Week 3 Readings for Lecture: The (Re)distribution of the Sensible

Dear All,

This week’s readings are, again, short and difficult.  We’re moving from the politics of poetic form and the possibility for the poetic page to allow for dialogic, pedagogical, and political re-thinking to re-thinking what “politics,” “pedagogy” and “art” might mean in wider or more foundational contexts, especially with regard to re-thinking gridlines of power, say, within the larger narrative that is the University/educational institution.

Not that we won’t come back to form, to past readings/ideas time and again, of course. 

Questions that should be of help with regard to these readings:

1) how do these terms above translate into and thru each other?

2) what does Ranciere mean by “dissensus” and “distribution of the sensible”?

3) How does Ranciere relate to the Debord, and both to Elrick’s Stalk, and all to Oppen’s work?

4) what does Ranciere mean by “narrative” and “frame” and, especially, “ghost”?

5) finally, what are these relations doing with respect to Freire?  How might they hook up?

I will be sending you the Ranciere reading below as a pdf too–because a) it’s good to have it, and b) I’ve highlighted areas that I think we should pay special attention to.

There are two sets of readings: the required readings for Weds, due by classtime, and the suggested/background readings–they are supplements in case you are interested or have further questions, etc.  Required readings are first, suggested second.

Don’t forget, we’ll reserve 15 minutes at beginning of lecture for Ally, Tommy, and Nicky’s workshop.  Note that all names here end in “y”.  Interesting.

See you Weds!

David

REQUIRED READINGS DUE WEDS:

Jacques Ranciere, “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics & Aesthetics (BELOW and as pdf in email to you)

Guy Debord, “Theory of the Derive,”  HERE

Laura Elrick, “Stalk,” (video poem)  HERE

Re-read the Oppen and ESPECIALLY the review on RADICAL PEDAGOGY (both links two posts down)

SUGGESTED/NON-REQUIRED READINGS:

Ranciere discusses dissensus (video)  HERE

Wiki Entry on May 1968 Uprisings/Strikes in France  HERE

Displaced Struggles: On Ranciere…  HERE

Thom Donovan, “Desiring Criticism”   HERE

David Wolach, Essay on Elrick (forthcoming from Jacket, March 2010) –  sent as pdf in email

The thinking of dissensus: politics and aesthetics 1

Jacques Rancière


What does it mean to think politics and aesthetics under the concept of dissensus? Obviously

dissensus is not only the concept of what politics and aesthetics are about. This notion also sets

up the theoretical stage on which politics and aesthetics themselves are thinkable and the kind of

relations that tie their objects together. At the most abstract level, dissensus means a difference

between sense and sense: a difference within the same, a sameness of the opposite. If you assume

that politics is a form of dissensus, this means that you cannot deduce it from any essence of the

community, whether you do it positively in terms of implementation of a common property such

as communicative language (Aristotle) or negatively in terms of a response to a destructive

instinct that would set man against man (Hobbes). There is politics because the common is

divided. Now this division is not a difference of levels. The opposition between sense and sense

is not an opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. Political dissensus is not the

appearance or the form that would be the manifestation of an underlying social and economic

process. In reference to the Marxist conceptualization, class war is the actual reality of politics,

not its hidden cause.

Let us start from the first point. In Dis-agreement I re-examined the old Aristotelian definition of

the political animal as a speaking animal. Some critics saw it as ‘a return to the classics’, which

also meant to them a return to an old view of language and an old theory of the subject that would

ignore Derrida’s deconstruction or Lyotard’s differend. But this view is misleading. Starting from

the Aristotelian ‘speaking animal’ does not mean returning to the definition of an anthropological

disposition to political life, to the idea that politics is based on the human capacity of speaking

and discussing, as Aristotle opposed it to the merely animal capacity of the voice which expresses

pleasure and pain. On the contrary, I show that this ‘common’ capacity is split up from the very

beginning. Aristotle tells us that slaves understand language but don’t possess it. This is what

1 This text transcribes with some slight modifications the paper presented at the conference ‘Fidelity to the

Disagreement: Jacques Rancière and the Political’, organised by the Post-Structuralism and Radical Politics and

Marxism specialist groups of the Political Studies Association of the UK in Goldsmiths College, London, 16-17

September 2003. I express my gratitude to Benjamin Arditi, Alan Finalyson and James Martin who organized that

conference.

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dissensus means. There is politics because speaking is not the same as speaking, because there is

not even an agreement on what a sense means. Political dissensus is not a discussion between

speaking people who would confront their interests and values. It is a conflict about who speaks

and who does not speak, about what has to be heard as the voice of pain and what has to be heard

as an argument on justice. And this is also what ‘class war’ means: not the conflict between

groups which have opposite economic interests, but the conflict about what an ‘interest’ is, the

struggle between those who set themselves as able to manage social interests and those who are

supposed to be only able to reproduce their life.

