Jacques Rancière (1940 - )
Publications, English translations:
The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (1989, orig. 1981)
The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991, orig. 1987)
On the Shores of Politics (1995, orig. 1990)
Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1998, orig. 1995)
“Ten Theses on Politics” (2001)
The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2004)
The Future of the Image (2007)
Hatred of Democracy (2007, orig 2005)
The Aesthetic Unconscious (2009, orig. 2001)
The Emancipated Spectator (2010, orig. 2008)
Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010)
Chronicles of Consensual Times (2010, orig. 2005)
The Politics of Literature (2011, orig. 2007)
Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double (2011, orig. 2003)
Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (2011)
Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2013, orig. 2011)
Rancière on political philosophy
• not a political philosophy
- discourses on politics, democracy, equality etc. (?)
• thesis: political philosophy (its classical aim?) is (in fact) an attempt to get rid of politics
=> the end of politics
• argument: the aim of political philosophy (since Plato) has been to resolve on a theoretical level the
question of the normative foundation of political order
- to ground the legitimacy of a political order
=> this resolution has as its aim the establishment of a political order that fulfils the demands of the
normative foundation
- what is left after this: a settled political order
=> Rancière: no politics any more, only a governmental order (≈a police order)!
Rancière on political philosophy:
• models of historical political philosophical attempts, all pointing towards the end of politics
• arkhi-politics: the establishment of a unified, all-encompassing and organised system as a justified
(reason-based) ground for the socio-political order.
- Greek: arkhê
- a government of reason
- Plato’s Politeia (The Republic)
• para-politics: the establishment of a (rational) balance between different goods.
- a rightful balance of equality and inequality, reasoned inequality
- Aristotle, the social contract tradition, Rawls (?)
- Aristotle: mixed governement: “a good polity being one in which the oligarch sees oligarchy and the
democrat democracy” (Rancière), “A constitution which is a really well-made combination of oligarchy and
democracy ought to look like both and like neither” (Aristotle, Politics, 1294b)
• meta-politics: the dominance of an overarching goal or value over politics,
- Marx: the revolution as an overcoming of conflicts and hierarchies
- of ethics over politics
- war against “the axis of evil”
• common trait: the removal or overcoming of politics, as something rooted in the insecure foundation of
the political order/the demos and the open freedom of the multitude/people
• Zizek: Ranciére’s ultra-politics: democracy (politics) as a pure act of interruption
Rancière on political philosophy
conception of politics/democracy as
disagreement (mésentente)
aesthetics
• the concept of partition (Fr. partage) of the sensible
• mésentente:
- dissension, dissensus, understanding
differently
- disagreement
• compare: Lefort on the formation of the
political as both concerned with sense and
staging
• normative outlook: (genuine?) politics as
rooted in the logic of equality
- the lack of foundation of inequality
• politics ≈ democratic politics
- divisions on the level of perception through which we
construct a conception of the situation, the world etc.
- conceptual, discursive, but having a direct effect
on/internalised in perception
- perception is always already both ‘seeing things’ and a
‘how they are seen’
• aisthesis ≈ sensual perception, perception containing
both sensual awareness and intellectual meaning,
organised perceptions containing sense or meanings
• politics and aesthetics
- the presence and relevance of partitions of the sensible
in politics
- the presence of political meanings in the arts (art,
literature, theatre, cinema)
Rancière on politics/the political
• takes place on the level of action
- at the meeting point of two heterogeneous logics
- action?  does not take place without ’human initiative’
 does not necessarily take place at all (politics is rare)
logic of politics
logic of the police
• the interruption of police logics in
the name of the equality of everyone
and anyone
- the act of raising claim of equality in
a manner that interrupts with the police
logic of governmentality
• roughly: governmental rule and administrative practices,
including the established practices of social life (culture)
• compare: Foucault’s studies of the 18th and 19th century
European discipline of the ‘science of the police’
- management of the whole, the welfare of the whole: health,
education, security etc.
- governmentality
• legitimate inequality
- the combination in actual societal life of equality of basic
rights, opportunity etc. with the actual inequalities in social
position, wealth etc.
- compare: Rawls difference principle
Rancière on the partition of the sensible (in politics)
• ‘primary’ act: a division between persons as political vs. non-political
- full beings of reason => full political rights vs. a delimitation into less rational => not full political
rights
• other acts: for example: the normative traits of world-views
phone
logos
• the voice that expresses
- pain
- pleasure
• the speech that reasons
- higher order distinctions: good-bad,
just-unjust
- justified pain, bad pleasure etc.
• Aristotle etc.
