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Jacques Rancire and the problem of pure politics

Samuel A. Chambers European Journal of Political Theory 2011 10: 303 DOI: 10.1177/1474885111406386 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ept.sagepub.com/content/10/3/303
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` re and the Jacques Rancie problem of pure politics

Samuel A. Chambers
John Hopkins University
Abstract ` res writings have increasingly provoked and Over the past decade, Jacques Rancie inspired political theorists who wish to avoid both the abstraction of so-called norma` re tive theories and the philosophical platitudes of so-called postmodernism. Rancie offers a new and unique definition of politics, la politique, as that which opposes, thwarts ` re calls the police order, la police a term that encapsulates and interrupts what Rancie most of what we normally think of as politics (the actions of bureaucracies, parliaments, ` re as proffering a formally and courts). Interpreters have been tempted to read Rancie pure conception of politics, wherein politics is ultimately separate from and in utter ` res thinking opposition to all police orders. Here I provide a different account of Rancie ` re politics goes on within police orders and for this reason he of politics: for Rancie strongly rejects the very idea of a pure politics. Politics is precisely that which could never be pure; politics is an act of impurity, a process that resists purification. In care` res political fully delineating the politiquepolice relation I show that the terms of Rancie ` re consistently undermines any effort to writings are multiple and multiplied. Rancie render politics pure, and therein lies his potential contribution to contemporary political theory. Keywords ` re, theory, the political democracy, politics, purity, Rancie
` res writings have had a growing impact on Over the last ten years Jacques Rancie English-speaking contemporary political theory, particularly in the UK and North America. The English translation of Disagreement prompted a trickle of articles at the beginning of this decade that turned into a steady stream of special issues, symposia, and edited volumes that are just now appearing at the end of the ` res rethinking of politics has provoked and inspired those political decade.1 Rancie theorists who seek an approach to politics that avoids the abstraction of Rawlsian
Corresponding author: Samuel A. Chambers, The Johns Hopkins University, Department of Political Science, 278 Mergenthaler, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA Email: samchambers@jhu.edu
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European Journal of Political Theory 10(3)
proceduralism and Habermasian deliberative democracy, while refusing to repeat the philosophical platitudes of certain forms of post-structuralism. The power and ` res approach to political philosophy lies in his ability and potential of Rancie willingness to treat politics afresh to come at the question of politics or the ` re thereby gives political theorists political from an as yet unexplored angle. Rancie new material, new resources for thinking politics, simply because he redenes not just what politics means, but what it is and what it does.2 ` res new conceptualization of Of course, this blade cuts both ways, since Rancie politics has certain negative consequences as well: rst, it means that much of what political theorists study, and a great deal of what they argue, will turn out ` res new denition to be something other than politics, according to Rancie ` re himself concludes, it means that the ancient project of and, second, as Rancie political philosophy is not the highest and noblest pursuit that both Socrates and ` re declares directly: I am Strauss made it out to be.3 Quite to the contrary, Rancie not a political philosopher.4 And he has good reasons to make such a statement, since within the terms of his arguments political philosophy has a very particular ` re rejects the idea of taking political philosophy as a branch or meaning. Rancie ` re natural division of the broader eld of philosophy.5 Indeed, according to Rancie the telos of the political philosophy project is the very elimination of politics.6 This ` re, across the canon. From Plato to Aristotle, claim holds, according to Rancie from Marx to Arendt, political philosophers have sought to supplant the anarchic disorder of politics with a hierarchical order of the philosopher.7 ` re have duly noted, all of this raises the question of how to As readers of Rancie ` re calls politics and what we have understand the relationship between what Rancie ` re renames la police).8 Given been calling politics for a very long time (and Rancie ` res redenition of the everyday activities of the broad-sweeping nature of Rancie politics under the category of police, it is tempting to read him as something like ` re an Arendtian.9 That is, in his eort to get at the specicity of politics, Rancie could appear to be circumscribing a specic sphere for politics while relegating all other phenomena to the non- or apolitical. Thus, as Arendt gives us the categories ` re would oer us politics/police. Like Arendt, of labour/work/action, Rancie ` re would here be seeking a purer conception of politics; as she protests Rancie ` re would against the encroachment of the social onto the realm of action, Rancie protest against the expansion of police orders in such a way as to crowd out politics. At the same time, one might instead be enticed to locate a third term in ` res thinking one that would either ground the other two, or transcend Rancie them in dialectical fashion. Rather than an Arendtian pure sphere of politics, we ` re (wherein the third term would thus have either a Kantian version of Rancie serves formally as the condition of possibility for politics/police) or a Hegelian version (in which politics and police stage a confrontation whose synthesis determines history). ` res best interpreters In this article I will rst show briey that some of Rancie ` res own texts) have followed one (and sometimes with encouragement from Rancie ` re to support a pure theory of these two, tempting readings and either taken Rancie
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of politics or supplemented his account with a third term that would somehow mediate the relation between politics and police. However, I will then go on to ` res potential contribution to political theory lies not in argue that Rancie ` re rejects, perhaps above all else, Arendtian or Hegelian veins of thought. Rancie the very idea of a pure politics. Politics is precisely that which could never be pure, ` res critique of the tradition of political philosophy (from Plato and and Rancie Aristotle to Marx and yes, Arendt10) centres on his resistance to the purity or purication of politics. As I will outline very briey, I frequently bring my reading ` re into sharper relief by contrasting it with those approaches to his work of Rancie that would (explicitly or tacitly) fold his arguments into a pure thinking of politics. But I wish to state clearly, here at the outset, that these hermeneutic conicts contain important political stakes. The emphasis on impurity matters a great deal ` re, politics is an act of impurity, a process that resists precisely because, for Rancie purication. That is, and as I will explain in this article, politics makes a supplement possible in the face of a social order that says it has no supplement. Politics makes visible that which a social order wishes to render invisible, and it does so in such a way that it does not just add to what is already given. Instead, it undermines the purity of the given. To think politics as impure in precisely this sense means, on the one hand, to reject any model of unalloyed politics (whether it be anarchism or Hegelianism) and, on the other, to insist that politics can never proceed as if the ` rean other can be fully known and incorporated into the social order. In Rancie language, we are always subject to an excess of words that both makes politics possible and prevents its closure. ` re against not I work out the support for these conclusions by reading Rancie only his critics but also some of his apparent supporters. Throughout, I insist on a ` res work, subtle and precarious understanding of the relationship, in Rancie between la police and la politique. This sort of understanding requires a serious ` res works into English contextualist engagement with the translation of Rancie (and curiously, also, as I will explain, the translation of his work from English back into French), yet the delicate issues of translation have an important substan` res thinking of politics. I argue that tive impact on how we understand Rancie la politique and la police do not name separate, sealed spheres that are mutually exclusive. At the same time, I insist that the relation between them cannot be ` res political mediated, grounded, or sublated by a third term. The terms of Rancie writings are multiple and multiplied. They can never be reduced to two (same/other) or even to three (thesis/antithesis/synthesis), since their impurity always resists such a reduction. Indeed, it is in those dimensions of his thought that consistently thwart eorts (even by his own readers) to render politics pure that political theorists may nd the best resources for thinking politics anew today.