I started from philosophers who defined politics as the implementation of a human disposition to

the community because I wanted to show that it is impossible to draw such a deduction, that this

‘common’ sensory quality is already the stage of a dissensus. This leads me to a methodological

remark: disagreement is not only an object of my theorization. It is also its method. Addressing

an author or a concept first means to me setting the stage for a disagreement, testing an operator

of difference. This also means that my theoretical operations are always aimed at reframing the

configuration of a problem. The same critics that suspect me of ‘returning’ to the classics think

that the distinction between politics and police in Dis-agreement or in the Ten Theses on politics

amounts to a search for the purity of politics. Marxists see it is a reminder of the old ‘populist’

opposition of spontaneity to organization, deconstructionists as an uncritical return to an old

metaphysics of identity. But both miss the polemical context of my argumentation. My analysis

of what ‘politics’ means was entirely aimed at challenging and overturning a given idea of that

purity. It was a response to the so-called ‘return of the political’ or ‘return to politics’ which

nearly overwhelmed us in the 80’s in France. At that time we could hear everywhere this motto:

we have now broken away from the subjection of the political to the social, to social interests,

social conflicts, and social utopias. We have thus returned to the true sense of politics as the

action on the public stage, the manifestation of a ‘being-together’, the search for the common

good and so on. The philosophical ground for that return was taken mainly from two

philosophers, Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt, who —in some way— had brought the legacy of

Greek philosophy to modern governmental practice. Both theorists had emphasised the

opposition between the political sphere of public action and speech and the realm of economical

and social necessity. Their arguments were strongly revived, even more so as they could be

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substituted for the old Marxist opposition of ‘economism’ and ‘spontaneism’ to true

revolutionary practice.

That conjunction was made obvious during the strikes of 1995 in France. The old Marxist

denunciation of ‘trade-unionism’ and the Arendtian denunciation of the confusion between the

political and the social could merge into one and the same discourse of support to the ‘political

courage’ of the government in charge of the common good and of the future of the community

against the archaic privileges advocated by the strikers. Therefore, it appeared that the return to

the ‘purity’ of the political meant in fact the return to the identification of the political with state

institutions and governmental practice. Consequently, my attempt at defining the specificity of

politics was first an attempt at challenging the mainstream idea of the return to pure politics.

There is no ‘pure’ politics. I wrote the ‘Ten Theses on Politics’ (Theory & Event 5:3, 2001)

primarily as a critique of the Arendtian idea of a specific political sphere and a political way of

life. The Theses aimed at demonstrating that her definition of politics was a vicious circle: it

identifies politics with a specific way of life. Ultimately, however, this means identifying it with

the way of life of those whose way of life already destined them to politics. It is the circle of the

arkhe, the anticipation of the exercise of power in the ‘power of beginning’, in the disposition or

entitlement to exercise it. The core of the problem lay precisely in the idea of ‘disposition’ or

‘destination’. It lay in the idea of the opposition between a political and a non-political life or a

‘bare life’. This distribution is precisely the presupposition of what I call the police: the

configuration of the political community as a collective body with its places and functions

allotted according to the competences specific to groups and individuals. There is politics when

this presupposition is broken by the affirmation that the power belongs to those who have no

qualification to rule —which amounts to say that there is no ground whatever for the exercise of

power. There is politics when the boundary separating those who are born for politics from those

who are born for the ‘bare’ life of economic and social necessity is put into question.

This means that there is no political life, but a political stage. Political action consists in showing

as political what was viewed as ‘social’, ‘economic’, or ‘domestic’. It consists in blurring the

boundaries. It is what happens whenever ‘domestic’ agents —workers or women, for instance—

reconfigure their quarrel as a quarrel concerning the common, that is, concerning what place

belongs or does not belong to it and who is able or unable to make enunciations and

demonstrations about the common. It should be clear therefore that that there is politics when

there is a disagreement about what is politics, when the boundary separating the political from the

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social or the public from the domestic is put into question. Politics is a way of re-partitioning the

political from the non-political. This is why it generally occurs ‘out of place’, in a place which

was not supposed to be political.

Let us draw some consequences from this analysis. First, this does not mean that my view of

politics is ‘value-neutral’.2 Sure, it refuses to ground politics on an ethical idea of the common.

More precisely, it puts into question the idea that politics, as a set of practices, has to be regulated

by ethics conceived as the instance pronouncing values or principles of action in general.

