The Second Return of the Political: Democracy and the Syllogism of Equality
Oliver Marchart
With his theorization of politics (la politique), Jacques Rancière has significantly contributed to a broader debate as to the meaning of the political (le politique), a debate unfolding within French post-foundational political thought since the early 1980s.1 To claim that Rancière’s thought developed within a particular configuration of comparable positions, all sharing a set of conceptual and argumentative ‘family resemblances’, does in no way diminish the originality of his own position. Current hagiographies of thinkers associated with French post-foundational thought all too often present philosophical work as if it was born out of a singular stroke of genius. Rancière would be the first to denounce such an approach. Rather than engaging in hagiographic exercises it is much more productive to study the shifts and twists initiated by a given author within a particular configuration of thought. This implies that we must not take an author’s overstatement of dissimilarities vis-à-vis other authors at face value. Even though there are dissimilarities between authors, there are also astonishing similarities that, for obvious reasons, tend to get played down both by authors themselves and by their respective communities of acolytes.2
This becomes evident as soon as we locate Rancière in the above- mentioned debate about the political. It was initiated by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe at their Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political where many French philosophers were invited to give lectures and discuss what the initiators referred to as the retreat of the political (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997), among them Lyotard, Lefort, Badiou, Rogozinski, Soulez, Ferry and Balibar. On 15 February 1982, Rancière delivered a lecture on the representation of the worker in Marxist discourse, followed by a discussion with, among others, Derrida.3 The topic of this lecture was clearly embedded in Rancière’s central theoretical preoccupation at that time which led to the publication of Le philosophe et ses pauvres a year later (English edition 2003). Yet when Rancière, partly inspired by the work at the Centre, started to engage in a more direct theorization of politics and democracy in the second half of the 1980s, he would silently take up the earlier debates, refashioning them in a peculiar way. While for many others, starting with Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, it was the notion of the political which had to be rethought and differentiated from politics in the ordinary sense (as particular social sphere or particular form of action), Rancière – together with Badiou, whose own talks at the Centre developed into the small volume Peut-on penser la politique? (Badiou 1985) – insisted on politics to be retained as an emphatically emancipatory term. The political, on the other hand, was largely discarded or relegated to a more marginal function as it was identified, by both Badiou and Rancière, as a central term of political philosophy whereby the latter, it was claimed, had to be rejected either as an outright liberal endeavour or as unwittingly bolstering liberalism.4 When today Rancière (2010: 206) explains his conceptual intervention in terms of a critical response to the return of liberal political philosophy in the 1980s, one may think of a liberal philosopher like Luc Ferry, who would later become a minister in the conservative Rafarrin government. But a closer look at the lecture series of the Centre reveals that immediately preceding Rancière’s presentation, Claude Lefort, on January 18, had delivered the most succinct account of his own position, a true mission statement. Under the title La question de la démocratie (English in Lefort 1988: 9–20) he not only proposed a notion of the political as the mode by which society is instituted through a set of form-giving principles, he also begins his lecture with the words: ‘My purpose here is to encourage and to contribute to a revival of political philosophy’ (1988: 9). What in Lefort’s eyes had to be taken up again was the question that lies at the very core of political philosophy: ‘what is the nature of the difference between forms of society?’ (11)
Rancière’s lecture can be read as a counter-point, the first sign of a theoretical dissensus to be developed later, but to depict Lefort as an antipode to Rancière would be to overstate their dissimilarities. First, and on the most basic plane, because both of them belong, as I said, to a larger configuration of thought which is most aptly described as post-foundational.5 This term refers to a theoretical position which denies the existence of an ultimate foundation of the social without, and this makes it post- rather than anti-foundational, disputing the necessity of contingent groundings. For Rancière, social or political order cannot be instituted on a firm, quasi-natural ground, yet no nihilistic consequences follow from this, as the absence of ground is what makes politics possible in the first place. It is in this sense that we have to understand such claims as the following:
The foundation of politics is not in fact more a matter of convention than of nature: it is the lack of foundation, the sheer contingency of any social order. Politics exists simply because no social order is based on nature, no divine law regulates human society. (Rancière 1999: 16)
Most post-foundational thinkers, including Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau and Mouffe would concur. Second, a striking similarity among the theorists mentioned consists in their habit to differentiate conceptually between politics and the political. While this difference is retained throughout the post-foundational configuration, it is inflected in varying ways. As is well known to readers of Rancière, he gives a double twist to the political difference: not only is the emphasis shifted from the political to politics, in order to avoid the alleged dangers of political philosophy, also a new term is introduced to mark the other side of the political difference: police. Police is defined as the order by which places, parts (shares), tasks and roles are allocated. Politics, conversely, is enacted by a ‘part of those who have no part’ which breaks with the order of police. It emerges in the emancipatory moment in which, based on the axiomatic assumption of general equality, such ‘part of no part’ (the poor in antiquity, the proletariat of the nineteenth century, etc.) dissensually claims to be the whole. The political then, so dear a concept to many other theorists, becomes a residual category for Rancière, naming merely the terrain on which politics and police meet or collide.