Politics as policing
` res most direct writings on politics and political philosophy written in Rancie French in the early 1990s, but translated much more swiftly into English than his
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earlier writings rapidly grabbed the attention of many political theorists for at ` re poses to himself and to his readers a question that least two reasons. First, Rancie is clearly fundamental for most political theorists. In the preface to Disagreement he frames that question as follows: what can be thought of specically as politics.11 Perhaps more importantly for political theorists, and this is the second and ` re gains our interest, Rancie ` re argues that a most powerful way that Rancie response to this question force[s] a distinction upon us: we must distinguish politics from what normally goes by the name of politics and for which I propose to ` re refers to what normally goes by the reserve the term policing.12 When Rancie name of politics he means: the actions of assemblies and parliaments, the decisions ` re not only of courts, the work of politicians, all the eorts of bureaucrats. Rancie renames all of this under a non-political heading, but also gives it a name that surely sounds pejorative on rst reading since he calls it policing.13 ` re immediately claries his conception of police by showing that, while it Rancie is related to the idea of uniformed ocers riding in patrol cars and walking the street, it must nevertheless be analytically distinguished from the truncheon blows ` re uses police, policing, and police of the forces of law and order.14 Rancie order to name any order of hierarchy. And thus he invokes this broader concept of policing to indicate both policy-making as the term in English, though not in French, already connotes as well a wide array of economic and cultural arrange` re ments. In order to stress the broad nature of his concept of la police, Rancie (uncharacteristically) emphasizes the link between his use of police and Foucaults work. Foucault argues: rst, to the extent that any police order determines hierarchical relationships between human beings, the police includes everything; second, to the extent that it sets up a relationship between men and things the police order also constitutes a material order.15 ` re calls on the concept of la police to These links make it clear that Rancie connote the vertical organization of society,16 the dividing up and distribution of the various parts that make up the social whole. A police order is not just an abstract order of powers (of laws or principles), it is an order of bodies that denes the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of ` re elaborates on the conthe visible and the sayable.17 In this key passage Rancie cept of the police in terms that will become central to his later writings, since an ` res vital notion of le partage du order of the visible and the sayable glosses Rancie sensible usually translated as the distribution/partition of the sensible but also connoting both sharing and division.18 Policing is a way of dividing up and making visible the various parts of the social order. ` re suggests that there are two ways of countIn Ten Theses on Politics Rancie ing the parts of the community. The rst way of counting he calls police, and he describes it as follows: it only counts empirical parts actual groups dened by dierences in birth, by dierent functions, locations, and interests that constitute the social body.19 At this point, the English translation of Ten Theses moves on ` res next sentence (and the next way of counting). However, in the to Rancie
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` re conoriginal French, as Maria Muhle has very helpfully pointed out, Rancie tinues: a` lexclusion de tout supplement.20 The police then, is not just a way of counting the actual groups that make up the social order; it is a manner of counting that excludes the possibility of any supplement to that order. There can be nothing more to count; the police must count all.21 By asserting that the polices way of ` re shows again that counting must preclude from the start any remainder, Rancie policing points to a particular type of partition of the sensible. This passage under ` res seventh thesis, which reads: the police discussion immediately precedes Rancie is a partition of the sensible whose principle is the absence of a void and of a supplement.22 The police order distributes bodies without remainder and without exclusion (a` lexclusion de tout supplement); there is nothing it does not account for, nothing left over or external to its process of counting.
Politics as purity
` res denition of politics is now fairly well-known in contemporary theory; it Rancie is his second way of counting the parts in any order. Having taken most of the everyday occurrences that ordinary language refers to as politics and recategorized ` re may then identify politics as the them under the heading of the police, Rancie very disruption of the police order. The police order is hierarchic and implicitly built upon the assumption of inequality (an inequality based on the very dierences that legitimate the domination of the social order). The logic of politics is based on the presupposition of equality;23 it challenges, disrupts, and consistently interrupts the ` re does in his seventh smooth owing of the police order. Put simply, as Rancie thesis: politics is specically opposed to the police.24 Politics is therefore dissensus: the disruption of the given order of domination (the police order) by a political subject that only emerges after the moment of politics, a subject that comes to exist only through the act of politics. I will return later to a much fuller exploration of ` re might mean by la politique, how it relates to la police, and how one what Rancie might understand it in the terms of political theory. But rst I want to interrupt that ` res initial denition immediately calls for: discussion with the question that Rancie having dened politics uniquely, what does one then do with that denition? ` res own texts sometimes invite, and one that surely One option one that Rancie has tempted some of his very best readers is to put that novel denition of politics to work, to use the denition the way Foucault said knowledge was used, for cut` res new denition of politics and operationalize ting.25 That is, one can take Rancie ` re does this himself when, in the latter half of it as a weapon of critique. Surely Rancie Disagreement he shows that neo-liberal consensus models of politics (third way options in Europe and regular interest-group liberalism in the USA) amount to nothing more, though surely nothing less, than orders of the police. This would ` res denition of politics a tool of criticism, but it remains unclear how it make Rancie could serve more than a negative function. It would invite all those questions posed to Foucaults work: what are your normative grounds?; what positive foundation for actual politics does this denition provide? etc.
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A second choice, then particularly if one nds the normative grounds complaints plausible and meaningful would be to take the unique denition of politics ` re himself and work it up into a full-blown alternative theory of politics. Rancie eschews this option, but Todd May has picked it in his recently published book, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancie`re, the rst of what will likely be many ` re.26 books in English that begin to constitute the secondary literature on Rancie ` res To be clear, rather than build a new theory of politics on the basis of Rancie ` res denition of politics as a prime resource denition, May attempts to use Rancie for elaborating the extant theory of anarchism. This leads to at least three significant implications for my eort here to get a better grip on the meaning of politics ` res work.27 in Rancie 1. For May, politics and police stand in stark and ultimate opposition to one another. It is not enough, on Mays account, to say that politics disturbs police orders. Rather, the ultimate (anarchist) goal must be the replacement of the police order of domination with an anarchist freedom. May sees politics ` re as seeking the elimination of police orders.28 May therefore reads Rancie against himself when he writes: distributions are what governments do[, b]ut they are not what people do.29 For May, the collective anarchist action of political agents must remain separate from la police. ` re, May will insist upon laying out and 2. This means, however, that unlike Rancie defending the ontological grounds for his anarchist vision. May appropriates ` res conception of equality for his (Mays, not Rancie ` res) normative Rancie grounds. Anarchism, in Mays understanding, is committed to a substantive ` res thinking to invigorate form of equality, and while May wishes to use Rancie his vision of anarchism, this substantive conception of equality is one that ` re would never embrace. For May, equality is a goal and a ground. Rancie ` re, equality is a presupposition that can only ever be veried, but For Rancie never actually realized. Hence the striking disparity between Mays defense of ` res concept of equality anarchist politics, in which he argues that it is Rancie ` res own assertions that equalthat oers a normative framework,30 and Rancie ity is always a one-o act, thus equality turns into the opposite once it aspires to a place in the social.31 3. Mays commitment to anarchist politics leads him, ultimately, to a vision of ` re politics as singular, unique, and autochthonous. May therefore reads Rancie iz iz ` re, what Z through the logic of Z eks supplement to Rancie ek calls ultrapolitics. Ultra-politics consists of the false radicalization of la mesentete through the construction of an absolute other, where this absolutization eliminates the ground for any real confrontation. The other cannot be met and therein politics itself becomes pure.32 May writes: A democratic politics is dened by the actions and the understandings of those who struggle, not by the eects upon or actions taken by those the police order supports.33 For May, politics in the sense given by anarchism becomes a pure force, utterly and radically distinct from and in complete opposition to any and all police orders.
