocratie et venir. Il prend, à strictement parler, la place du dèmos. L’« à-venir » est l’équivalent d’un « non-présent », d’un « non-anticipable ». Le kratos de la démocratie devient alors l’akratia du dèmos. Le supplément de l’« à-venir » est un supplément à la politique. Il est subsumé sous une rationalité qui n’est pas celle de la politique. (167)

La justice inhérente à l’idée de la « démocratie à venir » est la justice de l’événement imprévisible — ou de l’imprévisible venue de l’autre. (168)

Dans ses textes des années 80 et 90, Lyotard a clairement renversé la logique du paradigme moderniste qui liait l’avant-gardisme esthétique à l’émancipation politique. Il a placé l’interprétation de l’art moderne sous le concept du sublime qu’il a interprété, à l’encontre de Kant, comme le pouvoir d’une hétéronomie irréductible qui nous met sous la dépendance de la loi de l’Autre. (169)

D’une même référence à l’Autre lévinassien, Derrida a tiré des conséquences très différentes. Il a lié la loi de l’Autre à la promesse d’une « démocratie à venir » et il a substitué cette promesse messianique à l’obéissance à la Loi. Il a donc en quelque sorte apporté un second tourà la conceptualisation éthique de l’altérité. (169)

Or Derrida lui donne un sens tout à fait inattendu : « quiconque, n’importe qui, à la limite d’ailleurs perméable entre le “qui” et le “quoi”, le vivant, le cadavre et le fantôme ». La justice, pour lui, concerne ce qui excède toute famille de semblables et de congénères. Elle doit donc excéder les limites de l’Humanité et inclure en particulier les animaux. (170)

L’autre, en ce premier sens, c’est tout être, vivant ou inerte, qui a besoin que je réponde pour lui. C’est ce que signifie la responsabilité : l’engagement envers un autre qui m’est confié et pour qui je dois répondre. Mais, en un second sens, c’est tout être, ou toute chose, qui a sur moi un pouvoir sans réciprocité. (171)

S’il faut faire reposer l’égalité politique sur l’absolue différence de Dieu, et si cette différence absolue se négocie à travers le crime, la complicité et la trahison, cela veut dire que la politique est fondée sur ce dont Derrida prétendait la délivrer, à savoir la souveraineté. Celle-ci, disait-il, est un concept théologique, transféré de la religion à la politique. Mais ce que nous présente le sacrifice sur le mont Moriah est une autre idée de la souveraineté. Cela veut dire, pour moi, que la politique derridienne reste fondée sur la théologie, même si c’est sur une sorte de théologie hérétique. Derrida n’a-t-il pas délié la politique d’une certaine théologie simplement pour la lier à une autre ? C’est, je crois, une question que nous devons laisser ouverte. (173)

Todd May “Humanism and Solidarity”

May, Todd 2013. Humanism and Solidarity. Parresia 18: 11-21.

Ultimately, I will claim that a-humanism has its limits, and that much of what we would like to promote under the banner of politics will require an inescapably humanist approach. (13)

While our specific intellectual skills may differ from one another, we are all equally capable of using those skills to communicate, to discuss, to make decisions, to take account of the world around us, and to act on the basis of all this. The presupposition of the equality of intelligence is the starting point for all politics. (15)

Equality, in challenging hierarchies, does not seek to offer another, better social partitioning than the one that is the object of challenge. To engage in politics is not to commend one police order as better than another. It is to challenge the concept of partitioning itself. The presupposition of equality does not work by offering a stabilizing set of equal roles for everyone to play; it works by undermining the hierarchies inherent in the very idea of a stabilizing set of roles. (16)

Moreover, a collective subject requires more than simply that ability. It requires co-ordinated actions with others on the basis of the expression of that ability. In order to be a member of a collective subject in political action in Rancière’s sense, I must be able to presuppose the equality of another and act alongside that other out of that presupposition. This does not require that I reflectively recognize myself as having that ability or as expressing it in my contribution to collective action. Recall that for Rancière the presupposition of equality in a political action is often “discerned,” not consciously claimed. Nevertheless, beings capable of political action through solidarity must be able to act in a mutual fashion out of that presupposition in order to form the collective subject that solidarity requires. (17)

Political solidarity is the coming together of disparate elements in a horizontal way, an assemblage in the term Deleuze uses and Bennett borrows, that gives rise to an emergent state of the system—a collective political movement. (17)

However, if we turn away from the structural similarities between solidarity and a-humanism, we see an aspect of solidarity that seems to push it into the humanist camp, namely the requirement that participants in a solidarity movement be able to presuppose the equality of others and act in a co-ordinated fashion out of that presupposition. (17)

On the one hand, if we embrace the distributive paradigm for politics, we can accord certain elements or aspects of the environment or certain non-human animals a type of justice. The cost of this is that of losing the perspective and insights that contemporary a-humanism lends us, to violate the horizontal structural approach it commends, and to engage in all of the problems that have been cited for distributive approaches to justice. On the other hand, if we embrace an approach roughly of the type Rancière recommends, we gain on a variety of political fronts but cannot realize at the level of political solidarity the horizontality contemporary a-humanism seeks. Political solidarity must yield, at some point, to a more distributive approach. While Williams may be mistaken in claiming that the only moral question in relation to other animals is how to treat them, he would not be mistaken in thinking it an important one. (19-20)

Jacques Rancière “Le tort: politique et police”

Rancière, Jacques 1995. La Mésentente : politique et philosophie. Paris : Galilée.

