Ranc Iere
Ranc Iere
Ranc Iere
Jacques Rancire
Thesis 1:[1]
1:
Politics is not the exercise of power. Politics ought to be defined on its own terms, as
a mode of acting put into practice by a specific kind of subject and deriving from a
particular form of reason. It is the political relationship that allows one to think the
possibility of a political subject(ivity) [le sujet politique],[2] not the other way around.
1.
power is to do away with politics. But we also reduce the scope of politics as a
in the form of a mode of relation that is its own. This is what Aristotle means
when, in Book I of the Politics, he distinguishes between political rule (as the
ruling of equals) from all other kinds of rule; or when, in Book III, he defines
the citizen as 'he who partakes in the fact of ruling and the fact of being ruled.'
Everything about politics is contained in this specific relationship, this 'part-
of the political." In the past several years, and in the context of a stateconsensus, we have seen the blossoming of affirmations proclaiming the end
of the illusion of the social and a return to a 'pure' form of politics. Read
2
between the social and the political; and to the idea of a city-state defined by
its common good is opposed the sad reality of modern democracy as the rule
circle posits a way of life that is 'proper' to politics. The political relationship is
subsequently deduced from the properties of this specific order of being and
is explained in terms of the existence of a character who possesses a good or
as a specific way of living. Politics cannot be defined on the basis of any preexisting subject. The political 'difference' that makes it possible to think its
moment you undo this knot of a subject and a relation. This is what happens
in all fictions, be they speculative or empiricist, that seek the origin of the
political relationship in the properties of its subjects and in the conditions of
3
their coming together. The traditional question "For what reasons do human
beings gather into political communities?" is always already a response, and
one that causes the disappearance of the object it claims to explain or to
ground -- i.e., the form of a political part-taking that then disappears in the
play of elements or atoms of sociability.
Thesis 2:
That is proper to politics is the existence of a subject defined by its participation in
contrarieties. Politics is a paradoxical form of action.
5.
the citizen is the one who part-takes in ruling and being ruled, articulate a
paradox that must be thought through rigorously. It is important to set aside
banal representations of the doxa of parliamentary systems that invoke the
that has it that an agent endowed with a specific capacity produces an effect
upon an object that is, in turn, characterized by its aptitude for receiving that
effect.
6.
opposition between two modes of action: poiesis, on the one hand, governed
by the model of fabrication that gives form to matter; and praxis, on the other,
instance, the order of praxis is that of equals with the power of archein,
conceived of as the power to begin anew: "To act, in its most general sense,"
(as the Greek word archein, 'to begin,' 'to lead,' and eventually 'to rule'
principle of freedom."[6] Once Arendt defines both a proper mode and sphere
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of action, a vertiginous short-cut is formed that allows one to posit a series of
equations between 'beginning,' 'ruling,' 'being free,' and living in a city-state
('To be free and to live in a polis is the same thing' as the same text puts it).
7.
engenders civic equality from the community of Homeric heroes; equals, that
is, in their participation in the power of arche. The first witness against this
the man who is an able public speaker despite the fact that he is not qualified
to speak -- Odysseus recalls the fact that the Greek army has one and only
one chief: Agamemnon. He reminds us of what archein means: to walk at the
head. And, if there is one who walks at the head, the others must necessarily
walk behind. The line between the power of archein (i.e., the power to rule),
freedom, and the polis, is not straight but severed. In order to convince
oneself of this, it is enough to see the manner in which Aristotle characterizes
the three possible classes of rule within a polis, each one possessing a
particular title: 'virtue' for the aristoi, 'wealth' for the oligoi, and 'freedom' for the
demos about whom the Homeric hero tells us (in no uncertain terms) that it
had only one thing to do: to keep quiet and bow down.
8.
Thesis 3:
Politics is a specific rupture in the logic of arche. It does not simply presuppose the
rupture of the 'normal' distribution of positions between the one who exercises power
5
and the one subject to it. It also requires a rupture in the idea that there are
dispositions 'proper' to such classifications.