Rancière’s differentiation between politics and the police has created some confusion, and in a recent statement Rancière conceded that he may have contributed to this (2010: 206). The difference is sometimes presented by Rancière as a Manichean division between spontaneous revolt and oppressing order, even though Rancière occasionally hints at the possibility of a ‘good’ police order, and more recently insists that politics/police can only be found in reality in form of mélange.6 By agreeing with this revised (or clarified) version of the politics/police difference however we will be left with some unexpected consequences, including a surprising comeback of the concept of the political. The reason is simple: If politics and police only surface in mixed form, then it is only logical to conclude that the political – defined precisely as the meeting ground between politics and police – is the only way in which we are confronted with politics. But then, why do we learn next to nothing about the political? Why, as a category, does it remain marginalized within the Rancièrean lexicon? Matters are getting even more complicated if we consider more recent definitions, elaborated in his work on aesthetics, of what Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible. It has been remarked (Rockhill 2009: 199) that at times this concept seems to be a mere synonym for the concept of police order, while on other occasions he alludes to the possibility of a dissensual, that is, political distribution of the sensible. Rancière’s conceptual apparatus is riven by a couple of ambiguities and indecisions. Does the so-called distribution of the sensible always belong to the order of police? Or is there both a police way and a politics way of distributing the sensible, and if yes, in which relation do they stand to each other? Or, given that the political is defined as their meeting ground, is the distribution of the sensible simply another term for the political?
Unsurprisingly, the political, given that it is treated by Rancière as a poor cousin of politics, has not received much attention in the literature on Rancière. Now it seems that its status has to be reconsidered. If Rancière reacted to the ‘return of the political’ in the 1980s with a renewed interest in the concept of politics, then a second return of the political announces itself today within the spaces opened by these ambiguities and indecisions. A silent return, certainly unaccounted for by Rancière himself, which in my view points to a series of problems that the Rancièrean twist produced but could not handle. Because much emphasis is given to the moment of disruption of a given regime, the moment of politics, the other side of such disruptive moment, that is, the form and status of a given regime’s institution, remains a constant problem. A series of attempts are set in motion to come to grips with the other side of politics. The most prominent attempt consists in Rancière giving increasing importance to the concept of a distribution of the sensible – without however fully clarifying the latter’s status with respect to the political and the institutional dimension of politics. This is because Rancière, as a consequence of his decision to discard political philosophy, is not willing to locate the dimension of form-giving institution – identified by Lefort as the core of political philosophy – on the same ontological level as the disruptive moment of politics. To relocate the twist given to the notion of the political by Rancière within the configuration of alternative moves may cast some light onto the status and role of some of his categories.
II. The Syllogism of Equality (On Rancière’s emancipatory apriorism)
Let us relate our initial observations to what might well be Rancière’s most succinct presentation of the logics of politics: the ‘syllogism of equality’ as explained in his On the Shores of Politics. It encapsulates in a highly structured form arguments that elsewhere in Rancière’s oeuvre tend to be presented in a more narrative, hence more ambiguous way. By the notion of a syllogism of equality, or an emancipatory syllogism, he seeks to account for the necessary connection between universal claims and their particular enactment. The ‘syllogism of equality’, supposedly underlying every emancipatory claim, consists of two premises or categorical statements (a universal and a particular one) and a conclusion. In the case of the preamble of the Charter promulgated in 1830 in France for example, the syllogism’s major premise is constituted by the universal claim that all French people are equal before the law, while the minor premise formulates a particular violation of the first premise. If employers, for instance, organize themselves but deny their employees the same right to organize, such a case would enter the second premise as a particular wrong with regard to the major premise. In such case the workers may draw the conclusion that either the minor premise or the major premise must be changed. If they opt for the second case, the idea of universal equality as a major premise will be abandoned. But if even the bosses share the universal idea of equality before the law, and if it is decided to uphold the major premise, then equality must be verified.