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` res thinking in the service of anarchist politics In his eort to appropriate Rancie May winds up defending a vision of pure anarchist politics that would obliterate each and every police order, once and for all. While these conclusions clearly do ` res own arguments, they do call for a reinvestigation of the not line up with Rancie ` res thinking. What does it mean to say, as Rancie ` re status of politics within Rancie does, that there is no pure politics? ` res critique of Plato and his deconstructive Here it seems helpful to recall Rancie (my word) reading of Aristotle. In the context of his reworking of Ancient Greek ` re consistently recurs to the theme of an impure politics, a politics thought, Rancie that always thwarts the order of the philosopher.34 Politics can never be pure precisely because politics names a fundamental impurity, an essential impropriety ` res reading of the that renders all essentialism futile. This explains Rancie Aristotelian logos as primordially tainted. As is well known, Aristotle takes logos to be the property of man that distinguishes him from the animals, those with mere phone (voice). We know the dierence between man and animal, according to ` re twists this story in Aristotle, because of the presence of this sign.35 But Rancie a crucial way, by asking a follow-up question of Aristotle: how, through what hermeneutics, can we interpret this sign? The logos/phone distinction is meant to ground politics, but it turns out that we can only draw the distinction through ` re writes: politics. Rancie
The only practical diculty [with Aristotles otherwise limpid demonstration] is in knowing which sign is required to recognize the sign; that is, how one can be sure that the human animal mouthing a noise in front of you is actually voicing an utterance rather than merely expressing a state of being? If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths.36
Politics cannot be determined by the presence of the logos. Politics cannot be given over purely as that which concerns the logos, since politics stages a more fundamental, but always impure, conict over the interpretation of phone and logos. In other words, when we encounter a creature that makes sound, only politics can determine whether we hear in that sound phone (rendering the creature a mere animal) or logos (granting the creature a part in the political community). ` re agrees with Aristotle that the question of language is fundamental to Rancie ` res foundations are impure in many senses, they are not politics, but Rancie really foundations. In claiming man as a political animal, Aristotle turns language ` re, on the other hand, subjects into an apolitical predeterminant of politics. Rancie the human being to the excess of words, thereby claiming man as a literary animal.37 This phrase should not indicate an abiding interest in literature; instead it describes the human animal as always exposed to that excess of words (which ` re names literarity) that Plato and every other philosopher of order had Rancie hoped to shield us from.38
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But if politics has no ground (in language or elsewhere), then it cannot be self` re explains that politics has no proper place nor does it grounding either. Rancie possess any natural subjects.39 We must say, then, not just that politics is not ` re formulates the pure, but more, that politics is that which renders impure. Rancie point in many dierent ways. Politics is dissensus.40 Politics is a splitting into two.41 Politics is a rupture of the logic of the arkhe.42 Politics is subjectivization in the form of disidentication.43 And with regard to the relation between politics and ` re makes a very consistent argument: the opposition between politics police, Rancie and police goes along with the statement that politics has no proper object, that all its objects are blended with the objects of police.44 Politics cannot be uncoupled from police; it only appears in this blended form. But because politics is not simply impure itself but that which renders impure, this blended form must not be confused with hybridity or the mere amalgamation of dierent parts. In blend` re refuses to merge the two; he gives us a blending ing politics with the police Rancie that is always also an othering. Thus, while it surely seems simple to conclude that Mays Manichean view of politics/police cannot hold politics can never be pure45 the argument proves more complicated than such a conclusion would suggest. Impurity is, by denition, ` res never simple. And the impurity of politics produces a paradox for Rancie thought. On the one hand, politics must not be pure. On the other, politics as that which disrupts the police order must somehow remain other to that order; this is why the blending is never a merging. For the disruptive force of politics to be preserved, it must somehow remain external to the police order that it would disrupt. Yet politics as pure externality would preclude the necessary meeting of the heterogeneous that enacts politics.46 Hence, politics must be other to police, but not purely other. The key to responding to this paradox is to refuse to over` res theory of politics must be understood as thinking the come it. Instead, Rancie paradox, as capturing its avour and mobilizing its force, rather than attempting to erase or resolve it.47 To defend this sort of paradoxical argument means starting ` re has repeatedly with a rejection of the idea of pure politics one that Rancie asserted and one that I have defended in this section but it is impossible to rest here. We must also grasp the relation between politics and police. And while we need to understand the relation as precisely as possible, we must always also insist that the relation itself can never be specied with precision. On the topic of this ` res thought, no English-language commentator on relation, so central to Rancie ` re has shed more light than Jean-Philippe Deranty. Rancie
Politics and the political: the three term model

Deranty has written a number of articles (in English) that provide comprehensive ` re. Arguing in particular that overviews of the political thought of Rancie ` res work can be best understood within the context of the politics of recRancie ` res arguments directly to the work of Axel ognition, Deranty compares Rancie Honneth. In this context, I am not overly concerned with Derantys broader
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arguments;48 instead, I wish to focus on a particular set of claims he makes within them about how we should understand the relation between politics and police. I am somewhat surprised that Derantys argument on this front has not had a ` re, since Deranty probigger impact on the English-language literature on Rancie ` res account of politics precisely the issue poses a radical re-evaluation of Rancie ` re that animates most political theorists when they turn to Rancie Deranty mentions at the end of his account (and in a footnote), a set of facts ` re was invited to that I think should be foregrounded. As Deranty explains, Rancie participate in a seminar run by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in February 1982. This was the seminar at which Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe argued for the distinction between la politique and le politique.49 Before digging into ` re it seems prudent to take one step back. Derantys specic reading of Rancie There is a rich and varied tradition in contemporary political theory of insisting on a dierence between politics or policy (la politique), on the one hand, and something like the political (le politique), on the other. Oliver Marchart provides perhaps the denitive history of what he calls political dierence from Ricoeur, through Arendt, Schmitt, and Moue, all the way to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe with side-trips into Wolin, Sartori, and others.50 Marchart assigns himself the task of tracing the distinction between politics/the political through all of 20th-century political theory. He sees his work as something of a denitive account and provides lengthy commentary on most of the big names in Continental thought. His refer` re, therefore, prove important precisely for their sparseness. Early on, ences to Rancie ` res name appears in a list of many who recognize a split between politics/the Rancie ` res work.51 Indeed, political, but there is no direct discussion of any of Rancie ` re receives no substantive attention until very late in the book. The few Rancie references that do appear prove thin, but nevertheless very signicant. So how does the general understanding of political dierence, which Marchart practically denes in his opening page as the dierence between la politique and ` re? On rst mention, Marchart suggests somele politique, manifest itself in Rancie thing striking, but which goes unremarked as such in his own text. He writes: what ` re calls la politique . . . others would call the political and this would be disRancie ` re, from politics as police.52 But the political is the English tinguished, for Rancie ` re uses la politique translation of le politique, and thus, according to Marchart, Rancie to refer to the political precisely when others would use le politique. In the terms of Marcharts own broader work (a book on political dierence) this move makes sense, since it allows Marchart to show that while not starting with or insisting upon the distinction politics/the political (and as I would note, while not explicitly or ` re, in a way, stumbles upon, formally using the term le politique at all) Rancie what Marchart calls, political dierence. For other thinkers this is the dierence ` re it is the dierence between between le politique and la politique, whereas for Rancie la politique and la police. And I should note that Marchart himself does not dwell on ` re is certainly not one of the central thinkers of political dierthis point Rancie ence and therefore Marchart may well be more alert to the slippery and impure ` re that I try to track and assert here. thinking of politics in Rancie
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` re Nevertheless, in terms of my own argument, Marcharts key quote on Rancie ` re does seem odd, especially to the eect that la politique is the political for Rancie ` res key texts on politics (the works from the since the English translators of Rancie early 1990s) have seen t to translate, and do so rather consistently, la politique as ` res work in politics and not as the political. That is, for those reading Rancie English translation, the political makes no appearance at all. Thus, I would sug` re out of the political dierence gest that it might make more sense to leave Rancie model entirely, rather than trying to make him t into it in inverted fashion. The ` re may be taken as evidence that fact that Marchart quickly moves on from Rancie ` re as not quite tting the model. he too sees Rancie In any case, things grow stranger still when one turns from Marcharts brief iz ` re and political dierence, to Marcharts reading of Z comments on Rancie eks iz ` re. In this context, Marchart tells us that Z account of Rancie ek nds his own ` re, which Marchart summarizes as the version of political dierence in Rancie dierence between la politique/police and le politique.53 This formulation, especially in light of the earlier one, requires some sorting out. Here again the political is distinguished from police. But whereas in the earlier version we had the formula la politique the political, we now have a return to the more standard le politique the political. At the same time, this second formulation requires iz making la politique a synonym for the police. However, Z eks claim54 here strikes ` res writings on politics consistently refer, me as quite simply untenable since Rancie iz in French, to a dierence between la politique and la police. Z ek asserts that ` re, when in fact the dierence la politique and la police are the same, for Rancie between them is the fundamental and driving force in all of Rancie`res writing on ` re it politics. Indeed, if there is to be any obvious political dierence in Rancie surely is to be found here in the dierence between la politique and la police that ` re discusses repeatedly and at such length. Again, one wonders whether the Rancie ` re is merely futile. project of nding politics/the political in Rancie Perhaps, then, the distinction between politics and the political has no obvious ` res work. Indeed, at rst glance it would seem that no commentaplace in Rancie ` re have any recourse to a distinction in his tors on, and no translators of, Rancie own work in French between la politique and le politique.55 It is more than notable, ` res argument, but also then, that Deranty not only locates this dierence in Rancie ` re. Deranty structures his articulation of makes it central to his reading of Rancie ` res key concepts by introducing both politics and police in a rather typical Rancie fashion. But in dening politics as that which breaks with the order of la police, Deranty refers explicitly to la politique. Thus, the opposing terms, according to Deranty, are la police and la politique. This brings Deranty back to the same dilemma that May faces: how to understand the interaction between these two terms that are diametrically opposed? Derantys answer is striking and original:
