THIS BOOK WAS written in France in 1983. The passage of nearly twenty years and an ocean crossing have not rendered its basic propositions either more valid or less. The pages that follow thus shall attempt simply to situate these propositions both within the evolution of my own work and the political and theoretical debates of the last thirty or so years.
My previous book, The Nights of Labor (published in France in 1981), allowed me to offer an interpretation—equally distant from the two poles of the then-dominant thought—of the French labor movement in the nineteenth century and of social conflict in general.1 Against the traditions of historical materialism and political avant-gardism, it endeavored to reveal the specific nature of the intellectual revolution assumed by the emergence of working-class thought. But it opposed at the same time a counter-discourse, flourishing in that era, that valorized an idea of working-class thought rooted in craft traditions or the forms of popular culture and sociability. The Nights of Labor sought to show how the idea of working-class emancipation assumed, on the contrary, a strong symbolic rupture with a culture of craft or popular sociabilities—in short, with working-class “identity.” Working-class emancipation was not the affirmation of values specific to the world of labor. It was a rupture in the order of things that founded these “values,” a rupture in the traditional division [partage] assigning the privilege of thought to some and the tasks of production to others. The French workers who, in the nineteenth century, created newspapers or associations, wrote poems, or joined utopian groups, were claiming the status of fully speaking and thinking beings. At the birth of the “workers’ movement,” there was thus neither the “importation” of scientific thought into the world of the worker nor the affirmation of a worker culture. There was instead the transgressive will to appropriate the “night” of poets and thinkers, to appropriate the language and culture of the other, to act as if intellectual equality were indeed real and effectual.
To highlight this egalitarian intellectual revolution not only assumed a rupture with Marxist orthodoxy. It required as well a major divergence from the presuppositions that sustained the discourse of social science concerning the dominated classes, and that inspired alternative political propositions. Through the historical naïveté of resorting to working-class “cultures” and “sociabilities,” through the sophisticated sociological demystification of “distinguished culture,” through the development of new discourses of identity as through old discourses of class struggle—I could hear through them all the same fundamental tone, the same valorization of the “bottom” against the “top.” And behind the various forms of this “progressive” valorization, I could hear the same proposition of preserving the order of things, the proposition for which Plato established the formula once and for all: let all do their own business and develop the virtue specific to their condition.
The Philosopher and His Poor thus attempted to grasp within its original theoretical core this splitting of times and occupations that assigns to the philosopher and the artisan their respective shares, and to show how most modern scientific discourses, even the progressive or revolutionary, had preserved this essential kernel. But this very formulation inscribed itself within a highly specific political and theoretical moment. What in France succeeded the exhausted leftism and the great repudiations of Marxism characteristic of the end of the 1970s was the brief euphoria of the coming to power of the Socialists. This occurrence was synonymous with an ephemeral Marxist revival and great reformist ambitions that claimed to rely upon the achievements of the social sciences for an egalitarian transformation of French society. These circumstances brought back to the fore the central program of every progressive reformism, the reduction of inequality through education. But in order to “reduce inequalities,” it is first necessary to know what these are, what equality is itself, and in what way it can be efficacious within the social order. Within the conjuncture of triumphant French socialism after 1981, the dominant answer to these questions was the kind of progressive sociology embodied by two works by Pierre Bourdieu, Reproduction and Distinction. These books proposed a general interpretation of the symbolic violence that set the dominated classes in their place. According to this interpretation, such violence manifests itself through a process of imposition in which school rituals and culture games exclude the dominated by offering them an ethos to which they cannot adapt, and by making them bear the blame for this very failure. From this, socialist reformers readily drew up a program that aimed particularly at reducing the inequalities of school by reducing the share in it of legitimate high culture—by making school more convivial, more adapted to the sociabilities of the children of low-income classes who were then becoming more and more the children of immigration.
