2.1. Marked by Sartrean existentialism
We have established, thus far, the Cartesian egalitarianism of Jacques Rancière. This commits him to an egalitarian concept of subjectivity without entailing adherence to other Cartesian principles, such as the often criticized dualism that splits thinking substance from extended substance. That is to say that Rancière maintains the principle of intellectual equality, the good sense supposed at the outset of the Discourse on the Method, without committing to Descartes’s metaphysics. Rancière appropriates this supposition of good sense from Descartes, though, as we might say, he directs it along different paths.
In this chapter, I will examine how Rancière develops a dynamic and collective account of egalitarian subjectivity through a critique of the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. I will argue that reading him with and against Sartre contributes to delineating Rancière’s concept of political subjectivity, which emerges as a collective subject, a ‘nos sumus, nos existimus,’ in opposition to policing. Whereas the standpoint of Cartesian egalitarianism begins with the individual and her relations to other individuals through forms of reciprocity and solidarity, Rancière’s politics of equality – especially as it is outlined in his landmark text, Disagreement – begins with the disruptive and irruptive power of a collective subject, a people, a demos.
Initially, it might seem that Rancière’s egalitarianism and Sartre’s existentialism – even with their respective commitments toward outlining an account of political subjectivity – have very few features in common. In his most extensive engagement with Sartre in The Philosopher and His Poor, Rancière concludes that Sartre reaffirms the Platonic injunction that each member of society must remain in a place where he or she must stay.1 In particular, he finds that Sartre persistently claims that workers’ fatigue, lack of time, and frustrations with the mute solidity of the practico-inert are obstacles to the formation of an active group out of their seriality. The problems of fatigue and lack of free time could point to the possibility of a critique of leisure time and the imposition of work under capitalism, but Rancière interprets Sartre’s iteration of this critique as the rejection of ‘the elastic intervals of autodidact freedom…in the disoriented space of pathways and dead ends where people searched not long ago for what rebellious workers and dreamers called “emancipation”’ (Rancière, 1983, 147). Consequently, these obstacles of the practico-inert prevent workers’ self-organization and necessitate an external puissance, an external activity or power, to catalyze the passive masses. The philosopher of freedom and ‘continuous creation’ requires, on Rancière’s account, a historical vanguard such as the party to forge the goals to be realized by mass politics. This verdict echoes that of Black Skin, White Masks, where Frantz Fanon argues that Sartre betrays his own principles when, in ‘Black Orpheus’ (1948a), he considers African struggle a tributary of the proletariat’s, as if the ‘historic chance’ of black struggle is a meaning already there to be taken up, rather than self-created and self-organized in lived praxis, when he forgets ‘that consciousness needs to get lost in the night of the absolute, the only condition for attaining self-consciousness’ (Fanon, 1952, 112).
Just as this is not Fanon’s last word on Sartre, neither is it Rancière’s. More recently, in several interviews and short texts, Rancière has made reference to Sartre’s work while summarizing his basic philosophical commitments.2 These comments reveal Rancière’s engagement with not only the later, political (that is, Marxist and anti-colonial) works such as the first volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960; hereafter referred to as the Critique), but also the earlier, existentialist-phenomenological philosophy of Being and Nothingness (1943). Admittedly, Rancière’s comments are both retrospective and schematic, but they are, I will argue, nonetheless instructive. They provide an impetus to reconsider Sartre’s work – from Being and Nothingness to the Critique – in light of Rancière’s politics of equality. This reconsideration is in order for two reasons. First, both Sartre and Rancière propose accounts of emancipatory political subjectivation in which subjective praxis emerges as a radical break with a given set of oppressive and exploitative social relations. Just as Rancière argues that politics is heterogeneous to policing, for Sartre, the free activity of praxis is absolutely opposed to the passive and alienated experience of the practico-inert – as he writes, ‘the free development of a praxis can only be total or totally alienated’ (Sartre, 1960, 395). This common emphasis on the subjective aspect of praxis distinguishes Sartre and Rancière from many of the more prominent poststructuralists, including those who work within post-Heideggerian French thought (Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben), Michel Foucault, and the ‘Spinozism’ of Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri.3 Establishing Rancière’s relationship to Sartre could, then, contribute to our understanding of their differences with these poststructuralist thinkers.
Nonetheless, there are important differences between Sartre’s and Rancière’s accounts of political praxis. Before discussing these differences, it is important to underline the second reason for reconsidering Sartre’s influence on Rancière: both conceptualize identity as a function or operation of oppressive or exploitative social relations, and thus, for both Rancière and Sartre (in both the Critique and Being and Nothingness), political praxis involves a disidentification with one’s previous identifications and interests. In terms of the organization of this chapter, after outlining Rancière’s egalitarian politics (in Section 2.2), I will contrapose Rancière’s criticisms of Sartre’s philosophy to Sartre’s critique of the seriality of identification, and then proceed to a reading of Being and Nothingness. Let us look first at the Critique. There, Sartre argues that identity is a serial classification of massified individuals, meaning that identity is an ‘abstract generality’ that characterizes individuals in their exteriority and separation (Sartre, 1960, 260). For Rancière, identity functions as a categorization of classes, groups, and occupations within a regime of policing. For both thinkers, politics involves a radical rupture with these established identities; as Rancière writes, echoing Marx: if classification is a crucial function of policing, politics is ‘the dissolution of all classes’ (Rancière, 1995, 18/39).
An important difference between Sartre and Rancière turns on how they conceptualize disidentification. Rancière, in Disagreement, thinks politics as a paradoxical and non-instrumental praxis, an activity with neither end nor interest other than the disruptive and transformative effects of the supposition of equality, by which he means ‘the open set of practices driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being and by the concern to test this equality’ (Rancière, 1995, 30/53). In this sense, Rancière’s account is consistent with his earlier criticisms of Sartre found in The Philosopher and His Poor, where he argues that Sartre’s account of activity results in the hyper-instrumentalization of praxis: ‘if the world’s matter is to bear the history of liberation, it must be traversed entirely by technique’ (Rancière, 1983, 155). Freedom becomes a ‘super technique,’ always turned to an ultimate end that forecloses on the intervals of autodidactic freedom that structure, on Rancière’s account, emancipatory politics. This hyper-instrumentalized praxis never escapes from either internal or external exigencies – whether Sartre is discussing the exigencies of the practico-inert, the pledged group, the organization, or ultimately, the party (1983, 140, 154).4 Rancière’s critique of Sartre turns on locating that point in revolutionary struggle that is, properly speaking, emancipatory. In short, he argues that Sartre’s dialectic of politics emphasizes the emergence of stability, organization, and the totalization of free praxis rather than that moment of disruptive emancipatory power. Therefore, Rancière’s politics of equality maintains the collective aspect of Sartre’s political subjectivity while rejecting its dialectic.
After examining Rancière’s reading of the Critique, we will turn to Sartre’s critique of identity found in Being and Nothingness. To my knowledge, Rancière’s only references to Being and Nothingness are at best oblique and cursory. Given that it establishes the tenets of Sartre’s existentialism – when Sartre considered existentialism a philosophy and not merely an ideology (Sartre, 1957b, 8) – it must be the work to which Rancière refers when, in response to a question about identity politics posed to him during an interview with the Quebecois journal Possibles in 1999, he states that ‘I must have been marked during my youth by Sartrean existentialism, meaning that every identity locks us into a role’ (Rancière, 1999, 105). Years later, he reiterates his youthful ‘Sartrean existentialism’ when he recalls that his ‘own rejection of identitarian fixations (fixations identitaires) was first satisfied in Sartrian [sic] freedom, its rejection of fixed identities, and the opposition it establishes to Being of doing things and making oneself’ (2012b, 207). Though Rancière does not provide the following examples, these brief remarks conjure, to a reader familiar with Sartre, the characters exemplifying the ‘Patterns of Bad Faith’ in Being and Nothingness, such as the man who while labouring with the ‘typical gestures’ of the café waiter is never closer to this role than an actor to Hamlet (Sartre, 1943, 103/95). Or, take the example of the woman on a date who refuses to see the double entendres of her suitor’s advances. She engages in a denial of a network of significance within – as we will know better after Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex – a woman’s situation.5 Words and bodies are treated as they are: his words are then only addressed to her personality, her intellect and her ‘full freedom’; her actions aim to be ‘what is respectful and discreet in the attitude of her companion,’ and her hand in his, when he makes his move, is ‘divorced’ from her intellect and treated by her as an inert thing rather than a gesture towards an amorous decision (Sartre, 1943, 96/90).