This tension between la police and la politique creates a necessary place where they can ` re calls this third term le politique. It is the place where and must be mediated. Rancie the underlying equality operating within social inequality is veried pragmatically in
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struggles and demands of equality. In this place is therefore also veried the wrongness and wrungness of a social order that is otherwise presented as naturally ordered. It identies victims of the tort and those who perpetrate the tort. In simple words, le politique is always a demand for justice. Le politique is in essence polemic.56
In a subtle yet stark departure from the standard reading, Deranty says there are ` res conceptual frame, there are three. Le politique is the not two terms in Rancie third term. It identies and points to that place in which the logic of domination contained by la police meets the presumption of equality mobilized by la politique. ` re has taken As Deranty explains in his later note, this reading contends that Rancie on board, in a serious way, the Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy-inspired distinction ` re between le politique and la politique. However, and utterly unsurprisingly, Rancie has mobilized the distinction for distinct, if not opposite, ends. Whereas le politique for Nancy suggests something like the very essence of the political, which has been ` re uses the third term, le politique, so as to eroded or lost within modernity, Rancie enable an anti-essentialist understanding of politics.57 ` res thinking of politics, By introducing what he calls the third term in Rancie Deranty oers a powerful and persuasive argument for how to interpret the relation between la police and la politique. But we still have to ask whether the reading is supported by the text; that is, is this dierence between la politique and ` res writings? If the dierence does exist in le politique actually present in Rancie ` res English translators: neiFrench it has by no means been preserved by Rancie ther Julie Rose, who translated La Mesentente, nor Rachel Bowlby and Davide Panagia, who translated the Ten Theses on Politics, refer to such a distinction; they make no eort whatsoever to call attention to a dierence between le politique and la politique. Indeed, the texts themselves include very sparse references to le politique and make no mention of any explicit or meaningful distinction to be drawn between la politique and le politique: for example, all of the theses in the 10 Theses use the French la politique and never le politique. All of this evidence leads ` re to one central question: where, if anywhere, do we nd the distinction in Rancie between la politique/le politique? iz In the case of Z ek (and to a certain extent, Marchart) we can safely say that the ` res writings from outside in an attempt to make distinction is imposed upon Rancie his thought t into a set of pre-made categories. But the answer in Derantys case cannot be that simple, since Deranty does not start with political dierence and ` re to this mould; instead, his argument for the three terms emerges then t Rancie ` re. But if a strong distinction between directly from his own reading of Rancie la politique and le politique cannot be found in either La Mesentente or Dix ` ses sur la politique, then where did Deranty nd it? the In repeatedly asking this question of myself I had begun to wonder, against my better judgment, if he made it up. But, of course, he did not. The answer is that Deranty very likely found the distinction (although he does not tell his readers this) ` res works that were originally written in English. To repeat for claritys in Rancie sake: the distinction that Deranty draws between la politique and le politique
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` res better-known writings on politics but from one or two originates not in Rancie ` re presented in English. In 1991 Rancie ` re gave the paper lectures58 that Rancie Politics, Identication, Subjectivization at a conference in the United States. ` re tells readers in the preface to the second French ediThe conference, as Rancie tion of Aux bords du politique, was devoted to the American debate over the question of identity, and circled around issues of nationalism and racism.59 The ` re conference organizers posed specic questions to the paper-givers, and Rancie chose to structure his talk directly in response to one of those. In just his second paragraph, after clearing the ground concerning his having to give the lecture in ` re writes: I quote from the third English, a language that is not his own, Rancie point of the list of issues we were asked to address: What is the political?60 Thus, ` re from outside, from the very idea of thinking about the political comes to Rancie what was at the time a very American-centric debate over multiculturalism, and it ` re then goes on give his answer to is voiced in a foreign language, English. Rancie the question what is the political, an answer that corresponds perfectly well with Derantys commentary. The political is the encounter between two heterogeneous ` re calls policy; the second is equality.61 As processes. The rst process Rancie ` re says we have 3 terms, but at Deranty will echo more than a decade later, Rancie ` re then this point those terms are policy, emancipation, and the political.62 Rancie suggests we name the process of emancipation politics. Finally, if we translate policy back into French as police,63 we wind up with the three terms that Deranty argues for: la police, la politique, and le politique. La politique is that logic of equality that encounters the order of domination constituted by la police; le politique is the ground or space of such an encounter. Nonetheless, the logic here clearly looks less than straightforward, and thus I remain skeptical that the three terms approach of both Deranty and the lecturer` re, captures adequately the thinking of politics that Rancie ` res in-English, Rancie original French texts provide. Before complicating matters with the help of just ` re to some sort those texts, I should bring the story of political dierence in Rancie ` re does mention the dierence between politics and the politof close. First, Rancie ` re ical in other places. In another lecture also given in English, in 2003, Rancie refers directly to the previous talk: in an earlier text, I proposed to give the name of the political to the eld of encounter and confusion between the process of politics and the process of police.64 Yet this lecture does not work with the politics/ political distinction and certainly does not maintain a three terms model; rather, it invokes this earlier work in order to make the point, which I have already discussed, that politics has no proper object.65 ` re was probably I would hypothesize that the idea of three terms in Rancie instantiated not by these two lectures given in English (one a minor work in ` res corpus and one still unpublished), but by Rancie ` res decision to have Rancie the earlier lecture translated into French and included in the second French edition of Aux bords du politique. The 1991 lecture was translated into French so as to make the distinction between la politique and le politique perfectly clear; indeed, in that edition the editor chose to italicize the le and la that precede politique in order
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to emphasize the political dierence. More than this, the new structure for this ` res earsecond edition of the very popular book (the rst edition included Rancie liest writings centered most directly on politics, the ones upon which La Mesentente directly built) placed the 1991 lecture at the centre of a new part one. Part one was ` la politique, from the political to politics. Finally, Rancie ` re titled Du politique a wrote a new preface for the second edition in which he explicitly discusses, for the rst (and to my knowledge, only) time in French, the dierence between la politique and le politique. If all that were not enough to make it seem as if this distinction had ` res thinking concerning politics, the blurb on the always been central to Rancie back of the book excerpts the new preface at just the place where it species the distinction between le politique and la politique. The blurb reads:
If le politique imposes itself as an object of philosophical thought, it is without doubt that this neutral adjective conveniently signies a variation with the substance of la politique, in its ordinary sense of a ght of the parties over power and the exercise of that power. To speak of le politique and not la politique indicates the principles of law, power, and community and not the activities of government.66
` res work in French at It seems quite likely, then, that a reader picking up Rancie some point over the past decade would come away with the impression that the dierence between la politique and le politique had an important role to play in his thinking of politics. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the vast majority of ` res writing on politics maintain no such distinction. And it seems crucial Rancie ` res most important works on politics from the 1990s were to note here that Rancie all produced after the 1991 lecture that had suggested three terms (in English), yet ` re did not bother to fold that terminology into La Mesentente clearly the Rancie ` res devoted to politics and engaged with the tradition of central text of Rancie political philosophy. I therefore contend that there is something very problematic about making the three terms of politics fundamental to ones interpretation of ` re. To do so would be to take the French translation of one short lecture Rancie coupled with an eight-page preface to a second edition of a collection of essays, and use those texts as some sort of central hermeneutic guidebook allowing one to ` res broad corpus on politics. Without any further reinterpret all of Rancie reason to think, or evidence to support the idea, that le politique mediates ` res main texts, it seems a mistake to structure la politique and la police in Rancie ` res conception of politics around this approach (not to an argument about Rancie ` re himself wishes to reinterpret mention that there seems no evidence that Rancie his past works through this lens; since the 1998 preface, there have been no more writings to my knowledge that maintain a dierence between la politique and le politique).67 I must stress, however, that my resistance to the idea that le politique provides a ground or space of encounter between la police and la politique does not rest only a contextualist argument concerning the production and presentation of these texts. While I contend that the contextualist work provides reasons to be wary, I also