According to this view, disasters and horrors would happen when you forget to ground politics in

ethics. I would put matters the other way around. In the age of George Bush and Osama bin

Laden, it appears that the ethical conflict is much more violent, much more radical than the

political one. Politics then can be conceived as a specific practice of antagonism, capable of

soothing the violence of ethical conflict.

Yet I do not reduce politics to a mere agonistic schema where the ‘content’ is irrelevant. I am far

away from the Schmittian formalisation of antagonism. Politics, I argue, has its own universal, its

own measure that is equality. The measure never applies directly. It does so only through the

enactment of a wrong. However, not every wrong is necessarily political. It has been argued

against my theses that there also anti-democratic forms of protest among the oppressed, shaped

by religious fanaticism or ethnic identitarianism and intolerance. Ernesto Laclau put this as the

blind spot of my conceptualisation of dissensus.3 But it is clear that in my view a wrong is

political when it enacts the basis of political action, which is the mere contingency of equality,

which is evidently not the case of ‘popular’ movements asking for the purity of the blood, the

power of religion and so on. But I also refuse a widespread tendency to stigmatize any form of

protest under the name of ‘populism’. The concept of ‘populism’ is a hotchpotch which allows

old Marxists and young liberals at once to put in the same basket struggles for maintaining the

welfare system and ethnic or religious riots.

The ‘people’ is a name for two opposite things: demos or ethnos. The ethnos is the people

identified with the living body of those who have the same origin, are born on the same soil, or

worship the same god. It is the people as a given body opposed to other such bodies. The demos

is the people conceived as a supplement to the parts of the community —what I call the count of

2 On this point,see in the same volume Alex Thompson.

3 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London: Verso, 2005, pp. 246-247.

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the uncounted. It is the inscription of the mere contingency of being born here or there, as

opposed to any ‘qualification’ for ruling, and it makes its appearance through the process of

verification of that equality, the construction of forms of dissensus. Now it is clear that the

difference is not given once and for all. The life of the demos is the ongoing process of its

differentiation from the ethnos.

Second, this does not mean that I reduce politics to exceptional and vanishing moments of

uprising. The mere enactment of the political principle rarely —if ever— appears in its purity, but

there is politics in a lot of ‘confused’ matters and conflicts, and politics makes for a memory, a

history. There is a historical dynamic of politics: a history of events that break the ‘normal’

course of time, a history of events, inscriptions, and forms of subjectivisation, of promises,

memories, repetitions, anticipations and anachronisms.4 There is no point in opposing exception

to process. The debate is about the conception of the process. The history of politics, as I view it,

is not a continuous process, going along with economic and social development. It is not the

unravelling of any ‘destinary’ plot either.

Thirdly, the opposition between politics and police goes along with the statement that politics has

no ‘proper’ object, that all its objects are blended with the objects of police. In an earlier text, I

proposed to give the name of ‘the political’ to the field of encounter —and ‘confusion’—

between the process of politics and the process of police.5 It is clear for me that the possibilities

for a political intervention reframing a situation have to be taken from a given setting of the

political, understood in that way. This is why, against the Marxist opposition of real and formal

democracy, I emphasised the part plaid by all the inscriptions of the democratic process in the

texts of the constitutions, the institutions of the states, the apparatuses of public opinion, the

mainstream forms of enunciation, etc. It is a point which clearly differentiates me from some

radical political thinkers who want to tear the radicality of politics apart from any confusion with

the play of state institutions. Alain Badiou who merely sees democracy as the form of state and

way of life of our western societies suspects me of clinging to that consensual view. Slavoj Žižek

opposes the risk of the ‘radical political act’ to the ‘legalistic logic of transcendental guarantee’

4 See my response to Mick Dillon in the discussion about the ‘Ten Theses’, Theory & Event, 6:4, 2003.

5 Jacques Rancière (1995), ‘Politics, Identification and Subjectivization’, in John Rajchman (ed), The Identity in

Question, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 63-72.

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which is provided by the democratic law of the majority.6 But I never identified the democratic

process with the functioning of our states or with the ‘opportunistic insurance’ (Žižek) provided

by the law of the majority. I identified it with the political supplementation which confronts this

functioning to the ‘power of anyone’ which grounds it at the cost of disrupting it. The unequal

order cannot work without its egalitarian presupposition. Conversely the egalitarian struggle itself

often uses the weapons of the police description of the common. Let us think for instance to the

role played in feminist struggle by the medical, moral and pedagogical standards of sexual

complementarity, or by the reference to the ‘property’ of work in workers’ struggles. Equality has

no vocabulary or grammar of its own, only a poetics.