And yet isn’t comparing this woman and this waiter-actor with the highly politicized examples cited by Rancière discordant? What does the waiter have to do with Auguste Blanqui, who, when asked to state his profession by a court magistrate during his trial in 1832, professes that he is a proletarian? What does the woman on the date have to do with Olympe de Gouges, who, to challenge the distinctions of public and private space that exclude women from collective social practices, declares that the woman who has the right to mount the scaffold ‘must equally have the right to mount the rostrum’ (de Gouges, 1791, 91; Rancière, 2005b, 60)? What relationship can there be between Being and Nothingness, that distended manual on the courage to walk the narrow paths of freedom in a world of bad faith, absurdity, and failure, and the work of Rancière, who places the equality of intelligences and abilities at the heart of an insurgent politics that challenges the contingency of the regimes of representation that police ways of doing, being, and speaking? One might object that Rancière’s suggestion that he must have been marked by Sartrean existentialism is made in jest.6
Let us look again at the objections leveled at Sartre by Fanon and Rancière. They are based on the fact that, in certain cases, Sartre does not pursue the consequences of existentialism – that workers or Africans are considered as they are, rather than as subjects oriented toward a free or emancipatory project. Through collective practices, a people is thrown into a situation in which it must be what it is not and not be what it is. In this phrasing, I have deliberately echoed Sartre’s description of consciousness: that it ‘must necessarily be what it is not and not be what it is’ (Sartre, 1943, 120/110). This describes a dynamic through which consciousness surpasses its facticity through transcendence. The patterns of bad faith are modes of avoiding the consequences of freedom by reifying either transcendence or facticity. As Sartre states,
bad faith seeks to affirm their identity [that of transcendence and facticity] while preserving their differences. It must affirm facticity as being transcendence and transcendence as being facticity, in such a way that at the instant when a person apprehends the one, he can find himself abruptly faced with the other. (Sartre, 1943, 98/91)
The man who plays at being a waiter who is his facticity is confronted by transcendence as if it comes from without, while the woman who is her transcendence is confronted by her facticity (her embodiment) from without. With this in mind, we can return to Fanon’s and Rancière’s objections to Sartre – that workers or Africans are treated according to their facticity by Sartre (that is, workers are their fatigue, Negritude is its particularity), meaning their free project comes from without, from either the party or the proletariat.7
After addressing Rancière’s critique of Sartre, I will propose a constructive reading of Sartre and Rancière that sheds a new light on both of their respective projects.8 On the one hand, Rancière’s appropriation of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in his politics of equality can contribute to a reading of Sartre that reconstructs his project in terms of freedom and equality rather than that of authenticity. On the other hand, reading Sartre’s work will accent how Rancière’s egalitarianism utilizes the concepts of freedom, contingency and facticity. Most importantly, Sartre’s account of consciousness demonstrates that subjectivation is a dynamic and not a mode of identification – precisely as Rancière argues when he claims that politics is a dynamic of subjectivation that constitutes new ways of speaking, being and doing. To this end, in Section 2.4, I will read Being and Nothingness with a focus on the relationships between freedom, contingency, and facticity, using Sartre to demonstrate the importance of these concepts for Rancière’s egalitarianism. I will conclude, in Section 2.5, that Rancière’s claim that politics involves an ‘impossible identification’ is proposed as an alternative to Sartre’s account of praxis. In short, Rancière’s paradoxical politics involves a political subjectivation that undermines previous identities by momentarily identifying with a part of society that has no part, with this dynamic introducing new and more egalitarian ways of speaking, being, and doing into a given set of social relations.
In Disagreement, Rancière contends that politics is a practice of equality. Whereas most forms of political philosophy consider equality as a problem of institutional guarantees, Rancière proposes that we must think equality as a practice of politics, as a transitory project that rests on the supposition of the equality of intelligences and abilities of anyone and everyone, rather than as a problem of entitlements. Todd May characterizes the difference between Rancière’s egalitarianism and mainstream political theories of equality as a difference between ‘active equality’ and ‘passive equality.’ He argues that the discussions of mainstream Anglo-American political philosophy are limited to questions concerning ‘passive equality’: ‘the creation, preservation, or protection of equality by governmental institutions’ (May, 2008, 3). This institutional or distributive concept of equality, May notes, can be situated within what Rancière considers to be policing. By contrast, Rancière’s politics involves the activation or declaration of equality; ‘active equality’ is a practice of dissensus premised on the equality of intelligences that (1) declassifies the presumed organization of roles and occupations within a regime of policing by (2) declaring that each of us ‘possesses the quality of being able to consider and act upon our world in such a way as to create a life that has significance for us’ (May, 2008, 57). Like May, I do not want to suggest that institutional correctives to inequalities of wealth, access, and rights do not have their place in social practices, as many of these ‘correctives’ are concessions won through mass social struggle. But, following Rancière (among other radical thinkers), I think it is clear that distributive efforts cannot address the inequalities that structure their political foundations. To reduce equality to a problem of entitlements concedes the foundational inequalities that perpetuate the very problems that these institutional corrections attempt to redress.
How, then, do we think equality outside of the parameters of institutions and entitlements? Rancière proposes that equality is the constitutive problem of politics. On the one hand, all social relations, all inequalities, are predicated on the supposition of equality – even in situations of domination, the dominated are still able to understand how they are dominated. People must be equal as speaking beings for some to command and others to obey.9 It is worth noting, however, that theoretically speaking, the hegemonic political philosophies of these social relations – of policing – seek either to naturalize these inequalities or demonstrate their necessity, to show how the practical supposition of the equality of intelligences and abilities does not signal inclusion within the community. Recall Fanon’s discussion of the way that colonialism destroys the history of the colonized in order to convince them that they need the colonizers, hammering ‘into the heads of the indigenous population that if the colonist were to leave they would regress into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality’ (Fanon, 1961, 149).
In classical political philosophy, Rancière argues, the necessity or nature of inequality is signified by the difference between speech (the use of logos) and voice (the expression of pleasure and pain). The distinction turns on the possession of logos rather than merely its comprehension. In articulating the differences between humans, slaves, and animals, Aristotle states that, as Rancière translates it, the ‘slave is the one who participates in the community of language under the form of comprehension (aisthesis), not [under the form of] possession (hexis)’ (Rancière, 1995, 17tm/38; Aristotle, 1254b20–21). Or, take Plato, who distinguishes between the logos of the philosopher and the doxa of the demos who can be so easily swayed by sophists or by poets (Rancière, 1995, 10/29; 1983, 46). In sum, Rancière argues that these political philosophies seek to find a principle or arkhê proper to the community, a principle that also works to deny politics, which occurs in the intersection of two opposed logics: police logic and egalitarian logic.
When Rancière distinguishes between political activity and what he calls a regime of policing, he explicitly points out that the choice of the term policing is non-pejorative, and he uses it to designate systems or social mechanisms that distribute roles and activities within a given set of social relations or a given distribution of the sensible. Thus, as I mentioned in the Introduction, techniques of policing are more extensive than those assigned to a police force or penal system. Rancière also argues that policing should not be considered as a state apparatus. To speak of a state apparatus, he argues, whether it is an ideological state apparatus or a repressive state apparatus as conceptualized by Althusser, presupposes an opposition between state and society in which state apparatuses impose or command order from above society (not to mention that for Althusser the subject is ‘always-already’ interpellated by ideological state apparatuses, which forecloses on the possibility of what Rancière calls political subjectivation – though ‘science,’ for Althusser, is outside of ideology) (Althusser, 1970, 175). Instead, Rancière’s account recognizes that the policing of roles can be implemented or distributed in relatively fluid social relations, just as the destructive power of capital, through which ‘all that is solid melts into air,’ nevertheless maintains varying degrees of social stability in order to function – such as that particular unfreedom of the worker to sell her labour freely. Police logic, then, configures occupations, identities, and systems of legitimation, and organizes speaking beings according to differences while at the same time representing them as natural. Police logic is not political; instead, it is the denial of politics, insofar as it attempts to naturalize a contingent order and reduce antagonism to administration. This logic counts and orders all parts of society according to some measure or proportion, but Rancière argues that policing excludes the possibility that this count is premised on a fundamental miscount that denies that there could be a part of society with no part. Rancière names the logic of the ‘part of those who have no part,’ the logic of equality.
Egalitarian logic is the way that a collective challenges the distribution of roles and identities in society, the way that collective practice demonstrates the contingency of all regimes of inequalities. Rancière refuses the idea that there is one principle of the rationality (logos) of community. Instead, politics plays out at the intersection of two logics. Politics is the ‘activation’ (in May’s words) of the principle of equality against the hierarchical organization of policing, a practice of disidentifying with the typical roles and representations that regulate social life.10 Egalitarian logic challenges the social relations that produce these inequalities by initiating ‘polemical situations’ that contest how ‘one of the partners [that is, the police] of the interlocution refuses to recognize one of its features (its place, its object, its subjects)’ (Rancière, 1995, 56/86). Every activation of egalitarian logic then opens the political antagonism whereby the part of those who have no part contest the police order in the name of equality.