How to verify words? Rancière’s remarkable answer is: ‘Essentially, through one’s actions’ (1995: 47). Not in an adventurist, voluntarist or decisionist sense of action, to be sure. Political actions ‘must be organised like a proof, a system of reason’. If, for instance, verification takes place by transforming the words of universal equality into the practice of a strike, then the strike takes on the form of a logical proof, and it does so by transforming ‘an alignment of forces into a logical confrontation. This did not simply mean substituting words for actions; rather, it meant transforming a power relationship by means of a practice of logical demonstration’ (Rancière 1995: 47). The strike turns into a visible and audible set of arguments.7 This leads Rancière to conclude that the universal claim (the universal value of equality) that serves as the syllogism’s major premise is far from being an empty illusion. In fact, it is a logical operator. It operates through ‘the discursive and practical construction of polemical verification, a case, a demonstration’ (Rancière 1992: 60). If this operator is employed within the syllogism of equality, a conclusion is called for: a third categorical statement or action. The question imposes itself: ‘What follows?’ If all men are equal, but one is able to demonstrate that some are ‘less equal’ than others, then what follows? As Rancière (1992: 60) sums up the ‘logical schema of social protest’: ‘Do we or do we not belong to the category of men or citizens or human beings, and what follows from this? The universality is not enclosed in citizen or human being; it is involved in the “what follows”, in its discursive and practical enactment’.
Politics resides in the ‘what follows’: the enactment of universal equality, the practical proof of the major premise. To frame political action in this way is original indeed, not least because a specific rationality of action is unclosed and decisionism avoided.8 The syllogism of equality, however, confronts us with a serious problem concerning the status of the major premise. If the major premise is upheld, a petitio principii appears hidden in the ‘what follows’, because the conclusion forces us to simply restate the major premise: what is supposed to be verified is the universality of equality, but it is this first premise which served as the starting point of the whole argument. (Hence, the petitio principii reads like this: What follows from upholding equality? It follows that equality is upheld.) The problem is not that things shift between a logical, a practical and a ‘poetological’ employment of the syllogism of equality, the problem is that it remains unclear as to how we originally arrived at the major premise (save through our very conclusion).
Rancière’s solutions to this problem are not fully convincing. Somehow sensing, I suppose, the petitio principii on which his syllogism rests, Rancière sets out to search for a non-political notion of equality as necessary precondition (a ‘major premise’) for politics. If he succeeded in showing that equality is always already there in a non-political form, he would be able to break the circle between conclusion and major premise. Yet success comes at a price. By turning equality into a non-political maxim, he transforms a fighting word well-known from political struggle into a transcendental, a-historical condition. One may even speak about a secret – though explicitly disavowed – Rousseauism in Rancière as any social order is supposed to rest on a hypothetical state of originary equality.9 This is because to understand a commandment and one’s duty to obey ‘you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you’ (1999: 16). For the same reason equality is not only the necessary precondition of political action, it is also the precondition of its opposite, the order of police. So Rancière concludes: ‘In the final analysis, inequality is only possible through equality’ (1999: 17). To illustrate this point with one of Rancière’s favourite examples, Menenius Agrippa’s attempt to explain to the Roman plebs their organic place in the city had to implicitly assume, Rancière believes, their equality within the domain of everyone’s capacity to speak and listen: ‘But to teach the plebs their place this way he must assume they understand what he is saying. He must presume the equality of speaking beings, which contradicts the police distribution of bodies who are put in their place and assigned their role’ (1999: 33). Such ‘equality of intelligence’ is therefore assumed to be ‘the absolute condition of all communication and any social order’ (1999: 34). It appears that, through an operation curiously reminiscent of Habermas, the condition of equality is anchored in the very structure of communication. Where Habermas draws rationality from the hat of communication, Rancière presents to us the white rabbit of equality.
So far, this argument is not compelling. A case could easily be made for the opposite assumption that all communication – not only political mésentente – is a priori structured in an asynchronous, asymmetrical and unequal way (a primordial misunderstanding), as communication does not occur simply between a sender and a receiver, both understood as equal speaking individuals, but is precisely what stands between them as an unsurpassable barrier and recurring stumbling block, as what Lacan calls ‘the wall’ of language, leaving no common measure to equate the status of sender with the status of receiver.10 Rancière reserves the status of such fundamental ‘disagreement’ to politics, where a dissensus is staged over the existence of ‘two worlds in one’, but even here disagreement is ultimately subordinated to what can be called his emancipatory apriorism: the idea of politics being egalitarian eo ipso. Politics, for Rancière (and Badiou for that matter), is either egalitarian, or it is not politics. Without doubt, to resort to the principle of equality in order to stage disagreement might be one possibility for political action. But I see no reason why politics should be emancipatory in principle whereby all non-egalitarian forms of politics are nominalistically defined out of the picture. Neither on a theoretical nor on a practical plane is this assumption convincing – and certainly not from a perspective more inclined to the Machiavellian-Gramscian trajectory of political thought. One may simply imagine the less than hypothetical case of a bunch of disenfranchised Neo-Nazis, a part of no part claiming to be the whole. In some countries, and in violation of any ‘universal premise’ of equality, they are legally stripped of this possibility for very good reasons – simply because the universal principle of equality can be used for other than emancipatory purposes. In such a case we may reasonably respond to the syllogism’s injunction ‘what follows?’ by deliberately upholding a given wrong, a given violation of the major premise.