Le tort : politique et police (43-67)

[…] la démocratie est le régime – le mode de vie – où la voix qui n’exprime pas seulement mais procure aussi les sentiments illusoires du plaisir et de la peine usurpe les privilèges du logos qui fait reconnaître le juste et en ordonne la réalisation dans la proportion communautaire. (44)

La simple opposition des animaux logiques et des animaux phoniques n’est donc aucunement le donné sur lequel se fonderait la politique. Elle est au contraire un enjeu du litige même qui institue la politique. (44)

[…] « peuple » est le nom, la forme de subjectivation, de ce tort immémorial et toujours actuel par lequel l’ordre social se symbolise en rejetant la majorité des êtres parlants dans la nuit du silence ou le bruit animal des voix qui expriment agrément ou souffrance. (44)

[…] le logos n’est jamais simplement la parole, parce qu’il est toujours indissolublement le compte qui est fait de cette parole : le compte par lequel une émission sonore est entendue comme de la parole, apte à énoncer le juste, alors qu’une autre est seulement perçue comme du bruit signalant plaisir ou douleur, consentement ou révolte. (44-45)

[la politique :] […] une querelle sur la question de la parole elle-même. (45)

Et ils ne parlent pas parce qu’ils sont des êtres sans nom, privés de logos, c’est-à-dire d’inscription symbolique dans la cité. Ils vivent d’une vie purement individuelle qui ne transmet rien, sinon la vie elle-même, réduite à sa faculté reproductive. (45)

Mais seul le déploiement d’une scène de manifestation spécifique donne à cette égalité une effectivité. Seul ce dispositif mesure l’écart du logos à lui-même et fait effet de cette mesure en organisant un autre espace sensible où il est avéré que les plébéiens parlent comme les patriciens et que la domination de ceux-ci n’a d’autre fondement que la pure contingence de tout ordre social. (48)

Et l’aisthesis qui se manifeste dans cette parole, c’est la querelle même sur la constitution de l’aisthesis, sur le partage du sensible par lequel des corps se trouvent en communauté. (48)

La politique est d’abord le conflit sur l’existence d’une scène commune, sur l’existence et la qualité de ceux qui y sont présents. (49)

J’utiliserai donc désormais le mot police et l’adjectif policier dans ce sens élargi qui est aussi un sens « neutre », non péjoratif. Je n’identifie pas pour autant le police à ce que l’on désigne sous le nom d’ « appareil d’État ». (52)

La police est, en son essence, la loi, généralement implicite, qui définit la part ou l’absence de part des parties. Mais pour définir cela, il faut d’abord définir la configuration du sensible dans lequel les unes et les autres s’inscrivent. La police est ainsi d’abord un ordre des corps qui définit les partages entre les mode du faire, les mode d’être et les modes du dire, qui fait que tel corps sont assignés par leur nom à telle place et à telle tâche ; c’est un ordre du visible et du dicible qui fait que telle activité est visible et que telle autre ne l’est pas, que telle parole est entendue comme du discours et telle autre comme du bruit. (52)

La police n’est pas tant une « disciplinarisation » des corps qu’une règle de leur apparaître, une configuration des occupations et des propriétés des espaces où ces occupations sont distribuées. (52)

Je propose maintenant de réserver le nom de politique à une activité bien déterminée et antagonique à la première : celle qui rompt la configuration sensible où se définissent les parties et les parts ou leur absence par un présupposition qui n’y a par définition pas de place : celle d’une part des sans-part. (52-53)

Spectaculaire ou non, l’activité politique est toujours un mode de manifestation qui défait les partages sensibles de l’ordre policier par la mise en acte d’une présupposition qui lui est par principe hétérogène, celle d’une part des sans-part, laquelle manifeste elle-même, en dernière instance, la pure contingence de l’ordre, l’égalité de n’importe quel être parlant avec n’importe quel autre être parlant. Il y a de la politique quand il y a un lieu et des formes pour la rencontre entre deux processus hétérogènes. (53)

On n’oubliera pas davantage que, si la politique met en œuvre un logique entièrement hétérogène à celle de la police, elle est toujours nouée à elle. La raison en est simple. La politique n’a pas d’objets ou de question qui lui soient propres. Son seul principe, l’égalité, ne lui est pas propre et n’a rien de politique en lui-même. […] ce qui fait le caractère politique d’une action, ce n’est pas son objet ou le lieu où elle s’exerce mais uniquement sa forme, celle qui inscrit la vérification de l’égalité dans l’institution d’un litige, d’une communauté n’existant que par la division. La politique rencontre partout la police. (55)

L’égalité n’est pas un donné que la politique mette en application, une essence que la loi incarne ni un but qu’elle se propose d’atteindre. Elle n’est qu’une présupposition qui doit être discernée dans les pratiques qui la mettent en œuvre. (57)

La politique est la pratique dans laquelle la logique du trait égalitaire prend la forme du traitement d’un tort, où elle devient l’argument d’un tort principiel qui vient se nouer à tel litige déterminé dans le partage des occupations, de fonction et des places. Elle existe par des sujets ou des dispositifs de subjectivation spécifiques. (59)

La politique est affaire de sujets, ou plutôt de modes de subjectivation. Par subjectivation on entendra la production par une série d’actes d’une instance et d’une capacité d’énonciation qui n’étaient pas identifiable dans un champ d’expérience donné, dont l’identification donc va de pair avec le refiguration du champ d’expérience. (59)

