Giuseppina Mecchia
Few philosophers have entertained a more complex relation to the history of philosophy, both in terms of aesthetics and of political thought, than Jacques Rancière. His rigorous engagement with this tradition has allowed him to powerfully critique it, forcing us to reconsider what is at stake when intellectuals assume a position of authority in the name of their philosophical, and more generally theoretical, credentials. Rancière is ultimately able to show us that, in political philosophy, what always had to be defended, in the most different times and places, was the position of the philosopher himself, as bearer of a knowledge inaccessible to people outside specific pedagogical situations. For Rancière, this presupposed inaccessibility is not only a conceptual blind spot but also a historical fallacy.
In the following pages we shall follow three main lines of enquiry within Rancière’s treatment of the philosophical tradition: the first will be his chronological point of entry into philosophical “disagreements”, that is, the Marxist tradition; the second, the general philosophical heritage common to all Western “apprentices in philosophy”, that is, the Greco-Roman Classics and the modern representatives of political philosophy from Hobbes to Sartre; the third and final line will try to situate Rancière with respect to the politics and philosophies of postmodernity.
Rancière shows us how, time and again, even extremely different philosophers tend to assume similar postures when faced with the independence of equal human beings claiming the same ability to reason as his or her own. It is the persistence and the freedom of a “people” newly defined as speaking subject that presents philosophy with its “poor”, and calls it back to the equality of minds and bodies acting on the scene of history as the sole foundation for a renewed democratic ideal.
As previous chapters have shown, Rancière came into contact with Marxism in the circle of Louis Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure. In La Leçon d’Althusser, however, he attempted to definitively “emancipate” himself not only from Althusser himself but more generally from the stranglehold that the French Communist Party was still trying to exert on master and disciples alike. Whether this emancipation implied an irrevocable distancing from Marxist theory is a much more difficult issue. Rancière’s philosophical discourse evolved in a way that makes of Marxism only one of the many foundation stones on which to build a startlingly original conceptual framework. This new conceptual construction implies a decisive rethinking of some of Marx’s own assumptions, particularly his extant belief in the scientific nature of social, economic and political analysis, as well as his use of a revised form of Hegelian dialectic that sees history largely as the manifestation of unconscious processes of actualization. It is precisely in Althusser’s Lesson that Rancière’s new conceptual landscape starts to take shape. If Rancière, however, does not appear, in this book, completely ungrateful towards his master, it is because the abjuration of Marxism was not his main political and philosophical focus.
One could even contend that one of the stakes of this first book was, in fact, to rescue several elements of Marx’s lesson from Althusser’s – and the Communist Party’s – version of it: one of Rancière’s tactics is to radically historicize supposedly “scientific” Marxist categories. One of the difficulties implicit in Althusser’s political position between 1968 and the early 1970s was his inability to incorporate in his theoretical thought the fact that during the 1960s class composition had already undergone radical changes, and that theories of class struggle needed to be revised in view of present historical developments. Although perfectly aware of historical determinations, Althusser wrote as if the “working class” – also called the proletariat – and the “petty bourgeoisie” had not changed, in both economical and cultural terms. In turn, this explains Althusser’s hesitancy to attribute full agency to the lower classes independently of the theoretical and organizational support provided by the Communist Party’s intelligentsia. This is precisely the point at which Rancière intervenes, denouncing the implicit elitism of this brand of Marxist philosophy, which betrayed the very subjects that it claimed to liberate.
The tendency to treat Marx’s descriptive categories as if they could ever be immutable concepts was another recurrent temptation for Althusser. His “voluntary servitude” as the Party’s intellectual established once and for all Rancière’s mistrust of an interpretation of the political as an ordering of minds and bodies, an ordering that could not but be nefarious both to historical agency and to philosophical thought: “philosophy entered into politics as one can enter into a religion: to expiate its sins” (LA 111, my trans.). This is also why Althusser, “in the last analysis”, still thought of the students who mobilized in 1968 as ideological representatives of the “petty bourgeoisie” described by Marx in the mid-nineteenth century. For Althusser, only the workers were meaningful fighters in the class struggle between the owners of capital and its exploited underlings.