To reserve the term politics for emancipatory action appears implausible when confronted with the realities of our political world. But to empty equality from its political nature and turn it into a non-political condition appears equally implausible against the background of a post-foundational approach to politics. For, in the last instance, equality (as a non-political condition of both politics and police) is used by Rancière as a theoretical figure of contingency. It is thus extracted from the mere fact that an ultimate ground of political and social order is not available. Equality is assumed to be a necessary implication of society’s groundless nature. If this were the case, the major premise would simply follow from, or be grounded in, a post-foundational view of society. As a figure of contingency, equality is ‘simply the equality of anyone at all with anyone else: in other words, in the final analysis, the absence of arkhê, the sheer contingency of any social order’ (1999: 15). Thus Rancière defends without doubt an ‘ontological’ form of an-archism.11 Anyone is equal to anyone else, so the argument goes, because ‘of the ultimate anarchy on which any hierarchy rests’ (1999: 16) – that is, because of the absence of a fundamental principle.
This claim can easily be identified as an extension of Rancière’s argument as to the necessary egalitarian nature of communication which now is located right on the ontological level of the ground/abyss of order eo ipso. But again, to frame equality in such way is not recommendable. First, for political reasons: to avoid wishful thinking and leftish self-complacency, one shouldn’t give in to the temptation to ontologically ennoble egalitarian politics by rooting it in the very ontological, an-archic condition of every order. Egalitarian politics must do without any ontological privilege over non-egalitarian, non-emancipatory politics – it must confront its enemies on the ontic plane without ultimate guarantee in the ontological. Second, for theoretical reasons (which again may have political implications): for a common confusion should be avoided on the modal level between the contingent and the arbitrary – that is, the accidental. Something is contingent because it could be different (or not at all), or put differently: because its essence does not entail its existence. Yet to claim that something could be different or not at all is not the same as claiming that it is arbitrarily so, that is, that everything else could be equally possible. (We will return to Rancière’s confusion of the contingent with the accidental in our discussion of his theory of democracy).
Let us illustrate this point with a political example: To say that the rule of a governing party is contingent is not the same as saying it is accidental. In the first case it is simply stated that a different party could be in power so that any claim for a non-contingent rule is ultimately unfounded (a given order’s essence does not entail its existence) and, as one may conclude, can therefore be challenged. To say it is accidental would mean, however, that a party stays in power by pure chance or good luck and any other party, provided it is lucky enough, could equally be in power. While the first position is defendable from a post-foundational perspective, the second smacks of an outmoded ‘anything goes’ version of postmodernism or anti-foundationalism. What makes the latter untenable is the simple fact that no one operates in a vacuum. The terrain on which we act is always already deformed by relations of power and subordination, by institutional fortifications, and by a multiplicity of competing political projects. In other words, the social world, although ungroundable in principle, is always partially grounded in reality. We will never be able to reach a point where the absence of foundation presents itself to us in form of pure accidentally – or, which is the same, in form of a primordial equality. Social order is structured contingently, not arbitrarily. And political action, contingent as it is, is not accidental either.12
I hope to have demonstrated that the absence of an ultimate ground does not necessarily imply the equality of ‘anyone at all with anyone else’ as even on the most fundamental level our social reality, although ultimately ungroundable, will always already be partially grounded. To institute the signifier ‘equality’ on the level of ground, as Rancière proposes, does amount to nothing more than just another attempt at partially grounding what remains ungroundable. For this reason, equality cannot be the non-political condition of politics because it will have to be politically instituted in the first place. As regards our question of where the major premise of universal equality comes from, we are thus confronted with the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, the major premise cannot be derived from the very structure of communication or the mere level of ‘ground’. On the other hand, it appears that it has to be instituted as ground by egalitarian political action – but then we are back to our petitio principii (egalitarian politics has to ground what it relies on as its own ground). Is there a way to avoid this dilemma? A critical engagement with Rancière’s theorization of democracy may provide the clue for escaping this dilemma.