For a concrete example of such a polemical situation, we will return to the trial of Auguste Blanqui. Rancière writes:
Asked by the magistrate to give his profession, Blanqui simply replies: ‘proletarian.’ The magistrate immediately objects to this response: ‘That is not a profession,’ thereby setting himself up for copping the accused’s immediate response: ‘It is the profession of thirty million Frenchmen who live off their labor and who are deprived of political rights.’ The judge then agrees to have the court clerk list proletarian as a new ‘profession.’ (Rancière, 1995, 37/62)
Blanqui thus names a subject of a wrong, the proletariat, through subverting the accepted meaning of the word ‘profession’: while for the prosecutor ‘profession’ means a job or trade, for Blanqui it names ‘a profession of faith, a declaration of membership of a collective’ (Rancière, 1995, 38/62). Here, for Rancière, the proletariat is not a substantial class. To profess to being a proletarian names a wrong: that workers have been counted only as those with jobs or trades and not as equals of those who are not deprived of political agency or rights. On Rancière’s account, Blanqui’s testimony stages or activates the politics of dissensus (on the ‘staging’ of politics in Rancière, see Hallward, 2009). Blanqui’s claim is not merely for juridical recognition; this moment of dissensus, as Oliver Davis notes, ‘cannot be resolved by legal means alone, even if the law and statements of equality enshrined within it sometimes have a role to play’ (Davis, 2010, 83). The disagreement between Blanqui and the magistrate stages the disjunction between the interests of a particular social group and political agency. There is a disjunction between being a worker (a sociological category) and enacting a form of political agency that aims to disrupt and dissolve these categories or identifications. Within the police logic, that a ‘worker’s having a part is strictly defined by the remuneration of his work’ defines the workplace as a private domain not regulated by the functions of the public domain (Rancière, 1995, 29/52). Proletarian struggle attempts to transform the ways of work, to make of them collective practices rather than private transactions. The activation of egalitarian logic, then, opens new ways of speaking, being and doing. The part of those with no part are not purely excluded from the police order, but miscounted as being what they are (counted, for instance, as workers), not counted as equal participants in social life.
2.3. Between the practico-inert and the party
Rancière argues that the dynamic of political subjectivation begins when subjects disidentify with the roles, occupations and places assigned to them by the apparatuses of policing. While he acknowledges Foucault’s influence on his concept of policing, I think a stronger case can be made for Sartre’s. On the one hand, Rancière notes that while Foucault ‘was never drawn theoretically to the question of political subjectivation’ (Rancière, 2000, 93), Sartre attempts to explain how the practical activity of the individual, as it takes place within the field of the practico-inert, serves to reproduce the conditions of her exploitation and how the dynamic of the subjectivation of free praxis emerges out of these conditions.11 On the other hand, Sartre characterizes identity as a form of seriality, just as Rancière argues that identity is a function of policing. Rather than conceptualizing identity as a constitutive moment of subjectivity (whether identity is conceived in metaphysical terms as the subject’s substance or practically as the self-recognition of the self’s practical activity), both argue that identity is an abstract generality or role assumed within an inert or reified set of social relations – the conditions of exploitation and domination of either the practico-inert or a regime of policing. Therefore, if identity is a feature of an exploitative and inegalitarian set of social relations, political praxis must pose a radical break with these relations through a process of disidentification.
Seriality, identity and interests – in Sartre’s terms, exigencies – are all structures of what he calls the practico-inert. These structures arise as a response to scarcity, which, he argues, makes praxis intelligible. Human praxis, Sartre contends, is a negation of scarcity. In its basic form, scarcity is ‘the contingent but fundamental relation of man to Nature,’ but it is also a mediating relation of determinate historical and material conditions (Sartre, 1960, 260).12 While human praxis is an attempt to negate the fundamental form of scarcity, it often produces and reproduces historical forms of scarcity: advanced capitalist countries, for example, have until recently generally minimized the effects of environmental scarcities within their borders while producing massive inequalities in wealth between the rich and the poor within and without. At a basic level, Sartre argues that all praxis is an attempt to transform the world by negating the needs arising from scarcity. However, in many cases, the means to overcoming scarcity are determined by the structures of the practico-inert, meaning that these means coerce the individual into reproducing the conditions of her exploitation or domination.
I say coerce because Sartre argues that individual praxis is, at the outset, constrained by a set of what he calls exigencies, which arise from the structures of the practico-inert field. To state the problem in Marx’s terms from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, the worker needs to negate her basic needs, and is thus forced to enter into social relations that dispossess her of her free praxis. An exigency is precisely a demand which arises on the basis of the possibilities of the practico-inert which takes on the character of a ‘categorical imperative’ without interiority (thus this imperative is far from Kant’s concept of the categorical imperative), forced on the individual by the situation: ‘the basic form of exigency lies in the inert expectation on the part of the instrument or material, designating the worker as the Other who is expected to do certain things’ (1960, 187; 188). The individual’s praxis is determined by the inertia of worked matter and by the inertia of others, but it is also important to underline that she enters into these practico-inert relations as an other, that is, her role is identified according to its ‘abstract generality’ and interchangeability.13 More specifically, the interests of the worker are produced by structures of seriality – her interest ‘is merely a specific form of exigency’ (1960, 197).
Sartre attacks the view of classical economics that individual interests – even if they happen to be identical to the interests of other individuals – precede sociality. By contrast, Sartre argues that ‘classical economics tried to define identical interests as if they existed equally in every individual member of a group, and it did not take account of the fact that this very identity was the result of a serial process’ (1960, 205). On Sartre’s account, identity is not self-identity, the interiority of a subject or individual; instead, identity designates the exteriority and interchangeability of an individual within a serial gathering. The place of an individual, for instance, in a queue, is determined by an arbitrary factor, such as the number on a ticket, rather than according to any ‘intrinsic qualities’ (1960, 261) of the individual. In a sense, a place in a line is occupied by an individual more than an individual occupies a place in a line. In other words, a common interest produces a ‘practico-inert unity’ in a gathering that is nevertheless not oriented, as it would be in a group, by common praxis or project. Instead, seriality is organized by material exigencies. Sartre gives the example of the nineteenth century capitalist who – insofar as he has taken on a role, as he ‘is already his factory’ – is led to automate parts of his factory: the capitalist’s decisions are imposed by market factors such as competition with other capitalists, so what appears to be his interest is that of all other capitalists (‘the interests of Others’) as determined by material social structures (technical capacities, profit rates, worker unrest) (1960, 200–201). Likewise, in order to gain sustenance in a capitalist society, the worker must sell her labour-power as a commodity whose value is determined by the rate of socially necessary labour more than an individual’s particular skill set; as Marx states, the ‘value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article’ (Marx, 1867, 274). The value of labour-power is not determined by an individual’s needs or abilities, but rather the average compensation required for the upkeep of the worker (see also Sartre, 1960, 207).14 As Sartre argues, exigencies and interests work as negative pressures or constraints on individual projects – barring, until the emergence of group activity, the possibilities of free praxis. He writes: ‘Being-outside-oneself as worked materiality therefore unites under the name of interest, individuals and groups by negation, always other and always identical, of each by all and of all by each’ (1960, 202). Far from a form of group praxis, ‘of each by all and of all by each’ signals the formation of identity through exteriority and separation.
For both Sartre and Rancière, identification is a function of oppressive social relations, whether we call these relations policing or the practico-inert. The key political and philosophical problem, then, is formulating a praxis of disidentification. Rancière maintains that:
Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise. (Rancière, 1995, 30/53)
Politics is a moment of dissensus whereby the supposition of equality interrupts a given social order and demonstrates the contingency of the distribution of roles. In his short essay ‘The Cause of the Other,’ Rancière reiterates his concept of political praxis in terms similar to Sartre’s account of seriality: political subjectivation breaks with the ‘identity of the other’ assigned to an individual by techniques of policing (Rancière, 1997, 32; see Section 2.5). Politics, then, is a disruption of how ways of being, speaking, or doing are distributed, counted, or identified – in a manner similar to the disruption of seriality and the practico-inert by group praxis. However, while both Sartre and Rancière conceptualize political subjectivation as a dynamic of disidentification, significant differences between them remain.