What Rancière can no longer accept is the vision of knowledge promoted by Althusser, who, unwittingly, reproduced a distinction between intellectual and productive forces – the infamous structure and superstructure – that other Marxist thinkers, and Antonio Gram-sci in particular, had been undermining for a long time. For Rancière, it is not the original assignation of places within the social structure that determines the political and epistemic potential of a person or of a group of people, but rather the knowledge and the struggle that they consciously adopt as the foundation of their political demands.
This kind of position questions the very concept of ideology, even before emerging theories of postmodern societies and “cognitive” labour would render it particularly obsolete. For Rancière, it was already necessary to take into account the actual historical instances of autonomous political intervention on the part of the exploited classes who, since the very institution of the political arena, were able to make their voices heard even in extremely hostile ideological structures.
Gramsci’s work, which was translated and published in French during the 1950s and whose reception by the French Communist Party was not uncontroversial, remains a largely understudied reference for both Althusser and Rancière. Arguably, though, Gramsci’s study of cultural formations and of the political agency exerted by politically and economically subordinate classes is a vital precedent for the understanding of the “democratic” agon appearing in Rancière’s later works. The Sardinian intellectual recommended and embraced the study both of folklore and of contemporary popular culture, making full use of historical, cultural and anthropological data. The proletariat as a social class is radically de-economicized by Gramsci, and its participation in the creation, conservation and transformation of cultural hegemonies occupies a pivotal role in his understanding of political struggle. In this respect, when Rancière said that it was necessary, at the end of the 1970s, to subtract the discourse on the working class produced by the French managerial and bureaucratic elites from “the economical necessity whose principle has been borrowed from the Marxist tradition” (SP 17, my trans.), Gramsci seemed to have expressed that necessity already in the 1920s.
Gramsci also defined the nature and modalities of intellectual labour in terms that are surprisingly close to Rancière’s later positions:
It must first be shown that all men are “philosophers”, by defining the limits and the characteristics of the “spontaneous philosophy” which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in: 1. Language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just words grammatically devoid of content; 2.“common sense” and “good sense”; 3. …ways of seeing and acting, which are collectively bound together under the name of “folklore”.
(Gramsci 1996: 325)
The emphasis placed on the recognition that all men participate in the elaboration of thought and social life through their linguistic competence and social interactions cannot fail to evoke the self-teaching students and proletarian workers that occupy the centre stage of The Nights of Labour and The Ignorant Schoolmaster. By his recognition that the proletariat is a full cultural and epistemic actor, one can say that Gramsci had already presented the Philosopher with his Poor. Gramsci, operating in the context of the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Revolution and the subsequent foundation of the European Communist Parties, remained a Leninist, as he predicated the necessity of an institution such as the Party as the medium through which the intellectual potential of the proletariat could be realized in a revolutionary action. For Rancière, such mediation coming from the outside always risks becoming an obstacle to emancipative action. It is through the domain of aesthetics, social participation and abstract thought that emancipation is expressed as a fact and that its political potential comes to be realized. It is in these participative and dis-identificatory moments – in terms of economic and social assignation of status – that the passive victims of power become “a people” as historical subject. While this identification is neither stable nor predictable, it is nonetheless indisputably real when it occurs as public performance of one’s ability to participate in any language-based human activity, be it politics, poetry or the fine arts. The Philosopher, therefore, should understand that his own role is not indispensable in the people’s history, and that philosophy can never present itself as the knowledge of a truth that could not be shared by anyone else.
It is in search of these “spontaneous philosophers” and poets that Rancière abandoned, for a time, the theoretical disputes tied to the communist official thinkers in order to plunge in the archives of the French workers’ publications dating from the mid-nineteenth century. What Rancière recognized in these “archives of the proletarian dream” reminds us of what Gramsci also said: “All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals” (1996: 304). For the accredited philosophers, for the mediatic intellectual, the most disconcerting part of class struggle, Rancière will argue, is not the one that sees the people fight for an improvement in wages or better parliamentary representation: the proletarian is only too readily recognized as an economically disadvantaged subject. What has proved inconceivable for many accredited thinkers and philosophers is the poor’s mental and affective equality with their self-declared masters and superiors, even though this equality is the only rational foundation of any democratic constitution.