III. Democracy: Interruption vs Regime
Demos, in Rancière’s definition, is a figure of ‘at once everybody and anyone at all’ (2010: 53) which comes to supplement the process of politics. A demos appears on the scene via the dissensual process of politics as soon as subjects challenge the police distribution of the sensible and ‘restage the anarchic foundation of the political’ (Rancière 2010: 54). For this reason there is a disruptive quality to a demos. Rancière’s notion of democracy is supposed to capture this quality. Democracy consists in the interrupting force of political action premised upon the axiom of equality (of anyone with anyone else). In this case, however, a question immediately arises: how is democracy different from egalitarian politics per se? Isn’t Rancière using two terms for roughly the same thing, thereby repeating with his arguments about democracy what has already been said about equality and politics? Statements like the following point in this direction: ‘Every politics is democratic in this precise sense: not in the sense of institutions, but in the sense of forms of expression that confront the logic of equality with the logic of the police order’ (Rancière 1999: 101). Are we not encountering here the same emancipatory apriorism dressed up as democratic apriorism? Politics is democratic – the subject that is produced as a supplement to political action is necessarily a demos – or it is not politics. One should not be surprised then to discover the same ambiguities and problems that were discussed in the above section on equality. Only that the accidental (under the mistaken name of the contingent) now reappears as a central category of democracy.
In his critical evaluation of Plato, Rancière sets out to defend what for Plato constitutes the ultimate scandal of democracy: ‘the choice of the god of chance, the drawing of lots, that is, the democratic procedure by which a people of equals decides the distribution of places’ (2006: 40). A procedure by which public offices are allocated via the drawing of lots runs counter to the right of birth and wealth. If the places of the police order are re-distributed by chance – Rancière speaks about the law of chance – anyone is considered to be equally qualified to hold public office, and order as such is de-naturalized. This might well be the case, but again we encounter an ambiguity in Rancière: it is quite telling that the drawing of lots is defended against Plato and the whole tradition of democratic thought which, according to Rancière, tended to forget this procedure (2006: 42), yet the very same procedure is not included in the list of recommendations for democratic renewal given at the end of Hatred of Democracy. Did Rancière himself ‘forget’ to include it? What he seeks to achieve with these recommendations is not to abolish representation but rather to democratize it in order to prevent it from producing fixed and foreseeable outcomes in accordance with ‘vested interests’ (so he proposes short and non-renewable mandates, the reduction of campaign costs to a minimum, etc.). Not even the appointment of jurors from the population ‘by lot’, which is a common procedure in the judicial system of many countries, is mentioned. So while Rancière accuses the whole tradition of political thought of having obliterated the law of chance, it appears that he himself does not see a way to integrate it into today’s democracies. And there are good reasons for this.
Let us imagine what would happen if we were to implement the fundamental or ontological level of groundlessness – that is, in Rancière, the an-archic arbitrariness of rule – in an immediate way, that is through procedures that would turn the ‘law of chance’ into a central feature of democracy. Of course, representational mediation would be abolished, but the scandal would not be that everyone and anyone may now assume a role in government without being qualified. The scandalous outcome would be precisely the end of democracy because we would have managed, ironically, to rid democracy of all politics in the strict Rancièrean sense: any dimension of dissensus and disagreement would ultimately disappear, no part without a part would enter in a syllogistic play with a universal premise of equality by way of staging a fundamental disagreement. Any individual would be able to incarnate the universal in a direct and unmediated way provided she or he is lucky enough to be selected by lot – no conflict and no collective subjectification needed. A world in which the law of chance reigns is a world without politics. This it has in common with a world governed by the rule of fate. In fact, chance and fate are exactly the same thing: it is simply a matter of perspective whether I think it is fate or luck to be elected by lot.
Such an outcome can be avoided as soon as we stop mistaking the contingent for the arbitrary.13 Of course, Rancière is to be fully endorsed from a post-foundational perspective when he speaks about the paradox of democracy (2010: 50) whereby the absence of ground is turned into the very ground of government (a position shared by Lefort, Mouffe, Laclau, the early Žižek and others). Democracy is ‘the institution of politics as such’ to the extent ‘that the very ground for the power of ruling is that there is no ground at all’ (2010: 50). This is true with only a small yet important qualification: there is never ‘no ground at all’, nor is there a possibility to institute ‘politics as such’. A dissensually and democratically revolting subject is never ‘anyone’, it is always a particular subject, and for the same reason it is not automatically a demos either. Fundamental contingency means exactly this: that it could be a different subject (not just any subject) with a different political project (not just any project).14 What was said above about the impossibility of a non-political notion of equality being extracted right from the unfounded nature of every social order must now be repeated with respect to democracy. The latter cannot simply be identical with the absence of an ultimate ground because contingency, the modal terminus technicus for this absence, implies that there might always be different, perhaps entirely undemocratic forms of politics. And if democracy is not simply pregiven together with contingency, it will have to be instituted against competing political projects – which implies that it will have to assume modes of permanence: institutions.