Politics does not stem from a place outside of the police. I agree on this point with some of my

contradictors.7 There is no place outside of the police. But there are conflicting ways of doing

with the ‘places’ that it allocates: of relocating, reshaping, or redoubling them. As I recall in the

Ten Theses, the space of democracy was opened in Greece by such a displacement —when

demos, which first meant ‘district’— became the name of the subject of politics. We know that it

did so when Cleisthenes reshaped the Athenian tribes by putting together three ‘demes’ that were

geographically separated —a measure that made two things at once: it constituted the autonomy

of the political space and deprived the aristocracy from its locally based power.

This gives me the opportunity to say something more about my use of spatial categories or

metaphors that has been underlined by several commentators.8 Speaking of the ‘space’ of

democracy is not a mere metaphor. The delimitation of the demos is a material matter and a

symbolical one at once. More precisely it is a new form of (dis)connection between the material

and the symbolical. The institution of democracy meant the invention of a new topography, the

creation of a space made of disconnected places against the aristocratic space which connected

the material privilege of the landowners with the symbolical power of the tradition. This

disconnection is at the core of the opposition between politics and police. So the issue of space

has to be thought of in terms of distribution: distribution of places, boundaries of what is in or

out, central or peripheral, visible or invisible. It is related to what I call the distribution of the

6 Alain Badiou makes this point against me in his Abrégé de métapolitique, Paris: Seuil, 1998. Žižek’s criticism of

the ‘democratic trap’ has been most clearly coined in the essay ‘From politics to biopolitics …and back’, South

Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2-3), Spring/Summer 2004, pp. 501-521.

7 See in this volume Alex Thompson.

8 See in this volume the contributions of Mustapha Dikec and Michael Shapiro.

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sensible.9 By this I mean the way in which the abstract and arbitrary forms of symbolisation of

hierarchy are embodied as perceptive givens, in which a social destination is anticipated by the

evidence of a perceptive universe, of a way of being, saying and seeing. This distribution is a

certain framing of time and space. The ‘spatial’ closure of Plato’s Republic which wants that

anybody be at its own place is its temporal partition as well: the artisans are initially figured as

they who have no time to be elsewhere than in their place. I called my book on worker’s

emancipation The Night of the Proletarians (translated into English as The Nights of Labour) to

stress that the core of emancipation was an attempt to break away from the very partition of time

sustaining social subjection: the obvious partition being that workers work during the day and

sleep during the night. Therefore, the conquest of the night was the first step in social

emancipation, the first material and symbolic basis for a reconfiguration of the given state of

things. In order to state themselves as sharing in a common world and as able to name the objects

and participants of that common world, they had to reconfigure their ‘individual’ life, to

reconfigure the partition of day and night that, for all individuals, anticipated the partition

between those who were or were not destined to care for the common. It was not a matter of

‘representations’ as historians would claim. It was a matter of sensory experience, a form of

partition of the perceptible.

In other words, my concern with ‘space’ is the same as my concern with ‘aesthetics’. I already

tried to explain that the shift perceived by some commentators between my work on history and

politics and my work on aesthetics is not a shift from one field to another. My work on politics

was an attempt to show politics as an ‘aesthetic affair’. What I mean by this term has nothing to

do with the ‘aestheticization of politics’ that Benjamin opposed to the ‘politicization of art’. What

I mean is that politics, rather than the exercise of power or the struggle for power, is the

configuration of a specific world, a specific form of experience in which some things appear to be

political objects, some questions political issues or argumentations, and some agents political

subjects. I attempted to redefine this ‘aesthetic’ nature of politics by setting politics not as a

specific single world but as a conflictive world: not a world of competing interests or values but a

world of competing worlds.

If that part of my work dealt with the ‘aesthetics of politics’, I would say that my later work dealt

with the politics of aesthetics. I do not understand by this term the question of the relationship

9 See The Politics of Aesthetics, translation and introduction by Gabriel Rockhill, afterword by Slavoj Žižek, London:

Continuum, 2004.

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between art and politics, but rather, the meaning and import of the configuration of a specific

sphere —the sphere of aesthetics— in the political distribution of the perceptible. Already in my

‘political’ work, I have tried to demonstrate how the existence of the political and the existence of

the aesthetical are strongly interconnected: the exclusion of a public scene of the demos and the

exclusion of the theatrical form are strictly interconnected in Plato’s Republic. This does not

mean, as it is often said, that Plato excluded art to the benefit of politics. He excluded politics and

art, both the idea of a capacity of the artisans to be ‘elsewhere’ than at their ‘own’ workplace and

the possibility for poets or actors to play another identity than their ‘own’ identity.