Going against the grain both of Marxist and anti-Marxist thought, Rancière is still willing to maintain some of his attachment to Marx himself, but only to the extent that he can purloin his texts not only from Althusser but also from the various parties and factions that used them as a guide for instituting “scientific” political programmes and to legitimize their own role as intellectual and political elites. The implication that only the bearer of the scientific awareness not only of capitalist exploitation but also of the laws of its historical unfolding can assess the opportunity and the success of the poor’s struggles is the pitfall of Marxist theory.
In The Philosopher and his Poor, Rancière proposes a paradoxical reading of Marx, arguing that for him already, at least in certain parts of his work, it was actually aesthetic and intellectual engagement that mattered most, as tools to dis-identify oneself from a pre-assigned social role. Not unlike the “reactionary renter Flaubert” (PP 169), who entered the impersonal world of fiction to the point of tearing himself away from his gender- and class-based social determinations, Marx is said to have slowly abandoned his own identification with the First International as “communist intellectual”. Precisely when the bourgeois were ready to see in Marx an agitator, Marx becomes a “scientist” and steps back from his more established role in order to devote himself to the writing of Capital: since intellectual endeavours are always profoundly disruptive of social assignations, Marx “was not a member of his own party” (PP 174).
Marx had famously presented Philosophy (in the face of Proudhon’s egalitarian theory) with its Poor. For Rancière, Marx himself still had to be presented with his own Poor: the people who, forgetful of their assigned place in society, stubbornly continue to speak as human beings radically equal to anyone else.
In Disagreement, Rancière pursues his critique of Marxist economicism and the theory of ideology into a critique of contemporary sociology. In so far as they assert the supremacy of the social in all political conflict, critical sociologists also elevate themselves to the status of bearers of a “truth” inaccessible to those experiencing the social structures. When Rancière introduced in 2006 the second French edition of The Philosopher and his Poor, he openly recognized that the book that had prompted him to write it had been La Distinction, originally published by Pierre Bourdieu in 1981. Bourdieu occupies an important role in Rancière’s argument, since after having dealt with Plato and Marx he shifts his interest toward two prominent figures in twentieth-century thought who still occupy what he calls “Marx’s horizon”: Jean-Paul Sartre and Pierre Bourdieu.
Taking the reader through a vertiginous excursus in the history of political philosophy, Rancière shows us how, far from deconstructing Plato’s unwillingness to accept the free workers – the “artisans” of the Republic – as philosophical, political and even aesthetic subjects, Bourdieu actually ends up reproducing the Platonic interdiction, presenting it in even more extreme, quasi-absolute terms. While criticizing bourgeois forms of knowledge and even philosophy as a symbolic violence through which the ruling classes reproduce their own supremacy, sociology neutralizes all pedagogical, political and aesthetic recourse against the reproduction of the hierarchical structure of society: “[the sociologist] transforms in a necessity of the social body what Plato the philosopher had presented as the necessary ‘lie’ for the founding of a legal inferiority whose reproduction would anyway also be insured by its empirical reality” (PP viii).
In a way, even if sociology considers itself as a “human science”, it fails to attribute full subjectivity to the objects of its enquiry, and therefore is literally incapable of conceiving the possibility of the political and aesthetic domains as an expression of the absolute equality of every speaking subject. This is why Rancière is extremely critical of the political use of sociological datas, as this science has become “the final form taken by the … philosophical project of achieving politics by doing away with it” (D 92).
In that respect, the Marxist tradition is still presented, in later works, as closer to Rancière’s concerns, since the theory of class struggle does stress the subjective role of all players on the socioeconomic stage. The intermittent nature of historical and political subjectivity had been asserted by Marx, at least in the way that Rancière wants to read him. As the German expatriate concerned himself on the one hand with the practice of revolutionary insurrections in contemporary France, Germany and England and on the other scientifically explaining why they failed in the 1830s and 1840s, he proceeded to
deconstruct the social and economical figure of the worker, who needs to recognize herself as a “proletarian” in order to achieve historical subjectivity within the existing organization of Capital. No one is a “proletarian:, that is a historical subject, at all moments in their life: only when the “conjuncture” is right does this historical subject come to life.