In The Philosopher and His Poor, Rancière contends that Sartre, despite his delineation of the various oppressive structures of the practico-inert, reinforces the distinction between those whose activity it is to think and those whose activity it is to work. Rancière reads Sartre’s distinctions between activity and passivity and interiority and exteriority (the group is active interiority while seriality is passive exteriority) in light of Marxist distinctions between the roles of the intellectual and the party and the roles of the workers. Therefore, Rancière focuses on Sartre’s thematization of workers’ fatigue. Rancière argues that Sartre’s account of fatigue slips from describing the situation of the workers to describing their being. In the terms of Being and Nothingness, Sartre identifies workers according to their facticity – they are their fatigue. Although, of course, he intends the following as a description of a situation that is to be surpassed by free praxis, Sartre comments that ‘fatigue is being in so far as it is distinct from knowledge and from praxis’ (1960, 335). This distinction, for Rancière, reiterates the distinction between the party (the organization of knowledge and praxis) and workers, who are, like the practico-inert, passive matter to be transformed by praxis. Thus, on Rancière’s account, Sartre precludes any possibility of workers’ autonomous free praxis; they are, in effect, trapped between the passivity of the practico-inert and the activity of the party.
For Rancière, this point is illustrated by Sartre’s account of ‘the manifestation par excellence for revolutionary reminiscence – the storming of the Bastille,’ which, in the Critique, is the paradigmatic moment when the practico-inert is liquidated by group activity (Rancière, 1983, 149). How Sartre interprets this moment of collective, emancipatory practice is, for Rancière, emblematic of the project of the Critique. From Rancière’s perspective, one could search out how the praxis of the ‘poor’ produced an event that was unprecedented, and, while acknowledging its transitory temporality, trace its transformative effects on social life, how the ‘Bastille’ becomes a watchword – or even homonym – for emancipatory struggle. This would be to treat the storming of the Bastille as, in Rancière’s terms, a political event. However, as Rancière argues, for Sartre, at this point in revolutionary praxis, the unity of the group in the Parisian crowd is constituted from without, and thus free, self-determined, revolutionary politics comes later. Rancière does not object that political praxis derives its tactics and strategies from its given situation, but rather he rejects Sartre’s emphasis on the emergence of this praxis as a negation of – a reaction to – the royal decrees; that is, he rejects the idea that the ‘poor’ can only take the impetus for praxis from the outside. Sartre even suggests that the revolutionary group was ‘alienated’ into praxis: ‘the political praxis of the government alienated the passive reactions of seriality to its own practical freedom’ (Sartre, 1960, 355). Here, Rancière contends that Sartre’s work dovetails with Marxist metapolitics: the ‘essential is already given. The power of royal praxis through which the group comes to be is of the very same nature as the power of worked matter or the power of the pure communist act;’ each is a power over a proletariat that can never completely work out its passivity and alienation (Rancière, 1983, 150). The significance of the storming of the Bastille, of the unprecedented liquidation of practico-inert structures by practices of freedom, is constituted from without: Sartre’s Parisian mob derives its impetus from the threat of royal decrees, and its revolutionary potential can be preserved from the threat of dispersion only by the exigencies of self-organization and hierarchization – which, Rancière argues, ultimately means the exigencies of the party.
Recall Sartre’s claim that ‘the free development of a praxis can only be total or totally alienated’ (Sartre, 1960, 395). The difference between Sartre and Rancière can be summarized by the way each of them would interpret this passage. Sartre would place the emphasis on totalization: free praxis must totalize or else it disintegrates into total alienation. Hence Sartre’s concern with structures – such as the pledge – that stabilize group praxis. Rancière, by contrast, would place the emphasis on the disjunction between free praxis and alienation – emphasizing their heterogeneity. The storming of the Bastille, then, would be a moment of disruptive emancipatory force that breaks with all forms of exigency.
Rancière contends, on this basis, that Sartre commits to a hyper-instrumentalization of political praxis, rendering freedom a ‘super-technique’ subject to the exigencies that emerge from within group praxis or from without (Ranciere, 1983, 156). While the emergence of the group breaks with the passivity and inertia of the practico-inert through a kind of spontaneous activity, it does not take on stability until the introduction of a pledge that legislates a relation of ‘fraternity-terror’ in response to external exigencies that threaten the group with dissolution (Sartre, 1960, 418–419; Rancière, 1983, 151). Though the pledge gives consistency to the group, as the individuals who make up the group become ‘the same’ in praxis, it is also the ‘advent of self-imposed inertia’ that reintroduces the creeping mechanisms of reification that constitute the practico-inert, which the group attempts to undermine through the heterogeneity (via the division of labour) that constitutes the organization (Flynn, 1984, 110). In the terms of Rancière’s Disagreement, the dialectic that leads the group to the sameness of the pledge and the complexity and heterogeneity of the organization’s division of labour – and eventually the exigencies of the party (see Ranciere, 1983, 140, which I think is based on a polemical reading of Sartre, 1960, 662) – leads also to the reintroduction of inequality and thus policing into group praxis. Even Sartre admits that as the group struggles to maintain its praxis, ‘the organization is transformed into a hierarchy, and pledges give rise to institutions’ (1960, 583). By the time of the pledge, in Rancière’s view, politics is already over.
Thus we cannot reconstruct Rancière’s account of political subjectivation using the categories of group praxis established in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, though, as I have argued, the Critique contributes to grasping exigencies, interests, and identities as functions of policing. While both Rancière and Sartre hold that politics is a praxis that breaks with and disrupts regimes of identification, for Rancière political praxis does so in a non-instrumental way; politics does not aim to seize or exercise power, but introduces new ways of being, speaking, or doing via the supposition of equality (1998e, 27).
Nonetheless, Rancière’s use of seemingly Sartrean terms in certain passages of Disagreement and On the Shores of Politics – especially freedom (liberté), contingency (contingence), and, less frequently, facticity (facticité) – suggests that a reconsideration of Being and Nothingness could contribute to our understanding of his concept of subjectivation, the nos sumus, nos existimus that is a subject of contingency rather than substance.
This does not mean that Rancière holds the same ontological commitments of Being and Nothingness, nor does it imply that Rancière necessarily intended to use these terms in a deliberately Sartrean manner.15 Instead, I will argue that the way Sartre turns the nihilating activity of freedom against the substance of the Cartesian subject provides a model for Rancière’s formulations such that ‘freedom, as an empty property’ (liberté, comme propriété vide), or as an ‘inexistent qualitative difference’ (différence qualitative inexistent), undermines all forms of inequality, or, that it is the ‘empty freedom’ (liberté vide) of the demos that demonstrates the contingency of all social order (Rancière, 1995, 8/27; 10tm/29; 15/35). Like Blanqui’s proletarian profession, subjectivation inscribes a name that marks its difference with any part of the count of the community. Subjectivation opens up new ways of speaking, doing, and being, which can either be transitory or be reinscribed into the police order, but its dynamic is not part of this order. At most, the subjectivation of equality only leaves a ‘reiteration of the pure trace of its confirmation’ (Rancière, 1995, 34tm/58). The subject is not substance; instead subjectivation is a social dynamic that activates an ‘empty freedom’ within the contingencies of its situation. If, as Rancière phrases it, all speaking beings are equal in intelligences and abilities, their respective occupations and places in society could be otherwise.
The return to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness might seem like a regression that forfeits the ‘advances’ of the consistency on poststructural critique of existentialism, such as Foucault’s genealogical studies and Derrida’s deconstruction of the priority of presence that operates within the Western philosophical tradition. From a poststructuralist perspective, Sartre’s work reiterates the problem of presence through an interrogation of the being of consciousness. Yet Christina Howells has convincingly shown that, despite defining subjectivity as ‘consciousness (of) consciousness,’ Sartre’s distinctions between the in-itself (en soi) and the nihilating activity of the for-itself (pour soi) problematize ‘any easy understanding of the subject, casting doubt on all attempts at identifying it other than as self-divided and self-negating’ (Howells, 1992, 334). Consciousness, according to Sartre, ‘does not coincide with itself in a full equivalence’; it must ‘necessarily be what it is not and not be what it is’ (Sartre, 1943, 120/110). Thus subjectivation is a dynamic of consciousness that hollows out all substantial claims of the Cartesian subject. Just as subjectivity is the self-negating activity of freedom for Sartre, so equality is the disidentifying dynamic of politics for Rancière – the nos sumus, nos existimus is not a declaration of identity but its disintegration.