I also tried to show how modern democracy and modern revolution are connected with this new

distribution of the sensible that delineates a specific place for art, a specific feeling called

aesthetic feeling. It is not a mere coincidence that made the art museum emerge at the time of the

French Revolution; neither is it a mere factual influence that led from Schiller’s idea of a specific

‘aesthetic state’ to Hölderlin’s idea of a new, sensory revolution and to the Marxist revolution of

the producers. Modern democracy is contemporaneous with the emergence of the aesthetic. By

this, I mean a specific sphere of experience suspending the forms of domination governing the

other spheres of experience: the hierarchies of form and matter, of understanding and sensibility,

that predicated domination on the opposition of two humanities, differentiated from the very

constitution of their sensory experience. This re-partition of the spheres of experience is part of

the possibilities of refiguring the question of places and parts in general. As we know, it did so in

an ambiguous way: it was not for casual reasons but because of the exceptionality of aesthetics

that replicated the paradoxical ‘exceptionality’ of politics.

The exceptionality of politics has no specific place. Politics ‘takes place’ in the space of the

police, by rephrasing and restaging social issues, police problems and so on. Aesthetic autonomy,

on the contrary, has specific places. But the definition of those specific places is bound up with

the equation between a form of art and a form of life. The solitude of the aesthetic experience was

bound, from the very beginning, with the promise of a future community where there would be

no more art or politics as separate spheres of experience. This means that, from the beginning,

aesthetics has its politics —which, in my terms, is a metapolitics—, a manner of ‘doing politics’

otherwise than politics does. Aesthetics opposes to both the practices of political dissensus and

the transformations of state-power the metapolitical project of a sensory community, achieving

what will always be missed by the ‘merely political’ revolution: freedom and equality

incorporated in living attitudes, in a new relationship between thought and the sensory world,

between the bodies and their environment.

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This project has taken a variety of shapes and undergone many transformations that eventually

led to its reversal: Schiller’s aesthetic education, the new mythology dreamed by Hegel, Schelling

and Hölderlin, the human revolution of the young Marx, the constructivist project of the Soviet

artists and architects, but also the surrealist subversion, Adorno’s dialectics of the modern work,

Blanchot’s idea of May 68 as a ‘passive’ revolution, Debord’s ‘derive’, or Lyotard’s aesthetic of

the sublime.

Here I have to spell out what is at stake in my discussion of Lyotard’s late work, a point which

remains unclear in Disagreement and that I have tried to develop in some recent essays.10 What is

at stake is the understanding of dissensus, which Lyotard turned, through the category of the

sublime, into a new form of absolute wrong. That absoluticisation was not apparent in The

Differend but it became more and more obvious in the following books. That turn has been

obscured in the Anglo-American reception of Lyotard by the concepts of poststructuralism and

postmodernism. Lyotard’s thinking of differend and wrong has been too easily aligned with a

poststructuralist critique of the subject and a postmodern perception of the end of the grand

narratives, which would result into a relativist view of the plurality of languages and cultures.

That perception conceals what is a stake in Lyotard’s theory and in the way of thinking dissensus

that his late books epitomized but which characterises much more widely what I call the ‘ethical

turn’ of aesthetics and politics.11

The absoluticisation of the wrong began in fact with the so-called ‘postmodern’ affirmation of a

break between a modern epoch where the proletarian would have been the universal victim,

subject of a great narrative, and a postmodern time of micro- or local narratives. This break has

no historical evidence. All my historical research had been aimed at deconstructing that

presupposition, at showing that the history of social emancipation had always been made out of

small narratives, particular speech acts, etc. So the argument of a breakaway from the time of the

great narrative and the universal victim seemed to me beside the point. More accurately, it was

beside the point unless it was in fact embedded in another narrative of an absolute wrong. My

10 See Le destin des images, Paris: La Fabrique, 2003, Malaise dans l’esthétique, Paris: Galilée, 2004 and ‘The

Sublime from Lyotard to Schiller: Two Readings of Kant and their Political Significance’, Radical Philosophy126,

2004, pp. 8-15.

11 In his contribution to this volume Sam Chambers has argued that I endorsed, against the Lyotardian differend, an

Aristotelian view of language that prevented me not only from understanding Lyotard but also from completing my

own project of rethinking politics.But I referred to Aristotle in order to show the gap or the wrong lying in the heart

of the classical equation man/speaking animal/political animal. The whole problem is how we conceive of this

wrong.

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assumption is that this was precisely the point. What Lyotard was doing was not breaking away

from the grand narrative of the victim. It was reframing it, in a retrospective way, in order to

make a new use of it.