If this is agreed upon, all questions regarding political institution assume an entirely different valence. It becomes impossible to describe democratic institution in terms of ‘fleeting’ inscriptions (Rancière 1999: 40). Nor can it be plausibly claimed, as Rancière repeatedly does, that (necessarily democratic) politics ‘in its specificity, is rare’, that it ‘is always local and occasional’ (1999: 139), and ‘doesn’t always happen – it actually happens very little or rarely’ (1999: 17). The major premise of equality, if we relate it to democracy, has to be instituted in a more permanent sense if it is to function as legitimatory background and political reference point. And indeed, examples given by Rancière himself point in the opposite direction, for instance a worker’s strike bringing together ‘the equality proclaimed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and some obscure question concerning hours of work or workshop regulation’ (1999: 40). The Declaration of the Rights of Man, the major premise of this strike, is not just a fleeting inscription but, rather, a major political institution.15 Unfortunately, Rancière is not prepared to account for this institutional dimension of democracy as he fiercely disputes the idea of democracy being a regime of equality. As he states again and again: democracy is not a regime or a form of government, nor is it a social way of life (1999: 101). On the contrary: ‘Equality turns into the opposite the moment it aspires to a place in the social or state organization’ (1999: 34).
Rancière thereby strips himself of any possibility to plausibly explain the universal valence of equality. As long as we refuse to conceptualize democracy as the regime of equality which has to be politically instituted and kept alive, we will not be able to explain how the major premise of the egalitarian syllogism has assumed its universal status in the first place.16 If it is not pregiven in an aprioristic fashion, it has to be anchored both in institutions and in a given ‘way of life’. And this does not occur by chance, it is the outcome of, in Antonio Gramsci’s terms, a long and protracted hegemonic ‘war of position’ at the end of which we encounter, exactly, a regime of universal suffrage, of the Rights of Man, etc. This regime might be internally disputed, externally endangered or even on the verge of shifting into a state of ‘post-democracy’ – it is nevertheless a regime.
To explain the shape and function of this regime we will have to turn towards alternative options within the configuration of post-foundational political thought. And if democracy has been analyzed by Claude Lefort precisely as a regime,17 it was not because his aim was to obfuscate the post-foundational nature of society – the ontological fact that that no order is based on an ultimate ground – but because he wanted to show how the ultimate absence of ground is inscribed, in an entirely mediated fashion, into democratic procedures and institutions. While, for Lefort, every regime is unfounded and unfoundable, it is only with the democratic regime that the groundless nature of society is symbolically accepted and institutionalized. To speak, as Lefort famously does, about an empty space (of power) in the ‘centre’ of the social then is nothing more than a shortcut, an abbreviation for all the institutional means by which social groundlessness is indicated within the symbolic structures of democratic society: the periodic evacuation of the place of power through elections; the separation of the spheres of power, law and knowledge; the separation of a civil society from the state and the emergence of a public sphere within the gap resulting from this separation. Accordingly, the decapitation of the King – by which the place of power is emptied in the first place – should be read as a moment of symbolic condensation, a metaphor for the widespread and institutionally regulated acceptance, within democracy, of the ungroundable nature of the social.18 For this reason Lefort’s claim that the place of power is kept empty under democratic conditions can by no means be reduced to the historical event of the execution of Louis XVI. The king is beheaded time and again whenever society’s non-identity with itself, the self-alienation of the social as I propose to call it, is marked symbolically through democratic institutions. And what is more, markers of uncertainty and self-alienation have to be inscribed into what Lefort refers to, in Merleau-Pontyan terminology, as the ‘flesh of the social’.
A regime in this widest sense includes both the institutional framework of democracy and a democratic ‘way of life’ (in the same way in which, as Lefort reminds us, the term ‘ancien régime’ is understood to refer not only to the institutions of monarchy but also to a specific way of life) – precisely what Rancière rejects as potential dimensions of democracy. I’m not claiming that Lefort is right and Rancière is wrong on that point. The question comes down to matters of plausibility and of conceptual economy. It is implausible, on the basis of a more realist view of our political world, to reduce politics aprioristically to emancipatory and democratic actions only. And it is questionable why one should introduce a second term, democracy, which just redoubles the features of politics rather than adding a further dimension – especially if this new dimension would allow for conceptually grasping the difference between a police style division of the sensible and a division of the sensible by which the ungrounded nature of the social is recognized.