9.
in birth. Those qualified to rule are those 'born before' or 'born otherwise.' This
grounds the power of parents over children, old over young, masters over
slaves, and nobles over serfs. The fifth qualification is introduced as the
principal principle that summarizes all natural differences: It is the power of
those with a superior nature, of the stronger over the weak -- a power that has
the unfortunate quality, discussed at length in the Gorgias, of being
indeterminate. The sixth qualification, then, gives the only difference that
counts for Plato; namely, the power of those who know [savoir] over those
10.
The list ought to stop there. But there is a seventh qualification: 'the
choice of god,' otherwise referring to a drawing of lots [le tirage au sort] that
designates the one who exercises arche. Plato does not expand upon this.
But clearly, this kind of 'choice' points ironically to the designation by god of a
regime previously referred to as one only god could save: namely,
democracy. What thus characterizes a democracy is pure chance or the
complete absence of qualifications for governing. Democracy is that state of
determined principle of role allocation. 'To partake in ruling and being ruled' is
quite a different matter from reciprocity. It is, in short, an absence of
reciprocity that constitutes the exceptional essence of this relationship; and
this absence of reciprocity rests on the paradox of a qualification that is
absence of qualification. Democracy is the specific situation in which there is
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quality of arche, its redoubling, which means that it always precedes itself
within a circle of its own disposition and its own exercise. But this exceptional
state is identical with the very condition for the specificity of politics more
generally.
Thesis 4:
Democracy is not a political regime. Insofar as it is a rupture in the logic of arche -that is, in the anticipation of rule in the disposition for it -- democracy is the regime of
politics in the form of a relationship defining a specific subject.
11.
What makes possible the metexis proper to politics is the rupture of all
of a people that constitutes the axiom of democracy has as its real content the
between a capacity for rule and a capacity for being ruled. The citizen who
partakes 'in ruling and being ruled' is only thinkable on the basis of the demos
those who were 'qualified' to govern because of seniority, birth, wealth, virtue,
means that those who rule are those who have no specificity in common,
apart from their having no qualification for governing. Before being the name
of a community, demos is the name of a part of the community: namely, the
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13.
above. Those who want to speak, though they belong to the demos, though
not a deduction but a definition: The one who is 'unaccounted-for,' the one
who has no speech to be heard, is the one of the demos. A remarkable
passage from Book XII of the Odyssey illustrates this point: Polydamas
complains because his opinion has been disregarded by Hector. With you, he
says, 'one never has the right to speak if one belongs to the demos.' Now
does not designate a socially inferior category: The one who speaks when
s/he is not to speak, the one who part-takes in what s/he has no part in -- that
person belongs to the demos.
Thesis 5:
The 'people' that is the subject of democracy -- and thus the principal subject of
politics -- is not the collection of members in a community, or the laboring classes of
the population. It is the supplementary part, in relation to any counting of parts of the
population that makes it possible to identify 'the part of those who have no-part' [le
compte des incompts][7] with the whole of the community.
14.
should not be identified either with the race of those who recognize each other
as having the same origin, the same birth, or with a part of a population or
even the sum of its parts. 'People' [peuple] refers to the supplement that
disconnects the population from itself, by suspending the various logics of
crucial reforms that give Athenian democracy its proper status; namely, those
addition of three separate boundaries -- one from the city, one from the coast,
and one from the countryside -- Cleisthenes broke with the ancient principle
that kept the tribes under the rule of local aristocratic chieftainships whose
power, legitimated through legendary birth, had as its real content the
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economic power of the landowners. In short, the 'people' is an artifice set at
an angle from the logic that gives the principle of wealth as heir to the
principle of birth. It is an abstract supplement in relation to any actual
(ac)count of the parts of the population, of their qualifications for part-taking in
the community, and of the common shares due to them according to these
qualifications. The 'people' is the supplement that inscribes 'the count of the
unaccounted-for' or 'the part of those who have no part.'
15.
sense but rather in a structural sense. It is not the laboring and suffering
populace that comes to occupy the terrain of political action and to identify its
name with that of the community. What is identified by democracy with the
role of the community is an empty, supplementary, part that separates the
community from the sum of the parts of the social body. This separation, in
turn, grounds politics in the action of supplementary subjects that are a
surplus in relation to any (ac)count of the parts of society. The whole question
of politics thus lies in the interpretation of this void. The criticisms that sought
to discredit democracy brought the 'nothing' which constitutes the political
people back to the overflow of the ignorant masses and the greedy populace.