(D 90)
Even Sartre, this most sympathetically undisciplined of modern French philosophers, is seen by Rancière as a victim both of the sociological mirage and of a kind of dialectical thought that forbids him to renounce the belief in a supra-personal historical necessity that remains invisible to “practico-inert” subjectivities. Even this staunch believer in existential freedom cannot bring himself to concede that if such a human faculty existed, it would equally belong to all human subjects. The only entity capable to enact the “continuous creation” (WHO 139) of dialectical realization is once again the Party, which in the 1950s Sartre saw as a dialectical mediation between two negativities: the bad faith of the philosopher, always tainted by the contact with the petty bourgeoisie which legitimates his knowledge, and the exhaustion of the worker, who cannot independently become a historical agent because s/he lacks the time and the energy necessary to disentangle herself from her social determinations.
Moreover, Sartre’s apparent “modesty” in his awareness of the philosopher’s bad faith retains the egotistical posture historically associated with philosophy’s practitioners. In his Critique of Dialectical Reason, workers’ relations are apprehended by “the philosopher at his window” (PP 144). While the workers are prisoners of their worked matter, the philosopher who observes them knows that only by belonging to a “group” will they again conquer the power to perform a “pure Act”. But the same philosopher – who after all had witnessed the rise of Stalinism and the repressive side of the Soviet socialist state – also thinks that he knows the reasons for the proletariat’s supposed historical failures: the workers do not see the dialectical nature of historical processes. In the mind of the frustrated philosopher, the workers’ repeated travails mirror his own loftier impotence: while the latter does not have the lived experience that would allow him to become a truly revolutionary subject, the former does not have the leisure to reflect. Clearly, the worker does not benefit at all by his assumption in such a degraded understanding of historical subjectivity, always tainted by blindness and impotence. Should not then the Philosopher speak for himself, and leave the Poor alone? Finally, according to Rancière, the only common ground between the philosopher and his poor is philosophically enunciated by Sartre as blindness and impotence. The philosopher becomes then a sort of deforming mirror-image for an imagined worker who truly does not benefit at all by his assumption into such a degraded form of political subjectivity.
In The Philosopher and his Poor, Rancière makes of Plato the inaugural classical reference that will serve as the basis for his ulterior critique of political philosophy. However, it is in the preface to Disagreement that we find another self-assessment on the part of Rancière with respect to his understanding of political philosophy. When, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, French leftist intellectuals seemed to have abandoned not only Marxism but also all reliance on “social” explanations of the political process, Rancière did not exult, because what emerged was an even more dangerous trend, consisting in a supposed return to “purely” philosophical investigations of the political field. Thence a return to the “classics”, and more precisely to Plato and Aristotle as early thinkers of democracy:
This return poses a few problems, however. When not limited to comment on certain texts, famous or forgotten, from out of its own history, this rejuvenated political philosophy seems most unwilling to go beyond the usual assortments of arguments trotted out by any state administration in thinking about democracy and the law … In short, the main aim seems to be to ensure communication between the classical doctrines and the usual forms of state legitimization we know as liberal democracies.
(D viii)
The alleged triumph of the “liberal” model of democratic organization over the so-called “socialist states” is the historical background against which Rancière wanted to raise a dissenting voice: when “political scientists” heralded the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy, it was essential to reiterate that the claim to historical subjectivity is always not only a possibility, but a real though excessively rare actuality periodically emerging in the most different forms.
In order to tackle the new paradigm, Rancière retraced the modalities of the often nefarious encounter between politics and philosophy in classical models. He shows that the stakes of political philosophy have not fundamentally changed since the time of Plato and Aristotle, who first tried to come to terms with the historical reality of the demos as political actor. In fact, the clarity of their perception of what was at stake in the philosophical intervention on the scene of politics was often blurred by later thinkers, who all tried to theorize current forms of “state legitimization”.
The differences between Plato and Aristotle help Rancière to identify two different but equally anti-democratic discursive modes within the field of political philosophy: the first he calls archipolitics, derives from Plato and is aimed at defining the principles of an ideal political arrangement devised by the “best” of society; the second he calls parapolitics, inspired by Aristotle and defines the rules of governing an inherently unruly and undesirable “body politics”. Both these models found their followers in modernity, but they and their inheritors fail to understand their own insufficiencies when outlining the dynamics of political subjectivation.
Aristotle took Athens’s democratic constitution as a de facto reality whose faulty nature derives essentially from the fact that it has ordered society into different but politically equivalent constituencies, who can claim a part in the polis without a just attribution of the proportional value that they create in it. Any autochton – that is, a person born in the polis – who is not a slave or a woman is a part of the citizenry, whose voice will carry equal weight in the public assembly independently of his inherent abilities.