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` res writings fails to account argue that the insertion of the third term into Rancie for the subtlety and power of his thinking of politics. It actually blunts the incisiveness of his conception of la politique to conceive of it within the three-term model. To make le politique into the space where the ght of politics is played out, ` re far too close to an Arendtian model. Rancie ` re always resists the returns Rancie idea of a sphere of action, and the promotion of le politique to a mediating, ` res conception of politics grounding term runs the risk of transforming Rancie into a specic sort of act that must occur in its proper space.68 Indeed, even in its formal logical structure, the three terms approach proves overly symmetrical and balanced for a thinker who consistently insists on a lack of balance who thinks in and through paradox, not symmetry. The three terms model creates a set ` res concepts, when those concepts are always designed of proper spheres for Rancie to thwart the idea of proper spheres.69
The doubling of politics: democratic politics within the police order

` res thinking of politics by assimilating it to such a To prevent closing down Rancie model, I will build directly on Derantys arguments, but I want to twist or wring them in a particular way. As Deranty stresses, the wrongness that politics asserts in the face of a police order is also a wrungness a twisting or torsion of the police order and its logic of inequality. In other words, I am trying to apply to Derantys own reading the anti-ontological torsion that Deranty so helpfully identies in ` res work. Thus I contend that there are not really three distinct terms in Rancie ` res argument. If there were three terms, then all three of them could be Rancie pure: a realm of domination (police), a realm of dissensus (politics), and a ground upon which they meet (the political). But this would be to found an essential conception of politics, le politique, as an ontological ground. This, as Deranty stresses and as I have been arguing throughout this article, could not be fur` res project. As Rancie ` re consistently underlines, he avoids all ther from Rancie ontology.70 Hence my argument: we do not have three terms (police, politics, the political) but merely a doubling of one of the two terms.71 Politics is doubled, always and already. It is doubled in that it is never singular and never pure always and already because the doubling is not a secondary process that happens to a pre-given politics, but an essential feature of la politique in the rst place. Politics, like the logos, is subject to an original taint split from ` re says politics must be.72 Thus, itself, split into two from the beginning, as Rancie ` res thought, nor can there be a clear political politics cannot be pure in Rancie dierence in his work (la politique/le politique) since in his very writings, politics doubles itself; that is, we cannot distinguish le politique from la politique, since neither is singular.73 This argument operates on two distinct, yet inextricably linked levels. First, I make the case for a doubled politics as a solution of sorts to the dilemma of how to translate which is nothing other than the question of how
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` re: if la politique is never simply itself (never pure, never one) then to read Rancie we can understand how it is both the disruptive other to the police order and somehow simultaneously a part of the police order. La politique is always ultimately opposed to and transformative of la police, but since the former is never simply itself, it cannot be taken to be wholly external to and outside of the latter. In grasping for a third term, le politique, Deranty actually goes some distance ` res work, but I toward bringing this dimension of doubling into play in Rancie insist on the crucial importance of the doubling of la politique, rather than the preservation of its purity through the introduction of a third term. However, and secondly, this argument cannot be conned to the level of hermeneutic debates or semantics (even if it arises there, even if that is the location from which we can begin to make the argument in the rst place). The notion of a doubled politics not only solves interpretive problems but also casts a great deal of ` res conception of politics on, as I said in the opening, not just light on Rancie ` re does not, a` la Nancy and others, wish to what it means but what it does. Rancie separate something like the political from politics; nor does he seek to establish the political as more originary, more fundamental to politics. For these reasons Deranty is too quick to assume that le politique is the necessary place for politics ` res work does not convey clearly and police to meet. Such a rendering of Rancie enough what Deranty refers to in the very next paragraph as the anti-ontological shape of his argument.74 Perhaps, as Deranty suggests, the dierence between le politique and la politique must be attended to, but the dierence cannot be ` res dichotomized.75 Indeed, the potential ambiguity of politics in Rancie English-translation texts helps to convey something of the impurity of politics ` re himself insists upon (interestingly, in English).76 If there can be that Rancie ` re, then it is surely this said to be such a thing as political dierence in Rancie doubling of politics itself, rendering it always already impure.77 The three-term model tends, as I have shown, to purify politics. In addition, that ` re himself approach also seems to ignore quite blatantly a crucial point that Rancie repeatedly makes: politics and police meet within the police order itself. Politics goes on in the only place where it can go on: within the social formation where it occurs, i.e. within the space of the police order. And politics must be doubled precisely because of this fact about its location, because politics is that which opposes the terms of the police order but does so within its terms. Only an impure form of politics could do such a thing. There is no pure politics.78 This means that in ` res conception of politics as trying to grasp the meaning and importance of Rancie that which irrupts into any given police order, we must see the interconnected nature of the two. In a crucial passage that responds to critics who would (mis)read ` re writes (and I comment in brackhim as proposing the purity of politics, Rancie ets): politics does not stem from a place outside of the police. There is no place outside of the police. [And hence there need not be a third place where politics and police meet all meeting is conict within the police order itself.] But there are conicting ways of doing [sic] with the places that it allocates: of relocating, ` res use of redoubling since reshaping, or redoubling them.79 I italicize Rancie
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the word itself is a doubling of double, connecting directly to my broader argument about how to understand his conception of politics. To remain both impure and non-dialectical (politics impurities cannot merely be waiting to be removed through a process of sublation), politics must always be redoubled in this way.80 Reading la politique as doubled while arguing for a doubling of politics in democratic politics, brings to light both the impurity of politics and the inherent oppo` res sition between politics and police. Thus, if le politique plays a role in Rancie theory, it cannot be a grounding role, that of providing a space for politics. ` re refutes this idea directly: As for the exceptionality of politics, it has no Rancie specic place. Politics takes place in the space of the police [again, no third space is needed], by rephrasing and restaging social issues, police problems and so on.81 The encounter between la politique and la police is never denitive, never nal, and never produces a new stage of history. It is always a renegotiation of the very police order in which we live.82 And in the end, democratic politics can do nothing else than this: renegotiate the ` re who see in (or project into) his works a police order. Those readers of Rancie radical alternative to every form of politics as we know and have known it, will nd ` re to provide what this conclusion utterly unsatisfying. May and others want Rancie a certain form of orthodox Marxism once oered: a utopianism stripped of the label utopian, a vision for a politics wholly other to what lies before us in our own political conjuncture. In a word, hope. But a particular kind of hope: a pure hope, untainted by the unruliness of democracy. And yet, nothing could be further from ` res own vision of democracy: for him, unruliness is precisely what democRancie racy oers. But that is not all it oers, for in the unruliness of democracy we can locate the verication of equality through the excess of words,83 and the only genuine hope there is: not the hope that politics will save us, but that democratic politics will change what is, will alter what is given. For this reason, what we might call, even in the face of his own reluctance to ` res political theory, must be a particular kind of give it such a name, Rancie political theory.84 Not despite, but due to the nature of its radical commitments to equality and the people, this is not a full-blown theory of politics or the polit` re has very recently written (speaking of his own work in the third ical. Rancie person): he never intended to produce a theory of politics, aesthetics, literature, cinema or anything else. He thinks that there is already a good deal of them and he loves trees enough to avoid destroying them to add one more theory to all those ` res thinkavailable on the market.85 These statements make it obvious that Rancie ing of politics resists the trajectory of an anarchist project, or any other pure, formal account of what politics should be or become. But this is not just because ` re has chosen to do something else other than produce a theory of politics. Rancie It is because democratic politics is never a pure politics.86 To insist that politics is not pure is surely to reject the idea of a formal political theory that would lay ` re puts it, I am not normative grounds or predict historical processes. As Rancie saying this is how all of us must think and act.87 But it is by no means to reject political theory in a more broadly conceived form, since a commitment to the
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impurity of politics is a commitment to another task, a reraising of the question How are we to reinvent politics?88 ` rean reinvention of politics would have to start with the hierarchy, A Rancie inequality, and structural domination of all social orders (la police). Deranty argues ` re has borrowed the metaphor of society as a gravitational order, a that Rancie kind of Aristotelian nature, where objects always end up falling to their proper ` re mentions such a metaphor places.89 I would stress, however, that while Rancie he always identies it as a metaphor. Those committed to the hierarchy of the police order may wish to literalize this metaphor, to naturalize the inequality of a given ` res arguments about the presuppopolice order. But, in a supplement to Rancie sition of equality, we can argue that police orders are built upon an assumption of inequality. Those stultiers whose existence depends upon that presumption will try to verify it repeatedly by demonstrating their own superior intelligences, and their own repeated presuppositions of inequality mean that the social order is always in fact marked by domination. But this is not to say that there is anything at all natural about the domination of the social order. And the verication of the equality of intelligences will always expose the wrong of the police order. There is nothing natural about inequality; it is ` re himself says in The nothing like gravity, despite the metaphor. As Rancie Ignorant Schoolmaster: convention alone can reign in the social order.90 Thus, to call the social order a quasi-natural order, as Deranty does, requires us to put enormous weight and repeated emphasis on the quasi- part: the social order passes itself o as natural; it has recourse to the metaphor of gravity. But natural it is not. A reinvented, impure politics would remain committed to the verication of the principle of equality a principle that can only be veried, never made substantial in the face of continued domination of the police order in which we do, and must, live.