It is not without reason that I refer to Rancière’s notion of a ‘distribution of the sensible’ at the end of this chapter, because it is with this concept that a potential point of convergence could be expected. When Rancière assumes that ‘police’ is not just any division of the sensible but a particular one ‘that claims to recognize only real parties to the exclusion of all empty spaces and supplements’ (2003: 226), he leaves open the possibility of a division of the sensible in which the existence of empty spaces and of the demos as supplement is recognized. But wouldn’t such particular form of a division of the sensible meet precisely the post-foundational definition of democracy as a regime in the Lefortian sense of the term, a regime in which society’s self-alienation, the absence of an ultimate foundation and the non-self-identity of the sovereign people is accepted politically, culturally and institutionally? Rancière’s notion of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ could very well be pushed in this direction. In this case, however, Rancière would have to relinquish one of his claims and consent to the conclusion that democracy is a regime.
IV. The Second Return of the Political
So far we have arrived at the following conclusion: If equality does not jump out of the hat of communication like the proverbial rabbit, and if it is not simply given with our ontological condition either, it must be instituted in order to become a ‘major premise’. And if it is instituted, it will be the result of an ultimately political act. But this does not yet resolve our initial problem of a petitio principii – it rather seems to re-instate it. In order to institute a major premise of universal equality egalitarian politics has to presuppose as a premise what it is about to institute or verify. The very precondition of democratic politics – the legitimating horizon of equality – appears to be the result of democratic politics. How can we insist, contra Rancière, on the political nature of the major premise of equality and at the same time avoid this petitio principii? There is only one possibility: we have to split our notion of politics from within. As a matter of fact, it is not the same form of politics which is involved in a major premise (the horizon of what is taken for granted or accepted as legitimate) and in the political action of verifying it. Our discussion of democracy as a regime has provided us with the key to this solution. As a regime the term democracy refers to the horizon of a more or less established ‘way of life’ and a set of democratic institutions: a ‘symbolic dispositif’, a set of principles by which a given society is symbolically staged, given form and furnished with sense. This is what in Lefort’s lexicon is termed the political – and which we have to differentiate from politics whereby by the latter may well be understood as an enactment or ‘practical verification’ of the political.
Without any doubt Rancière deserves praise for developing theoretically an active concept of equality: we must not take equality as something given, even if it is inscribed institutionally into the democratic horizon. It has to be enacted in practice time and again, which amounts to saying that politics is as much an instituting as it is a disrupting force. (But the same must be said, I would add, about all political projects and articulations, egalitarian or not – they all have to be re-instituted time and again to remain effective.) By over-stressing the disruptive dimension of politics, and by denying democracy the status of a regime, Rancière strips himself of the means to explain how the legitimating principle of equality has assumed some degree of permanence and stability as a reference point for emancipatory action today. This price is paid because the very dimension of institutional organization of a given symbolic dispositif or apparatus remains untheorized. Rancière is in need of an elaborated theory of the political, the meeting ground of politics and police.19 Our observations have come to converge in a single point: what imposes itself today is a second return of the political.
Notes
1.I have presented the main lines of this debate in Marchart (2007).
2.Of course, there can be an overstatement of similarities as well, for instance when Badiou reacted to the publication of La Mésentente (1995) [tr. Disagreement (1999)] with a thinly veiled allegation of plagiarism (Badiou 1998).
3.The lecture together with a synopsis of the discussion can be found in Lacoue-Labarthe et al. (1983: 89–111).
4.On a more general note, political philosophy is denounced as ‘the set of reflective operations whereby philosophy tries to rid itself of politics’ (Rancière 1999: xii), in particular via the ‘specific masking’ of the distinction between politics and police (xiii). From a post-foundational perspective, political philosophy can therefore be described as a foundational enterprise which aims at founding politics on a more elementary principle: ‘And political philosophy, by its desire to give to the community a single foundation, is fated to have to re-identify politics and police, to cancel out politics through the gesture of founding it’ (Rancière 2010: 41).
5.The term post-structuralist would be too narrow, as Lefort – as a direct pupil of Merleau-Ponty’s – is more a phenomenologist than a post-structuralist.
6.This revised version moves Rancière’s political difference closer to a more Heideggerian understanding of difference as difference: the constant chiasmatic movement between both sides of a difference which have to be somehow distinguished and yet are always intertwined and inseparable – a reading with which Rancière himself, being a staunch anti-Heideggerian, would certainly disagree.