The interpretation of democracy posed by Claude Lefort gave the democratic
void its structural meaning.[9] But the theory of the structural void can be
interpreted in two distinct ways: First, the structural void refers to an-archy, to
the absence of an entitlement to rule that constitutes the very nature of the
political space; Secondly, the void is caused by the 'dis-incorporation' of the
king's two bodies -- the human and divine body.[10] Democracy, according to
this latter view, begins with the murder of the king; in other words, with a
Against these interpretations, let us say that the two-fold body of the
9
but rather a given constitutive of politics. It is initially the people, and not the
king, that has a double body and this duality is nothing other than the
supplement through which politics exists: a supplement to all social (ac)counts
and an exception to all logics of domination.
17.
that this part belonging to god -- this qualification of those who have no
qualification -- contains within it all that is theological in politics. The
contemporary emphasis on the theme of the 'theologico-political' dissolves the
question of politics into that of power and of the grounding event that is its
sacrificial body, at the price of not seeking Oedipus' body, that Athenian
democracy receives the benefit of its burial. To want to disinter the body is not
Thesis 6:
If politics is the outline of a vanishing difference, with the distribution of social parts
and shares, then it follows that its existence is in no way necessary, but that it occurs
as a provisional accident in the history of the forms of domination. It also follows
from this that political litigiousness has as its essential object the very existence of
politics.
18.
10
gather together under the rule of those qualified to rule -- whose qualifications
are legitimated by the very fact that they are ruling. These governmental
qualifications may be summed up according to two central principles: The first
refers society to the order of filiation, both human and divine. This is the
power of birth. The second refers society to the vital principle of its activities.
This is the power of wealth. Thus, the 'normal' evolution of society comes to
that is expressed in the nature of political subjects who are not social groups
but rather forms of inscription of 'the (ac)count of the unaccounted-for.'
19.
There is politics as long as 'the people' is not identified with the race or
society, a specific figure of 'the part of those who have no-part.' Whether this
part exists is the political issue and it is the object of political litigation. Political
struggle over the very possibility of these words being coupled, of their being
able to institute categories for another (ac)counting of the community. There
are two ways of counting the parts of the community: The first only counts
functions, locations, and interests that constitute the social body. The second
counts 'in addition' a part of the no-part. We will call the first police and the
second politics.
Thesis 7:
Politics is specifically opposed to the police. The police is a 'partition of the sensible'
[le partage du sensible] whose principle is the absence of a void and of a supplement.
11
20.
social. The essence of the police is neither repression nor even control over
the living. Its essence is a certain manner of partitioning the sensible. We will
call 'partition of the sensible' a general law that defines the forms of part-
taking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed.
The partition of the sensible is the cutting-up of the world and of 'world;' it is
the nemen upon which the nomoi of the community are founded. This
partition should be understood in the double sense of the word: on the one
hand, that which separates and excludes; on the other, that which allows
participation (see Editor's note 2). A partition of the sensible refers to the
manner in which a relation between a shared 'common' [un commun partag]
and the distribution of exclusive parts is determined through the sensible. This
no-part
identified
with
the
community
as
whole.
Political
from the police that is, in turn, always attempting its disappearance either by
crudely denying it, or by subsuming that logic to its own. Politics is first and
foremost an intervention upon the visible and the sayable.
Thesis 8:
The principal function of politics is the configuration of its proper space. It is to
disclose the world of its subjects and its operations. The essence of politics is the
manifestation of dissensus, as the presence of two worlds in one.[11]
12
22.
what there is, or rather, of what there isn't: "Move along! There is nothing to
see here!" The police says that there is nothing to see on a road, that there is
nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space of circulating is nothing
other than the space of circulation. Politics, in contrast, consists in
communal nomos.