From this point of view, Heidegger and the Jews can be considered as a switching point that

gives to the so-called ‘postmodern’ argumentation a meaning that perhaps was not there and

certainly was not obvious at the beginning. This meaning is that of the substitution of a narrative

and of a substitution of the victim. In this text, the Jews became the subject of the new narrative

of modernity, the new narrative of the western world. It was no longer a narrative of

emancipation, the one-way plot of the fulfilment of a promise. Instead, it was another one-way

plot: the narrative of the absolute crime that appears as the truth of the whole dialectic of Western

thought, the end-result of the great attempt at forgetting the original debt of thought with respect

to the Other, the Untameable or the Unredeemable.

The idea of the unredeemable debt, as we know, is itself the last stage in the transformation of the

exceptionality of the aesthetic state. Lyotard interprets the aesthetic exceptionality through the

grid of the Kantian sublime: as an experience of impotence. The exceptionality of the aesthetic

state would mean the radial dis-agreement of sense and thought. The Kantian inability of

Imagination to present the idea of Reason is overturned into a power of the aistheton that escapes

the power of thinking and bears witness to an original ‘disaster’: the immemorial dependence of

the mind, its ‘enslavement’ to the law of otherness. The first name of this Otherness is ‘the

Thing’, the Freudo-Lacanian Das Ding. Its second name is the Law.

In this way, the Jewish obedience to the Law is the same as the obedience to the original

experience of the ‘disaster’ or ‘disempowerment’ of the mind. Thus, the Nazi extermination of

the European Jews could be interpreted as the disaster resulting from the denial of the original

disaster, the last accomplishment of the project of getting rid of Das Ding or the Law, of getting

rid of the immemorial dependence to otherness. This properly means interpreting the aesthetic

experience as an ethical experience, debarring any process of emancipation. In such a plot, any

process of emancipation is perceived as the disastrous attempt to deny the disaster that enslaves

the mind to otherness. This thinking of a new kind of radical evil currently leads —at least among

French intellectuals— to two kinds of attitudes regarding politics: one is abstention and other is

support for another kind of absoluticisation of the wrong, support for the current campaigns of

the forces of Good against the axis of Evil.

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Therefore, what is at stake in my research on politics and what ties it up with a research on

aesthetics is an attempt to think a specificity of politics as disagreement and a specificity of the

aesthetic heterogeneity that break away from the absoluticisation of the dissensus as wrong or

disaster. It is an attempt to think such exceptionality outside of a plot of purity. What is at stake in

Lyotard’s last work is clearly a transformation of the Adornian interpretation of the aesthetic

separateness. In Adorno, the aesthetic experience had to be separated in order to hold the purity

of the aesthetic promise. In Lyotard, the aesthetic purity of the work boils down to the status of

sheer testimony of the Untameable.

Similarly, the Arendtian idea of the separation between political life and bare life was reversed in

Agamben’s theorisation of the ‘state of exception’. The latter becomes the great narrative of

Modernity as the subsumption of political life under ‘bare life’. This subsumption accounts for

Hobbes’ theory as well as for the Rights of Man, the French revolutionary sovereignty of the

people, or genocide. The idea of the purity of politics leads to its contrary, to empty the stage of

political invention by sweeping aside its ambiguous actors. As a result, politics comes to be

identified with the act of a power that appears as an overwhelming historico-ontological destiny:

we are all, from the outset, refugees in the homogeneous and pervasive space of the camp,

entrapped in the complementarity of bare life and exception.12

If, at the beginning of the 1990’s, I was addressing the standard theories of the return of the

political, I found myself more and more concerned with this infiniticisation of the logic of

exceptionality, with this double reversal of the political and the aesthetic exceptionality whose

conjunction constitutes the ‘ethical’ trend. I try to oppose to it a way of thinking esthetical and

political dissensuality apart from the idea of purity. The exceptionality of politics is the

exceptionality of a practice that has no field of its own but has to build its stage in the field of

police. And the autonomy of art, in the aesthetic regime, is heteronomy as well: art is posited as a

specific sphere falling under a specific experience, but no boundary separates its objects and

procedures from the objects and procedures belonging to other spheres of experience.

The global logic of my work aims at showing that pure politics and pure aesthetics are doomed to

be overturned together in the radicalisation of the infinite wrong or infinite evil. I try to think

disagreement as the wrong that cannot be settled but can be processed all the same. This means

that I try to keep the conceptualisation of exception, wrong or excess apart from any kind of

12 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanforf: Stanford University Press, 1998,

and my essay ‘Who is the subject of the Rights of Man?’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103 (2-3), Spring/Summer 2004,

pp. 297-310.