Notes
An earlier version of this paper was given at the American Political Science annual meeting in Toronto, in Sept. 2009; I am deeply indebted to my fellow panelists and audience members for their insights and suggestions, especially Lisa Disch, Davide Panagia, Mike Shapiro, ` res thought on the police, I am and John Zumbrunnen. For earlier engagements with Rancie grateful to the graduate students in my 2009 seminars and to Andrew Schaap. I am pleased to note my great appreciation for the eorts of two anonymous reviewers for EJPT for their very helpful comments and suggestions. For help with translations, I owe another debt to Rebecca Brown. Finally, for her careful and inspiring reading of an earlier draft, I give my sincere thanks to Jane Bennett. ` re (1999) [1995] Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: 1. Jacques Rancie University of Minnesota Press. In this article I cite a large number of the early texts ` re; nonetheless there are a few that I do not address directly that are certainly on Rancie important contributions. They include: Michael Dillon (2003) (De)void of Politics? A ` res Ten Theses on Politics, Theory and Event 6(4); Kirstie Response to Jacques Rancie
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2.
3. 4. 5. 6.
7. 8.
9.
10.
McClure (2003) Disconnections, connections, and questions: Reections on Jacques ` res Ten Theses on Politics, Theory and Event 6(4); Aamir Mufti (2003) Rancie ` res Ten Theses on Politics: After September 11th, Theory Reading Jacques Rancie and Event 6(4); Paolo Palladino and Tiago Moreira (2006) On Silence and the Constitution of the Political Community, Theory and Event 9(2). I also address some of the more recent literature, but much of it has only just appeared or remains in press. Here I would wish to emphasize two recent special issues in Parallax (15(3), 2009) and Borderlands (8(2), 2009) and two forthcoming volumes: Jean-Philippe Deranty (ed.) (2010) Jacques Rancie`re: Key Concepts. London: Acumen. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (eds) (2010) Reading Rancie`re. London: Continuum. ` re the question of politics is not a question of I put the point this way because for Rancie denition or even of ontology, but always a question of interruptions, interventions or eects. Politics is not; politics disrupts. Leo Strauss (1959) What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. ` re (2003) Comment and Responses, Theory and Event 6(4): para. 10. Jacques Rancie ` re (n. 1), pp. ix, 61. Rancie ` re might be seen to intersect This is the rst of many places where my reading of Rancie ` re share a harsh with the thought of Alain Badiou. In this case, Badiou and Rancie ` re this judgement reects a fundacondemnation of political philosophy. For Rancie ` re sides with politics in this mental conict between philosophy and politics (and Rancie dispute) whereas for Badiou the problem of political philosophy consists in a misunderstanding of the proper role of philosophy in relation to politics. Alain Badiou (2005) Metapolitics, tr. Jason Barker, p. 118. London: Verso. In discussing so-called political dierence in the text, one could also broach an analysis of the shared but distinct ` re and Badiou both give to la politique. On this point, see special status that Rancie Marcharts very helpful chapter on Badiou, specically the argument concerning ` res shared reversal of the privileging of the political over politics Badiou and Rancie within Marcharts broader exploration of political dierence. Oliver Marchart (2007) Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Dierence in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, pp. 11920. Edinburgh University Press. In general, further exploration of the ` re would take me too similarities, and radical dierences, between Badiou and Rancie far aeld within this article, but I would suggest that Marcharts analysis combined with ` re in the exegesis I oer here (along, of course, with Badious own chapters on Rancie ` re and Badiou. See also Metapolitics) might help set the stage for future work on Rancie ` re in Light of Ludwig Nina Power (2009) Which Equality? Badiou and Rancie Feuerbach, Parallax 15(3): 6380. ` re (1974) La lec ` re Jacques Rancie on dAlthusser. Paris: Gallimard. Jacques Rancie (2008) Misadventures in Critical Thinking, unpublished manuscript. ` re and Derrida, paper given Alex Thomson (2003) Re-Placing the Opposition: Rancie at Fidelity to the Disagreement, Goldsmiths College, University of London. Jeremy ` re and Contemporary Political Problems, Paragraph 28(1): Valentine (2005) Rancie 4660. Hannah Arendt (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Andrew Schaap (2010) The Rights of Political Animals: Jacques ` res Critique of Hannah Arendt, European Journal of Political Theory 9(4): 2245. Rancie ` re is emphatic: I wrote the Ten Theses on Politics primarily as a On this point Rancie critique of the Arendtian idea of a specic political sphere and a political way of life.
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11. 12. 13.
14. 15. 16.
17. 18.
19. 20.
21.
22. 23.
24. 25. 26. 27.
28.
` re (2003) The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and aesthetics, p. 2, Jacques Rancie presented at Fidelity to the Disagreement, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London. ` re (n. 1), p. xiii; emphasis added. Rancie Ibid.; emphasis in original. ` res thinking with regard to politics has been so caught up Early commentary on Rancie in his distinctive denition of politics as to lead to relative neglect of his concept of la police. Ibid. p. 28. Michel Foucault (1979) Omnes et Singulatum, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Stanford, CA. ` res insistence on thinking social I call this a vertical organization to express Rancie order as an order of hierarchy and domination. See Jane Bennett (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. One might wonder whether police order describes any social order, whether the term is ` re simply does broad enough to include spontaneous and horizontal ordering. Rancie not address these issues; for him, the social order is always structured hierarchically. ` rean terms, that the horizontal dimensions of a But we might go on to say, within Rancie social order are produced by politics. ` re (n. 1), p. 29; emphasis added. Rancie For an argument that shows how partage can (and must) be both sharing and division, see Davide Panagia (2010) Partage du sensible, in Jean-Philippe Deranty (ed.), Jacques Rancie`re: Key Concepts. London: Acumen. ` re (2001) Ten Theses on Politics, Theory and Event 5(3): para. 19. Jacques Rancie ` re (1998) Aux bords du politique., p. 176. Paris: La Fabrique; all transJacques Rancie lations from this edition are mine. Cf. Maria Muhle (2007) Politics, Police and Power ` re, unpublished manuscript, p. 4. between Foucault and Rancie I agree completely with Muhle (n. 20), when she goes on to suggest that the phrase left ` res argument, out of the English translation is actually the central piece of Rancie precisely because what politics does, is to make this supplement possible, p. 4. ` re (n. 19), para. 19. Rancie The phrase presupposition of equality may sound like it needs a qualier: social ` re equality equality, bodily equality, existential equality? But as I will explain, for Rancie is never substantive, and it is for just this reason that it cannot have a qualier. ` re (n. 19), para. 19. Rancie Michel Foucault (1984) The Foucault Reader, p. 88. New York: Pantheon Books. Todd May (2008) The Political Thought of Jacques Rancie`re: Creating Equality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. The three points condense and summarize certain elements of a much longer engagement of mine with Mays book. Samuel A. Chambers (2010) The Politics of the Police: From Neoliberalism, to Anarchism, and Back to Democracy, in Bowman and Stamp (n. 1). May (n. 26), p. 43, argues that in the end, the goal of policing is precisely that of ` re or a signicant departure eliminating politics. This is either a misreading of Rancie ` re simply never says such a thing about police orders or from his argument, since Rancie policing (though he does say it about political philosophy, which is precisely the project of eliminating politics in favour of only policing). For the context of Mays anarchism, see Todd May (1994) The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism.