23.
kind of property that obliges or compels politics. These properties are litigious
as much in their understanding as in their extension. Exemplary in this regard
are those properties that, for Aristotle, define a political ability or are intended
for 'the good life.' Apparently nothing could be clearer than the distinction
made by Aristotle in Book I of the Politics: the sign of the political nature of
humans is constituted by their possession of the logos, the articulate
and the unjust, as opposed to the animal phone, appropriate only for
presence of an animal possessing the ability of the articulate language and its
power of manifestation, you know you are dealing with a human and therefore
with a political animal. The only practical difficulty is in knowing which sign is
required to recognize the sign; that is, how one can be sure that the human
animal mouthing a noise in front of you is actually voicing an utterance rather
than merely expressing a state of being? If there is someone you do not wish
to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers
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an utterance coming out of their mouths. And the same goes for the
opposition so readily invoked between the obscurity of domestic and private
life, and the radiant luminosity of the public life of equals. In order to refuse
the title of political subjects to a category -- workers, women, etc -- it has
expressing suffering, hunger, or anger could emerge, but not actual speeches
demonstrating a shared aisthesis. And the politics of these categories has
sensible from itself. Politics makes visible that which had no reason to be
seen, it lodges one world into another (for instance, the world where the
factory is a public space within the one where it is considered a private one,
the world where workers speak out vis--vis the one where their voices are
and that the discursive forms of exchange imply a speech community whose
constraint is always explicable. In contrast, the particular feature of political
dissensus is that the partners are no more constituted than is the object or the
very scene of discussion. The ones making visible the fact that they belong to
a shared world the other does not see -- cannot take advantage of -- the logic
implicit to a pragmatics of communication. The worker who argues for the
public nature of a 'domestic' matter (such as a salary dispute) must indicate
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demonstrate it as such for those who do not possess a frame of reference to
conceive of it as argument. Political argument is at one and the same time the
demonstration of a possible world where the argument could count as
object, to an addressee who is required to see the object and to hear the
argument that he or she 'normally' has no reason to either see or hear. It is
the construction of a paradoxical world that relates two separate worlds.
25.
Politics thus has no 'proper' place nor does it possess any 'natural'
demonstrations are thus always of the moment and their subjects are always
disappearance: the people are close to sinking into the sea of the population
or of race, the proletariat borders on being confused with workers defending
their interests, the space of a people's public demonstration is always at risk
of being confused with the merchant's agora, etc.
26.
manner in which John Adams identifies the unhappiness of the poor with the
fact of 'not being seen.'[13] Such an identification, she comments, could itself
15
this deafness has nothing accidental about it. It forms a circle with the
acceptance of an original partition, a founding politics, with what was in fact
the permanent object of litigation constituting politics. It forms a circle with the
definition of homo laborans as a partition of the 'ways of life.' This circle is not
Thesis 9:
Inasmuch as what is proper to 'political philosophy' is to ground political action in a
specific mode of being, so is it the case that 'political philosophy' effaces the
litigiousness constitutive of politics. It is in its very description of the world of politics
that philosophy effects this effacement. Moreover, its effectiveness is perpetuated
through to the non-philosophical or anti-philosophical description of the world.
27.
who 'rules' by the very fact of having no qualifications to rule; that the principle
of beginnings/ruling is irremediably divided as a result of this, and that the
political community is specifically a litigious community -- this is the 'political
community of the 'good' to that of the 'useful.' At the head of the anodyne
expression 'political philosophy' one finds the violent encounter between
philosophy and the exception to the law of arche proper to politics, along with
philosophy's effort to resituate politics under the auspices of this law. The
Gorgias, the Republic, the Politics, the Laws, all these texts reveal the same
know [les savants]. These texts all reveal a similar strategy of placing the
community under a unique law of partition and expelling the empty part of the
demos from the communal body.
28.
But this expulsion does not simply take place in the form of the
opposition between the 'good' regime of the community that is both one and
hierarchised according to its principle of unity, and the 'bad' regimes of
16
division and disorder. It takes place within the very presupposition that
identifies a political form with a way of life; and this presupposition is already
operating in the procedures for describing 'bad' regimes, and democracy in
democratic man, Plato transforms the form of politics into a mode of existence
and, further, transforms the void into an overflow. Before being the theorist of
the 'ideal' or 'enclosed' city-state, Plato is the founder of the anthropological
conception of the political, the conception that identifies politics with the
'man,' this 'way of being,' this form of the city-state: it is there, before any
discourse on the laws or the educational methods of the ideal state, before
even the partition of the classes of the community, the partition of the
perceptible that cancels out political singularity.