La subjectivation politique produit un multiple qui n’était pas donné dans la constitution policière de la communauté, un multiple dont le compte se pose comme contradictoire avec la logique policière. […] Une mode de subjectivation ne crée pas de sujets ex nihilo. Il les crée en transformant des identités définies dans l’ordre naturel de la répartition des fonctions et des places en instances d’expérience d’un litige. (60)

Toute subjectivation est une désidentification, l’arrachement à la naturalité d’une place, l’ouverture d’un espace de sujet où n’importe qui peut se compter parce qu’il est l’espace d’un compte des incomptés, d’une mise en rapport d’une part et d’une absence de part. (60)

L’animal politique moderne est d’abord un animal littéraire, pris dans le circuit d’une littérarité qui défait les rapports entre l’ordre des mots et l’ordre des corps qui déterminaient la place de chacun. Une subjectivation politique est le produit de ces lignes de fracture multiples par lesquelles des individus et des réseaux d’individus subjectivent l’écart entre leur condition d’animaux doués de voix et la rencontre violente de l’égalité du logos. (61)

Un sujet politique, ce n’est pas un groupe qui « prend conscience » de lui-même, se donne une voix, impose son poids dans la société. C’est un opérateur qui joint et disjoint les régions, les identités, les fonctions, les capacités existant dans la configuration de l’expérience donnée, c’est-à-dire dans le nœud entre les partage de l’ordre policier et ce qui s’y est déjà inscrit d’égalité, si fragiles et fugaces que soient ces inscriptions. (65)

L’acte politique de la grève est alors de construire le rapport entre ces choses qui n’ont pas de rapport, de faire voir ensemble comme objet du litige le rapport et le non-rapport. (65)

Une subjectivation politique, c’est une capacité de produire ces scènes polémiques, ces scènes paradoxales qui font voir la contradiction de deux logiques, en posant des existences qui sont en même temps des inexistences ou des inexistences qui sont en même temps des existences. (66)

Jacques Rancière “The Politics of Aesthetics”

Rancière, Jacques 2011. The Politics of Aesthetics. London; New York: Continuum.

I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense  perception  that  simultaneously  discloses  the  existence  of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. (12)

If the reader is fond of analogy, aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense – re-examined perhaps by Foucault – as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of [14] spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. (13)

It is on the basis of this primary aesthetics that it is possible to raise the question of‘aesthetic practices’ as I understand them, that is forms of visibility that disclose artistic practices, the place they occupy, what they ‘do’ or ‘make’  from the standpoint of what is common to the community. Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’  that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility. (13)

The arts  only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible. (19)

There is first of all what I propose to call an ethical regime of images. In this regime,  art’ is not identified as such but is subsumed under the question of images. As a specific type of entity, images are the object of a twofold question: the question of their origin (and consequently their truth content) and the question of their end or purpose, the uses they are put to and the effects they result in. (20)

In this regime, it is a matter of knowing in what way images’ mode of being affects the ethos, the mode of being of individuals and communities. This question prevents art’ from individualizing itself as such. (21)

The poetic – or representative – regime of the arts breaks away from the ethical regime of images. It identifies the substance of art – or rather of the arts – in the couple poieis mimesis. The mimetic principle is not at its core a normative principle stating that art must make copies resembling their models. It is first of all a pragmatic principle that isolates, within the general domain of the arts (ways of doing and making), certain particular forms of art that produce specific entities [29] called imitations. (21)

I call this regime poetic in the sense that it identifies the arts – what the Classical Age would later call the ‘fine arts’ – within a classification of ways of doing and making, and it consequently defines proper ways of doing and making as well as means of assessing imitations. I call it representative insofar as it is the notion of representation or mimesis that organizes these ways of doing, making, seeing, and judging. (22)

A regime of visibility is at once what renders the arts autonomous and also what links this autonomy to a general order of occupations and ways of doing and making. (22)

The aesthetic regime of the arts stands in contrast with the representative regime. I call this regime aesthetic because the identification of art no longer occurs via a division within ways of doing and making, but it is based on distinguishing a sensible mode of being specific to artistic products. The word aesthetics does not refer to a theory of sensibility, taste, and pleasure for art amateurs. It strictly refers to the specific mode of being of whatever falls within the domain of art, to the mode of being of the objects of art. (22)

The aesthetic regime [33] of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific  rule,  from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres. Yet it does so by destroying the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated with art from other ways of doing and making, a barrier that separated its rules from the order of social occupations. The aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity. It simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself. (23)

Jacques Rancière “Poliitilise kunsti paradoksid”

Rancière, Jacques 2012. Poliitilise kunsti paradoksid. Vikerkaar 4-5: 99-127.

Esteetiline mõjusus tähendab nimelt niisugust mõjusust, mis tuleneb igasuguse otsesuhte peatumisest kunstiliste vormide tootmise ning kindlale publikule teatava mõju avaldamise vahel. (104)