The people who in Aristotle are excluded a priori from the polis are precisely those more directly engaged in the production of economic goods: whether slaves and women have or do not have a fully developed intellect, and therefore the ability to participate in public debates, is not so much a matter of fact, as of social necessity. Slavery and the exclusion of women continued to function in the same way well into the nineteenth century, and their consequences are still with us today. Even when manual labour was no longer performed by slaves or indentured servants, Rancière shows how the “worker” was still conceived as not being a fully competent linguistic subject even by its Marxist defenders. From antiquity to postmodernity, the Philosopher never took his Poor seriously. In this sense, all limitations of citizenship functioned in ancient and modern societies as a convenient reduction of the actors involved in the political agon. The oligarchic nature of the original forms of democratic government is often forgotten. Ran-cière helps us remember how, from the very beginning, the equality of minds and bodies was never fully expressed in any historical form of representative democracy and never completely embraced by the philosophers of politics.
In Rancière’s account, Aristotle sees the problem of democracy mostly as an issue of assigning value: “the pure and the impure are able to blend their effects. But how can they basically be compared with each other?” (D 7). Since nobody seems able to attribute such absolute value in a secular state, even the “ oligoi” and the “ aristoi” – that is, the wealthiest and the most accomplished individuals – will have to be part of inherently imperfect and contingent calculations trying to assign to each his rightful position within the representative bodies of the republic. In this way, politics becomes the art of giving to each one a “part” in the state, but the paradoxical nature of this arrangement is that in a democracy, a part is juridically attributed to those who have “no part” in it, that is, to people who do not have either the wealth or the superior qualities judged necessary to participate in fully rational political deliberations. The philosopher, then, is left with the task of lamenting this inevitable inadequacy, where knowledge and truth seem constantly betrayed in the political agon by actors who are neither the “best” nor the most “virtuous”.
Plato is read by Rancière, both in the Republic and in the Laws, as describing Athens’s current form of democratic government as a profoundly un-philosophical political arrangement. The Athenian democracy is incapable of mediating between the absolute value of the Law and the contingent and often undignified particularities of its subjects. The discourse of the Law, which the philosophers and the rulers cooperate to establish, is betrayed by its historical incarnation in the democratic constitution. Paradoxically, the democratic principle stating the representative equality of unequal constituents of the democratic state makes it vulnerable to injustice, corruption and even anarchy. According to Plato, only the best should govern, while the other inhabitants of the polis should be content with the virtue of “ sophrosyne”, that is, the basic wisdom of literally “minding one’s own business” while the really virtuous people – educated to become such from childhood – will take care of the state. The Philosopher becomes pedagogue and advisor to the rulers. From this point of view, it appears that the discipline of political philosophy itself is deeply compromised in its commitment to the truth because of its own reliance on the enlightened rulers who, for a time at least, consent to lend it their ear.
According to Rancière, the modern republican ideal, as it was embodied in the USA and then in other Western democracies, is constantly devising and enforcing “an education that would harmonize laws and behavior, the system of institutional forms and the dispositions of the social body” (HD 72). Even when the transcendent tendencies of Platonic theory have been replaced with the more “realist” spirit of Aristotle, the mistrust of governments with respect to their constituents remains the same. Rancière considers the belief in a knowable, generalized notion of human nature dividing humanity between different levels of political capacity as one of the basic tenets of modern political philosophy.
Foremost among the modern thinkers pursuing the tradition of political philosophy, Hobbes also anchored his political-philosophical meditations in the link between the state’s constitution and general characteristics of human nature. Hobbes’s positions are particularly interesting with respect to Rancière because he paradoxically starts from a principle dear to the latter – the natural equality of all men – in order to reach starkly different conclusions. Precisely because men are intellectually not that different from one another, competition and conflict are the main characters of the state of nature: if men enter a political covenant, it is precisely to protect themselves from the deadly potentialities of human equality, “that condition which is called Warre; … a warre, as is of every man, against every man” (1997: 70). In Hobbes, the philosopher appears once again, and even more radically than for the Ancients, as the denouncer of equality. With Hobbes is enshrined the philosopher’s mission of helping the ruler keep his fellow human beings in check. A new, pressing concern makes its way into political philosophy: security, as the main motivation behind the renunciation to one’s own decisional and deadly powers in the name of the Commonwealth.