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29. 30. 31. 32.
33. 34. 35. 36. 37.
38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.
44. 45.
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. See also Colin Ward (1982) Anarchy in Action. London: Freedom Press. May (n. 26), p. 47; emphasis added. Ibid. p. 128. ` re (n. 1), p. 34. Rancie iz ` re, in Gabriel Rockhill (ed.), The Politics of Slavoj Z ek (2005) The Lesson of Rancie iz Aesthetics, p. 71. New York: Continuum. Z ek seems to be oering a very subtle and ` re in this afterword that otherwise remains full wholly unelaborated critique of Rancie iz of praise. Early in the essay Z ek provides his supplement in the form of an ultrapolitics that clearly depends upon making politics so pure as to be meaningless, and iz ` re as one of the postthen, later in the essay, Z ek somewhat casually refers to Rancie ` re atly and Althusserian partisans of pure politics (p. 75). As I will show, Rancie ` re has recently deected forceful denies the very idea of a pure politics. And Rancie iz iz Z eks implicit critique by denying the use of the concept post-politics, which Z ek ` re (2009) A Few Remarks on the Method of wrongly attributes to him. Jacques Rancie iz ` re, Parallax 15(3): 11423, p. 116. For a reading that follows Z Jacques Rancie eks ` res privileging of demopost-politics line and that oers a strong critique of Rancie cratic politics, see Jodi Dean (2009) Politics without Politics, Parallax 15(3): 2036. iz ` re, see Valentine (n. 8). For a powerful reading of Z ek on Rancie May (n. 26), p. 72; emphasis added. ` re (2004) The Philosopher and his Poor. Durham, NC: Duke University Jacques Rancie Press. Aristotle (1958) Politics, tr. Ernest Barker, p. 6. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ` re (n. 19), para. 21; cf. Rancie ` re (n. 1), p. 2. Rancie Samuel Chambers (2005) The Politics of Literarity, Theory and Event 8(3): 1843. Davide Panagia (2006) The Poetics of Political Thinking. Durham, NC: Duke ` res Aesthetic Communities, University Press. Mark Robson (2005) Jacques Rancie ` re, Paragraph 28(1): 7795. Mark Robson (2009) A Literary Animal: Rancie Derrida, and the Literature of Democracy, Parallax 15(3): 88101. ` re (2000) Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancie ` re, Jacques Rancie ` re (n. 1), p. 37. Diacritics 30(2): 11326, p. 115. Cf. Rancie ` re (n. 19), para. 25. Rancie ` re (n. 10). Ibid. para. 24. Cf. Jacques Rancie ` re (2006) Hatred of Democracy, p. 61. London: Verso. Jacques Rancie ` re (n. 19), para. 8. Rancie ` re (n. 1), p. 37. Jacques Rancie ` re (2007) What does it Mean to be Un, Rancie ` re (1995) [1991] Politics, Continuum 21(4): 55969, pp. 55960. Jacques Rancie Identication, Subjectivization, in John Rajchman (ed.)The Identity in Question, pp. 6370. New York: Routledge. ` re (n. 10), p. 4; emphasis added. Rancie Of course, we can already nd a solid body of secondary literature that makes this case convincingly. In addition to Muhle (n. 20) and Panagia (n. 37), see Gabriel Rockhill (2004) The Silent Revolution, Substance 33(1): 5476. As I noted early on, Mays book is the rst ` re as a political thinker. His full-length monograph in English specically devoted to Rancie work makes a wonderful contribution both for its specic readings and arguments and, in general, for starting to build a secondary literature, which has remained quite sparse up to now. For just these reasons, however, I nd it rather startling that May himself pays no attention whatsoever to the political theory literature, in English, that already exists on
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46. 47.
48.
49.
50. 51. 52. 53. 54.
55.
56. 57. 58. 59.
` re. Derantys work, in particular, provides crucial insights to Rancie ` res broader Rancie project, and Deranty published more than ve years ago in two of the top political theory ` re, journals. In addition, Theory and Event published not only individual articles on Rancie but also two separate symposia on his work, both of which were available more than ve years before the appearance of Mays book. I note this lack of attention to any secondary literature not for the sake of picking nits, but because Mays rich text might have been so much richer had it worked with, built from and spoken to some of these earlier, important texts. ` re (n. 1), p. 32. Rancie ` re and Contemporary Political Ontology, Theory Jean-Philippe Deranty (2003) Rancie ` res entire project in political philosophy and Event 6(4). Deranty points out that Rancie ` re claims that political philosophy is a has a paradoxical quality to it, in that Rancie logical impossibility (para. 2). ` res Contribution to the Ethics of Jean-Philippe Deranty (2003) Jacques Rancie Recognition, Political Theory 31(1): 13656. Though it should be noted that the ren` res arguments might be traced back to his eort to link dering Deranty gives of Rancie ` re up with the tradition of the politics of recognition. Surely Hegel is the most Rancie prominent theorist in both that tradition and in the tradition of dialectical thought (and, anecdotally, Hegel is the other author upon whom Deranty has focused most of ` res thought to the his work). Moreover, although Deranty would never reduce Rancie ` res conception of politics within the terms of the dialectic. dialectic, he still sees Rancie He refers, for example, to the dialectic between equality and inequality that is ` rean politics (p. 153). punctuated by Rancie Deranty (n. 47), n. 27. For non-native French speakers such as myself, I would interrupt here to cover the basics: this distinction, in French, is rst of all nothing more than the dierence between feminine and masculine and thus becomes no dierence at all when translated into the genderless English language. In regular French usage, la politique connotes more of the everyday business of politics (e.g. department politics as used in English) while le politique suggests something broader, more systematic, more philosophical. Marchart (n. 6). Ibid. p. 7. Ibid. p. 120. Ibid. p. 145. iz iz And it does seem to be Z eks claim and not a misreading by Marchart as Z ek ` re in The Ticklish Subject by referring to la politique/police opens his reading of Rancie as a singular entity that would be perturbed by a political mode of rebellion. Slavoj iz Z ek (1999) The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, p. 172. London: Verso. In his translators introduction Gabriel Rockhill does make reference, if only in passing, to a distinction between politics and the political, but he gives no French translation of those terms in his English introduction and his translation of the French marks no ` re (2006) The Politics of Aesthetics. London: distinction either: Jacques Rancie Continuum. I return to this point in the text. Deranty (n. 47), para. 6, italics original, underlining mine. Ibid. n. 27. Or, the French translations thereof. ` re (n. 20), p. 13. Rancie
324
` re (1995, in n. 43), p. 63. The French translation entirely leaves out these rst two 60. Rancie ` re simply asking, of himself and the reader, paragraphs, and begins instead with Rancie ` re, n. 20, p. 83). Quest-ce que le politique, nous est-il demande? (Rancie ` re (1995, in n. 43), p. 63. 61. Rancie 62. Ibid. p. 64. Cf. Deranty (n. 47), para. 6. 63. It seems plausible to make this move, but technically it is surely a mistranslation, since any English to French dictionary will give la politique as the translation for policy. Here ` re proposes dierences that really we see even more starkly that in this lecture Rancie ` re uses only hold in English. A direct translation back into French of the English Rancie would give us the dierence between la politique and la politique. ` re (n. 10), p. 4. 64. Rancie 65. Ibid. ` re (n. 20), p. 10. Even here, where Rancie ` re explicitly claries what might be at 66. Rancie stake for him in the dierence between la politique and le politique we still see nothing like the stark political dierence (as Marchart nds in so many other authors) nor a clear delineation of three terms as suggested in Derantys work. 67. My goal here is not to provide some sort of denitive refutation of Deranty. Indeed, ` re, but I worry that his Deranty is not necessarily wrong in his approach to Rancie ` re can have a somewhat distorting eect, partipresentation of the three terms in Rancie ` res writings in French. cularly for those readers who do not have easy access to Rancie ` re (n. 19), para. 4; Cf. Rancie ` re (n. 10), p. 3. 