Nõnda on esteetiline lahkulöömine tekitanud ühe eripärase mõjuvormi: mõju, mis tuleneb lahtiseotusest, sideme katkemisest kunstilise oskustöö viljade ja kindlaksmääratud ühiskondlike eesmärkide vahel; meeleliste vormide, loetavate tähenduste ja nende võimalike toimete vahel. Seda võib nimetada ka teisiti: dissensuse mõjuks. Dissensuse all ei pea ma silmas ideede või tunnete konflikti. Selleks on mitme meelelisusrežiimi konflikt. Just seeläbi hakkab kunst oma esteetilise eraldatuse režiimis puutuma poliitikasse. Sest dissensus on poliitika tuum. Tõepoolest, poliitika ei seisne esmajoones võimu teostamises ega võimuvõitluses. Poliitika raamistikku ei määratle esmajoones seadused ja institutsioonid. Esmatähtsaks poliitiliseks küsimuseks on see, milliseid objekte ja subjekte need institutsioonid ja seadused puudutavad, millised iseomased suhete vormid määratlevad poliitilise kogukonna, milliseid objekte need suhted puudutavad ning millised subjektid on võimelised neid objekte tähistama ja nende üle vaidlema. Poliitika on tegevus, mis kujundab ümber selle meelelise raamistiku, millesse ühikondlikena määratletavad objektid asetuvad. (104-105)

Poliitika tõttu kaotab meelelise evidentsuse see „loomulik“ kord, mis määrab üksikisikud ja rühmad võimu- või alluvuspositsioonile, avalikku või eraellu, omistades neile juba ette ühe või teise aja- ja ruumitüübi, need või teised olemis-, nägemis- ja eneseväljendusviisid. Selles avaliku ja privaatse jaotuses – mis on ühtlasi nähtava ja nähtamatu, kõne ja müra jaotus – omal kohal asuvate kehade loogika tähistamiseks olen ma pakkunud välja termini police. (105)

Kui esteetiline kogemus poliitikaga seondub, siis seepärast, et ka tema on määratletav dissensuse kogemusena, mis vastandub kunstitoodete mimeetilisele või eetilisele kohandamisele sotsiaalsete eesmärkidega. Kunstitooted kaotavad siin oma funktsionaalsuse, väljuvad seoste võrgustikust, mis oli andnud neile otstarbe ning ennetanud nende toimeid; neid esitatakse neutraliseeritud aegruumis ja pilgule, mis on korraga ära lõigatud igasugusest kindlapiirilisest sensomotoorsest pikendusest. Selle tulemusena ei inkorporeerita mingit teadmist, väärtust ega habitus’t, vaid – vastupidi – lahutatakse koost teatav kogemuskeha. (105)

[…] allutatute jaoks pole kunagi olnud küsimuseks, kuidas teadvustada võimumehhanisme, vaid kuidas olla midagi muud kui allumiseks kõlblik keha. (106)

Kunst ja poliitika on teineteisega seotud kui dissensuse vormid, mis kujundavad ümber meelelist ühiskogemust. Võib kõnelda poliitika esteetikast, mõeldes neid poliitilise subjektivatsiooni akte, mis määratlevad ümber selle, mis on nähtav, selle, mida nähtava kohta saab öelda, ning selle, millised subjektid on võimelised seda tegema. (107)

Kunsti poliitikaks nimetame me niisiis erisuguste loogikate põimingut. Esmajoones võiks „esteetika poliitikaks“ nimetada kunstirežiimile omaste meelekogemuste struktureerimise vormide mõju poliitilisel väljal. Kunsti esteetilises režiimis tähendab see neutraalsete ruumide moodustumist, teoste otstarbekuse kadu ning nende üldist kättesaadavust, eri aegade osalist kattumist, kujutatud teemade võrdväärsust ja teoste adressaatide anonüümsust. […] Need tingivad ka esteetilise lahutuse paradoksaalse kaaslase: kunstiteoste eneste immanentsete kriteeriumide puudumise, eraldusraja puudumise kunsti kuuluvate ja mittekuuluvate asjade vahel. Nende kahe omaduse seos määratleb teatava esteetilise demokratismi, mis ei sõltu kunstnike kavatsustest ja millel puudub kindlapiiriline mõju poliitilisele subjektivatsioonile. (107-108)

Fiktsioon ei ole kujuteldava maailma loomine vastukaaluks reaalsele maailmale. Fiktsioon on töö, mis teostab dissensust, mis muudab meelelise esitamise viise ning lausumise vorme, muutes raame, mastaape või rütme, konstrueerides uusi seoseid näivuse ja tegelikkuse, ainulise ja ühise, nähtava ja selle tähenduse vahel. See töö muudab representeeritava koordinaate. See muudab ka seda, kuidas me meelelisi sündmusi tajume, seda, kuidas me seostame neid süžeedega (sujets), ning seda, kuidas meie maailm on sündmuste ja figuuridega täidetud. (108)

Kui poliitika tavatähendus seisneb subjektide tootmises, kes annavad nimetutele hääle, siis kunstile omane poliitika esteetilises režiimis seisneb meelelise anonüümsusmaailma ning selle ja mina sääraste laadide väljatöötamises, millest tärkavad poliitiliste meie’de maailmad. (108)

Nii põimuvad „kunsti poliitika“ moodustumisel kolm loogikat: esteetilise kogemuse vormide, fiktsioonitöö ja metapoliitiliste strateegiate loogika. See põiming eeldab ühtlasi, et need kolm mõjuvormi, mida üritasin määratleda, põimuksid kokku ainulaadsel ja vastuolulisel viisil: representeerimisloogika, mis püüab mõjuda representatsioonidega, esteetiline loogika, mis mõjub representatiivsete eesmärkide peatumise kaudu, ning eetiline loogika, mis soovib, et kunsti ja poliitika vormid otseselt samastuksid. (109)

Konsensus tähistab kooskõla (aistilise) meele ja (mõistelise) meele vahel, teisisõnu, meelelise esitusviisi ja selle andmete tõlgendamise režiimi vahel. Ta märgib seda, et hoolimata meie ideede ja püüdluste kõikidest lahknevustest me tajume ühtesid ja samu asju ning anname neile ühe ja sama tähenduse. (110)