For Hobbes and his many followers, the actual form of government that the common will adopt in order to ensure the conditions for social peace and prosperity seems to be of much lesser consequence. What needs to be achieved is transformation of the equal subjects of the Multitude into a single juridical Person able to express and enforce a common will. In the De Cive, Hobbes goes into describing different forms of “dominion” – democratic, aristocratic and monarchic – but for him what really matters is the establishment of sovereignty. From Rancière’s perspective, however, sovereignty itself, as absolute power of life and death, is in fact a philosophical fallacy, since the insuppress-ible equality of all subjects, conveniently repressed and forgotten by modern and postmodern political philosophers, will always find a way to historical emergence. In history, however rarely, “a sphere of appearance of the demos is created, an element of kratos, the power of the people, exists” (D 88).
Rancière parts decisively from Hobbes and other moderns – Rousseau, of course, but also twentieth-century conservative thinkers of sovereignty like Carl Schmitt – in his rejection of the foundational nature of a theoretical “covenant” that would reduce conflicts to their minimum and ideally extinguish them in the name of security and commerce. What changes in Rancière is the valuation of equality, which is no longer considered a permanent threat to public order, but as the sole and welcome guarantee that this order cannot and will not ever become a fully realized totality. Efficiency and personal safety are indeed always compromised by political conflict, but far from decrying this phenomenon, Rancière embraces it while rejecting all hypostatized notions of sovereignty. For Rancière, the philosophers of sovereignty make a necessity of contingent, historically construed power structures. As a result, political philosophy always risks supporting totalitarian projects.
Rousseau’s friendlier assessment of human equality and fundamental questioning concerning the ontological immateriality of social inequalities appears much closer to Rancière, and echoes of the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality can be heard throughout his works. On the other hand, Rousseau still falls into the traps of modern political philosophy when, in The Social Contract, he reduces the political space to a contractual agreement where equality will no longer need to be regularly demonstrated as it is already carried out by the collective sovereign. As Rancière says, “Rousseau is in agreement with the Hobbesian tautology of sovereignty: sovereignty rests solely on itself, for beyond it there are merely individuals” (D 78).
Generationally and historically, Rancière belongs fully to the postmodern era. However, postmodernism is constantly challenged in his texts. Armed with the solid “realism” deriving on the one hand from the classic Aristotelian notions of citizenship and democratic participation and on the other from the history of class struggle, Rancière does not conflate the philosophical deconstruction of historical narratives with the theoretical annihilation of the political space.
By contrast with postmodernist sociology (in particular Jean Beaudrillard), Rancière is not interested in theorizing the masses. Politically, they do not exist for him, since they are not a “subject” of political action but only the object of an abjectifying philosophical reconstruction. Once again, sociology becomes an instrument for keeping the people outside of the philosophical arena, since according to postmodern philosophers the people in fact no longer exists. Equality is all but forgotten in an apocalyptic Weltanschauung that makes even the Althusserian notion of ideology look tame and open to historical contingencies. What Baudrillard calls the “inert matter of the social” (Baudrillard 1994: 3) had in fact already been theorized at the peak of the modern era in classical sociological theories (Le Bon, Durkheim, Tarde). Baudrillard himself, at an earlier stage of his reflection, had expressed the need to deconstruct the myth of the masses when he said that “the term mass is not a concept. It is a leitmotiv of political demagogy” (Baudrillard 1983: 4). The danger with this kind of focus on the disembodiment brought about by mass medias or – more recently – by the diffusion on a massive scale of digital information technologies, is that it slips easily into a conservative, pessimistic analysis of the possibilities for political sub-jectivation in contemporary societies. This is the reason for Rancière’s recent demystification of theories of simulacra in his work on cinema and digital aesthetics. The Future of the Image argues precisely that our apprehension of visual data is deeply linked to linguistic functions and subject to critical reception by an “emancipated spectator”.