Therefore, we will focus on the way that Sartre develops the problematic of presence, facticity, and freedom in first two parts of Part II, Chapter 1 of Being and Nothingness (the ‘Immediate Structures of the For-Itself’). By then, Sartre has already shown that consciousness is always wrenched away from its being by temporality, that is, by not being the past that it has been, while not yet being its future possibilities (Sartre, 1943, 72–73/70–71).16 Temporality produces the structure by which consciousness must be what it is not and not be what it is, and in Part II, Sartre pursues the consequences of this structure for the emergence of the for-itself in the world.
He begins with the problem of presence, which has traditionally been conceived, in terms of consciousness or subjectivity, as a fullness of the self-presence, substance, or essence of being. For Sartre, however, the for-itself is presence in the mode of never coinciding with itself. Only being-in-itself, as he says, ‘is what it is.’ Contrary to the ‘infinite compression’ of the in-itself, the activity of the for-itself ‘decompresses’ being by always surpassing what it is (1943, 120–121/110). Presence to self is only possible because the for-itself is always distanced or different from itself. This has already been acknowledged by previous philosophers when the interrogation of consciousness (of) belief led them to a ‘game [jeu] of reflections’ between consciousness as reflection and consciousness as reflecting. While they have defined consciousness as an infinity, Sartre argues that this merely ‘fixes’ and ‘obscures’ the phenomena (1943, 122/112).17 He proposes, instead, to approach the being-for-itself of consciousness as a dynamic activity. Then presence is only possible for being-for-itself as distance or difference; when we ask ‘what it is which separates the subject from himself, we are forced to admit that it is nothing’ (1943, 124/113). Rather than being the revelation of essence or substance, presence is an ‘inconsistency of being’ (inconsistance d’être) which marks the nothingness or distance of being-for-itself: ‘Nothingness is always an elsewhere’ (1943, 126tm/114).
Hence being-for-itself cannot be its own foundation, inasmuch as all attempts to found itself in-itself end in failure. From this, Sartre encourages the cultivation of freedom of the for-itself while acknowledging its ultimate absurdity.18 Both are responses to the contingency of the for-itself. While Ronald Aronson has called contingency, which he links to the failure of freedom that makes of a human being a ‘useless passion,’ one of the ‘more somber, negative counterparts’ to the positive propositions of Sartre’s ontology (Aronson, 1980, 81), we will focus on how the contingency of all situations also opens the possibility that they could be otherwise. While Rancière would not accept Sartre’s account of the ‘fundamental project’ of determining human reality as an In-itself-For-itself, contingency plays a dual practical role in Rancière’s thought, opening the possibility that the world could be otherwise, while demanding, as May points out in connection with Foucault, ‘a hyper- and pessimistic activism’ (Foucault, quoted in May, 2008, 126). Indeed, Sartre’s discussion of facticity and contingency deals concretely with the for-itself in its presence to the world, that is, the ‘pure contingency’ of the for-itself ‘thrown into a world and abandoned in a “situation”’ (Sartre, 1943, 127/115).
It is important to differentiate between contingency and facticity in this account, so that we do not mistake Sartre’s point that things could be otherwise with the idea that they are not, in some way, historically conditioned. Despite his tendency to indulge in hyperbole concerning absolute freedom and absolute choice during the 1940s, the analysis of facticity shows that the free activity of being-for-itself takes place within a set of historical constraints that limits its possibilities.19 Contingency means that, from the consideration of being, the being of the for-itself and its situation could be otherwise, which sustains the possibilities of surpassing the givens of any particular situation. But the for-itself is thrown into its situation, and this determines its possibilities. He returns to the example mentioned in the ‘Patterns of Bad Faith’ of the man who plays at being a waiter: in that situation, even if I play at the role of being a waiter, this ‘contingent block of identity’ is mine in a way that it would be ‘vain for me to play at being a diplomat or a sailor’ (1943, 131/119). It would be in vain because this play (at being a diplomat or sailor) transforms the waiter’s previous mode of bad faith (identifying with his facticity) into identification with pure transcendence that no longer refers to a situation. Facticity is defined, if I may switch to the first person for a moment, by the way that a particular and ultimately contingent fact of a situation is mine. Nevertheless, a situation, and even what is mine, is fundamentally determined by others: ‘It is my place, my body, my past, my position in so far as it is already determined by the indications of Others, finally my fundamental relation to the Other’ (1943, 629/534).
The determination of the situation by others indicates that it is mine as an ostensive function, pointing toward aspects of my concrete facticity, rather than a possessive function. Thus the bad faith of pure transcendence acts ‘as if I were to my self the truth of myself’, which ignores the ‘equal dignity’ of being-for-others and being-for-myself (1943, 100/92).20 While freedom wrenches me away from my situation and opens the possibility that I might change it, this fact does not eliminate the way that others saturate this situation with other determinations that render some of my possibilities vain. I am always situated between my freedom and my facticity. Hence Sartre writes:
the for-itself is sustained by a perpetual contingency for which it assumes the responsibility and which it assimilates without ever being able to suppress it. This perpetually evanescent contingency of the in-itself…, without ever allowing itself to be apprehended, haunts the for-itself and reattaches it to being-in-itself. (1943, 131/119)
This concrete and ostensive facticity is what we mean when we say that being-for-itself is: to treat facticity as a transcendent that cannot be surpassed through freedom is to lapse into bad faith. But Sartre also argues that there is no way to eliminate contingency in order to take up a transcendent project of authenticity in the manner that Heidegger develops an ethics to ‘reconcile his humanism with the religious sense of the transcendent’ (1943, 128/116). Such a criticism suggests that taking up Sartre today requires abandoning the project of authenticity.21 One possibility is to think his work in terms of its anti- and postcolonial resonances and with Rancière’s politics of equality. If Rancière’s work speaks to Sartrean existentialism, it is because human existence is absurd and contingent, as Sartre claims, except that it is also fundamentally egalitarian.
There are two critical questions that we will now pose to Rancière that I think can be answered by reference to Sartre (the first is posed by Bosteels, 2009, the second by Hallward, 2009). First, how does Rancière reconcile his analysis of equality with the movements he cites in developing his political thought? More simply put: how can the principle of equality be thought historically? Second, we might ask how to register the effects of egalitarian logic on the order of policing, if equality cannot be institutionalized?
Let us begin with the first question, concerning historicizing the principle of equality, for, in Rancière’s work, the opposition of equality to the police functions as a transhistorical structure of politics; that is, when there is politics, it is at the intersection of egalitarian practices and policing. This holds whether we are discussing the Athenian demos, plebian revolts on Aventine Hill, or workers’ struggle in nineteenth-century Europe. It is notable that these examples share, on Rancière’s account, a similar dynamic despite the differences of demands and practices, which suggests that accounting for these differences provides the impetus for historicizing egalitarianism. Very rarely, in his examples, do these movements demand equality directly. Instead, Rancière argues that ‘every politics works on homonyms and the indiscernable’ (Rancière, 1995, 91/130). This is, at first sight, a puzzling claim, as he is arguing that each politically contentious term, such as the social, class, or profession, is not a word with different meanings, but two words with different meanings but identical spelling and pronunciation. There is one word, defined and used within the regime of policing, and there is another, homonymous word that names the logic of equality. Although politics and policing are heterogeneous, politics is never ‘pure.’ Political subjectivation begins when the homonymous use of common terms produces dissensus. This is evident in Blanqui’s subversion of the magistrate’s articulation of profession. Class, Rancière adds, is a ‘perfect example’ of a homonym, which in police logic names the classification of parts of the social order, but which in egalitarian logic designates ‘an operator of conflict, a name for counting the uncounted, a mode of subjectivation superimposed on the reality of all social groups’ (Rancière, 1995, 83/121).22
Homonymy is also the case for demos. For Plato, the demos names the wrong that the people commit when they attempt to rule on the basis of doxa and ‘appearances’ rather than the logos and arkhê of community. As I mentioned above, Rancière turns the problem around and returns the logos of equality to the activity of the demos; they do not act irrationally, but out of the supposition that all Athenians are born free. This freedom of the demos is nothing other than the nothingness of equality: ‘the freedom of the demos is not a determinable property but a pure facticity’ (Rancière, 1995, 7tm/26).23 Sartre has prepared us to interpret this passage. Freedom (here the name for equality) is not a positive attribute or substance of the demos but instead arises from its contingency – being born in Athens after enslavement for debt had been abolished. These homonyms share an egalitarian logic, which is a dynamic of subjectivation and not a creation ex nihilo. This means that while the terms are historically contingent (class, proletariat, the social), they name, at particular times, a dynamic of equality that surpasses their facticity toward new ways of speaking, being, and doing. Yet this example is less than sufficient, given that the freedom of the demos did rest in large part on the quality being a male citizen. It nevertheless stands out to Rancière for the ‘threat’ that classical political philosophy had felt from an equality that opposed qualifications of birth or wealth. Equality has had a long history since then, so let us look at one more example.