Niisiis ei suuda kunsti poliitika lahendada oma paradokse sekkumisega „reaalsesse maailma“ väljaspool kunstile määratud paiku. Kunstivälist „reaalset maailma“ ei ole olemas. On vaid ühise meelelisuse koe kurrud ja krooked, milles esteetika poliitika ja poliitika esteetika ühinevad ja lahknevad. Pole reaalsust iseeneses, vaid selle konfiguratsioonid, mis on antud meile reaalsusena, meie tajude, mõtete ja sekkumiste objektina. Reaalsus on alati fiktsioon ehk sellise ruumikonstrueerimise objekt, milles nähtav, öeldav ja tehtav omavahel sõlmuvad. See on domineeriv fiktsioon, konsensuslik fiktsioon, mis oma fiktsionaalset iseloomu eitab, lastes end pidada reaalsuseks eneseks ning vedades lihtsa eraldusjoone reaalsuse valla ning representatsioonide ja nähtumuste, arvamuste ja utoopiate valla vahele. […] Niisamuti ei ilmne kunsti suhe poliitikasse üleminekuna fiktsioonilt reaalsusse, vaid suhtena kahe fiktsiooniloomise viisi vahel. (117)

Nüüdisaegne poliitiline film tähendab võib-olla ka filmi, mida tehakse ühe teistsuguse filmi asemel, see on film, mis demonstreerib oma distantsi sellest sõnade, helide, piltide, žestide ja tunnete käibimisviisist, millele ta oma vormidega mõju võiks avaldada. (125)

Kriitiline kunst on kunst, mis teab, et tema poliitiline mõju avaldub esteetilise distantsi kaudu. Ta teab, et see mõju pole millegagi tagatud – et sellesse jääb alati osake otsustamatust. (125)

Todd May “The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière”

May, Todd 2008. The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

 

Active Equality in Contemporary Politics

It is a framework that does not speak to the elites of their obligations, but to the demos of their possibilities. It is not a discourse of duty, nor is it a discourse of rights. It is a discourse of emancipation. Unlike mainstream polit-ical theory, Rancière’s articulation of active equality is not commis-sioned by a tradition whose discussants are those who have a part. (142)

Democratic politics “is a matter of interpreting, in the theatrical sense of the word, the gap between the place where the demos exists and a place where it does not, where there are only populations, individu-als, employers and employees, heads of households and spouses, and so on.” (142; Rancière, Disagreement, 88)

Distributive theories of justice, because they concern themselves with what is owed to people, can offer people nothing more than the obligations of others. Whether those obligations are material, social, or, as with Nozick, simply obligations of non-interference, they come to us rather than from us. (144)

In a democratic politics, since the moment of active equality is at the same time and in the same gesture the moment of self-creation, hope is folded into political expression. It is a politics of hope, rather than a politics that offers the resources out of which a person may, if she overcomes her role as recipient, create a bit of hope. (144)

Hope, we are told, is economic, not polit-ical; private, not public. (145)

Democratic politics is not a spectator sport. We do not watch the theorist in reflection and become emancipated. (145)

Rancière claims that the politics of active equality cannot be institutionalized, which denies all permanency to democratic expression. (145)

Rancière writes that consensus democracy, or what he sometimes calls post-democracy, is „the paradox that, in the name of democracy, emphasizes the consen-sual practice of effacing the forms of democratic action. Postdemocracy is the government practice and conceptual legitimization of a democ-racy after the demos, a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute of the people and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay of state mechanisms and combinations of social energies and interests . . . This is the actual meaning of what is called consensus democracy.“ (146; Rancière, Disagreement, 101-102)

While in the U.S. the paring away of state services (except those associated with the military) leaves people to their own devices, Europe is more oriented toward a social safety net. Nevertheless, common to both is the view that the political sphere is subservient to the economic one. Otherwise put, capitalist economic development is the answer to questions that once may have seemed political, and the role of the state is to help create the conditions for the efficient (and, in Europe, minimally humane) functioning of a capitalist market. (147)

The technological approach to politics is not far from the traditional liberal political philosophy we considered in the first chapter. It is concerned with the distribution of goods rather than with the par-ticipation of people in the creation of their lives. (149)

Instead of acting in solidarity with those who struggle, humanitarianism places those who might struggle in the position of recipients of aid or intervention. They are to be helped because they cannot help themselves. As with Levinas’ view, it is the vulnerability of the victims that obliges us rather than their equality to us. (152)

Humanitarian assistance is, while certainly necessary at moments, profoundly apolitical. It is a counter-movement to democratic politics. And to the degree to which it substitutes itself for such a politics, the ability to act in solidarity under the banner of equality is com-promised. (152)

In any case, the intervention of states is not  with or alongside peoples (as anarchists have long recognized, states cannot do this), but for them. (153)

First, what terrorism aims at is what has been called our way of life. That way of life is defined by capitalism and liberal freedom. The struggle against terrorism is waged on behalf of a historical legacy of markets and, to one degree or another, individualism and personal liberty. Neoliberalism is, centrally, the object to be protected in the war on terrorism. (155)