At issue then were two ideas of inequality, two ideas of inegalitarian symbolic violence that confronted each other. According to one, this violence resided in the imposition on the dominated class of high cultural forms and manners. According to the other, it resided on the contrary in the division that reserves for the elect the acme of thought and refinements of language while assigning to the dominated the values of an “autochthonous” culture. The political conjuncture thus gave a larger stake to the conclusions of my own research. But it also confined them in a problematic context in which two kinds of progressivism struggled with each other: on one side, the old republican pedagogy, proclaiming the universalism of the citizen and the promotion of the children of the common people through science and instruction delivered to everyone in the same way; on the other, modernist pedagogy, supported by sociological analyses of cultural reproduction and advocating a school and a cultural politics that gave high priority to adapting to the needs and manners of the disadvantaged sectors. Within the socialism then in power and its circle of intellectual counselors, these two sides strongly opposed each other—the pedagogy of the reduction of inequalities against the pedagogy of republican excellence. This political conflict doubled itself as a conflict of disciplines: to the theoretical and political ascendancy of the social sciences (which was the “pink” version of yesterday’s Marxist thinking and the subdued fervor of ‘68) was opposed the idea of a return to the concepts of political philosophy defining the conditions of “living together” and the “common good.” To the promises of social thought and social science were opposed the philosophical promises of the citizen republic.
The constraint of this context and my own difficulty in situating myself in it are noticeable in The Philosopher and His Poor, and more particularly in its last chapter. It seemed to me essential that I denounce the complicity between sociological demystifications of aesthetic “distinction” and the old philosophy of “everyone in his place.” But this denunciation itself implied a relation of equivocal proximity to the ideological counter-movement that was to accompany the recasting of socialist ardor as liberal wisdom. As the 1980s wore on, the critique of the illusions of social science, the rehabilitation of political philosophy, and the themes of republican universalism were to blend, in France, into the great reactive current that denounced the erring ways of “‘68 thought” and proclaimed a return to good philosophy, healthy democracy, and the selection of “republican” élites leading, in the end, to the simple adoration of the world government of wealth. Echoing the eulogists of the “return” was not exactly what interested me. And, after this book, my work proceeded in two essential directions that drew it away from this dominant trend. On the one hand, the critique of the presuppositions of social history and cultural sociology opened onto a vaster reflection on the writing of social science and on the idea of a poetics of knowledge, which was developed in The Names of History.2 The study of the literary procedures through which social knowledge treats the speech-acts that shape history and politics has itself led to more systematic research on the connections linking the modern idea of literature with democracy and the forms of knowledge. My most recent works to appear in France—La Parole muette, La Chair des mots, Le Partage du sensible, and L’Inconscient esthétique—fall within this line of research.3
On the other hand, the difficulty of finding myself in a position caught between the sociological demystification of inequalities and the equivocal proclamation of the virtues of “republican universalism” forced me to take up once more the question of equality. The rapid incursion of a feeble consensus about an even more feeble democracy led to a reflection that sought to show what, if taken seriously, could be the extraordinary implications for thought itself of the word “democracy” and the egalitarian theme. The opportunity first arose through a work that appears highly anachronistic. My research led me to encounter the singular figure of Joseph Jacotot who, in the 1830s, raised the banner of intellectual emancipation and proclaimed, in the face of academicians and progressive educators, that everyone could learn on his own and without a master, and even teach someone else about which one was ignorant oneself. If I resuscitated this eccentric figure in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, it was not on the account of curiosities in the history of pedagogy but because of the radical manner in which Jacotot formulated the egalitarian idea.4 Equality is not a goal that governments and societies could succeed in reaching. To pose equality as a goal is to hand it over to the pedagogues of progress, who widen endlessly the distance they promise that they will abolish. Equality is a presupposition, an initial axiom—or it is nothing. And this egalitarian axiom subtends in the last instance the inegalitarian order itself. It is in vain that the superior gives orders to his inferior if the inferior does not understand at least two things: first, the content of the order, and second, that he must obey it. But for the inferior to understand this, he must already be the equal of the superior.