In Hatred of Democracy (2005b), Rancière analyses how the distinction between public and private spheres exercises police logic insofar as it works to organize society around the reinforcement of inequalities of wealth, institutional access, and rights, if not the reinforcement of relations of domination toward those who are excluded from these. This failure of the rights of man and the rights of the citizen to protect those who are excluded from social life has led a number of prominent critics, from Edmund Burke and Hannah Arendt to Giorgio Agamben, to denounce the duality of man and citizen. For these critics, if there are two principles, at least one must be illusory, if not both. For Burke and Arendt, according to Rancière,
the rights of man are either empty or tautological…bare man, the man who belongs to no constituted national community, has no rights. The rights of man, then, are the empty rights of those who have no rights. Or they are the rights of men who belong to a national community. They are, then, simply the rights of the citizens of that nation, the rights of those who have rights, and hence a pure tautology. (Rancière, 2005b, 59)24
From this standpoint, equality becomes, or is returned to, a problem of passive equality, reduced to the logic of institutional access and constitutional guarantees, even though this critique concerns the failure of these guarantees. This critique remains at this level because none of these critics advocate mass politics, let alone of the ‘trust in the people’ demonstrated by Rancière’s egalitarian politics.25 By contrast, Rancière does not dismiss rights as the illusory guarantees of liberalism. Instead, as May notes, Rancière is careful to show that the politics of equality cannot be reduced to the contours of liberalism, and that where ‘politics becomes passive is not in the recognition or embrace of rights; it is when rights come to structure the field of politics’ (May, 2008, 34).26 Rancière argues that critics such as Burke, Arendt, and Agamben are mistaken in seeking to identify the subject of rights and check his or her possessions (having rights), when the dynamic of subjectivation is ‘always defined by an interval between identities determined by social relations or juridical categories’ (Rancière, 2005b, 59).
For Rancière this interval has allowed political subjects to challenge distinctions between public and private life, citizen and man. Olympe de Gouges, in her ‘Declaration of the Rights of Woman’ (1791), challenges how these rights exclude women. However, for Rancière, this dissensus over rights does not turn on the possession of rights, but their activation through political practice. Here he reiterates Sartre’s emphasis on activity over possession (Sartre, 1943, 558/475). But Rancière’s formulation also echoes Sartre’s account of the dynamic of subjectivation. Sartre, as we have already mentioned, writes that consciousness must necessarily ‘be what it is not and not be what it is’ (d’être ce qu’elle n’est pas et de ne pas être ce qu’elle est) (Sartre, 1943, 120/110). To formulate a third possibility that avoids the logical bind of the empty or tautological problem of rights, Rancière states that the dissensus over rights concerns ‘the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not’ (les droits de celles qui n’ont pas les droits qu’elles ont et qui ont les droits qu’elles n’ont pas) (Rancière, 2005b, 61/68). Both formulations reject the priority of being or possession and instead emphasize the differences between subjectivation and identification. This is an especially salient point for reconsidering Sartre’s work, which has quite often been dismissed as a reiteration of consciousness as the identity of self-presence.
For Rancière dissensus over the ‘rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not’ turns universality against the particular and contingent lines – those ramparts of inequality – that separate the public (universal) and private (particular) spheres. While the discourse on rights can be a moment of dissensus and politics, it is not necessarily so – rights can be reduced to questions of distributive justice and institutional guarantees, or far worse, invoked to justify imperialist interventions.27 This should not be surprising: as Rancière states in Disagreement, politics is rare, just as Sartre notes that the anxiety that throws us toward the interrogation of being and of freedom is rare (Rancière, 1995, 17/37; Sartre, 1943, 73/70). But rights actively challenge policing in the name of equality when one polemically deploys the universality of one set of rights against the particularities institutionalized by the other. The universality of the rights of man can be activated to contest the exclusion of peoples from the ‘privatizations’ and privileges of citizenship, or the universality of the rights of the citizen can be used to contest the lines between public and private life. The movement for rights for workers, for instance, asserts the universality of public and collective decision making to oppose the presumption that work is a private transaction. Or, to return to the example above, Olympe de Gouges disputes the exclusion of women from French citizenship when she argues that the woman who has the right to mount the scaffold ‘must equally have the right to mount the rostrum’ (de Gouges, 1791, 91; Rancière, 2005b, 60). This is not to say that, for instance, de Gouges has the rights guaranteed under the rights of man, but not the rights of the citizen. Instead, her actions declare the rights that the law denies her.28 For Rancière, it is clear that equality names a practice and a logic and not something that somebody has. In each case, political subjectivation works to produce homonyms out of the contingencies (freedoms, rights, classes) of social situations. Rights are not principles with a significance or guarantee ‘in themselves,’ but only become political (or become depoliticized) within engaged social practices.29
2.5. The politics of impossible identification
The question remains as to whether equality can become permanent within the police order. As we have seen, Rancière argues that the police and the politics of equality are two heterogeneous logics. The positive aspect of the distinction between two logics of social practice is that, against mainstream political philosophy, Rancière restores rationality to the practice of political dissensus. However, this move forecloses, it seems, on the possibility of egalitarian politics effectively transforming the policing of the social order. This is one of the major points of contention with Rancière’s approach. Peter Hallward, for example, argues that it is ‘far from clear that the resources of the interval as such can give effective analytical purchase on the forms of relation (relations of oppression, exploitation, representation, and so on, but also of solidarity, cooperation, empowerment) that shape any particular situation’ (Hallward, 2009, 154). Rancière reinforces these doubts when he writes that the ‘always one-off act of equality cannot consist in any form of social bond whatsoever. Equality turns into the opposite the moment it aspires to a place in the social or state organization’ (Rancière, 1995, 34/58). The strict opposition between equality and the police suggests that egalitarian politics can only be temporary and cannot be sustained without introducing inequalities.
Rancière amplifies the heterogeneity of politics and policing when, in ‘The Cause of the Other,’ he describes political subjectivation as – in contrast to the techniques of identification of policing – a dynamic of ‘impossible identification’ (see also Rancière, 1998a, 112–125; and the discussion of the demonstrations of October 1961 in 1995, 138–139/187–188). Rancière’s account of impossible identification is attentive both to forms of social inclusion and exclusion and how to combat them, for political subjectivation is oriented toward a relation to the other that is inclusive without being dominating and that is political rather than ethical. The result of this politics of the cause of the other is to transform the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion by combatting a wrong committed against others without speaking for them.
Rancière considers this politics of the other with a specific point of reference. He asks: what was at stake in the political praxis of those French citizens who opposed the actions of the French government in the Algerian war? He contends that this question was posed through ‘two opposing Sartreanisms’ (1997, 28). On the one hand, Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth forcefully argues that this book is not addressed to the French; instead, the French appear as objects, as ruthless hypocrites whose system of colonialism betrays their humanist principles. In the language of the Critique, Sartre’s preface establishes that there is no ‘common activity’ of group praxis possible between the French anti-colonialists and the Algerians. Sartre claims that through the revolutionary praxis (and its necessary violence) of the colonized, ‘we, too, peoples of Europe, we are being decolonialized: meaning the colonist inside every one of us is surgically extracted in a bloody operation’ (Sartre, 1961, lvii). Despite the anti-ethical stance of his preface, Rancière argues, Sartre’s radical exclusion of the ‘cause of the other’ from the possibilities of the political praxis of the French who opposed the war results in ‘a purely ethical and individualistic relationship with the [Algerian] war’ reminiscent of the ethics of Being and Nothingness – or, I might add, ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ (Rancière, 1997, 27–28). Thus Rancière contrasts Sartre’s preface to Wretched of the Earth with Maurice Maschino’s own Sartrean justification for desertion: ‘If I am mobilized in a war, that war is my war. It is made in my image and I deserve it’ (quoted in Ranciere, 1997, 28; cf. Sartre, 1943, 709–710). Nevertheless, what Rancière considers to be a ‘truly political mobilization’ inclusive of the cause of the other is an ‘impossible identification’ forged from these two opposed Sartreanisms: ‘this war is and is not our war’ (Ranciere, 1997, 28).
This Sartrean paradox, ‘this war is and is not our war’ demarcates a space of French opposition to the war. The response of the French activists and demonstrators opposed to the war (as shorthand I will henceforth refer to them as protestors) was constrained by the fact that, first, it was not their war. They could not identify directly with Algerian struggle in either Algeria, for there it was a matter of Algerian self-determination, or in France, where they would be speaking in the place of Algerians. Second, the Algerian war was their war, and to oppose it required disidentifying from the French state and its apparatuses of policing. The politics of the cause of the other, Rancière writes, produces ‘a people different from the people seen, named and counted by the State, of a people defined by the wrong done to the constitution of a commonality that was constructing an other communal space’ (Rancière, 1997, 29).