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ontology. The current trend has it that you cannot think politics unless you trace back its

principles to an ontological principle: Heideggerian difference, Spinozist infinity of Being in

Negri’s conception, polarity of being and event in Badiou’s thought, re-articulation of the

relationship between potency and act in Agamben’s theory, etc. My assumption is that such a

requirement leads to the dissolution of politics on behalf of some historico-ontological destinary

process. This may take on different forms. Politics might be dissolved in the law of being, like

the form that is torn up by the manifestation of its content. In Hardt and Negri’s Empire, the

Multitudes are the real content of the empire that will explode it. Communism will win because it

is the law of being: Being is Communism. Alternatively, all political wrong could appear as the

consequence of an original wrong, so that only a God or an ontological revolution can save us.

My first concern, from the beginning has been to set aside all analysis of political matters in

terms of metaphysical destination. For this, I think necessary to dismiss any temporal teleology,

any original determination of difference, excess, or dissensus. This is why I have always tried to

define specific, limited forms of excess, difference, or dissensus. I do not ground political

dissensus in an excess of Being which would make any count impossible. I link it with a specific

miscount. The demos does not embody the excess of Being. It is primarily an empty name. On

the one hand, it is a name for a supplementary count that has no necessity, and on the other, this

‘arbitrary’ count enacts the ‘egalitarian’ condition inherent in the legitimisation of inequality

itself. There is no ontological gap but a twist that ties together the contingency of equality and the

contingency of inequality. The power of the demos does not enact any original excess of being. It

enacts an excess inherent in any process of nomination: the arbitrariness of the relationship

binding names and bodies together, the excess of names which makes them available to those

who are not ‘destined’ to give names and to speak about the common. Difference always means

to me a specific relationship, a specific measure of incommensurables.

This is what keeps me at a certain distance from Derrida’s spectrality, though, obviously, I have

to tackle the same kind of issues as he does. For instance, the Derridian problematic of ghosts and

spectrality ties together two issues whose knot is crucial to me too, disidentification and the status

of anachronism. It deals with the same problem that I confront: how are we to think the

‘existence of the inexistent’, how are we to think the ‘supersensible-sensible’? However, in my

view, Derrida gives too much presence, too much flesh to the inexistent. While deconstructing

identity, he is always on the verge of reinstating it by overstating the ‘identity of alterity’ or the

presence of the absent. As he puts it in Specters of Marx, we know nothing about the reality of

13

the ghost. Yet we know that he looks at us, that he sees us and speaks to us. We do not know its

identity but we have to bear its gaze and obey its injunction.

I am fully aware of the weight of ‘otherness’ which separates us from ourselves. What I refuse is

to give it a gaze and give to its voice a power of ethical injunction. More precisely, I refuse to

turn the multiplicity of forms of alterity into a substance through the personification of Otherness,

which ultimately reinstates a form of transcendence. The same goes with the issue of temporal

dis-junction. I also deal with the issues of anachronisms, repetitions and so on, but I refuse to

unify them in the idea of a ‘time out of joint’. I rather think of it in terms of multiplicities of

forms and lines of temporality. In the logic of dis-agreement, as I see it, you always consider a

dis-junction as a specific form of junction (and a junction as a form of dis-junction) instead of

constructing an ontology of dis-junction.

I am aware of the flipside of this argument. If there is no original structure of temporal

‘disjunction’, it is difficult to think the horizon of an emancipatory fulfilment. To put in other

terms, if there is no ghost, there is no Messiah. If I translate the messianic proposition in prosaic

terms, the question runs as follows: is it possible to ground politics on its own logic? Do we not

need to frame a specific temporality, a temporality of the ‘existence of the inexistent’ in order to

give sense to the process of political subjectivisation? I prefer to reverse the argument by saying

that the framing of a future happens in the wake of political invention rather than being its

condition of possibility. Revolutionaries invented a ‘people’ before inventing its future. Besides,

in the context of the ‘ethicisation’ of the political’ that is ours, I think that we have to focus first

on the specificity of the ‘aesthetics of politics’, the specificity of political invention.

Therefore when Derrida speaks of ghosts, opposing them to the binarism of ‘effectiveness’ and

‘ideality’, I prefer to speak of fictions —a term which, in my view, plays the same role but keeps

us from substantialising the part of the ‘inexistent’. The inexistent for me is first of all words,

texts, fictions, narratives, characters —a ‘paper life’ instead of a life of ghosts or Geist. It is a

poetic framing of specific appearances rather than a phenomenology of the unapparent. So when

Derrida proposes to frame a ‘hauntology’ that would be wider and more powerful than an

ontology, I prefer to speak in terms of poetics. Ontology or ‘hauntology’ are as fictitious as a

political invention or a poem. Ontology claims to provide a foundation to politics, aesthetics,

ethics, and so on, whereas a ‘hauntology’ purports to de-construct this pretension. In my view, it

does so at the cost of substantialising the ‘otherness’ that undermines the foundationalist project.