What can be done within the social order with this deduction as simple in its principle as it is vertiginous in its consequences? Jacotot’s pessimism led to the conclusion that the egalitarian axiom was without political effect there. Even if equality were to ground inequality in the last instance, it could be realized only individually in the intellectual emancipation that always could extend to every person the equality denied by the social order. This pessimism had an eminent merit, however, for it marked the paradoxical nature of equality—at once the ultimate principle of all social and governmental order, and that which is excluded from its “normal” functioning. It put equality out of the reach of the pedagogues of progress. It also put it out of the reach of liberal platitudes and superficial debates between those who situate equality within constitutional forms and those who situate it within the standards of society. Equality, Jacotot taught us, is neither formal nor real. It consists neither in the uniform teaching of the children of the republic, nor in the availability of bargains in supermarket displays. Equality is fundamental and absent, current and untimely [actuelle et intempestive]. From which was clarified the struggle of those proletarians who could not be the equals of the bourgeoisie whether through the education that the bourgeoisie provided them or through their own culture, but rather through the transgressive appropriation of an intellectual equality whose privilege others had reserved for themselves. But from which also was offered the possibility of rethinking democracy by exiting the conventional debate between the egalitarian indistinction of the law common to all and claims for equality grounded upon the rights or values of communities.
The situation created by the collapse of the Soviet system and the development of the consensual ideology of the Western states lent itself to this reexamination. In particular, France in 1990 presented the singular conjuncture in which the fall of the communist systems gave the bicentenary of the French Revolution the aspect of a great funeral of two centuries of egalitarian utopias. While the intellectual class retrospectively went into a rage against the illusions and crimes of the revolutionary age, the new socialist administration proposed to resolve, through the sober examination of realities and consultation between social partners, the problems that formerly occasioned the rifts of social conflict. This triumph of consensual realism over Marxist utopia nevertheless presented two paradoxes. First, it proclaimed the end of Marxism only at the cost of making triumphant its most radically determinist version, of affirming the ineluctable weight of economic constraint and of identifying exactly the task of government with that of the business agents of international capitalism. But above all, the affirmation of the end of class struggles and of “archaic” social conflicts was accompanied by the return of a much more radical archaism. The racist and xenophobic party of the National Front saw its influence growing at the same speed as the consensus. Governmental realism, supported by the ressentiments of the intellectual class, assured us that the conflicts and ills of the past stemmed from the fatal weight of words without bodies, of these phantoms called the people, the proletariat, equality, or class struggle. By looking at last at reality with a disenchanted eye—by identifying clearly the necessities inherent in the life of the social body, the margins of choice left to the collectivities, the partners who might join to share effort and profit among the parties of society—we were to enter finally the path of political wisdom and social peace. But the new outbursts of racism in France and ethnic warfare in Europe were contradicting this happy teleology. By showing that “realism,” with its optimization calculations, was itself a utopia, they prompted a rethinking of the centrality, within the definition of democracy, of this theater of appearances that consensus sought to eliminate.
The consideration of this state of affairs at the time of the consensus led me to revive an idea that had been at the heart of The Philosopher and His Poor: the link between the power of equality and that of appearance. Plato’s common battle against the demos and appearance showed this connection well (as did the place of “aesthetic communism” in workers’ emancipation): appearance is not the illusion masking the reality of reality, but the supplement that divides it. That analysis allowed me to continue with the thought that democratic appearance is not identifiable with the legal forms of the legitimate State that would conceal class interests and conflicts. The “forms” of democracy are the forms of dispute. And dispute is not the opposition of interests or opinions between social parties. Democracy is neither the consultation of the various parties of society concerning their respective interests, nor the common law that imposes itself equally on everyone. The demos that gives it its name is neither the ideal people of sovereignty, nor the sum of the parties of society, nor even the poor and suffering sector of this society. It is properly a supplement to any “realist” account of social parties. In the natural history of the forms of domination, only this supplement can bring forth democratic exceptionality. If equality is efficacious in the social order, it is by means of the constitution of this scene of appearance in which political subjects inscribe themselves as a litigious, “fictitious” supplement in relation to every account of social parties.