Already at the end of the 1970s, Jean-François Lyotard had understood that the postmodern deconstruction of modern forms of knowledge and the dawn of the new digital era were inseparable from a political reflection on society and hierarchical structures of power. Lyotard was Rancière’s senior by over a quarter-century. His political engagement during the Algerian War and later the events of May ‘68, as well as his philosophical activity in a group such as “Socialisme ou Barbarie” made him one of the leading figures in the French intellectual landscape to whom Rancière would appear to have been closest. This makes Lyotard’s strong disinvestment in any project remotely resembling socialist or “proletarian”-centred movements even more significant, because this move away from politics to philosophy is precisely the anti-democratic step that Rancière judges dangerous and misguided.
When Lyotard started articulating his critique of knowledge, in the The Postmodern Condition, he identified two main ways of representing the social bond: one that considers society as a self-regulating system and resembles a cybernetic network, and another one that considers society as always “divided in two” (Lyotard 1984: 11). The first tendency is technocratic and unitary in nature, while the second retraces in class conflict a fundamental social constituent. Lyotard famously rejected the traditionally Marxist oppositional perspectives and theorized as post-modernity a cultural form where machines and technocratic oligarchies are making opposition itself an outdated model for thinking the social mechanism and thence the political scene. What appears in Lyotard’s analysis is nothing less than the disappearance of political struggles.
Postmodernity does not allow social disputes, disagreements in Rancière’s sense of the world, but only endless language-games that are still “agonistic” (Lyotard 1984: 16) in nature, but in a sterilized, abstract manner, since language is postulated as a purely self-referential activity. The social bond founded by these agons is not really threatened by them, as in fact they represent its very foundation. The risk of disembowelling the contents of the agon to the point of making political action completely unthinkable remains constant in this kind of approach to postmodernity. This explains why a few years later Rancière rejected any coincidence between Lyotard’s “différend” and his own “disagreement”. As Rancière himself states, politics is a matter of subjective recognition, of being able to recognize the opponent as such, as being an equal part of the same political universe:
Disagreement clearly has not to do with words alone. It generally bears on the very situation in which speaking parties find themselves. In this, disagreement differs from what Jean-Frangois Lyotard has conceptualized as differend. Disagreement is not concerned with issues such as the heterogeneity of regimes of sentences.
(D xi)
For Rancière, Lyotard and his followers have made of postmodernity something decisively different from a historical category dependent on precise economical and cultural dynamics. Postmodernism can become a trans-historical approach to knowledge that in its renunciation to “grand narratives” and deconstruction of subjectivity runs the risk of dismissing the actual and continued persistence of political struggles. Notwithstanding his or her rejection of the philosopher’s authority to speak for the other, the postmodern intellectual risks forgetting that the other is already speaking, and much too easily condemns him to the sublime silence of suffering. It is Rancière, and not Lyotard, who makes the very concept of philosophical authority obsolete in his absolute claim for equality and agency for all historical enactors of political conflict. In The Future of the Image, Lyotard’s paradigmatically postmodern reconstruction of the Jews as the bearers of the ineffability of suffering and of artistic un-representability that as such needed to be silenced in the Holocaust, is violently attacked by Rancière, because it turns a historical event into “a law of the psychic apparatus” (FI 134). Nothing of the “concrete historical figures of a people or civilization” (ibid.) is deemed worthy of reflection. Philosophy, once again, presents itself as the theoretical enemy of language, and in its postmodern incarnation it even dismantles the very notion of historical event, as it connects it to unconscious psychic mechanisms that end up emptying out not only politics, but also art.
Equally distant from Rancière’s positions are other strands of postmodern political philosophy, and in particular any account of the subaltern as sacrificial victim ontologically inscribed in the socius. What Giorgio Agamben compellingly described in the 1990s as homo sacer – a figure going back to ancient Greece, but epitomized in our times by the Jews caught in the Nazi regime – will never be, ontologically, a subject of politics: thence, once again, the “nihilistic” horizon that inscribes itself as the unsurpassable limit of this approach to postmodernity. For all of its conceptual value, this kind of “philosophical persona” makes of the political space a homogeneous surface that alterity can never dis-integrate but only harden even further.
For Rancière the universal value attributed to this model is not only historically inaccurate, but politically nefarious. The designation of a part of the population as expendable in the name of society is always inscribed in a “local” dispute, and politics is the universal name of the dispute, not of its victims.
Politics is the art of warped deductions and mixed identities. It is the art of the local and singular construction of cases of universality. Such construction is only possible as long as the singularity of the wrong – the singularity of the local argument and expression of law – is … separate from the naked relationship between humanity and inhumanity.