He sums up this recent suspicion regarding democratic individualism as a „triple operation: it is necessary, first, to reduce democracy to a form of society; second, to identify this form of society with the reign of egalitarian individualism, subsuming under this concept all sorts of disparate properties from rampant consumerism to claims of minor-ity rights, passing along the way trade union struggles; and finally, to cash out (verser au compte) the “individualist society of the masses” thus identified with democracy in the quest for an indefinite growth that is inherent in the logic of the capitalist economy.“ (156; Rancière, La haine de la democratie, 26)

By reducing all values into market values, everything becomes a matter of personal choice. (157)

That is why, as Rancière points out, when the people do resist, as for instance when the French voted against the European Constitution in May, 2005, this is con-sidered not so much a matter of opposition as of ignorance. We can be more specific. The inequality ascribed to the people is an ignorance about economics. In a world dominated by neoliberalism, those who are not conversant with the workings of the market need to yield their political involvement to those who are. Where pol-itics is a matter of proper economic administration, only those with economic expertise are qualified to participate fully in the political realm. (159)

Rancière points out that a mobile population does not necessarily include those who have no part. (169)

The question of institutionalization is not so much of the present as of the future. It bears upon the character of what we can hope for from a democratic politics. So far, the conception of democratic pol-itics that has been proposed treats it in the context of resistance. A democratic politics, in the present but also in the past, is a dissensus from the police order. But this dissensus is not simply reactive. It does not amount only to a refusal of the police order. It is, more signifi-cantly, an expression – the expression of equality. (176)

Given the complexity of dominations, what guarantee do we have that the results of a democratic politics in one area will not result in a new form of domination arising in another? None at all. (177)

The argument is not that there cannot be a democratic political utopia, but that to envision one in any specificity (that is, aside from the general idea of expressing equal-ity) neglects both the various registers along which domination operates and the contingency that characterizes political struggle. (178)

Jacques Rancière “Dissensus”

Rancière, Jacques 2010. Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics. London; New York: Continuum.

 

Ten Theses on Politics (27-44)

Thesis 1. Politics is not the exercise of power. Politics ought to be defined on its own terms as a specific mode of action that is enacted by a specific subject and that has its own proper rationality. It is the political relationship that makes it possible to conceive of the subject of politics, not the other way around. (27)

If politics has a specificty that makes it other than a more capacious mode of grouping or a form of power characterized by its mode of legitimation, it is that it concerns a distinctive kind of subject, and that it concerns this subject in the form of a mode of relation that is proper to it. (27)

In practice, this celebration of pure politics relinquishes the virtue associated with the political good, handing it over to governmental oligarchies enlightened by their experts. This is to say that the supposed purification of the political, freed from domestic and social necessity, is tantamount to the pure and simple reduction of the political to the state (l’étatique). (28)

Politics cannot be defined on the basis of any pre-existing subject. (28)

The traditional question ’For what reason do human beings gather into political communities?’ is always already a response, resulting in the disappearance of the object it professes to be explaining or founding – that is, the form of political partaking that then vanishes in the play of elements or atoms of sociability. (29)

Thesis 2. What is specific to politics is the existence of a subject defined by its participation in contraries. Politics is a paradoxical form of action. (29)

In short, the opposition between praxis and poiesis by no means enables us to resolve the paradoxical definition of the politès. As far as the arkhê is concerned, conventional logic posits, as with everything else, the existence of a particular disposition to act that is exercised upon a particular disposition to ’be acted upon’. The logic of the arkhê thus presupposes that a determinate superiority is exercised over an equally determinate inferiority. For a political subject – and therefore for politics – to come to pass, it is necessary to break with this logic. (30)

Thesis 3. Politics is a specific break with the logic of the arkhê. It does not simply presuppose a break with the ’normal’ distribution of positions that defines who exercises power and who is subject to it. It also requires a break with the idea that there exist dispositions ’specific’ to these positions. (30)

Democracy is the specific situation in which it is the absence of entitlement that entitles one to exercise the arkhê. It is the commencement without commencement, a form of rule (commandement) that does not command. (31)

Thesis 4. Democracy is not a political regime. As a rupture in the logic of the arkhê, that is, of the anticipation of ruling in its disposition, it is the very regime of politics itself as a form of relationship that defines a specific subject. (31)

[…] the ’power of the demos’ referred to the fact that those who rule are those whose only commonality is that they have no entitlement to govern. Before being the name of a community, the demos is the name of a part of the community: the poor. But the ’poor’, precisely, does not designate an economically disadvantaged part of the population, but simply the people who do not count, who have no entitlement to exercise the power of the arkhê, none for which the might be counted. (32)

This is not a deduction but a definition. To be of the demos is to be outside of the count, to have no speech to be heard. […] The one who belongs to the demos, who speaks when he is not to speak, is the one who partakes in what he has no part in. (32)

Thesis 5. The people that comprises the subject of democracy, and thus the atomic subject of politics, is neither the collection of members of the community, nor the labouring classes of the population. It is the supplementary part in relation to every count of the parts of the population, making it possible to identify ’the count of the uncounted’ with the whole of the community. (33)

The people (demos) exists only as a rupture with the logic of arkhê, a rupture with the logic of commencement/commandment. It can be identified neither with the race of those who recognize each other as having the same beginning or birth, nor with a part or sum of the parts, of the population. The people is the supplement that disjoins the population from itself, by suspending all logics of legitimate domination. (33)

These expressions are to be understood not in a populist but in a structural sense. It is not the labouring and suffering populace that emerges on the terrain of political action and that identifies its name with that of the community. The ’all’ of the community named by democracy is an empty, supplementary part that separates the community out from the sum of the parts of the social body. This initial separation founds politics as the action of supplementary subjects, inscribed as a surplus in relation to every count of the parts of society. (33)