29.
strictly defined as a common body with its places and functions and with its
other words its way of inhabiting an abode), as law but also as the specific
'tone' according to which this ethos reveals itself. This etho-logy of the
But Plato also invents a 'concrete' mode for describing the production
of political forms. In a word, he invents the very forms of the refusal of the
'ideal state,' the settled forms of opposition between philosophical 'a-prior-ism'
as expressions of ways of life. This second legacy is more profound and more
17
long-lasting than the first. The sociology of the political is the second resource
against itself) its fundamental project: to found the community on the basis of
a univocal partition of the sensible. In particular, de Tocqueville's analysis of
out the structural singularity of 'the qualification without qualifications' and the
Inversely, the claims for the purity of the bios politikos (of the
share in the effectiveness of the same knot between the a-prior-ism of the
matter which side one rests on, the opposition between the 'political' and the
'social' is a matter defined entirely within the frame of 'political philosophy;' in
other words, it is a matter that lies at the heart of the philosophical repression
of politics. The current proclamations of a 'return to politics' and 'political
philosophy' are an imitation of the originary gesture of 'political philosophy,'
without actually grasping the principles or issues involved in it. In this sense, it
modern society and the 'politico' theme of the 'return of politics' both derive
from the initial double gesture of 'political philosophy' and both move towards
the same forgetting of politics.
Thesis 10:
The 'end of politics' and the 'return of politics' are two complementary ways of
canceling out politics in the simple relationship between a state of the social and a
state of statist apparatuses. 'Consensus' is the vulgar name given to this cancellation.
18
32.
separation of the sensible from itself, the annulment of surplus subjects, the
reduction of the people to the sum of the parts of the social body, and of the
words, it is the 'end of politics' and not the accomplishment of its ends but,
simply, the return of the 'normal' state of things which is that of politics' non-
existence. The 'end of politics' is the ever-present shore of politics [le bord de
la politique] that, in turn, is an activity of the moment and always provisional.
'Return of politics' and 'end of politics' are two symmetrical interpretations
producing the same effect: to efface the very concept of politics, and the
thesis simply occludes the fact that the 'social' is in no way a particular sphere
of existence but, rather, a disputed object of politics. Therefore, the
subsequently proclaimed end of the social is, simply put, the end of political
litigation regarding the partition of worlds. The 'return of politics' is thus the
affirmation that there is a specific place for politics. Isolated in this manner,
this specific space can be nothing other than the place of the state and, in
fact, the theorists of the 'return of politics' ultimately affirm that politics is out-
dated. They identify it with the practices of state control which have, as their
principal principle, the suppression of politics.
33.
existence of a state of the social such that politics no longer has a necessary
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asserting that the logical telos of capitalism makes it so that politics becomes,
once again, out dated. And then it concludes with either the mourning of
politics before the triumph of an immaterial Leviathan, or its transformation
into forms that are broken up, segmented, cybernetic, ludic, etc -- adapted
to those forms of the social that correspond to the highest stage of capitalism.
It thus fails to recognize that in actual fact, politics has no reason for being in
any state of the social and that the contradiction of the two logics is an
identifies the political community with the social body, subsequently identifying
political practice with state practice. The debate between the philosophers of
the 'return of politics' and the sociologists of the 'end of politics' is thus a
Notes
[1] The original translation of the "Ten Theses" was done by Rachel Bowlby.
[2] Our English 'political subject(ivity)' does not give an adequate sense of
Rancire's "le sujet politique," a term that refers both to the idea of a political
subjectivity and to the 'proper' subject of politics.
[4] The reference is to Arendt's claim that "the human capacity for freedom,
which, by producing the web of human relationships, seems to entangle its
producer to such an extent that he appears much more the victim and the
sufferer than the author and the doer of what he has done" (The Human
20
[5] The word-play, here, is on the idea of an 'inter-est' referring both to a
pages 50-58).
[7] Though the literal translation of the French is "the count of the
unaccounted-for" the formulation found in the English translation of Dis-
Apparatuses" (see Lenin and Philosophy, New York: Monthly Review Press,
1971).
[13] See Arendt's chapter entitled "The Social Question" from On Revolution;
especially pages 68-71 (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).
Jacques Rancire is professor of aesthetics at the University of Paris VIII (St.-Denis). He is the author
of numerous books including: Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy (1998), On the Shores of
Politics (1995), and The (ames of History (1994).