(D 139)
In Rancière’s analysis, the designation of someone as homo sacer is always localized and it is a name and a function attributed to a subject who, far from accepting it, tries to reject it in refusing the identity attributed to him. This is why politics is different from religion, for only in the latter are sacrificial roles legitimated by a transcendent reference. In politics, the stripping of one’s citizen’s rights in order to be reduced to naked life, simple zoas, is not an ontological necessity, but a political strategy that can be challenged in multiple fashions, depending on how much political and juridical room is left for such a resistance. The apocalyptic, quasi-mystical “dérives” implicit in Agamben’s discourse are then another risk undergone by political philosophy “in its nihilistic age” (D 123–39). In his essay “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man”, Rancière deepens his critique of Agamben, showing how the latter still relies on absolutist theorists of sovereignty derived from Hobbes and his modern followers such as Schmitt, and then conflates the totalitarian state with Michel Foucault’s theories of the modern democratic state as biopolitical apparatus. In Agamben, nobody fully escapes the space of the camps, because the camps are modernity itself.
For Rancière, this latter-day philosophical position “would prove quite effective for depoliticizing matters on power and repression and setting them in a sphere of exceptionality that is no longer political … situated beyond the reach of political dissensus” (WHO 299). The infinite injustice of the state in Agamben, the inhuman alterity that threatens all public space in Lyotard: finally, our postmodern philosophers sanction the vanity of politics and of democracy with the same conviction of their ancient and modern predecessors. Some other way of thinking is necessary if we want to “understand who is the subject of the Rights of Man” (WHO 309).
There is no eschatological, apocalyptic horizon in Rancière’s understanding of the political. Always too ready to enumerate the necessary conditions for meaningful political action – and more often, of its impossibility – philosophers pontificate while history goes on. History, in this sense, is not a grand narrative that needs to be undermined, but the material struggle for democracy that the people have undertaken since the very beginning of politics. In The Hatred of Democracy, Rancière takes one last jab at what he calls the “ imprécateurs” – the “cursers” – of democracy, who are always too ready to denounce the inadequacies of democratic forms of government because they do not see that democracy is not a form of government but the contested stake of every political arrangement.
Democracy cannot but be the object of philosophical hatred, says Rancière, because it provokes the ire both of the disappointed leftists who cannot accept that the people still do not “understand” how they are duped every day by the oligarchic, media-supported, capitalist “democracies”, and of the pessimist reactionaries who would rather have it done with the sovereignty of a people in such dire need of ethical and political guidance. Luckily, if the intellectuals do not listen to the people, the opposite is also true: while political events are indeed rare and far between, they keep occurring notwithstanding the intellectuals’ disbelief. “We don’t live in real democracies. We don’t live in concentration camps either, as certain authors, who see us all subjected to the law of exception of biopolitical governance, try to make us believe” (HD 81). The reality of the oligarchies that keep reproducing themselves in contemporary representative democracies is not contested by Rancière, but the personal freedoms dearly conquered by the people in the course of their historical struggles are still there, and from time to time they allow us to talk back to oligarchic powers in a meaningful and successful way. That political philosophy has often been unable to think this cannot but be attributed to its own lack, deriving either from elitist conceit or from political complicity with historically determined structures of power.
Paradoxically, though, it is precisely because of the fallacies of political philosophy that Rancière can end his long confrontation with the history of political philosophy and of the people’s continued interventions in their own historical existence, on a happily contrarian optimistic note. If political philosophers are still entrenched in the habit of exerting an intellectual authority that condemns them to repeating the oppressive structures of the polis, history periodically reminds them that a better pedagogical path is possible, one that builds subjects able to recognize and cultivate their equal apprehension of the world. The final passage of Hatred of Democracy constitutes the most appropriate end to our excursus:
Democracy is as bare in its relation to the power of wealth as it is to the power of kinship that today comes to assist and to rival it. It is not based on any nature of things nor guaranteed by any institutional form. It is not borne along by any historical necessity and does not bear any. It is only entrusted to the constancy of its specific acts. This can provoke fear, and so hatred, among those who are used to exercising the magisterium of thought. But among those who know how to share with anybody and everybody the equal power of intelligence, it can conversely inspire courage, and hence joy.
(HD 97)