From there I went on to develop in several essays and even more so in Disagreement a theory of politics that moved considerably away from what generally is understood by that name—that is, a theory of power and its legitimations.5 I wanted to highlight that the forms of the political were in the first place those of a certain division of the sensible. I understand by this phrase the cutting up [découpage] of the perceptual world that anticipates, through its sensible evidence, the distribution of shares and social parties. It is the interplay of these forms of sensible evidence that defines the way in which people do “their own business” or not by defining the place and time of such “business,” the relation between the personal [du propre] and the common, the private and the public, in which these are inscribed. And this redistribution itself presupposes a cutting up of what is visible and what is not, of what can be heard and what cannot, of what is noise and what is speech.
This dividing line has been the object of my constant study. It was at the heart of The Nights of Labor, where the assertion of worker emancipation was first of all the upheaval of this division of temporalities that anticipated the redistribution of social and political shares by making night into the laborer’s time of rest—by inscribing him within the cycle of production and reproduction that separated him from the leisure of thought. It was this that was at stake in The Philosopher and His Poor, the Platonic allocation transforming the work’s “absence of time” into the worker’s very virtue. But this “absence of time” was itself only a symbolic division of times and spaces. What Plato had excluded was the slack time and empty space separating the artisan from his purely productive and reproductive destination: the space/time of meetings in the agora or the assembly where the power of the “people” is exerted, where the equality of anyone with anyone is affirmed. The demos is the collection of workers insofar as they have the time to do something other than their work and to find themselves in another place than that of its performance. It is the empty supplement accounting for social parties and organizations. The admission or refusal of this emptiness defines two antagonistic divisions of the sensible.
It is this antagonism that I wanted to systematize in Disagreement by splitting the current notion of the political into two concepts: police and politics [police et politique]. I proposed to call “police” the division of the sensible that claims to recognize only real parties to the exclusion of all empty spaces and supplements. Society consists here of groups devoted to specific modes of doing, in places where these occupations are performed, and in modes of being that correspond to these occupations and these places. I then proposed to call “politics” the mode of acting that perturbs this arrangement by instituting within its perceptual frames the contradictory theater of its “appearances.” The essence of politics is then dissensus. But dissensus is not the opposition of interests or opinions. It is the production, within a determined, sensible world, of a given that is heterogeneous to it. This production defines, in a specific sense, an aesthetics of politics that has nothing to do with the aesthetization of forms of power or the manifestations of collectivity. Politics is aesthetic in that it makes visible what had been excluded from a perceptual field, and in that it makes audible what used to be inaudible. It inscribes one perceptual world within another—for example, the world in which proletarians or women may participate in a community within another in which they both are “visibly” domestic beings outside the life of the community; the world in which they both can speak within another in which they both “evidently” were capable only of moans of pain, cries of hysteria, or groans of fury. Politics is completely an affair of the antagonistic subjectivation of the division of the sensible.
The analysis of the individual and collective forms of this subjectivation, of the status of speech that gives rise to them, and of their translation into forms of learned discourse is the vital thread tying together all of my research. Not that these have followed a premeditated plan. It was due, rather, to discovered necessities and encountered contingencies that I became a historian or philosopher, a critic of sociological science or of political philosophy, a researcher in labor archives or an interpreter of literature. For me, this was not a question of opposing voices from below to discourses from above, but of reflecting on the relation of division of discourses and the division of conditions, of grasping the interplay of borders and transgressions according to which the effects of speech that seize human bodies become ordered or disturbed. Neither have I passed from politics and society to literature and aesthetics. The object itself of my research demanded that I move incessantly across the borders from which the philosopher or historian, the interpreter of texts or the scholar of social issues, claims to circumscribe his or her domain.