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.
2
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
3
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
4
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.
5
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.
6
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.
7
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.
8
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.
9
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.
10
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.
11
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.
12
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
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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
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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
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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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