Rancière examines, as an exemplary case of this dynamic of political subjectivation, the protests that occurred in France after the brutal repression of a demonstration on 17 October 1961, called by the Front de libération nationale; aided by a news blackout, the French police proceeded to beat and drown numerous Algerians. The response of the protestors – ‘our’ response, Rancière writes – was a political response to the cause of the other, which has three characteristics (Rancière, 1997, 29). First, the protestors rejected, or disidentified with, the actions of the French state and the atrocities it committed in their name. Second, this political mobilization demonstrated that a wrong had been committed. Policing, as Rancière notes, operates through a count of parts of society, counting who is part of the community and who is not. Politics is a moment of making visible or making heard that part of society, the ‘part of those who have no part,’ which has not been counted. As Rancière states, due to the news blackout, ‘it was impossible even to count the victims’ of the massacre (1997, 28).30 Thus, demonstrating a wrong did not rely on counting the victims. Instead, the protestors contested the operations of inclusion and exclusion that rendered Algerian struggles invisible and speechless. Third, there is an impossible identification with the cause of the other. The demonstrations forced the count of what was not counted by the French state – making Algerian struggles visible, making French atrocities visible – revealing how Algerians continued to be excluded from French public space, despite being granted French citizenship (the difference between French subjects and French citizens having been abolished in June 1958). This political subjectivation identified with the other, the part of those who have no part, who mark the difference between political citizenship and juridical citizenship, between a political people and a juridical people (Rancière, 1997, 29). Elsewhere, he will suggest that politics signals the difference between a demos and an identarian ethnos (Rancière, 2012b, 212).
Perhaps, Rancière writes, this impossible identification anticipated the ‘exemplary formula’ of May 1968: ‘We are all German Jews’: ‘That impossible identification inverted a name that was meant to stigmatize by turning it into the principle behind an open subjectivation of the uncounted, but it did not politically confuse them with any representation of an identifiable social group’ (Rancière, 1997, 30).31 However, the politics of impossible identification is not, on Rancière’s account, limited to these cases. As shown by the example of Blanqui, Rancière argues that an impossible identification is part of political subjectivation itself; it is always possible because the count of any policing regime is always a miscount, an inegalitarian distribution of roles and parts of society. Politics is possible because there is always a disjunction between particular identities or social categories and egalitarian political agency. Without the possibility of political subjectivation, Rancière claims, the worker, immigrant, or migrant worker is confined to the ‘identity of the other, to being a mere object of pity or, more commonly, hatred’ (Rancière, 1997, 32). To elaborate further, the immigrant becomes an object of pity when her struggle becomes a humanitarian cause (which seeks to ameliorate her suffering), and an object of hatred when she is considered as an other, a member of a social group, who does not belong to the national ethnos. In neither case is she a political agent. As Rancière argues, what makes the ‘political identity of the “worker” or the “proletarian” operational [is] the disjunction between political subjectivity and social group’ (Ranciere, 1997, 32). Here we re-encounter the Sartrean inflections of Rancière’s account of identity, reminiscent of Sartre’s investigations into the abstract generalities of the material forces and exigencies, the reified and passive identities, of the practico-inert. Politics, for Rancière, is possible because there is always a disjunction between the interests and identifications of social groups and political agency – that impossible identification with the cause of the other, with the part of those who have no part.
This account of the politics of impossible identification has not entirely answered the question of how equality might become a permanent feature within regimes of policing. At best, it demonstrates that the politics of dissensus contests and transforms the count of speech, the divisions of social space that demarcate who speaks and who makes noise, more than the quantity or number of those who speak, more that it initiates any stable mechanisms for guaranteeing that such speech is heard. Given the transitory and temporary irruption of politics, and given possibility that radical change can be subsumed by relations of domination and oppression, it can still seem like nothing has changed, though we should keep in mind that, at one point, Rancière states that politics is the ‘name of nothing’ (Rancière, 1995, 35/58).
We will conclude with a Sartrean suggestion that provides a clue into what Rancière means when he writes that politics is the name of nothing. In his discussion of sincerity in Being and Nothingness, Sartre draws a surprising conclusion: sincerity is a phenomenon of bad faith. The person who demands sincerity from another does not elicit the other’s freedom or responsibility; instead he demands that his addressee identify herself as what she is, reifying her freedom. As we know, bad faith demands that we affirm our facticity to be transcendence and affirm facticity (our contingency) as transcendence, when the dynamic of subjectivation demands that consciousness must be what it is not and not be what it is. As Sartre writes, ‘the essential structure of sincerity does not differ from that of bad faith since the sincere man constitutes himself as what he is in order not to be it’ (Sartre, 1943, 109/100).
We have already drawn attention to the parallels between Rancière and Sartre, so let us sketch a preliminary reply to the problem of the opposition between egalitarian logic and police logic. Granting that equality can be a permanent feature of the social order suggests that we have finally arrived at equality, which means that it is no longer a problem of active struggle. In many ways, we already acknowledge that we will never arrive when, as critics, we recognize how political struggle has transformed social relations, and yet, more must be done. To say ‘here is an egalitarian institution’ turns a dynamic into a thing, and, as we could say following Todd May, transforms an activity into the passive equality of distributions between institutions and entitlements. This response is not entirely satisfactory, but neither is it complete. As I will argue in Part II, Rancière conceptualizes aesthetics as a form of micropolitics that takes place in the interval of the heterogeneity of policing and politics.
Notes
1To reach this conclusion, Rancière revises his position in Althusser’s Lesson, where he defends Sartre against Althusser’s criticisms by arguing that Sartre’s thought must be evaluated in light of his political commitments: his support for anticolonial insurgency in Algeria, his engagement with the student uprisings of May 1968, and his alliances with Maoist militants that involved assuming the editorship of La Cause du people and participating in the Lens tribunal. Rancière asks: do these commitments ‘not attest to some sort of convergence between Sartre’s theoretical questions and the questions the Cultural Revolution raised’ (1974, 19)? Do they not propose some new practices of interaction between intellectuals and the masses? In The Philosopher and His Poor, Rancière separates Sartre, the philosopher, and Sartre, the activist of the late 1960s and 1970s: ‘To speak and act in favor of the most disadvantaged, he will now fall silent as a philosopher. From Russell’s tribunal to the tribunal of Lens, he will speak only in the register and space of judgment’ (1983, 156).
2In this chapter, we will focus on comments from three sources: ‘The Cause of the Other’ (1997), ‘Politique et identité’ (1999), and ‘Work, Identity, Subject’ (2012b). Note also his comments in Rancière and Davis (2013, 215): ‘generally, I have found little interest in questions of interiority….This is my Sartrean side, if you recall Sartre’s famous text [The Transcendence of the Ego] on Husserl and consciousness as that which is outside, a thing among things. That text shaped me a lot when I was young.’
3For his critique of the ‘epochal’ claims about the end of metaphysics and about post-subjectivity that have emerged since, as Nancy phrases it, ‘the close of the Sartrean enterprise’ (Nancy, 1991, 3), see Rancière’s ‘After What’ (1991). For Rancière’s discussions of Foucault, see ‘Biopolitics or Politics?’ (2000, 93) and Chapter 3; on Deleuze, see the Conclusion; on Foucault’s and Deleuze’s account of the role of intellectuals, see Rancière and Rancière (1978, especially 87–100); on Negri see ‘The People or the Multitudes?’ (2002b, 84–90). We will discuss Agamben below.
4For further discussion of Sartre’s ‘poor,’ see Giuseppina Mecchia 2010.
5To make this link clearer: Sartre is discussing in part how the woman denies her embodiment as a woman, which, as we know from Beauvoir, is done in bad faith: ‘no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex’ (Beauvoir, 1949, 4/1: 13). Of course, Beauvoir is more specific than Sartre about the gender inequalities present in a woman’s situation. Note also Toril Moi’s critique of Sartre’s account: by ‘refusing to take the different social conventions applying to the two protagonists into account, Sartre can only see [the woman’s] refusal as a sign of her will to self-deception….The real problem in this passage is not the woman’s interpretation, but Sartre’s bland assumption that he knows more than the woman’ (1994, 128, my emphasis).
6Note, however, the parallel between Rancière’s comments and those of Alain Badiou, who refers to Sartre as ‘a man who was, when I was eighteen, my absolute master and the man who initiated me into the delights of philosophy’ (2008, 191–192).