It is initially the people, and not the king, that has a double body. And this duality is nothing but the supplement by which politics, itself, exists as a supplement to every social (ac)count and in exception to every logic of domination. (34)

Thesis 6. If politics is the tracing of a vanishing difference with respect to the distribution of social parts and shares, it follows that its existence is by no means necessary, but that it occurs as an always provisional accident within the history of forms of domination. It also follows that the essential object of political dispute is the very existence of politics itself. (35)

Politics is by no means a reality that might be deduced from the necessities leading people to gather in communities. Politics is an exception in relation to the principles according to which this gathering occurs. (34)

Politics exists insofar as the people is not identified with a race or a population, nor the poor with a particular disadvantaged sector, nor the proletariat with a group of industrial workers, etc., but insofar as these latter are identified with subjects that inscribe, in the form of a supplement to every count of the parts of society, a specific figure of the count of the uncounted or of the part of those without part. (34)

Two ways of counting the parts of the community exists. The first counts real parts only – actual groups defined by difference in birth, and by the different functions, places and interests that make up the social body to the exclusion of every supplement. The second, ’in addition’ to this, counts a part of those without part. I call the first police and the second politics. (35)

Thesis 7. Politics stands in distinct opposition to the police. The police is a distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible) whose principle is the absence of void and of supplement. (35)

The police is not a social function but a symbolic constitution of the social. The essence of the police lies neither in repression nor even in control over the living. Its essence lies in a certain way of dividing up the sensible. I call ’distribution of the sensible’ a generally implicit law that defines the forms of partaking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed. The partition of the sensible is the dividing-up of the world (de monde), the nemein upon which the nomoi of the community are founded. This partition should be understood in the double sense of the word: on the one hand, as that which separates and excludes; on the other, as that which allows participation. A partition of the sensible refers to the manner in which a relation between a shared common (un common partagé) and the distribution of exclusive parts is determined in sensory experience. This latter form of distribution, which, by its sensory self-evidence, anticipates the distribution of part and shares (parties), itself presupposes a distribution of what is visible and what noe, of what can be head and what cannot. (36)

The essence of the police lies in a partition of the sensible that is characterized by the absence of void and of supplement: society here is made up of groups tied to specific modes of doing, to places in which these occupations are exercised, and to modes of being corresponding to these occupations and these places. […] It is the exclusion of what ’is not’ that constitutes the police-principle at the core of statist practices. (36)

Thesis 8. The essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space. It is to make the world of its subjects and its operations seen. The essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus as the presence of two worlds in one. (37)

The police is not the law which interpellates individuals […], not unless it is confused with religious subjection. It consists, before all else, in recalling the obviousness of what there is, or rather of what there is not, and its slogan is: ’Move along! There’s nothing to see here!“ (37)

Politics, by contrast, consists in transforming this space of ’moving-along’, of circulation, into a space for the appearance of a subject: the people, the workers, the citizens. It consists in re-figuring the space, that is in what is to be done, to be seen and to be named in it. It is the instituting of a dispute over the distribution of the sensible, over that nemein that founds every nomos of the community. (37)

If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing him as the bearer of signs of politicity, by not understanding what he says, by not hearing what issues from his mouth as discourse. (38)

The essence of politics is dissensus. Dissensus is not a confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself. Political demonstration makes visible that which had no reason to be see; it places one world in another […] (38)

Political argumentation is at one and the same time the demonstation of a possible world in which the argument could count as an argument, one that is addressed by a subject qualified to argue, over an identified object, to an addressee who is required to see the object and to hear the argument that he ’normally’ has no reason either to see or to hear. It is the construction of a paradoxical world that puts together two separate worlds. (39)

Politics, then, has no proper place nor any natural subjects. […] A political subject is not a group of interests or of ideas, but the operator of a particular dispositif of subjectivation and litigation through which politics comes into existence. A political demonstration is therefore always of the moment and its subjects are always precarious. A political difference is alwawys on the shore of its own disappearance: the people are always close to sinking into the sea of the population or of the race […] (39)

Thesis 9. inasmuch as the province of political philosophy lies in grounding political action in a specific mode of being, it works essentially to efface the litigiousness constitutive of politics. Philosophy effects this effacement in its very description of the world of politics. Moreover, the effectiveness of this effacement is also perpetuated in non-philosophical or anti-philosophical descriptions of the world. (40)

[…] an effort to turn democracy into a simple case of the indeterminable principle of ’the government of the strongest’, leaving no other solution but to contrast it with the government of experts (des savants). They testify to one and the same effort to place the community under a unique law of partition and to expulse the empty part of the demos from the body of the community. (40)

Both the sociological theme of the ’end of politics’ in postmodern society and the ’political’ theme of the ’return of politics’ originate in political philosophy’s initial twofold act and combine to bring about the same forgetting of politics. (42)

Thesis 10. The ’end of politics’ and the ’return of politics’ are two complementary ways of cancelling out politics in the simple relationship between a state of the social and a state of the state apparatus. ’Consensus’ is the common name given to this cancellation. (42)

The essence of consensus […] does not consist in peaceful discussion and reasonable agreement, as opposed to conflict and violence. Its essence lies in the annulment of dissensus as separation of the sensible from itself, in the nullification of surplus objects, in the reduction of the people to the sum of the parts of the social body and of the political community to the relations between the interests and aspirations of these different parts. (42)

 