Now, the substantialisation of Otherness is at the core of the ‘ethical’ enterprise. I am fully aware

14

of the distance separating Derrida from the mainstream ethical trend and its obviously reactive

politics, but I think that ‘otherness’ has to be de-susbstantialised, de-ontologised if we want to

escape this trend.

This leads me to answer some questions regarding the sense of my work or the status of my

discourse. Rather than founding or deconstructing, what I always tried to do is to blur the

boundaries that separate the genres and levels of discourse. In The Names of History, I proposed

the notion of a ‘poetics of knowledge’. A poetics of knowledge can be viewed as a kind of

‘deconstructive practice’, to the extent that it tries to trace back an established knowledge —

history, political science, sociology and so on— to the poetic operations —description, narration,

metaphorisation, symbolisation and so on— that make its objects appear and give sense and

relevance to its propositions. What is important to me is that this ‘reduction’ of scientific

discourse to the poetical moment means its reduction to the equality of speaking beings. This is

the meaning of the ‘equality of intelligence’ that I borrowed from Jacotot. It does not mean that

every manifestation of intelligence is equal to any other. Above all, it means that the same

intelligence makes poetic fictions, political inventions, or historical explanations, that the same

intelligence makes and understands sentences in general. Political thought, history, sociology and

so on use common powers of linguistic innovation in order to make their objects visible and

create connections between them. So does philosophy.

For me this means that philosophy is not the discourse that grounds the other forms of discourse

or spheres of rationality. Instead, it is the discourse that undoes the boundaries within which all

disciplines predicate their authority on the assumption of a specific methodology fitting the

specificity of their field of objectivity. My practice of philosophy goes along with my idea of

politics. It is an-archical, in the sense that it traces back the specificity of disciplines and

discursive competences to the ‘egalitarian’ level of linguistic competence and poetic invention.

This practice implies that I take philosophy as a specific battlefield, a field where the endeavour

to disclose the arkhe of the arkhe simply leads to the contrary, that is, to disclosing the

contingency or the poetic character of any arkhe. If much of my work has been elaborated as a rereading

of Plato, it is because his work is the most elaborated form of this battlefield. The

Republic tells us that the inequality of destination is a ‘noble lie’ and lets us understand that the

‘lack of time’ that prevents the artisan to be elsewhere is a proscription of the elsewhere as such.

Phaedrus shows us the link between the proscription of writing and the proscription of

democracy. It draws a radical line separating the space-time of the cicadas-philosophers and the

space-time of the workers, and it promises to tell us the truth about Truth. However, the truth

15

about Truth can only be told as a myth. The equality of fairy tales underpins the whole hierarchy

of discourses and positions. If there is a privilege of philosophy, it lies in the frankness with

which it tells us that the truth about Truth is a fiction and undoes the hierarchy just as it builds it.

An egalitarian practice of philosophy, as I understand it, is a practice that enacts the aporia of

foundation, which is the necessity of a poetical act to constitute an arkhe of the arkhe, an

authority of the authority. I am aware that I am not the only person committed to this task. What

is thus the specificity of my position? It is that I refuse to ontologise a principle of the aporia.

Some thinkers put it as difference, at the risk of conjuring up a spectre of transcendence. Others

identify it with the infinity or multiplicity of Being. We have in mind Hardt and Negri’s

multitudes or Badiou’s theory of Being as pure multiplicity. Both Negri and Badiou set out to

ground the unbinding of authority in a law of Being as unbinding. But, from this point on, it

seems to me that they can complete the enactment of the unbinding power in specific spheres of

practice only at the cost of some sleights of hands which in my view reinstate the principle of

authority. I prefer not to set a principle of the aporia, not to put Equality as an arkhe but to put it

just as a supposition that must be verified continuously —a verification or an enactment that

opens specific stages of equality. These stages are built by crossing the boundaries and

interconnecting forms and levels of discourse and spheres of experience.

By reconstructing the logic of my thinking of dissensus, I was not willing to say how we must

think and act. I was just trying to explain why I went that way. I realise that my practice of

philosophy makes the reading of my work difficult. This is why I am very grateful to those who

accepted to discuss it. Let me stress in conclusion that the main point is not understanding what I

wrote. It is moving forward together in the discussion of the issues we are facing to-day. For

those who want to thread a new way between consensual thinking and the ethical absoluticisation

of the wrong, there is still much room for discussion.

 

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