7As we know, Sartre concedes much of Fanon’s critique of ‘Black Orpheus’ by the time he writes the preface to The Wretched of the Earth.
8This has been suggested, but not developed, by Todd May (2008, 65) and Peter Hallward (2009, 141).
9See Rancière 1995, 16/37: ‘There is order in society because some people command and others obey, but in order to obey and order at least two things are required: you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it. And to do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you. It is this equality that gnaws away at any natural order.’ Sartre makes similar claims about how structures of domination undermine themselves. In the Critique, in a passage on colonialism, he writes: ‘This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism, and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man’ (1960, 111). A similar passage appears in his essay on Memmi, that ‘in order to give [humans] orders, even the harshest, the most insulting, you have to begin by acknowledging them’ (1957a, 61). Note that for Ranciere the equality of speaking beings is constitutive of politics, while for Sartre scarcity is.
10Disidentification, as we will see in Chapter 4, also plays an important role in the micropolitics of aesthetics (see Rancière, 2009a, 73).
11As Flynn notes, ‘Passive activity is not originative; it is an ontological deformation of praxis because of practico-inert mediation’ (1984, 105).
12By distinguishing between a fundamental form of scarcity and its historical forms, Sartre observes Marx’s distinction, established in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, between objectification (Vergegenständlichung) and alienation or externalization (Entfremdung or Entäußerung).
13As Sartre later summarizes the concept of seriality: ‘A group is said to be a serial group when each of its members, though he may be in the same circumstances as all the others, remains alone and defines himself according to his neighbor insofar as his neighbor thinks like the others’ (1972, 166).
14This phrasing is deliberately chosen in contrast to the communist motto ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’
15Admittedly, I read Sartre’s analysis as a method of undermining substantial ontological commitments. Like Samuel Chambers, I consider Ranciere’s opposition to ontological accounts of politics to be a definitive feature of his thought (see Chambers, 2013, 18–21).
16Note that while Sartre cautions against equating consciousness with the for-itself and the world with the in-itself, he sometimes is loose with his terminology. I will move, like Sartre, between discussing consciousness and the for-itself.
17Sartre names Hegel and Spinoza, and we will remain at the level of his account without evaluating his accuracy as a reader of history of philosophy.
18Though we should note here Beauvoir’s correction to Sartre’s thought: the ‘notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won’ (1947, 129). Then: ‘Only the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardening in the absurdity of facticity’ (1947, 71).
19See Sartre’s later self-critique in ‘The Itinerary of a Thought’ (1969, 33–34): ‘I re-read a prefatory note of mine to a collection of these plays – Les Mouches, Huis Clos and others – and was truly scandalized. I had written “Whatever the circumstances, and wherever the site, a man is always free to choose to be a traitor or not….” When I read this, I said to myself: it’s incredible, I actually believed that!’
20This claim is important because it acknowledges the intersubjective character of facticity without the pessimism that accompanies many of Sartre’s comments on the relation between the for-itself and others. As Thomas Flynn points out, Sartre defines intersubjective relations as ontologically – rather than historically – conflictual (Flynn, 1984, 20). If Sartre followed through with the claim that there is ‘equal dignity’ between being-for-others and being-for-myself, he would have to search out the historical conditions of interpersonal or social conflict.
21For an extensive argument against renewing the project of authenticity see Sherman, 2007, 135ff.
22Ranciere’s discussion, in The Philosopher and His Poor, of aesthetic misinterpretation anticipates this discussion of homonymy (1983, 200), which we will discuss in Part II, especially Section 3.5. The concept of homonymy plays an important role in The Names of History insofar as Rancière notes ironically that an ‘unfortunate homonymy in the French language designates lived experience, its faithful narrative, its lying fiction, and its knowledgeable explanation all by the same name. Exact in their pursuit of the traps of this homonymy, the English distinguish story and history’ (Rancière, 1992, 3).
23Compare the French to Rose’s translation, which blunts the existential terminology of the passage: the phrase ‘la liberté du démos n’est aucune propriété déterminable mais une pure facticité’ becomes in translation ‘the freedom of the demos is not a determinable property but a pure invention.’
24In ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’ Rancière criticizes Agamben for capturing theoretically all political struggles in the ‘biopolitical trap’ of the destiny of being: ‘Any kind of claim to rights or any struggle enacting rights is thus trapped from the very outset in the mere polarity of bare life and the state of exception, a polarity that appears as a sort of ontological destiny: we are all, every single one of us, in the same situation as the refugee in a camp’ (Rancière, 2004c, 66).
25Metapolitics, then, is for Rancière a politics of mistrust: the ‘point of view of mistrust [is that] behind things is where their reasons lie.’ By constrast, trust is egalitarian: ‘trust affirms that no one can see for those who do not see and turn others’ ignorance into knowledge’ (Rancière, 1990, 122; 123).
26Lynn Hunt makes a similar point when she argues that human rights become self-evident due to the emergence of new convictions and practices concerning equality, empathy, and autonomy – convictions and practices that have literary and cultural as much as juridical origins, and whose ramifications extend beyond traditional rights frameworks. Nonetheless she concludes by endorsing the distributive structures of passive equality: ‘The human rights framework, with its international bodies, international courts, and international conventions, might be exasperating in its slowness to respond or repeated inability to achieve its ultimate goals, but there is no better structure available for confronting these issues’ (2007, 213). She makes no mention of the possibility of transforming ‘available structures’ through a radical or revolutionary politics of equality.
27Micheline Ishay (2008) claims that a ‘new realism of human rights’ should criticize the human rights abuses of imperialism but should nevertheless ‘seize opportunities to advance its cause whenever Western powers confront repressive governments’ (290), or be prepared to offer ‘a substantive agenda linking human rights and international security’ (289). Through this model, she argues, globalization can be made to advance the cause of ‘the wretched of the earth’ (293). One of the central planks of Fanon’s philosophy is that the self-determination of the oppressed cannot be advanced by imperialist intervention. To intervene and implement rights from above repeats the civilizing gesture of the old imperialism. Any reference to rights must take place through local conflict and struggle, from the organization of the masses from below. In addition, when Ishay appeals to presenting a ‘substantive agenda’ of human rights, she is speaking within a Western framework. The framework of rights-security is already Western and imperialist, and often has little accountability to those (the oppressed) to whom Ishay or nongovernmental organizations appeal for their moral legitimacy.
28Joan Wallach Scott underlines, from a different perspective, how de Gouges’s literary activities were, in this sense, political: ‘For de Gouges, writing, signing and publishing demonstrated, for her contemporaries and for posterity, what the law erased: the fact that women could be, already were, authors. Under revolutionary legislation women did not have the rights of authors, of individuals who possessed their intellectual property, because they did not have the rights of active citizens’ (Scott, 1996, 37).
29We should nevertheless signal the limits of de Gouges’s egalitarianism. Madeleine Dobie argues that ‘while [de] Gouges was clearly sympathetic to the predicament of the enslaved, she also tended to project a liberal socioeconomic philosophy inflected with feminist ideas onto the colonial context, without giving much consideration to the tensions and contradictions that this projection entailed’ (Dobie, 2010, 270). For example, in the wake of the upheaval in Saint-Domingue, ‘rather than speaking to enslaved men and women in the language of rights and freedom,’ de Gouges prefaced the publication of her play Black Slavery by ‘condemning the crimes they had committed in freedom’s name. Instead of attacking slavery as a moral offense, [de] Gouges embarks on a prolonged denunciation of violence, extremism, and disorder…[reproaching] the slaves for their failure to differentiate between good and bad masters in their blind pursuit of revenge’ (278).
30Jim House and Neil MacMaster examine competing accounts of the police massacre of Algerians. While prefacing their remarks that ‘a conclusive or definitive figure as to the number of Algerian deaths will never be arrived at,’ they conclude, after noting that official statistics exclude ‘the large number of deaths which never reached the morgue and went unrecorded,’ that ‘during September and October well over 120 Algerians were murdered by the police in the Paris region, a figure that compares quite closely to the estimates by Linda Amiri in particular (about 130), the FLN (200), and [Jean-Luc] Einaudi (200), but which have been widely and misleadingly attributed to the single night of 17 October’ (House and MacMaster, 2006, 166–167). I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this source.
31In a later discussion of the significance of May 1968, Rancière maintains that the claim ‘We are all German Jews’ offers ‘a model of political subjectivation involving the creation of space through a declaration by subjects,’ a space that cannot be identified in advance. ‘The creation of the subject does not imply the emergence of an underlying social force, but rather a rupture in the system of class and identity’ (Rancière, 2008, 154).