68. Rancie 69. Another way of grasping the logic here would be to emphasize the terms of dialectics. ` re have either addressed the issue of dialectical Numerous commentators on Rancie ` re directly (Thomson (n. 8); cf. Chambers (n. 27)), applied dialectics thinking in Rancie iz ` re (Z ` rean understanding of politics to Rancie ek (n. 32)), or oered a putatively Rancie that obeyed its own dialectical logic (May (n. 26)). For the purposes of my specic argument here, the question of dialectics is not the essential one, since what matters, ultimately, is whether or not politics can be rendered pure, or if politics is that which always renders itself (through its doubling) and its other, impure. A dialectical over` re coming produces a puried result, so in that sense a dialectical approach to Rancie would arrive at the same problematic end point (telos) of a puried politics. For the sake of clarity my argument here largely avoids the language of dialectics. ` re (n. 10). Bram Ieven (2009) Heteroreductives: Rancie ` res disagreement with 70. Rancie ` re elaborates on this point in his recent essay, ontology, Parallax 15(3): 5062. Rancie ` re. He written in the third person, A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancie explains: Most of those who conceptualize politics today do it on the basis of a general re argues that theory of the subject, if not on the basis of a general ontology. But Rancie he cannot make any deduction from a theory of being as being to the understanding of politics, art or literature. The reason, he says, is that he knows nothing about what being as being may be. Thats why he had to manage with his own resources which are not that much. Since he cannot deduce politics from any ontological principle, he chose to investigate it out of its limits, he means out of the situations in which its birth or its ` re (n. 32), p. 117). disappearance are staged (Rancie ` re (n. 32) refers to a doubling up of the notion of 71. In the recent essay on method, Rancie politics (p. 121). And it seems more than anecdotal to point out that this essay, specically devoted to method and dealing at length with the question of political theory, makes no mention whatsoever of a dierence between politics and the political (nor one between la politique and le politique).
Chambers
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` re (n. 41), p. 61. 72. Rancie 73. This doubling may disappear in English translations if and when they lose a sense of any subtle dierences between la politique and le politique when the act of translation turns these two terms into the oneness of the English politics. But it would be just as wrong for English translators to construct a third term i.e. the political and insist ` re writes le politique. This reading is further supon its appearance whenever Rancie ` res own references to a distinction only emerge in ported by the fact that Rancie ` re himself thereby suggests a doubling of la politique much more than English. Rancie ` la Deranty. he points to a creation of three terms, a 74. Deranty (n. 47), para. 7. ` res writings 75. For this reason, there would be no reason to go back and retranslate Rancie on politics from the mid-1990s, rewriting them in Bloomian fashion with a literal politics for every appearance of la politique and the political for le politique (and the fact that Deranty refers to la politique as the political would undoubtedly trouble such a ` re himself made little or nothing of that dierence at the time of writing project). Rancie those texts. But even if he might make something of it now, English translators would ` res French a coherent still be right, in a certain sense, not to substitute for Rancie system of three English terms (police, politics, the political). Current English translations of both Disagreement and the Ten Theses fail to mark for the English reader any potential distinctions between le politique and la politique, but this is not a failure to be ` re more subtly and deftly than xed. Even Davide Panagia, who otherwise reads Rancie anyone, pays no heed to the dierence between la politique and le politique in his retranslation of The Ten Theses. Davide Panagia (2001) Ceci nest pas un argument: An Introduction to the Ten Theses on Politics, Theory and Event 5(3). Perhaps it would make sense to leave la politique and le politique in French (at least in parentheses) in ` res work. future translations of Rancie ` re (n. 10), p. 2. 76. Rancie 77. Derantys attentiveness to the dierence between le politique and la politique shows that the mediation between la police and la politique is, contra May, not one that would be transcended or sublated by a third term. Deranty himself holds to this line, saying that the mediation provided by le politique must not be thought as a synthesis, since the logic of the tort [the logic of the wrong that makes for dissensus] is decidedly nondialectical (Deranty (n. 48), p. 144). Derantys argument thereby exposes the weakness in Mays reading; it does so by unravelling the very questions that Mays turn to normative grounds and substantive equality were meant to answer. Moreover, by shifting Derantys observation of the dierence between la politique and le politique from the introduction of a third term to the doubling of one of the two main terms, my reading ` res work just as it maintains the impurity of insists on the paradoxical logic of Rancie his account of politics. It also supports Derantys own emphasis on the non-dialectical ` res thought. Split from itself (containing the traces of both la politique nature of Rancie and le politique within it), politics could never be pure. Part of my point here is to argue ` res terms in dialectical both with and against Deranty. I agree that to render Rancie fashion is to miscontrue them badly, but I think we best avoid this false construal by ` re. This gets at a going further to avoid the hypostatization of three terms in Rancie more general point: it always proves very hard to avoid dialectics simply by claiming a position as non-dialectical. This is the case since any opposition to dialectics runs the risk of being captured precisely by dialectical logic, of turning that opposition into the negative moment on the way to dialectical synthesis. Thus, my goal here with
326
78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.
84.
85. 86.
87. 88. 89. 90.
` re centres on making a more concerted respect to Derantys interpretation of Rancie ` res thought. In this vein, Deleuzes eort to avoid a dialectical rendering of Rancie project to articulate a non-dialectical opposition in Nietzsche proves exemplary, and, of course, in many ways the entire Derridean project devotes itself to a thinking of non-dialectical dierence, i.e. dierance. Gilles Deleuze (1983) [1962] Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Jacques Derrida (1982) Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ` re (n. 10), p. 2. Rancie Ibid. p. 5: emphasis added. On impure politics, see Kaplans notion of impure democracy in the work of Paul Ricoeur: David Kaplan (2008) Reading Ricoeur, p. 207. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ` re (n. 10), p. 7. Rancie Thomson (n. 8), p. 6. ` re (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Jacques Rancie ` re (1994) The Emancipation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jacques Rancie Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ` re In the afterword to the English translation of The Philosopher and his Poor Rancie ` re refers to his own theory of politics. To my knowledge, this is the only place Rancie uses such language in a positive sense, though even here he complicates it signicantly, saying that it moved considerably away from what is generally understood by that ` re (n. 34), p. 225). name (Rancie ` re (n. 32), p. 114. Rancie It is also why, again working against Mays project, the moment a putatively democratic project becomes purely self-referential concerned only with those who struggle and not with the struggle itself is the moment that it is no longer political in ` res sense (see Thomson (n. 8), p. 17). Rancie ` re (n. 10), p. 14. Rancie ` re (1995, in n. 43), p. 70. Rancie Deranty (n. 47), para. 30. ` re (n. 83), p. 78. Rancie

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Jacques Rancire and the problem of pure politics

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` re and the Jacques Rancie problem of pure politics

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European Journal of Political Theory 10(3)

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Politics and the political: the three term model

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The doubling of politics: democratic politics within the police order

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