7.In Disagreement, Rancière (1999: 40) speaks about politics as a ‘montage of “proofs” ’.
8.On political rationality, see also Rancière (1999: 43ff). For a more extensive discussion of Rancière’s syllogism, see Marchart (1997).
9.This secret Rousseauism of originary equality is particularly evident in Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster.
10.This assumption might well be a non sequitur too, but at least it is a non sequitur in line with a more realistic account of our political world.
11.Not necessarily a political one. From the post-foundational assumption of the ‘an-archic’ ultimate groundlessness of any order it does not follow that anarchism as a political ideology or movement would be more (or less) adapted to our ontological condition (this would simply amount to an anarchist apriorism). There is no unmediated passage from an ontological condition to a particular political project.
12.This is not to deny that accidental events happen, in politics as much as everywhere else. It is to deny that the accidental can be made into a ground (albeit paradoxical) of politics.
13.If both a society built on the principle of fate and a society built on the principle of chance exclude political dissensus and articulation, it is because politics only opens up when there is contingency, not the rule of either fate or chance.
14.The point relates critically to Rancière’s aprioristic formalism. For Rancière, to relate – through a process of political verification – to the universal maxim of equality is enough for politics to be called emancipatory. In this case however, the particular ‘content’, the programme, the ideology and all the particular discursive articulations of a political project become irrelevant as long as only the major premise is verified.
15.The same can be said of most examples given by Rancière. The case of Jeanne Deroin, for instance, who presented herself as a candidate for legislative elections in 1849, thereby demonstrating ‘the contradiction within a universal suffrage that excludes her sex from any such universality’. Such operation exploits the internal inconsistency, as Rancière himself concedes, of ‘a regime founded on a declaration of equality that does not recognize any difference between the sexes’ (1999: 41) – yet this is only possible, of course, if such regime has been instituted in the first place.
16.It is evident that a historical dimension has to be introduced in order to explain the universal status of the major premise, which explains – ex negativo – why only modern examples and examples from Greek and Roman antiquity are given by Rancière. In his model he has to rely on historical conjunctures in which a certain sense of equality (of a relatively significant number of citizens) was already instituted politically. It would be hard to draw examples from feudalist societies. Certainly, some egalitarian signifiers with a Christian inflection were floating around, yet rarely were they articulated into an egalitarian political project. Political articulation, as in the case of peasants’ rebellions or corporate uprisings, were premised not on universal equality but on traditionally granted rights of a particular group. It was the goal of such politics to re-institute a major premise of particularity rather than universality.
17.I’m leaving aside, for reasons of space, the similar cases of Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) theory of democracy and of the Lacanian assumption of an ethics of democracy (Stavrakakis 1999).
18.There is no sacrificial logic, no theatre of sacrifice involved in this Lefortian point, as Rancière (2010: 34) claims. Lefort’s description is closer to the way in which the terror of the French revolution is laconically described by Hegel, in the Phenomenology, in terms of cleaving a cabbage head or swallowing a gulp of water. The significance of the execution of Louis XVI does not consist in any grandiose theatre of sacrifice (or, vice versa, in the royalist drama of victimization), but in the minimal displacement in the real – not much more than a gulp of water – which provides for a maximum symbolic condensation in the symbolic. Saint-Just, in his eventually successful tautological argument for the execution of the king, was well aware that the king is fundamentally metaphor: he has to die not because of his particular crimes (because he betrayed his country to the foreign enemy), that is to say, not as an individual, but because he was the king, because his earthly body acted as a metaphor for monarchy’s transcendent principle of legitimation. Nobody will ever be able again to proclaim ‘the king is dead, long live the king’. As soon as the link to the transcendent ground is symbolically severed, it becomes publicly evident that no sovereign – neither the king nor the people – is identical to himself. Which is also why Rancière’s alternative claim that not the king but the people is internally divided does not present an alternative to Lefort, as it is Lefort himself who claims that the people, as a sovereign subject, does not exist in democracy but is only available in a fragmented, non-self-identical form.
19.Of course, if Rancière’s concept of a distribution of the sensible is understood in a sense analogous to ‘the political’, a Machiavellian-Gramscian reading of a given distribution of the sensible would require a much more concrete, and less metaphorical, analysis of the shifts and continuities within hegemonic formations. I submit that such analysis would neither qualify as ‘historical’ in the sense of the science of history nor in Rancière’s alternative definition of a poetology of history writing, but rather as a specific form of political analysis on the diachronic axis: an analysis, in the last instance, of social struggles unfolding over time. One may call this historical materialism.
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