- the political animal: the animal that has the capacity for logos (rational animal)
• Rancière:
- the act of making distinctions between ‘mere expression’ (emotionality) and rational, political speech
makes up a primary partition of the sensible, and this partition is foundational for the political
community as political order
- who belong and do not belong to the political community (the people)
- distinctions within the political community itself: the establishments of legitimate rights to speak and
obligations to stay silent
- today: a distinction between non-legitimate speech and legitimate speech
Rancière on politics and equality
“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 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 it from 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” (Disagreement, p. 123)
• classical: the people as demos: those who have nothing else but/no other quality than freedom
- the wealthy, the virtuous and the people as different groups (the people as the mob the poor etc.)
- Rancière is playing with this distinction: the people is at the same time both those with nothing else
but freedom, and the whole of the people
Rancière on democracy
“democracy is neither a form of government nor a form of social life. Democracy is the institution of
politics as such, of politics as a paradox” in “Does Democracy Mean Something” (orig. 2005) in
Dissensus, p. 50
“democracy cannot consist in a set of institutions … one and the same constitution and set of laws
can be implemented in opposite ways … They can circumscribe the the sphere of the political and
restrict political agency to an activity performed by definite agents endowed with the appropriate
qualifications; or they can give way to forms of interpretation and practice that are democratic” in
“Does Democracy Mean Something” (orig. 2005) in Dissensus, p. 54
“this … does not arise from a set of institutions but consists in another distribution of the sensible,
another setting of the stage …” in “Does Democracy Mean Something” (orig. 2005) in Dissensus, p.
54
vs.
Derrida (according to Rancière):
- democracy contains an inherently unlimited capacity for self-criticism
- Derrida on auto-immunity: may give rise to anti-democratic movements, democratic government
may evoke these in order to fight (≈ un-democratically?) against them.
Lefort:
- democratic government is based on the symbolic level of democratic rights and a public space
- these need to be enacted in order to stay ‘real’
Rancière on equality
• normativity?
• the foundation of equality
- equality ≈ a similarity in value, in the value of individuals as persons
- no values in nature ≈ without a human assessment of something as valuable
• so: how does Rancière establish equality?
- an assessment of equality ≈ concerns a certain quality
- freedom: a quality that lacks any features or distinctions (a quality without a quality)
=> no ground for inequalities
=> no justified limits to demands of a basic, principled equality between persons
- thus: the justification of a (moral) right to demand basic equality between persons as political subjects
is grounded in the limitless possibility to assert the freedom of all, everyone and anyone (the demos) as
the foundation of society
=> the abolition or interruption of all qualitative distinctions between human beings
• Rancière on arithmetic and geometric equality/inequality
- arithmetic (or numeric) equality: all that are the same have the same value (in the same way as all
numbers are just numbers)
- examples: commercial exchange (all are equal units), equality before the law
=> distribution of goods according to what people do ≈> real inequality (I do this and you do that, I get
this and you get that etc.)
- geometric (or proportional) equality: equality means being in one’s right place
=> legitimate inequality: the rightness of the place provides equality, while the places themselves may be
inequal in nature (to give everyone his/her due)
- wealth, capability (virtue), expertise, desert
Rancière on the political
democratic logic of interruption in
the name of equality (politics)
oligarchic logic of governmentality (the
police)
• to reinscribe onto the stage
- the lack of secure foundation of any
government, and
- the equality (without property) of all and
everyone
• as the moment of politics
• not necessary
• management of the whole
- unification of society
- in the name of some sufficiently well defined
common goods
- hierarchy of goods (partition)
• necessary for any socio-political order
the political
- the action that sets in motion the
interruptive encounter between the two
Rancière on equality
equality as the lack of foundation for inequality
foundations for qualitative distinctions (≈inequality)?
wealth
- some are richer than others
 some have more economic
possibilities than others
freedom
heritage (natural qualities)
- some are born more well off (in
some respect) than others
virtue (inherent goodness)
- some are better (in some respect)
than others
- a propertyless property (lack of specified
content
- cannot be measured, no foundation for
comparison
 any count is a miscount
the only qualification (property) of the
demos
desert
- some deserve to have it better (in
some respect) than others
Rancière on the political
• Rancière vs. Lefort: the political is an action that interrupts the staging and the
partitions in place (not only the form of the staging and the meanings distributed)
• Rancière vs. Arendt: the political/democratic politics is not to rise above the level of
the social onto the creative level of beginning something new or of disclosing one’s own
identity in communication with others, but is the act whereby the (policeing) logic of
managing the whole is interrupted in the name of the equality of everyone and anyone.
Politics may well concern exactly the social, the main distinction is whether that is made
in the name of management or in the name of equality.
Rancière on the political (political ontology)
Lefort:
• the political is the form of the staging and the sense-giving that has come to condition the whole of
society
 neutral and descriptive account
• the staging of democracy is co-foundational with certain normative elements (human rights, public
space etc.)
Rancière:
• democratic politics is the agonistic interruption of consensus in the name of the equality of anyone
and everyone
 introduces a normative dimension as characteristic of democracy: equality, in
alignment with freedom and pluralism