Biopolitics or Politics? (91-96)

The police is that distribution of the sensible in which the effectuation of the common of the community is identified with the effectuation of the properties – resemblances and differences – that characterize bodies and their modes of aggregation. It structures perceptual space in terms of places, functions, aptitudes, etc., to the exclusion of any supplement. As far as politics is concerned, it consists – and consists alone – in the set of acts that effectuate a supplementary ’property’, a property that is biologically and anthropologically unlocatable, the equality of speaking beings. This property exists in addition to every bios. There are two contrasting structurations of the common world: one that knows only of bios (from transmission through bloodlines to the regulation of population flows); and one that empowers artifices of equality, that is, forms enacted by political subjects which re-figure the common ’given world’. Such subjects do not affirm another type of life but configure a different world-in-common. (92)

In Foucault’s ’biopolitics’, the body in question is the body as object of power and, therefore, it is localized in the police distribution of bodies and their aggregations. Foucault presents biopolitics as a specific difference in practices of power and their effects, that is, to say as a means by which power produces effects through the individualization of bodies and the socialization of populations. Now, this question is not the same as that of politics. The question of politics begins when the status of the subject able and ready to concern itself with the community becomes an issue. (92-93)

[…] while the concept of biopower seems sound, that of biopolitics is confused. Indeed Foucault uses the term biopolitics to designate things that are situated in the space that I call the police. It does not help to say that he used the terms of biopolitics and biopower interchangeably, the point is that his conception of politics is constructed around the question of power, that he was never drawn theoretically to the question of political subjectivation. (93)

In my view, it [Deleuzian vitalism, positive biopolitics (Esposito?)] amounts to an attempt to identify the question of political subjectivation with that of the forms of personal and collective individuation. For my part, I do not believe that an ontology of individuation is of any use for the theorization of political subjects. (94)

In Omnes et Singulatim, Foucault conceives of the police as an insitutional apparatus that participates in power’s control over life and bodies; while, for me, the police designates not an institution of power but a distribution of the sensible within which it becomes possible to define strategies and techniques of power. (95)

For me, the social is not a concern of power or a production of power. It is the stake of a division between politics and police. It is thereby not a univocal object – a field of relations of production or of power. (95)

 

The People or the Multitudes? (84-90)

The people in this sense is a generic name for the set of processes of subjectivation that, enacting the egalitarian trait, dispure the forms of visibility of the common and the identities, forms of belonging, partitions, etc., defined by these forms. (85)

[…] processes of subjectivation stage politics as an artifice of equality, which is itself not a ’real’ foundation, since it exists only as the enacted condition of these dispositifs of dispute. […] Politics, in this sense, is the enacted discrimination of that which, in the last instance, is placed under the name of the people: either the operation of differentiation which institutes political collectives by enacting egalitarian inconsistency or the operation of identity which reduces politics to the properties of the social body or the fantasy of the glorious body of the community. Politics always involves one people superadded to another, one people against another. (85)

[…] the stance of the multitudes is a stance for a subject of political action unmarked by separation, a ’communist’ subject in the sense that it denies the specificity of particular dispositifs or spheres of subjectivation. (86)

If the concept of the multitudes is distinct from that of the people, it is owing to an ontological claim that substantializes the egalitarian presupposition: in order not to constitute itself in oppositional, reactive terms, it holds that the principle and telos of politics has to be drawn from something other than itself. Political subjects ought to express the multiple insofar as the multiple is the very law of being. In this sense, the concept of the multitudes is part of the tradition of political philosophy, since it resides in an attempt to reduce political exceptionality to the principle of that which places beings in community. (86)

’Multitudes’ is the name for this power of superabundant being identified with the essence of the community, one which, by virtue of its superabundance, is endowed with the burden of blowing apart all barriers and of accomplishing itself in the form of a perceptible community. (87)

Jacques Rancière “Disagreement”

Rancière, Jacques 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press.

Politics in Its Nihilistic Age

[…] politics exists wherever the count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who have no part. It begins when the equality of anyone and everyone is inscribed in the liberty of the people. This liberty of the people is an empty property, an improper property through which those who are nothing purport that their group is identical to the whole of the community. Politics exists as long as singular forms of subjectification repeat the forms of the original inscription of the identity between the whole of the community and the nothing that separates itself – in other words, the sole count of its parts. Politics ceases wherever this gap no longer has any place, wherever the whole of the community is reduced to the sum of its parts with nothing left over. (123)

Realism claims to be that sane attitude of mind that sticks to observable realities. It is in fact something quite different: it is the police logic of order, which asserts, in all circumstances, that it is only doing the only thing possible to do. (132)

The present modesty of the state, as we have seen, is first of all modesty in relation to politics, in other words, hyperbolization of the normal practice of the state, which is to live off the elimination of politics. (136)

The inter of a political interesse is that of an interruption or an interval. The political community is a community of interruptions, fractures, irregular and local, through which egalitarian logic comes and divides the police community from itself. It is a community of worlds in community that are intervals of subjectification: intervals constructed between identities, between spaces and places. Political being-together is a being-between: between identities, between worlds. (137)

A political community is not the realization of a common essence or the essence of the common. It is the sharing of what is not given as being in-common: between the visible and the invisible, the near and the far, the present and the absent. This sharing assumes the construction of ties that bind the given to what is not given, the common to the private, what belongs to what does not belong. It is in this construction that common humanity argues for itself, reveals itself, and has an effect. (138)

Politics, in its specificity, is rare. It is always local and occasional. (139)